52 LUTHER BURBANK 



and also among the pignuts, hazels, hickories, 

 shellbarks, and butternuts made a very vivid 

 impression on my mind. It seemed strange that 

 trees obviously of the same kind should show 

 such diversity as to their fruit, 

 i When, at a later period, my experiments were 

 started in California, it occurred to me that a 

 plant showing such inherent tendency to vary 

 should afford an unusual opportunity for devel- 

 opment — for by this time I had come to fully 

 appreciate the value of variation as the founda- 

 tion for the operations of the plant experimenter. 

 But I had conceived the idea also — as our 

 earlier studies have shown — that there would be 

 very great advantage in hybridizing the best 

 native species of plants with plants of foreign 

 origin. And the chestnuts were in mind among 

 others when I sent to Japan and Italy and the 

 Eastern States for new plants with which to 

 operate. So the very first lot of plants that came 

 to me from Japan (in November, 1884), 

 included twenty-five nuts that I find listed in a 

 memorandum as "monster" chestnuts. The same 

 shipment, it may be of interest to recall, included 

 loquats and persimmons with which some inter- 

 esting experiments were made; pears, peaches, 

 and plums of which the reader has already heard ; 

 and climbing blackberries and yellow and red 



