LUTHER BURBANK 
He is performing, as I said before, the most 
marvelous of all experiments. 
He deals with the same matter with which the 
chemist deals in his laboratory; but with this mat- 
ter aggregated into new and wonderful combina- 
tions which alone make possible those responses 
to the environment and that primeval capacity for 
growth and of self-reproduction that differentiates 
what we call living tissue from the matter out of 
which it is constructed. 
But if the plant experimenter must be allowed 
to indulge in such visions he must none the less 
remember that the microcosm of the germ cell 
represents after all only a transitory and transi- 
tional phase in the life cycle of the organisms with 
which he deals. 
He may love to ponder over the mysteries of 
the nucleus of the germ cell, but he cannot offer 
that nucleus for sale in the market. 
The tangible product of his investigations, the 
one that will have commercial importance, must 
find representation in germ cells that have in- 
finitely multiplied until their descendants are 
piled together in such unthinkable numbers that 
they make up the structure of visible plants, and,— 
to meet the exigencies of the case under consider- 
ation,—of visible and tangible fruits of the or- 
chard. 
[188] 
