76 LUTHER BURBANK 



edge of botany and plant physiology. The more 

 he had studied the subject, the better he would 

 be able to appreciate what stonelessness in a 

 plum really means. The more he had worked in 

 plant development, the fuller would be his ap- 

 preciation of the labor represented in the repro- 

 duction of this anomaly. 



And my visitor, being both a botanist and 

 a plant experimenter, was certainly greatly 

 surprised. 



WHAT THE STONE MEANS TO THE FRUIT 



The story of the development of the stoneless 

 plum has been told in an earlier chapter. 



It will be recalled that I worked primarily 

 with a small, partially stoneless plum that was 

 found in France a sour, acrid fruit of no in- 

 terest except for its partial lack of seed covering 

 I crossed this inedible fruit with a cultivated 

 plum, and selected and recrossed through suc- 

 cessive generations until I had segregated the 

 characters of stonelessness and good quality of 

 flesh and reassembled them in a single individual. 



Further mention of the development of the 

 stoneless prune, through crossing the stoneless 

 plum with the French prune, with the ultimate 

 production of the Conquest prune, was given in 

 the preceding chapter. 



