LUTHER BURBANK 



strains difTcring so widely a result is produced 

 that may be described as a conflict of hereditary 

 tendencies. And out of this conflict comes a 

 tendency to variation. 



The reasons for this are relatively simple. 

 Heredity, after all, may be described as the sum 

 of past environments. The traits and tendencies 

 that we transmit to our children are traits and 

 tendencies that have been built into the organisms 

 of our ancestors through their age-long contact 

 with varying environmental conditions. 



The American ox-eye daisy, through long 

 generations of growth under the specific climatic 

 conditions of New England, had developed certain 

 traits that peculiarly adapted it to life in that 

 region. 



Similarly the European daisy had developed a 

 different set of traits under the diverse conditions 

 of soil and climate of Europe. 



And in the third place, the Japanese daisy had 

 developed yet more divergent traits under the 

 conditions of life in far away Japan, because these 

 conditions were not only more widely different 

 from the conditions of Europe and America than 

 these are from each other, but also because the 

 Japanese plant came of a race that had in all 

 probability separated from the original parent 

 stock of all the daisies at a time much more 



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