LUTHER BURBANK 
along any line which has made it more desirable 
or more marketable. 
Its evolution, then, has been simply a slow 
response to a new environment which for the first 
time in its history included man. 
Suppose, now, that we desire to work, in a 
single season or a dozen seasons, an improvement 
in this vegetable which will overshadow all of the 
improvement which countless generations of culti- 
vation and unconscious selection have wrought. 
Our first step is to secure its wild counterpart— 
inedible, maybe, sour, perhaps, tough, no doubt; 
wholly undesirable as compared with the plant 
which the seed bought at any grocery store will 
produce. 
Nevertheless in the wild brother of our plant 
there is confined an infinity of old heredity just 
as an infinity of old heredity was confined in 
those two daisies; and the bees, and the winds, 
can bring forth variation between the tame and 
the wild, just as striking and just as widely 
divergent as the variations in the daisies. 
Perhaps the first attempt to mix up the 
heredities of the tame and the wild might produce 
no improvement—-only retrogression. But if we 
keep on mixing heredities and combining com- 
binations of them, we shall soon see before us 
evidences of all of the tendencies of the plant— 
[164] 
