8 LUTHER BURBANK 



such men as Erasmus Darwin, the poet Goethe, 

 and the French biologist Lamarck were advocat- 

 ing the idea of the mutability of species. And 

 no doubt the Rev. Herbert had some of their 

 theories in mind as he went about his plant ex- 

 periments in the gardens of the Manchester 

 Deanery. 



Yet in the main he was probably quite uncon- 

 scious of the full significance of the experiments 

 that he was performing. 



The particular experiments that are of interest 

 to us in the present connection are those in which 

 he hybridized one species of gladiolus with an- 

 other, and in so doing not only produced new 

 races of gladiolus, but proved to his own satis- 

 faction that these new races were altogether 

 fertile. 



Almost half a century later Charles Darwin 

 in his "Origin of Species" had occasion to quote 

 the opinion of the Rev. Herbert, based on his ex- 

 periences with this flower and several others, to 

 the effect that hybrids are not necessarily sterile 

 a point that was still ardently in debate. He 

 even cites Herbert as having claimed that the 

 hybrids gained in fertility over the original 

 species a fact which Herbert himself regarded 

 as being "a strange truth," but regarding which 

 Darwin, writing with fuller knowledge, asserts 



