ON HURRYING EVOLUTION 
without our influence, nature might easily have 
taken till 3913. 
The real work before us, then, is to study 
nature’s processes—to learn to read the history 
of plants, to uncover tendencies and understand 
their trends—and then to provide short-cuts so 
that the far distant improvement may be made 
a matter of months, instead of centuries. 
These short-cuts, and their application, from 
this point on, will be our principal study; perhaps 
a single illustration here, more comprehensive 
than that of the daisy, will serve to give a clearer 
idea of their kind: 
Let us take, then, as a specimen, Mr. Burbank’s 
methods in the production of a new cherry. 
First, as with the daisy, there must be an ideal 
—some particular kind of cherry of which we 
have made a mental blue print. Let us say that 
our blue print calls for a large, sweet cherry, 
which will ripen early and bear long—an eating 
cherry rather than a canning cherry, so that 
appearance is a great factor. 
The first step would be to gather in our 
elements; to pick out a large, beautiful cherry 
which, after the manner of many large, beautiful 
fruits, may be more or less insipid in taste; then to 
select another cherry, size and appearance incon- 
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