ON HEREDITY 
Plant potato eyes, and you get potatoes like 
the parents—improving, or retrograding, a little, 
according to the present environment in which 
they grow. 
But plant potato seeds, and you tap a mine of 
heredity, infinite in its uncertainty, but infinite, 
too, in its possibility. 
That was the boyhood lesson which Luther 
Burbank learned. 
We shall see, now, how he applied it to other 
plants—how he built on it and expanded it—and 
how it became the basis of more than 100,000 later 
experiments in plant life. 
—Heredity ts the sum of 
all of the environments 
of a complex ancestry 
back to the beginning. 
I a eT 
