LUTHER BURBANK 



fruits on the same principle. You seem to have 

 gone ahead and produced the fruit, while a more 

 cautious experimenter would have been occupied 

 in designing hybridizing methods and testing 

 unit characters, and would not have been fully 

 prepared to start on the actual constructive work 

 until about the time you finished." 



Whatever the force of this comparison, it is true 

 that I have often succeeded in producing a fruit 

 of the finest quality by methods that to a less 

 practiced experimenter might look haphazard; 

 methods that did in point of fact lack something 

 of the precision that an investigation conducted 

 solely for purposes of scientific record rather than 

 for practical results might have required. 



Such is the case with a large number of experi- 

 ments in plum breeding. Here I have dealt with 

 such vast numbers of individuals and brought into 

 the hybridizing tests such varied and so many 

 races, that accurate record of every step of a series 

 of experiments extending over a term of years was 

 quite out of the question. 



My "Combination" plum has a pedigree, could 

 it be accurately traced, that includes strains of 

 almost every race of plums under cultivation. 



From the seed of this strange hj^brid you may 

 produce trees that will bear fruit closely similar 

 in all respects to at least a score of entirely 



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