SOME FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES. 



39 



planes of action towards that happy day when man shall offer his brother man, 

 not bullets and bayonets, but richer grains, better fruits and fairer flowers. 



Cultivation and care may help plants to do better work temporarily, but by 

 breeding plants may be brought into existence which will do better work 

 always in all places and for all time. Plants are to be produced which will 

 perform their appointed work better, quicker and with the utmost precision. 



Science sees better grains, nuts, fruits and vegetables all in new forms, 

 sizes, colors and flavors, with more nutrients and less waste, and with every 

 injurious and poisonous quality eliminated, and with power to resist sun, 

 wind, rain, frost and destructive fungus and insect pests ; fruits without stones, 

 seeds or spines; better fiber, coffee, tea, spice, rubber, oil, paper and timber 

 trees, and sugar, starch, color and perfume plants. Every one of these, and 

 ten thousand more, are within the reach of the most ordinary skill in plant 

 breeding. 



Fellow plant breeders, this is our work. On us now rests one of the next 

 great world movements ; the guidance of the creative forces is in our hands. 



Man is slowly learning that he, too, may guide the same forces which have 

 been through all the ages performing this beneficent work which he sees every- 

 where, above, beneath and around him in the vast, teeming animal and plant 

 life of the world. 



These lines were penned among the heights of the Sierras while resting on 

 the original material from which this planet was made. Thousands of ages 

 have passed, and it still remains unchanged. In it no fossils or any trace of 

 past organic life are ever found, nor could any exist, for the world creative heat 

 was too intense. Among these dizzy heights of rock, ice-cleft, glacier-plowed 

 and water-worn, we stand face to face with the first and latest pages of world 

 creation, for now we see also tender and beautiful flowers adding grace of form 

 and color to the grisly walls, and far away down the slopes stand the giant 

 trees, oldest of all living things, embracing all of human history, but even their 

 lives are but as a watch tick since the stars first shone on these barren rocks 

 before the evolutive forces had so gloriously transfigured the face of our 

 planet home. 



The Chair: Anything that Luther Burbank says is entitled to most respectful 

 consideration because of the fact that he is a man who has done so much in this fi< d 

 of work, the most successful worker in the field of hybridization of any in this country, 

 and who has produced wonderful economic values from his labor. 



