110 LUTHER BURBANK 



The potato seed ball is an insignificant-looking 

 fruit, of no use as any ordinary practical farmer 

 would have said. 



Away back in the history of the potato, on 

 the bleak Chilean mountainsides where it had 

 to depend almost wholly upon its seeds instead 

 of tubers for reproduction, every healthy potato 

 plant bore a great number of seed balls and this 

 is the case even at the present time in the high 

 Andean region and down in the canyons and 

 valleys of Chile, wild potatoes are one of the 

 worst of weeds, though in some cases producing 

 fairly good small potatoes. 



But years of cultivation have removed from 

 the potato the necessity of bearing seeds for the 

 preservation of its race. The potato plant, so 

 certain now to reproduce itself through subdivi- 

 sion of its tuber, so reliant on man for its propa- 

 gation, has little use for the seed upon which 

 its ancestors mostly depended for perpetuation 

 before man relieved it of this burden. 



So the average potato grower, knowing that 

 next year's crop depends only on this year's 

 tubers — and being more anxious, alas, to keep 

 his crop at a fixed standard than to improve it 

 — ^might see the occasional seed ball without 

 knowing its meaning — or realizing its pos- 

 sibilities. 



