LUTHER BURBANK 
pursuits of the hunter and fisher and put him on 
the road to future greatness. 
And all along the road of advancing civiliza- 
tion the friendship with the fruit tree has been 
kept up. Yet it is only in comparatively recent 
times, probably, that rapid progress has been 
made in aiding our coadjutors of the pomological 
world to step forward and better themselves as 
man had long ago bettered himself with their 
assistance, To be sure, our forebears developed 
many forms of fruit that were not lacking in pal- 
atability; but the great advances in the improve- 
ment of orchard fruits are matters of the nine- 
teenth century. 
Recent progress in this field has been almost 
as wonderful as progress in the fields of mechanics 
and electricity. 
The orchard fruits of today that find their way 
to the markets are so different in size and quality 
from the fruits with which our grandparents were 
satisfied—even though some of them are grown 
on cions grafted on the old trees—as to seem to 
belong almost to different orders, certainly to dif- 
ferent species from the fruit stocks from which 
they have been developed. 
Yet what has been done is only the beginning. 
We speak of “perfected” fruits, and in a sense the 
word is justified, so conspicuous are the good 
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