NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 



time building up more beautiful forms. It is 

 interesting to note, in passing, that while the 

 dahlia seeds which he has sent out to leading 

 amateur gardeners in various parts of the 

 world are the ones which he has discarded as 

 not valuable enough to use in carrying forward 

 his experiments, — reserving, of necessity, the 

 very best ones for the work in hand, — yet he 

 has received enthusiastic letters from those 

 who have grown flowers from these discarded 

 seeds, reciting the triumphs won in prizes and 

 premiums at flower shows and county fairs. 



The dahlia, like many another flower, when 

 first broken of an old habit of life and led into 

 a new one, finds it sometimes hard to persist 

 in the new way. Everything is strange. It is 

 called upon to do things it never was called 

 upon to do before. A million past tendencies 

 are at work to keep it in the old paths. So, 

 when any new and particularly desirable trait 

 is developed, it is often hard to fix it. And in 

 the fixing of this trait a thousand things must 

 be taken into account, — incidents in its life 

 history, peculiarities of environment, methods 

 of growth and development, individual char- 

 acteristics. 



176 



