LUTHER BURBANK 



course of six generations from a single parent 

 form. 



The new variety of heuchera, or "wild gera- 

 nium," with its amazingly corrugated and convo- 

 luted leaf, furnishes another example of extraor- 

 dinary modification of form brought about by 

 merely selecting the seed of an individual that 

 showed a tendency to modification, and carrying 

 on the selection through several successive gen- 

 erations. 



That the same principle applies equally to the 

 modification of stalk or root or bulb or flower or 

 fruit of plants of every type has been demon- 

 strated so many times over in Mr. Burbank's 

 experience that to cite his proof of the proposition 

 in its entirety would be equivalent to naming all 

 the hundreds of new varieties that he has devel- 

 oped. For the cases are few indeed in which the 

 principle of selection has not been applied at some 

 stage of the experiment. Even where hybridiza- 

 tion has played an important part, it is of course 

 necessary first to select the parents for crossing; 

 and then, in due course, selection is made again 

 among the progeny. 



So it may be repeated that artificial selection 

 is the keynote to plant development ; and that the 

 experiments at Santa Rosa and Sebastopol fur- 

 nish an unending series of demonstrations as to 

 the way in which nature works in the bringing 

 about of evolution of races through natural selec- 

 tion and the survival of the fittest. 



(2) As to the question of the transmissibility 

 [26] 



