368 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



selected from among them those varying in a similar direction, raised 

 new generations from them and so on until now he who wishes may 

 have his California poppies of a strange glowing crimson for the price 

 of a little package of seed, where formerly he was perforce content 

 with the golden orange. For me the golden orange suffices, but that 

 does not detract from my eager interest in the flower-painting methods 

 of Mr. Burbank. Even more striking a result is his blue Shirley 

 poppy, produced also solely by repeated selection from the crimson 

 field poppy of Europe. " We have long had various shades of black 

 and crimson and white poppies, but no shade of blue. Out of 200,000 

 seedlings I found one showing a faintest trace of sky blue and planted 

 the seed from it, and got next year one pretty blue one out of many 

 thousand, and now I have one almost pure blue." 



But another brilliant new poppy was made in a different way. 

 The pollen of Papaver pttosum, a butter-colored poppy, was put on the 

 pistils of the Bride, a common pure white variety of Papaver somni- 

 ferum (double), and in the progeny of this cross was got a fire-colored 

 single form. The character of singleness was common to the ancestors 

 of both parents, the character of fire color in the lineage of somniferum 

 only, although the red of the new form is brighter than ever before 

 known in the somnifera series. Both characteristics were absent (or 

 rather latent) in both parents. And yet the perturbing influence of the 

 hybridization brought to the fore again these ancestral characters. 

 The foliage of this fire poppy is intermediate in type between that of 

 the two parents. 



The history of the stoneless and seedless plum, now being slowly 

 developed by Burbank, shows an interesting combination of selection, 

 hybridization and reselecting. Mr. Burbank found a plum in a small 

 wild plum species with only a part of a stone. He crossed this wild 

 species with the French prune; in the first generation he got most 

 individuals with whole stones, some with parts of a stone, and even 

 some with no stone. Through three generations he has now carried 

 his line by steadily selecting, and the percentage of no-stone fruits is 

 slowly increasing, while quality, beauty and productiveness are also 

 increasing at the same time. 



The plum-cot is the result of crossing the Japanese plum and the 

 apricot. The plum-cot, however, has not yet become a fixed variety 

 and may never be, as it tends to revert to the plum and apricot about 

 equally, although with also a tendency to remain fixed, which tendency 

 may be made permanent. 



Most of Burbank's plums and prunes are the result of multiple cross- 

 ings in which the Japanese plums have played an important part. Hun- 

 dreds of thousands of seedlings have been grown and carefully worked 

 over in the twenty years of experimenting with plums, and single trees 



