104 LUTHER BURBANK 



the best and most beautiful dahlia among the 

 number in your garden. In that case you have 

 doubtless been subjected to bitter disappoint- 

 ment. For when the carefully nurtured seed-^ 

 lings came finally to blooming time, instead of 

 presenting flowers closely similar to those of the 

 parent form, they have shown, in all probability, 

 the widest range of variation — not one of them 

 perhaps has been similar to the parent. Nor, 

 perhaps, were any two precisely alike. Among 

 them you could discover resemblances to all the 

 other dahlias in your garden and, indeed, to a 

 large proportion of those that you had seen 

 pictured in the seed catalogues. 



In a word, your dahlia seeds show that they 

 contain the racial strains of a great variety of 

 ancestors, and they present a variation that is 

 truly disconcerting to the gardener whose sole 

 desire was to produce a lot of dahlias of uniform 

 character. 



In one case, recorded by Darwin, an experi- 

 menter listed no fewer than eighteen different 

 varieties of the dahlia grown in the first genera- 

 tion from the seed of a single plant, and of course 

 there were all manner of intermediate forms. In 

 the listed eighteen only six corresponded pretty 

 closely to certain named or catalogued varieties. 

 It would perhaps more truly present the record 



