364 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



and generally favorable conditions. So-called new qualities are usually, 

 if not always (the fact may sometimes not be obvious), simply new 

 combinations of old qualities, both latent and obvious. To get a new 

 and pleasing odor it may often be sufficient simply to lose one bad ele- 

 ment in an old odor. So one might go on for some pages with specific 

 conclusions or deductions reached by Burbank on a basis of experience. 

 But it is true that he has at his command the knowledge of no new 

 fundamental scientific principles to give him advantage over us. And 

 yet none of us has done what Burbank has been able to do, although 

 many of us have tried. What then is it that Burbank brings to his 

 work of modifying organisms swiftly and extremely and definitely that 

 others do not? 



To answer this it will be advisable to analyze, in general terms, 

 at least, the various processes which either singly, or in combinations of 

 two or three, or all together, are used by Mr. Burbank in his work. 

 We may roughly classify these processes and means. First, there is 

 the importation from foreign countries, through many correspondents, 

 of a host of various kinds of plants, some of economic value in their 

 native land and some not, any of which grown under different condi- 

 tions here may prove specially vigorous or prolific or hardy, or show 

 other desirable changes or new qualities. Among these importations 

 are often special kinds particularly sought for by Burbank to use 

 in his multiple hybridizations; kinds closely related to our native or 

 to already cultivated races which, despite many worthless character- 

 istics, may possess one or more particular, valuable ones needed to 

 be added to a race already useful to make it more useful. Such an 

 addition makes a new race. 



Second, the production of variations, abundant and extreme, by 

 various methods, as (a) the growing under new and, usually, more 

 favorable environment (food supply, water, temperature, light, space, 

 etc.) of various wild or cultivated forms, and (b) by hybridizations 

 between forms closely related, less closely related and, finally, as dis- 

 similar as may be (not producing sterility), this hybridizing being 

 often immensely complicated by multiplying crosses, i. e., the offspring 

 from one cross being immediately crossed with a third form, and the 

 offspring of this with still another form, and so on. These hybridiza- 

 tions are made sometimes with very little reference to the actual useful 

 or non-useful characteristics of the crossed parents, with the primary 

 intention of producing an unsettling or instability in the heredity, of 

 causing, as Burbank sometimes says, ' perturbations ' in the plants, 

 so as to get just as wide and as large variation as possible. Other 

 crosses are made, of course, in the deliberate attempt to blend, 

 to mix, to add together, two desirable characteristics, each possessed by 



