320 LUTHER BURBANK 



of the great shipping centers by these fruits, 

 and whole communities benefited, and the occu- 

 pations of the entire population changed. 



THE PUBLIC INTEREST EXPLAINED 



To understand why the general public became 

 so much exercised over the announcement of the 

 new fruits and flowers, it is necessary to recall 

 that the broad general questions of evolution 

 were still exercising the public mind at the time 

 when "New Creations" appeared. 



Darwin's epoch-making work had indeed 

 appeared more than thirty years before, and the 

 theory of evolution had taken its place as an 

 accepted working hypothesis among men of 

 science, but so revolutionary a doctrine could 

 not be expected to make its way with the general 

 public in less than a generation. 



At the earlier period, indeed, the man in the 

 street had known but little of the character and 

 implications of the doctrines involved. He per- 

 haps had heard that "Darwin thinks men 

 descended from monkeys," and with a few of 

 the conventional and obvious jokes associated 

 with that idea, the matter, so far as he was 

 concerned, for the most part ended. 



But by the closing decade of the nineteenth 

 century, after the bitter controversies of the men 



