EDITORIAL AND GENERAL 



215 



truths about him. Some of these dis- 

 agreeable things are darkly hinted in 

 a letter from President Woodward 

 dated August first: "You are certainly 

 unaware of the thousand pages or more 



From "The Human Plant." Courtesy of The 

 Century Company, New York City. 



of history bearing' on this subject filed 

 in our offis." 



Let every Carnegie library through- 

 out the country be filled with tens of 

 thousands of such pages, all bearing" all 

 sorts of "cuss words" against Mr. Bur- 

 bank, from eminent scientist or from 

 some petty, little, jealous horticultur- 

 ist, and the reason why the Carnegie 

 Institution should encourage him be- 

 comes all the more prominent. The 

 allowance should be doubled and made 

 for life, because one fact stands un- 

 questionable, and that is the incalcul- 

 able value of Air. Burbank's applica- 

 tion of horticultural discovery to the 

 improvement of mankind. 



It looks as if the Carnegie Institu- 

 tion thought it was buying a gilt- 

 edged, de luxe edition of "Burbank"; 

 that it read and re-read him and copied 

 him for a few years, gladly PAYING 



for these great privileges the paltry 

 sum of ten thousand dollars a vear. 

 In the first years of this allowance, 

 when Mr. Burbank was so extensively 

 exploited by the newspapers, when it 

 was impossible for him to personally 

 meet more than a small percentage of 

 the visitors who made pilgrimages 

 from all over the world to Santa Rosa, 

 he could easily have made twice ten 

 thousand dollars if he had "gone on 

 the road" as a lecturer, and had devot- 

 ed to lecturing one-half the time that 

 he gave to the supplying of the Car- 

 negie Institution with information. It 

 was seemingly not in any sense an 

 encouragement, but a shrewd bargain 

 to use the man to the extent of its 

 desires, in exchange for money, an ex- 

 change of which he was not aware. In 

 other words, he, like any other inter- 

 esting book, was to be read so long as 

 he pleased the high and mighty Insti- 

 tution, and was then to be tossed aside 

 with no thought of the effect on the 

 book. So they read on. and by and 

 by they found several blotted pages 

 devilishly inserted by jealousy, and 

 they threw the book away. 



It does not seem probable that there 

 was in reality any such "shrewd bar- 

 gain." Let us be charitable and assume 

 that the original intent was to be an 

 "encouragement." Then all the more 

 is it to be regretted that good intent 

 should be put in such bad light. 



For why should the Carnegie Insti- 

 tution want to ourchase the informa- 

 tion and store it in its archives, with 

 tomes of biological data to twelve dec- 

 imal places on tons of paper? Who 

 better than Burbank will put that in- 

 formation into practice? For some six 

 years the Institution bothered the man, 

 prying into all his affairs and methods, 

 using his home for botanists and their 

 stenographers, and taking his valuable 

 time for dictation and revision of man- 

 uscripts. Then when they had appar- 

 ently got all that they felt he could 

 put into words, they unceremoniously 

 dropped him. What about all the 

 equipment that he had modified and 

 enlarged to meet this special work? 



Undoubtedly Mr. Burbank has meth- 

 ods that certain scientific men. and 



