58 Master Minds of Modern Science 



its ancestors or very different from either. Sometimes 

 there appeared a whole series of monstrosities unlike 

 anything that ever before had grown from the earth. 

 But among all these freaks Burbank's keen eyes might 

 single out one or two that looked promising, and these were 

 kept and cultivated until they in their turn bloomed and 

 seeded. In the end it might be that no more than a single 

 plant was saved out of hundreds, and that this one was 

 merely promising. Then it would be crossed with some 

 other plant, and their progeny in turn tried out. The 

 Shasta daisy, of which we have spoken, was obtained by 

 crossing a common American daisy with an English 

 daisy and crossing the hybrid thus obtained with quite 

 another daisy from Japan. 



Burbank's patience was as amazing as his genius. 

 Months and years of toil often resulted in nothing, yet he 

 was never discouraged. Take, for instance, his experi- 

 ments with the native Californian dewberry. He treated 

 the blossoms of this plant with pollen from the apple, 

 quince, pear, cherry, hawthorn, strawberry, and other 

 fruits, and eventually secured five thousand seedlings. 

 As he said himself, stranger plants were never seen. 

 Some had strawberry, some raspberry leaves, some 

 prickles, some none. But of the whole five thousand only 

 two bore fruit. These fruits looked promising, but 

 imagine the disappointment of the inventor to find that 

 neither had seeds. All were destroyed. No wonder he 

 said with his whimsical smile, " Most of my plants are 

 raised for the brush pile." 



Luther Burbank worked for the sheer joy of working, 

 and even when seventy years old still spent fourteen hours 

 a day in his garden. You cannot take out a patent for a 

 new plant as you can for a new sort of tin-opener or shoe- 

 horn, and though the plant wizard made large sums of 

 money by selling his novelties, all that money went back 

 into his experiments. He confesses to having put two 



