LUTHER BURBANK 
the combination between the two, instead of 
between the pollen grains and the eggs of a single 
blossom. 
Which is exactly what the Mother Geranium 
intended we should do. 
If the stigma of a blossom were at its receptive 
stage when the pollen packages around it burst 
open, there would probably be combined in the 
seeds of its egg chamber below, only the charac- 
teristics of one parent plant—only the tendencies 
of a single line of ancestry. 
The geraniums growing from those seeds would 
be so like in their tendencies of heredity that they 
would differ, individually, only as their individual 
environments differed. 
But when those eggs have brought to them 
the pollen from another plant, there are, confined 
within them, the tendencies and characteristics of 
two complex lines of ancestry; so that the plants 
into which they grow will be encouraged into 
variation and individuality, not as a result of 
environment alone, but as a result of the countless 
tendencies inherited from two separate lines of 
parentage. 
What a scheme for pitting the old tendencies of 
heredity against the new tendencies of environ- 
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