NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 



It has become the academic fashion to take 

 the ground that, unless a man is a man of 

 record, unless he keeps a close and systematic 

 note-book, so that at any given time he can 

 refer authoritatively to any given step in a 

 given research and show precisely what the 

 conditions and what the tendencies at that 

 moment, he cannot be classed a scientist. In 

 the unusual sweep of his lifework, unusual in 

 its results as well as in his understanding of its 

 inner life, Mr. Burbank has steadily set at 

 naught this contention. He has not kept such 

 records of his work as should have been kept, 

 — and no one better than himself knows and 

 laments this fact, — such records as his larger 

 opportunities now provide ; but the keeping of 

 these records in the past would not have made 

 him a scientific man, — they are incidental, 

 even if important. He has not disdained rec- 

 ords, he simply has not had time to make 

 them himself or money to hire others to make 

 them, and yet in his plan books, elsewhere 

 noted, — books which probably not one man in 

 ten thousand who has visited him ever heard 

 of, — he has been eminently scientific, even 

 from the standpoint of the academician 



356 



