Luther Bur bank 51 



Worse than the sufferings of his body were those of his 

 mind. His neighbours, who saw him raising thousands of 

 plants and then consigning all, or nearly all, to a bonfire, 

 thought he was crazy. He was held in derision by his 

 relatives, in pity by his friends. Scientific men denounced 

 him as a charlatan, a producer of spectacular effects, 

 a seeker for the uncanny, a misleading prophet. One 

 clergyman actually preached against him, calling him a 

 " foe to God." Remember, please, that Luther Burbank 

 was no longer a young man, that his health was broken, 

 and that he had so little money that he could never afford 

 to hire the labour he needed or buy the fertilizers. Often 

 he could hardly pay the taxes on the land. Yet he never 

 lost heart, and year after year he toiled away, growing 

 thousands of new plants of one particular sort at a time, 

 testing them, then ruthlessly destroying all those that 

 failed to come up to his expectations. 



In the production of one of his most famous fruits, the 

 well-known Primus berry, which is a cross between the 

 blackberry of California and the raspberry of Siberia, he 

 secured five thousand seedlings from the many crosses 

 made, and though the fruits of some of these were mar- 

 vellous in appearance, not one was found to be of any 

 commercial value, and all the plants were grubbed up and 

 destroyed. No fewer than nine hundred thousand berry- 

 bushes, mostly two years old, were grubbed up and burned 

 in a single season because Burbank did not consider them 

 fit to live. 



It was not until the year 1899 that the genius of this 

 great man was first recognized. In that year the Associa- 

 tion of American Agricultural Colleges met in San 

 Francisco, and a number of the representatives paid a 

 visit to the Burbank Gardens at Santa Rosa and his 

 farm at Sebastopol, where they saw his new sorts of 

 potatoes, plums, nuts, and grapes, and were immensely 

 interested. Within a few days accounts of this visit, with 



