LUTHER BURBANK 



ents; but others were extraordinarily dwarfed, 

 growing far less rapidly than ordinary walnuts. 

 Plants side by side, grown from nuts picked from 

 the same stem, might differ so radically that they 

 would seem to belong to totally unrelated species. 

 One seedling might grow ten inches in height, 

 while the one beside it had grown but half an inch. 

 And this disparity, as was shown in due course, 

 would be retained throughout the life of the trees. 

 The seedling that sprang up rapidly and showed 

 vigor from the start had potentialities of a giant 

 tree; while the weakling beside it was prenatally 

 doomed to remain forever a dwarf. 



The nuts produced by the Paradox walnut were 

 so few in number that Mr. Burbank was enabled 

 to plant them all and to note carefully the char- 

 acteristics of the seedlings that grew from them. 

 He observed that about one-third of these seed- 

 lings revealed the characteristics of the Persian 

 walnut, one of their grandparents; that another 

 third tended to revert in the opposite direction 

 toward their black- walnut grandparent ; and that 

 the remaining third were intermediate in char- 

 acter, reproducing more or less closely the char- 

 acteristics of their hybrid parent. 



It is interesting to note that Mr. Burbank re- 

 corded this observation in his printed catalogue 

 of 1898, in offering the nuts of the Paradox walnut 

 for sale. 



iV 7 This observation regarding the hybrids of the 

 second filial generation is substantially in accord 

 with what has since become famous as the Men- 



[218] 



