NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 



life that shall be better than the old, he is 

 restive under rules. If such were imposed 

 upon him, it would be but natural that he 

 should at once proceed to break them, not so 

 much for the delight of breaking them as a 

 protest against conventionahty. He does not 

 start out among his flowers in the dawn of a 

 spring morning with a book on botany in one 

 hand and a treatise on plant-breeding in the 

 other. Had he done so, there would have 

 been no Luther Burbank. He utterly ignores 

 much of what so-called scientists have set 

 down. Nor does he depend upon scientific 

 nomenclature unless it is sensible. In his 

 conversations he is peculiarly free from scien- 

 tific terminology; so direct and simple is his 

 speech that the greatest scientist and an 

 unlettered farm laborer may sit side by side 

 and both understand. I cannot better illus- 

 trate this than by a single word which I saw 

 on a box high up in his storehouse of rare 

 seeds and bulb§. The box contained seeds that 

 for some reason had been carefully sterilized. 

 The outside bore this word, written in bold 

 letters: "Boiled." 



This word bore a volume. 



134 



