PRODUCING A NEW COLOR 293 



shades of salmon and light scarlet, but with 

 no trace of crimson or of darker colors of 

 any kind. 



This flower, which had been selected also for 

 size and crimping of petals and gracefulness, as 

 well as for color, was introduced under the 

 name of "Burbank's Sunset Shades of Shirley 

 Poppies." 



But this new variety is mentioned only to point 

 the contrast. No such amount of work was in- 

 volved in its production as that which attended 

 the production of the blue poppy, because yel- 

 low pigments are in the heredity of the poppies 

 in general, and must have been manifested 

 among the ancestors of any given strain of 

 poppy within relatively recent times. 



The affinity between the yellow and red, for 

 example, in the case of the poppy, is clearly 

 enough demonstrated in the experiment, out- 

 lined in an earlier chapter, in which I developed 

 a race of crimson California poppies (Esch- 

 scholtzia), the parent species being, as is well 

 known, bright yellow in color. It will be recalled 

 that the new crimson flower was developed by 

 selection through successive generations from a 

 specimen that showed a little line of crimson, 

 like a streak or thread of another color, length- 

 wise of a single petal. 



