NEW VARIETIES 125 



biggest crop Indian corn (worth $1,615,000,000 last year), and 

 consider the work of Hopkins and others in breeding maize. Or 

 take Hays's work with wheat. Any of these might be figured as 

 more important to humanity than all of Burbank's work. Again, 

 the newspapers fail to mention that many of the famous Burbank 

 things Mr. Burbank never pretended to "create." He merely 

 bought and introduced them like any other nurseryman. He 

 would be the last man to contend that such disseminations were to 

 be compared with the steady output, for half a century or more, of 

 the great foreign houses, such as Haage and Schmidt, Benary, or 

 Vilmorin, or any one of half-a-dozen big seed houses in the East 

 that you know. Even the original Burbank boomer, Professor 

 Wickson, once wrote me that on the Pacific Coast, where Bur- 

 bank's plants do best, his work had not affected commercial hor- 

 ticulture to the extent of I per cent, of the value of horticultu- 

 ral crops. All this is no reflection against Mr. Burbank only 

 against the newspapers. Mr. Burbank is a great man. It is not 

 his fault that his introductions are of trifling value in the East. 

 Climate is responsible for that. 



But, granting that Mr. Burbank's results are more important 

 than those of all the plant breeders who have ever lived, it does not 

 follow that his methods are the best for the amateur. For then we 

 should have no records that would help others. Mr. Burbank 

 himself deplores the fact he has kept no records of scientific value. 

 For this is the sort of thing he does. He shakes a plum branch 

 over another plum tree that is in flower and all the fruits that 

 form on that tree he saves, and then plants their stones. But is 

 there any evidence that any of those plums is a hybrid? Not the 

 slightest. For that plum tree would have made hundreds of 

 fruits without the waving of that branch. And no one can plant a 



