LUTHER BURBANK 



In this view the exceptional growth of these 

 hybrids betokens reversion to remote ancestral 

 strains that for countless generations have not 

 been able to make their traits manifest, but which 

 have always transmitted these potentialities as 

 submerged and subordinated tendencies. The 

 admixture of the divergent racial strains — one 

 from Europe, the other from California, or in the 

 case of the Royal, from origins separated by the 

 breadth of a continent — sufficed to bring together 

 factors of growth that for all these generations 

 had been separated, and the atavistic phenomenon 

 of a giant walnut came into being. 



Thus interpreted, the case of the big walnut 

 is not dissimilar to the case of our white black- 

 berries or to that of the fragrant calla. 



In each of these instances, as in that of 

 numberless others that we shall have occasion 

 to examine, a mixture of racial strains brings 

 about a reversion to the structure or quality of 

 a remote ancestor. 



In the case of the walnuts we have had 

 occasion to go back a few thousand generations 

 farther than in the other cases, but there is ample 

 warrant for believing that nature sets no limit on 

 the length of time throughout which a submerged 

 character may be transmitted, with full possi- 

 bilities of ultimate restoration. 



[166] 



