LUTHER BURBANK 
acquired. The plants were here before there were 
animals to feed on or destroy them, so there must 
have been a time in their history when they had 
no need for such defense. 
“It must be true, then, that away back in their 
ancestry there were desert sagebrushes which 
were not bitter, desert euphorbias which were not 
poisonous, and desert cactus plants which had 
not even the suspicion of a spine. It could only 
be the long continued danger of destruction 
which could have produced so radical a means of 
defense. 
“We have, then, but to take these plants back 
to a period in their history before defense had 
become a problem—in order to produce an edible 
sagebrush, a non-poisonous euphorbia, a spineless 
cactus.” 
How, in a dozen years, Mr. Burbank carried the 
cactus back ages in its ancestry, how he proved 
beyond question by planting a thousand cactus 
seeds that the spiny cactus descended from a 
smooth slabbed line of forefathers—how he 
brought forth a new race without the suspicion 
of a spine, and with a velvet skin, and how he so 
re-established these old characteristics that the 
result was fixed and permanent—all of these 
things will be explained in due course where the 
discoveries involved and the working methods 
[12] 
