LUTHER BURBANK 
become an actual working factor, a necessary 
tool, without which it is impossible to do the 
day’s work. 
Whether plant improvement be taken up as a. 
science, or as a profession, or as a business—or 
whether it be considered merely a thing of general 
interest, an idle hour recreation—there is ever 
present the need to understand Nature’s methods 
and her forces in order to be able to make use of 
them—to guide them—there always stares us in 
the face that solitary question: 
“Where—and how—did life start?” 
We have seen in this volume a color photograph 
of corn as it grew four thousand years, perhaps, 
before the days of Adam and Eve. 
It took less than eight seasons to carry this 
plant backward those ten thousand years. 
How this plant was first taken back to the 
stage in which it was found by the American 
Indians, thus revealing the methods which they 
crudely used to improve it—and how it was taken 
back and back and back beyond the Pharaohs and 
then back forty centuries before the time of man— 
how we know these things to be true—and how, as 
a result of these experiments we are about to 
see it carried forward by several centuries—all of 
these things are reserved for a later chapter where 
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