LUTHER BURBANK 
eye, opened only a slit, to see simply the things 
we can touch and feel, we find evidences of adap- 
tation made possible through variation. 
The violet, responding to kindness, became a 
pansy. 
The pear, responding to racial tastes, adapted 
itself to the Orientals and to us. 
Corn, responding to a need for food, produced 
forty times the kernels which it had produced 
before. : a 
The orange, the lettuce, the celery, and every 
cultivated plant that grows, responding to our 
market demands, have transformed themselves to 
meet a readier sale. 
And those daffodil and narcissus seedlings, how 
eloquently they tell of the adaptation of a plant 
to fit an individual ideal! 
We studied electricity a long time without 
much apparent practical benefit. Then suddenly 
electric lights and trolley cars were everywhere. 
We knew the principles of sound vibration for 
centuries before the telephone and the phonograph 
appeared, but it took less than a generation to 
make them universal. 
We dreamed motor carriages three hundred 
years before we got one, and then, in a decade, we 
awoke to find our dream come true. 
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