58 LUTHER BURBANK 



Of course it was necessary to wait two or three 

 years for results. But when the time came, the 

 judge very cheerfully admitted that I had been 

 absolutely right all along the line. The cions 

 from my discarded pile in every case bore fruit 

 that was almost worthless; those from the inter- 

 mediate pile produced varieties of good fruit; 

 and from the pile of my first-choice seedlings 

 fruits of such quality were produced that he 

 named it the Klondike tree, declaring that it 

 gave him more good plums than he had ever seen 

 before. 



I cite the incident as showing the possibility 

 of gauging fruiting qualities of a seedling at a 

 time when the plant itself is a mere sapling a few 

 inches in height. The capacity to make such 

 selection has sometimes been spoken of as intui- 

 tion ; but it is really a matter of observation and 

 practice. One learns through long experience to 

 judge what characteristics of the seedlings are 

 suggestive of possibilities of fruit bearing. 



And after all this is no more than judging the 

 man of the future by observation of the child of 



to-day. 



THE CORRELATION OF PARTS 



If we were to state the matter a little more 

 technically, we might say that such selective 

 judgment as I have just illustrated is based on a 



