LUTHER BURBANK 
ber, in spite of the old belief, which will combine 
readily to produce fertile offspring constituting 
a new species or a new genus. 
We shall find plants of different species or 
genera which combine to make a sterile offspring 
—a mule among plants. 
And we shall find plants which can hardly be 
combined at all—plants in which the pollen of one 
seems to act as a definite poison on the other— 
plants with large pollen grains which cannot push 
their tubes down the pistils of smaller flowers— 
and plants which, through long fixed heredity, 
seem as averse to combination as oil seems averse 
to combining with water. 
“But no man,” says Mr. Burbank, who has just 
read this, “can tell until he has tried—tried not 
once, but thousands and thousands of times.” 
“What is that?” asked a seedsman who was 
visiting Mr. Burbank. 
“That is a Nicotunia,”’ replied Mr. Burbank, 
“and you are the first man in the world who has 
ever seen one. It is the name which I have given 
to a new race of plants produced by crossing the 
large flowering nicotianas, or tobacco plants, with 
petunias. It is, as you can see, a cross between two 
genera of the nightshade family.” 
“H’m!” said the seedsman. 
[240] 
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