314 LUTHER BURBANK 



And as new surroundings arouse the mind and 

 give a fresh stimulus to the imagination, in the 

 case of human beings both individually and 

 collectively, so the transplantation of a plant to 

 new soil sometimes brings out unsuspected racial 

 tendencies and stimulates variation in such a way 

 as greatly to improve individual specimens and 

 quite to transform their progeny. 



I had seen instances of this as applied to 

 many different species of plants from the time of 

 my first coming to California. I myself felt the 

 mental uplift of new surroundings, and seemed 

 to find evidence that plants that had come from 

 the eastern United States, even as I had come, 

 were not unmindful of a similar influence. 



No species of plant or bird or animal is quite 

 the same on the Atlantic and the Pacific sea- 

 board. We have but to compare specimens of 

 such familiar birds as the robin, quail, and 

 meadow lark, or of plants of any garden 

 variety to note the evidence of beginning trans- 

 formations. 



My early letters from California told of my 

 astonishment in seeing "great rose trees, thirty 

 feet high ; veronica trees, and geranium trees" 



Of course in those cases where the species has 

 been long resident in California the change has 

 progressed so far that representatives of what 



