ON HURRYING EVOLUTION 
purpose and desire—each step in this selection 
representing an advance, which, without our help, 
might take a hundred or a thousand years to 
bring about. 
So, in working out any ideal in plant improve- 
ment, the first factor and the last one is selection. 
Selection enters into the ideal itself, it enters into 
every step of its accomplishment, and it enters 
into the production of every succeeding plant 
which represents that accomplishment. 
“If you believe that nature makes no mistakes, 
and has no lapses, how can you account for the 
evident unfitness of so many individual plants 
to survive—how can you account for the 
wastefulness and extravagance which is apparent 
throughout all forms of plant life?” 
“Leaving nature out of it for the moment,” 
replied Mr. Burbank, “let us look at the work 
which {I have been doing here for forty years. 
There has hardly been a time during this period 
when I have had less than twenty-five hundred 
experiments under way, and there have been 
seasons when from three to five thousand were in 
process. I estimate that, right on this three 
acre tract, considerably more than one hundred 
thousand definite, separate experiments in plant 
life have been conducted, in all. 
[189] 
