172 LUTHER BURBANK 



Corn, responding to a need for food, produced 

 forty times the kernels which it had produced 

 before. 



The orange, the lettuce, the celery, and every 

 cultivated plant that grows, responding to our 

 market demands, have transformed themselves to 

 meet a readier sale. 



And those daffodil and narcissus seedlings, 

 how eloquently they tell of the adaptation of a 

 plant to fit an individual ideal! 



We studied electricity a long time with- 

 out much apparent practical benefit. Then 

 suddenly electric lights and trolley cars were 

 everywhere. 



We knew the principles of sound vibration for 

 centuries before the telephone and the phono- 

 graph appeared, but it took less than a genera- 

 tion to make them universal. 



We dreamed motor carriages three hundred 

 years before we got one, and then, in a decade, 

 we awoke to find our dream come true. 



And, almost from the beginning, man has 

 studied the forces which go into the make-up 

 of life without much encouragement, till now 

 these ages of contemplation have begun to 

 crystallize into thornless cacti, stoneless plums, 

 fragrant calla lilies and a thousand other 

 results as definite and perhaps even more 



