374 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



as it often does, the new creation is encouraged by nature; then time and 

 environment fix it, and man comes on the scene, perhaps ages later, and dis- 

 covers it, and, not knowing all the facts, wonders where the connecting links 

 have gone. It is botanically classified as a new species, which it is most 

 certainly. 



In cultivated plants the life struggle is removed, and here we find varia- 

 tion almost the rule rather than the exception. 



Varieties are the product of fixed laws, never of chance, and with a knowl- 

 edge of these laws we can improve the products of nature, by employing nature's 

 forces, in ameliorating old or producing new species and varieties better 

 adapted to our necessities and tastes. Better food, more sunshine, less 

 arduous competition, will of themselves induce variation in individual plants 

 which will be more or less transmitted to their seedlings, which, selected con- 

 secutively through a certain number of generations, will become permanent. 

 Environment here exerts an influence as in all chemical cosmical and celestial 

 movements. These small increments from environmental forces may produce 

 a gradual or sudden change according to circumstances. The combustion of 

 food liberates the moving force, environment guides it as it does the planets. 



When once the persistent type is broken up, old latent forces may be 

 liberated and types buried in the dim past reappear. This, called atavism, is 

 a concentration of ancestral forces — reverberating echoes — from varieties long 

 since passed away, exhibiting themselves when from some cause, for instance 

 crossing, present forces are in a state of antagonism, division, perturbation or 

 weakness. These echoes, if collected by crossing and selection, produce com- 

 binations of superlative importance and value. 



Finally, in any summation of the scientific aspects of Burbank's 

 work must be mentioned the hosts of immensely valuable data regarding 

 the inheritance of characteristics, the influence of epigenetic factors in 

 development, the possibilities of plant variability, and what not else 

 important to evolution students, mostly going unrecorded, except as 

 they are added in mass to the already too heavy burden carried by the 

 master of the laboratory, and as they are summed up in those actual 

 results which the world gratefully knows as Burbank's ' new creations.' 



