THE MAN AND HIS WORK 



LUTHER BURBANK 's EARLY EXPERIMENTS 



The inventive genius hitherto applied to me- 

 chanical apparatus was now transferred to the 

 living plant, and from the outset young Burbank 

 began experimenting along new lines even in car- 

 rying out the most commonplace work of the gar- 

 dener. For instance, he found a way to force the 

 development of his sweet corn by sprouting the 

 seed in a hotbed and dropping the young plants 

 into hills in the open as if they were mere seed 

 kernels ; and he performed a great variety of in- 

 teresting experiments in the cross-fertilization of 

 different races of beans, of sweet corn, and of 

 various other garden products. 



Nothing strikingly notable came of this work, 

 however, until an occasion when the experimenter 

 discovered a seed ball on the vine of an Early 

 Rose potato; saved the twenty-three seeds that 

 the ball contained, and grew from each of them 

 a hill of potatoes next season. The twenty-three 

 hills were in a single row, and were given pre- 

 cisely the same attention, yet each produced a 

 quite different type of tuber ; and one of the hills 

 revealed a large cluster of potatoes of such ex- 

 ceptional size and smoothness of contour and 

 quality of flesh as to be very notable. 



This was the potato which the young experi- 

 menter sold next season to a practical gardener, 

 who gave it the name of the Burbank potato. 



It was estimated several years ago by the au- 

 thorities of the Department of Agriculture at 



[5] 



