192 LUTHER BURBANK 



successful in a commercial sense and were not 

 primarily expected to be. 



I recall reading an address by the late Profes- 

 sor Newton, a distinguished American astron- 

 omer, on the subject of "dead work/' in which he 

 emphasized the fact that the main bulk of the 

 experiments which any scientific worker must 

 make will lead to no definite goal. A large part 

 of the time of every experimenter must be given 

 up to following trails that lead nowhere in par- 

 ticular or that end in cul-de-sacs. 



The work of the plant experimenter is no ex- 

 ception, but there is always an incentive to fur- 

 ther .effort in the knowledge that a path that 

 seems to lead only into impenetrable mazes may 

 presently bring one out into the light. To make 

 the application to one illustrative case among 

 many: For twenty or more successive seasons I 

 attempted to hybridize certain species of Sola- 

 num before I finally succeeded in effecting a 

 cross that gave me a few seeds from which sprang 

 the new race of sunberries. 



But it must be understood that the main bulk 

 of my experiments are not made in any haphaz- 

 ard manner. 



On the contrary, my most important results 

 have been attained by continuing the experimen- 

 tation along rigidly predetermined lines and by 



