92 LUTHER BURBANK 



difficulty, and represents the bringing forth of 

 a quality that has been submerged from time 

 immemorial. 



Of course there are numerous flowers — • 

 although as we have seen they are relatively rare 

 — that are blue in color. These are races that 

 have either retained the ancestral color unmodi- 

 fied because it served them well in adaptation to 

 their environment; or they are plants in which 

 the recessive blue, which must occasionally 

 appear in the course of hybridizations, was pre- 

 served and restored to prominence because it 

 served its purpose better than the other colors, 

 whatever they might be, that had supplanted it. 

 As might be expected, deep or indigo blue 

 flowers are more abundant than light or pure 

 blue ones. 



It is perhaps not without significance that blue 

 flowers have usually a white counterpart — the 

 bluebell furnishes a familiar example. Blue and 

 white, according to the theory just presented, lie 

 close together in the evolutionary scale. Either 

 will be recessive to red or orange or violet; and 

 it is only flowers from the germ plasm of which 

 these dominant colors have been largely removed 

 that are likely to develop blue or white races. 



Yet the fact that the white flower carries a 

 strain of yellow is an ever-present menace to its 



