as if the world were the mere raw material purposely left 

 unfinished so as to enable man to exercise the divinest of 

 his qualities, his creativeness. The imperfections of nature 

 appear from this point of view as if made on purpose so as 

 to offer man the opportunity of accomplishing this ambitious 

 task and building up a human world above the natural. A 

 late Latin proverb characterizes the pride of the inhabitants 

 of the Netherlands in this line: 



Deus creavit mare sed Batavus litora fecit. 



"God created the ocean, but the shores have been made by 



Batavians." 



The creativeness of man appears to acquire a special re- 

 semblance of God's own work, when it extends to the pro- 

 creation of new species, and this has actually been accom- 

 plished of late by Dr. Nilsson, the Director of the Swedish 

 Agricultural Station at Svalof, and our reputed countryman 

 Luther Burbank, of Santa Rosa, California. However meri- 

 torious these undertakings are, they remain exposed to the 

 criticism of the narrow-minded, so we need not be sur- 

 prised to find that Mr. Burbank was once called to account 

 for arrogance by some ignorant clergyman who for the pur- 

 pose of censuring him in the name of God, invited him one 

 Sunday to his church, gave him a prominent seat in a pew 

 exposed to the view of the congregation and denounced the 

 supercilious ways of men who meddled with the plans of 

 God by attempting to create new species. The incident is 

 referred to by Mr. Harwood in his New Creations in Plant 

 Life, (pp. 20-21) when he speaks of the troubles which Mr. 

 Burbank encountered at the start of his career. He says : 



"Opposition now came from many quarters. Not only 

 did his friends see the fulfillment of their predictions, — 

 some of them very kindly telling him so, — but people who 

 had heard of some of the strange things he had done and 

 who had not the breadth of vision to see what manner of 

 man this was, pronounced him a charlatan. — a man who 

 was creating all manner of unnatural forms of life, mon- 

 strosities, indeed a distinct foe to the race. A minister in- 

 vited Mr. Burbank to listen to a sermon on his work, and 

 when the guest was in the pew denounced him in bitter 

 fashion as a man who was working in direct opposition to 

 the will of God, in thus creating new forms of life which 

 never should have been created, or if created, only by God 

 himself." 



