LUTHER BURBANK 



Mendel, the Austro-Silesian monk, to which no 

 one paid any attention until long afterwards. 



After Mendel died in 1884, there was an interval 

 of about sixteen years, prior to his rediscovery 

 and the posthumous promulgation of his doctrines 

 by Professor De Vries and others, during which 

 Mr. Burbank was probably the only man in the 

 world who had any clear conception of the essen- 

 tial facts of the segregation and recombination of 

 characters in the second filial generation of cross- 

 bred races. Mr. Burbank did not make mathe- 

 matical tests in connection with his experiments, 

 as Mendel had done ; but he demonstrated the gen- 

 eral truth of what has since come to be known 

 as Mendelian inheritance thousands of times over 

 in the course of his independent experiments at a 

 time when neither he nor anyone else had so much 

 as heard the name of Mendel. 



It was by application of his independent dis- 

 covery of the principle of the segregation and re- 

 combination of parental characters in the second 

 and subsequent generations that most of his re- 

 markable new varieties and new species were 

 developed. 



Thus the commercial races of stoneless plums 

 and prunes were produced through blending the 

 strains of a little partially stoneless European 

 plum that was not much bigger than a cranberry, 

 and was acrid and worthless, with the strains 

 of numerous choice varieties of cultivated plums 

 through successive generations, each immediate 

 cross resulting in stone fruit; and the quality of 



[32] 



