LUTHER BURBANK 
“Poor man! Whatever may have been thought 
of his good taste, or his tact, or his judgment, I 
could hardly take offense at his sentiments—for 
they really reflected the thought of that day. 
“Poor man! He could not see that our plants 
are what they are because they have grown up 
with the birds, and the bees, and the winds to help 
them; and that now, after all these centuries of 
uphill struggle, man has been given to them as 
a partner to free them from weakness and open 
new doors of opportunity. 
“He could not see that all of us, the birds, and 
the bees, and the flowers, and we, ourselves, are 
a part of the same onward-moving procession, 
each helping the other to better things; nor could 
many of the others of his time see that. 
“And the botanists of that day, less than four 
short decades ago, found their chief work in the 
study and classification of dried and shriveled 
plant mummies, whose souls had fled—rather than 
in the living, breathing forms, anxious to reveal 
their life histories. 
“They counted the stamens of a dried flower 
without looking at the causes for those stamens; 
they measured and surveyed the length and 
breadth of truth with never a thought of its 
depth—they charted its surface, as if never 
realizing that it was a thing of three dimensions. 
[228] 
