338 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



crossed with the large flowered, brilliant orange-red, perennial poppy, 

 and a great number of hybrids were now growing. These were almost 

 all sterile. Some of them terminated in a dried-up stub without 

 flowers, others had a minute rudiment of fruit, others only remnants 

 of calyx and corolla. There were all stages up to normal flowers, and 

 seed capsules in which the not yet fully developed seeds could be seen 

 through a lens. 



After crossing all kinds of color varieties of the common poppy he 

 got one with a light blue color. Although the color is not very pretty, 

 yet this plant is very interesting, as blue poppies have been hitherto 

 unknown. Probably the change in color is caused by the combination 

 of pigments in some flowers and the chemical constituents of cells of 

 others. This is, however, only a supposition.* 



Many other wild plants, as Brodiceas, Erysimums and Cephdlyptrum 

 Drummondi, he had hybridized, getting flowers which first came out 

 carmine red, but then slowly changed to white, a very unusual mode of 

 variation. In order to reduce the price of Amaryllis and Gladiolus to 

 a few cents, and thus make these beautiful red and white-striped 

 flowers common in every garden, he devoted attention to the increase 

 of side-bulbs. He had already plants with twenty to twenty-four bulbs 

 instead of the old forms with hardly any or but a few side-bulbs. 

 Burbank has his own peculiar ideas about the power of nature and 

 natural phenomena, which play such an important part in his work. 

 His principal theory is that i heredity is the sum of all past environ- 

 ments/ This he repeated time and again in his explanations. Cross- 

 ing brings together in one individual the sum total of the environ- 

 mental influences to which the two lines of parents have been subjected, 

 and hence increases its variability. 



Among the remarkable results of Burbank's work which we saw at 

 the Sebastopol farm were a couple of trees of Loquat (Eryobotrya 

 japonica) about six feet high, but with spreading fruit-laden branches. 

 One of these trees was the original Japanese kind with small yellow 

 fruit, the size of a cherry, of acid taste and almost filled with the large 

 seed. It has a peculiar flavor, found in no other fruit. This aroma 

 was also found in the fruits of the other tree, but these were larger 

 than walnuts and had an orange-red color. The seed was not larger 

 than that of the wild tree, but the juicy fruit-flesh was greatly devel- 

 oped in thickness and very delicious. This improvement of the loquat, 

 which fruit makes one of the finest delicacies for the table, was accom- 

 plished by Burbank without crossing, by selection only. This is the 

 same process by which, since the time of the celebrated Belgian horti- 



* The original reads: De kleur berust waarschijnlijk op een verbinding 

 van de kleurstof van somniige soorten met de scheikundige inhoudstoffen van de 

 cellen van andere. Maar voorloopig is dit nog slechts een vermoeden. 



