318 LUTHER BURBANK 



and quality as not alone to give this fruit an 

 altogether new standing in the markets of 

 America, but fairly to revolutionize the plum 

 industry in such far away regions as South 

 America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, our 

 own Southern States, and the States of the 

 Pacific Coast. 



Already, when scarcely more than a boy in 

 New England, I had had the good fortune to 

 develop a new race of potato that had proved 

 of vast economic importance, supplanting most 

 other varieties of its tribe in widely extended 

 regions, and making its way triumphantly round 

 the entire world. 



Now I was enabled, practically at the outset 

 of my work as a plant developer, to in- 

 troduce races of plums that followed and 

 even outdistanced the potato, revolutionizing 

 a great fruit industry in widely scattered 

 regions of two hemispheres and preparing the 

 way for other conquests in fruit development 

 of which even now the limits are quite un- 

 predictable. 



Visionary indeed must have been my dreams 

 a forecast of the possible result of this im- 

 portation of the twelve little plum seedlings was 

 more than a faint adumbration of the actual 

 denouement. 



