LUTHER BURBANK 
among a billion creations may show the way 
toward a single improvement in a race. 
* * * * * 
In this hurried backward glance, we have, by 
no means, gone back to the beginning of things. 
Even the moving picture of Nature’s course from 
the salt-water cell to us, covering what seems an 
infinity of time, may be but a single stationary 
film in a still greater moving picture—and that, 
too, but a part of a greater whole. 
Indeed, the further we go into our subject, the 
more we are convinced that instead of having 
followed the thread of life to its beginning, we 
have merely been following a raveling which leads 
into one of its tiny strands. 
The more we learn definitely about the process 
which we trace back to the simple salt-water cell, 
the more we are led to inquire into those other 
forms of energy—into the chemical reactions— 
into the vibrations which manifest themselves to 
us as sound, heat, light—into electricity and those 
manifestations whose discovery is more recent, 
and whose nature is less well understood. 
The more we observe the phenomena in our 
own fields of activity, the more we realize the 
futility of trying, in a single lifetime, to explore 
Infinity. 
The more content we feel, instead, to learn as 
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