Abstract

The earliest record of the production of sweet potato from seed, according to Thompson (1925), is a report of work done at the St. Helena Penal colony in Queensland in 1901. Since then similar work on a small scale has been done in some of the experiment stations of the West Indies. Over 40 years ago, the Florida Experi- ment Station is reported (Stout, 1924) to have produced seedlings from seed obtained from the West Indies but the work was discontinued before definite results were obtained. In Japan, Hirama (1941) conducted experiments as early as 1922 which were carried through 1937, resulting in the release of improved strains. About the same time, breeding work was begun at the Virgin Islands Expri- ment Station by Thompson (1925) who grew approximately 240 varieties through three consecutive years. In India, the first work in sweet potato is reported to have been recorded by Funicane in 1886 (Richharia, 1945) from Bengal. This and the subsequent items of work in India by the Imperial Council of Agricultural Rescarch (now Indian Council of Agricultural Research) were primarily concerned with the study of varieties. Sampath and Bhanumurthy (1948) have recorded some preliminary observations on hybridization and seed setting based on studies made at Benares, Coimbatore and Bapatla. Abraham (1951) conducted studies on inter-varietal and inter-specific hybridization in the University of Trivandrum. Investi- gations on the floral biology were conducted by Chatterjee and Nagbiswas (1952). Richharia and Ghosh (1954) carried out breeding investigations in Bihar with varieties obtained from different sources. including the U. S. A.

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