LUTHER BURBANK 



In a word, your ancestors increase in a geo- 

 metrical ratio, and at a remove of only ten gen- 

 erations they number more than one thousand 

 individuals. According to the most fundamental 

 law of heredity, each individual tends to transmit 

 all of his or her traits, and a moment's reflection 

 shows that the ancestral tendencies that are strug- 

 gling for mastery in the germ-plasm of any indi- 

 vidual are multitudinous. 



It is obvious that many of the traits involved 

 must be mutually exclusive, and that hence any 

 given individual must have almost numberless 

 latent qualities that may never be tangibly re- 

 vealed. 



We shall have occasion to make fuller refer- 

 ence to this aspect of the subject in a moment. 

 Here I wish merely to point out that no two indi- 

 viduals even of the same parentage show pre- 

 cisely the same combination of characters, and 

 that the probability of bringing out any given 

 trait obviously increases with the actual number 

 of progeny. 



As a tangible illustration, Mr. Burbank has 

 himself called attention to the fact that he was 

 his father's thirteenth child, and that no one of 

 the dozen children who preceded him manifested 

 any exceptional aptitude for horticultural pur- 

 suits. There are numberless cases in history 

 where the man of genius appears as a later mem- 

 ber of a mediocre fraternity. So we must recog- 

 nize that the full racial opportunities of any given 

 strain are not likely to be realized if the progeny 



[252] 



