LUTHER BURBANK 
almost certain that the coat was developed long 
before the fruit came under cultivation. 
The fair presumption is, probably, that the an- 
cestor of the peach, wandering from one territory 
to another as all plants do, found itself at a certain 
stage of its career in an environment where the 
conditions of moisture and wind and sunshine 
were peculiarly trying, or where some insect or 
fungoid or bacterial pest menaced its immature 
fruit. And in such a case it may readily have 
chanced that a peach that tended to produce a skin 
of exceptionally resistant texture, one in which 
the bloom assumed a more than usually powdery 
or fibrous character, was given protection against 
the enemies, and thus preserved where fruit with 
smoother skin was destroyed. 
Under these circumstances, the incipient fuzz 
on the peach would serve as material for the oper- 
ation of natural selection, and a race of peaches 
bearing fuzzy-skinned fruit would presently sup- 
plant the tribe of smooth-skinned peaches. 
Something like this, I suspect, we should find 
to be the history of evolution of the fuzzy-skinned 
peach, could we look with some necromantic mi- 
croscope into the germinal center of the peach 
seed and translate the marvelous history of end- 
less generations of peaches, back to the beginning, 
that is therein recorded. 
[148] 
