THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT 



cently issued work, Animals and Plants under Do- 

 mestication, and at once he began making personal 

 scrutiny of all the plants of his neighborhood, and 

 was struck with the fact of universal variation 

 both in the wild state and under cultivation. 



From the outset, his experiments had to do 

 with selection between individual specimens that 

 differ in some measure from their fellows, and at 

 every stage of his work such a selection continues. 

 "The beginning is selection and the end is selec- 

 tion," declares Mr. Burbank; and the, possibility 

 of developing new races of many types from a 

 single stock through selection alone has been 

 demonstrated by him thousands of times over. 



As Burbankian selection is after all only nat- 

 ural selection, in which a man's wishes become the 

 chief determining agent among environmental in- 

 fluences, it may fairly be said that the demon- 

 strations made over and over at Santa Eosa have 

 supplied the largest body of evidence for the truth 

 of the doctrine of evolution through natural selec- 

 tion that has anywhere been made available. 



After studying Mr. Burbank 's results, it is im- 

 possible to doubt that natural selection has been 

 at least one highly important agency in shaping 

 the evolution of the living races. 



As an instance of the way in which new races 

 may be rapidly developed by artificial selection 

 alone, we may cite the case of the half-dozen new 

 varieties of garden peas, differing radically from 

 one another, and each breeding true to its own 

 kind, that were developed by Mr. Burbank in the 



[25] 



