252 LUTHER BURBANK 



Here we are, pitting ten thousand years of 

 hardened heredity against five or ten years of 

 new environment; sometimes we succeed. Is it 

 any wonder that more often we fail? In five 

 years, however, we can often work a practical 

 transformation. 



Every season we are working changes which 

 nature would take ages to work; but from a 

 practical standpoint we must seek always to take 

 advantage of the old heredities which nature has 

 stored up — to make them serve our ends, be- 

 cause this can be done quicldy; rather than to 

 create and fix new heredities which might take 

 so long as to rob our work of its usefulness. 



Before us is a world of living, onward march- 

 ing plants which have made, are making, and will 

 continue to make their own rules as they go 

 along. Here before us, too, is the propaganda of 

 our subject with its maps, plans, charts, rules, 

 laws, theories, beliefs, built up all too fixedly, too 

 arbitrarily, too superficially, perhaps, but very 

 completely, nevertheless, around this onward- 

 marching mass. 



Let us use to the utmost all the help that sci- 

 ence can give ; to save time, let us accept the laws 

 and the rules, let us have confidence in the maps 

 and the charts, until the plants themselves show 

 our error. 



