LUTHER BURBANK AND HIS PLANT SCHOOL 23 



called the potato ball, and many were the children who 

 picked the fruits and played with them. 



In the summer of 1871 as the young man was walking 

 through his garden one morning, he saw among the leaves 

 of one of the potato plants a seed ball. He had early 

 formed the habit of close observation, else he would have 

 passed this by unnoticed, for it was the only fruit on the 

 whole acre of potatoes. 



He had known from childhood that when seeds are 

 planted, either from the potato or almost any of our best 

 orchard fruits, one is likely to get a better or poorer vari- 

 ety than that planted; for seeds from these plants seldom 

 come true. 



V He determined to save this lone fruit and plant the 

 seeds, hoping he might succeed in raising a new and better 

 kind of potato, so he watched with impatient eye its ripen- 

 ing. But when the vine turned brown and the fruit was 

 almost ready to break from the mother plant, he missed 

 this treasure. He searched day after day, and when he 

 had almost given up the seed as lost, he found it some 

 distance from the vine. It had probably been broken 

 off by a dog running through the patch. 



This seed ball contained just twenty-six seeds so small 

 that ten of them were not as large as an ordinary pin-head. 

 Burbank carefully saved them until the following spring. 

 He planted them, but had to wait through the long sum- 

 mer months for the vines to grow and the tubers to form. 



