The Plant's Response 



1 85 



That is, the bacteria and moulds of lactic fermentation 

 have been cared for and watched by man and have re- 

 sponded to his fancy, lending him constantly the aroma 

 he prefers. In this invisible microscopic garden unen- 

 lightened man has toiled for ages, moving as a gardener 

 might move at night, among his plants, guided only by 

 the sense of taste and smell. In fact, the more we 

 study our inheritance from the dim and irrecoverable 

 past, the higher rises our respect for those our far-away 

 unknown progenitors. In a most noble sense we are all 

 of us sons and daughters of Cincinnatus; nay of Adam, 

 if you will; the man who was set in the earth as in a 

 garden to keep it and to dress it. For all the civilization 

 of the past two thousand years, it does not appear that 

 we have discovered a single species, which our modern 

 art has led to utility, to rival the rice and the wheat and 

 the sweet-potato, and soy, and millet, and peaches, and 

 cherries, and grapes and apples; all of which stood in 

 human gardens from thirty to fifty centuries ago; all, 

 responses to a cultivation so old that the primitive type 

 must remain forever lost in prehistoric night. Such is 

 the antiquity of horticulture and the lineage of Bur- 

 bank, and his kind. 1 



But it is written that man shall not live by bread 

 alone. Fortunately for us, men have found during all 



i Burbank accomplishes his results by crossing and selection. 

 Crossing is certainly common in the natural world. In high an- 

 tiquity we may suppose men were selectors only, taking advantage 

 of such sports, mutations as doubtless constantly arose among the 

 plants they sought. But later on, but before the Christian era, the 

 more experienced people, now horticulturists, used precisely the 

 same methods and upon the same plants which now lend fame to 



