BURBANK'S WAY WITH TREES 



delian formula, which at that time was quite un- 

 known to the scientific world. The formula had 

 indeed been discovered by Mendel as long ago 

 as 1863, but the paper in which he announced his 

 discovery remained quite unknown until it was 

 brought to light in 1900 by Professor Hugo De 

 Vries and two other European botanists. 



Mr. Burbank had observed the tendency to 

 segregation and redistribution of characters in 

 second-generation hybrids, which is the essential 

 feature of Mendelian heredity not alone in the 

 case of the walnuts, but in hundreds of other hy- 

 brids, and for many years his experiments have 

 all been carried out with an eye to taking advan- 

 tage of this observed natural phenomenon. But 

 for many years after the death of Mendel (which 

 occurred in 1884) Mr. Burbank was probably the 

 only prominent plant experimenter in the world 

 who clearly grasped the import of the law of in- 

 heritance, according to which hybrids of the first 

 generation are relatively uniform and hybrids of 

 the second generation enormously variable. 



Mr. Burbank was too busy making practicable (pr<L<J 

 application of this discovery (which of course was 

 made by him quite independently) to give thought 

 to the publication of his observations. But such 

 incidental publication as that just cited serves to 

 fix his claim to independent discovery; and the 

 long list of remarkable plant developments in 

 many fields that were carried out at Santa Eosa 

 and Sebastopol prior to 1900 by application of 

 what is essentially the Mendelian principle very 



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