js PLANT LIFE 



a fundamental education upon which he has 

 builded by wide reading, he yet leads the 

 scientific world in the department to which 

 he has given his life. He has suffered as few 

 men suffer, not only from actual physical 

 want and privation but from the unjust criti- 

 cism of those who did not comprehend; but 

 he has preserved through it all an unshaken 

 confidence in the ultimate triumph of all good 

 forces in human life. He has been engaged in 

 a line of work so novel and so profitable he 

 could easily have built up a fortune, yet he 

 has subjected himself all his life to the most 

 rigid self-denial and sacrifice in order that 

 every energy and every resource might be 

 devoted to the betterment of the world. 



Luther Burbank was born in the town of 

 Lancaster, Massachusetts, not far from the 

 city of Boston, on the 7th of March, 1849. 

 Two controlling streams met in the forming 

 of the main current of his life. From his 

 father, a cultivated man of English extraction, 

 came an intense love for books; from his 

 mother, whose ancestry was Scotch, an ardent 

 love for all beautiful forms of life. These two 

 hereditary influences have been at work all 



