GENERAL METHODS OF WORK 



morally, by the influence of those who are 

 born and reared in country places, so, many 

 times, a plant which has long lived in a care- 

 less civilization having lost its vitality, needs a 

 new infusion of blood. Mr. Burbank has ever 

 been a close student of all the outward forms 

 of nature, as well as of all her strange inner 

 life. All through all the years he has been 

 working upon the flowers and plants he has 

 found in the open, using them frequently for 

 this very purpose to strengthen the strain of 

 some over- civilized plant needing the fresh 

 impulse of the wild, strong neighbor of the 

 mountains or forest. Collectors in all quarters 

 of the world, too, are steadily on the lookout 

 to provide him with plant life from their re- 

 gions, sometimes wild, sometimes tame, with 

 which to make combinations or developments. 

 So he is confined to no one species nor to 

 any one line of combinations. The whole 

 world is his field, and he makes his selections 

 and forms his combinations in absolute dis- 

 regard of all precedent. The end in view is 

 the point, how to reach it most directly. It 

 may be along so - called scientific lines, it may 

 be in absolutely new and original paths, — 



