LUTHER BURBANK 
ingenuity and a fitness to survive which may have 
cost ten thousand generations of patient struggle. 
The sweetness of our cherries, our grapes, our 
plums, has been developed only through ages 
and ages of response to environment, with some 
environments so oft repeated that they have 
hardened into heredity. 
The flowers on our lawns may have acquired 
their colors in Germany, or in Ecuador, or in 
Siberia; our nuts reflect flavors picked up through 
a world-wide migration; and even our early 
vegetables show traits which hark back to times 
before animals and men came into their lives. 
So, just as the earth has stored up limestone 
in Indiana, and marble in Italy, and brick-clay in 
New York, and ten-thousand-year-old redwoods in 
California, for the architect to draw upon, just so, 
in a world full of plants, representing an infinity 
of ancestry with its infinity of heredity, will we 
find an infinity of traits with which to build. 
If we wish to change the color of a flower, or 
its scent, or its size, or its adaptability to climate— 
if we have it in mind to transform a tree or its 
fruit, or to give any plant a new trait or a new 
habit—the most practical way is to dig the quality 
we want out of the mass of heredity about us. 
* * * * * 
“T thought,” says some one, “that plants could 
[142] 
