186 LUTHER BURBANK 



to another, as all plants do, found itself at a cer- 

 tain stage of its career in an environment where 

 the conditions of moisture and wind and sunshine 

 were peculiarly trying, but more likely where 

 some insect or fungoid or bacterial pest menaced 

 its immature fruit. And in such a case it may 

 readily have chanced that a peach that tended to 

 produce a skin of exceptionally resistant texture, 

 one in which the bloom assumed a more than 

 usually powdery or fibrous character, was given 

 protection against the enemies, and thus pre- 

 served where fruit with smoother skin was 

 destroyed. 



Under these circumstances the incipient fuzz 

 on the peach would serve as material for the 

 operation of natural selection, and a race of 

 peaches bearing fuzzy-skinned fruit would pres- 

 ently supplant the tribe of smooth-skinned 

 peaches. 



Something like this, no doubt, we should find 

 to be the history of the evolution of the fuzzy- 

 skinned peach, could we look with some necro- 

 mantic microscope into the germinal center of 

 the peach seed and translate the marvelous his- 

 tory of endless generations of peaches, back to 

 the beginning, that is therein recorded. 



There is no such microscope as this, of 

 course. 



