INTRODUCTION 



EVERYONE knows that marvelous work in 

 developing new forms of plant life has been 

 performed by Luther Burbank at Santa 

 Rosa, California. Indeed, the name Burbank is 

 a household word. And yet when you come to 

 question people as to their precise knowledge of 

 what Mr. Burbank has done, you find that, as a 

 rule, their information is singularly vague. They 

 may have heard of the Burbank potato, the stone- 

 less plum, the Shasta daisy, the white blackberry, 

 or the spineless cactus. But something like this 

 is pretty sure to be the full measure of their 

 knowledge as to the Santa Rosa experimenter's 

 specific accomplishments. 



This is not strange, for until recently there has 

 been no authoritative and comprehensive account 

 of just what Mr. Burbank has really done, much 

 less how he does it. 



Now, to be sure, Mr. Burbank 's own account 

 of his lifework is available in twelve large vol- 

 umes with more than twelve hundred illustrations, 

 all in color. There is no longer any reason why 

 the critic should be in doubt as to just what Mr. 

 Burbank has done, just what are his theories and 

 methods. But of course not everyone has yet 

 seen the comprehensive work in question, so it 

 still seems desirable to give a briefer account of 



[ix] 



