296 LUTHER BURBANK 



is always alert to prevent the break — unless it 

 demonstrates itself to be an advance, an improve- 

 ment — from occurring. 



She gives us, all of us, and everything — indi- 

 viduality, personality — unfailingly, always — at 

 the same time preserving in each the general 

 characteristics of its kind. 



Yet all the time she is creating her freaks and 

 "sports" — all the time she is trying new experi- 

 ments — most of them doomed to die unproduc- 

 tive — with the hope that the dozen freaks among 

 a billion creations may show the way toward a 

 single adaptive improvement in a race. 



In this hurried backward glance we have by 

 no means gone back to the beginning of things. 

 Even the moving picture of nature's course from 

 the warm water cell to us, covering what seems 

 an infinity of time, may be but a single stationary 

 film in a still greater moving picture — and that, 

 too, but a part of a greater whole. 



Indeed, the further we go into our subject, 

 the more we are convinced that instead of having 

 followed the thread of life to its beginning, we 

 have merely been following a raveling which 

 leads into one of its tiny strands. 



The more we learn definitely about the process 

 which we trace back to the simple cell, the more 

 we are led to inquire into those other forms of 



