30 LUTHER BURBANK 



strong for him. The transitory influence of a 

 few years of education could not efface the ra- 

 cial instincts that had been implanted through 

 thousands of generations of breeding of a more 

 primitive sort. 



And so it is with the prunes. Through 

 extreme specialization in recent times they have 

 developed certain properties that were not of 

 value to their ancestors, and, like the Indian, 

 they are very ready to throw these off and revert 

 to their blanket stage of existence. 



So when we combine a prune with some fine 

 variety of plum, or even cross two varieties of 

 prunes, in the hope of getting a larger and more 

 productive prune, we very commonly secure a 

 fine fruit a fruit sometimes that is in many 

 ways superior to either parent but a fruit that 

 is not a prune at all in the technical sense ; a f ruik 

 in short, lacking the refinements of large sugar 

 content and peculiar quality of covering; being, 

 therefore, a mere plum in a word, a blanket 

 Indian. 



And all this tends to show that we are right in 

 assuming that the peculiar property of deposit- 

 ing a large quantity of sugar in the fruit is one 

 that was not inherent with the ancestors of the 

 prune until man undertook the education of the 

 fruit and trained it for that particular purpose. 



