322 LUTHER BURBANK 



Otherwise stated, the Santa Rosa catalogue 

 told of the creation of new valued species, by- 

 scientific selection, in an experiment garden, in 

 a brief term of years. 



All details aside, the photographic pictures 

 showed offspring that seemed to be conspicu- 

 ously unlike their parents — not different enough, 

 to be sure, to belie utterly the familiar doctrine 

 that "like begets like," yet different enough to 

 demonstrate that new species may arise. 



However vaguely the laws or principles of 

 heredity involved might be understood ; however 

 far from understanding the precise method of 

 production of the new forms the general public 

 might be, the tangible fact that widely divergent 

 forms of plant life might spring from the same 

 source — witness, for example, the brier stems of 

 strikingly different forms of cluster of utterly 

 different leaves grown from the seed of one plant 

 — was made clear beyond misunderstanding. 



And this constituted, in the minds of many 

 laymen, a clearer and more cogent argument for 

 the truth of the doctrine of evolution than could 

 have been found in any amount of theorizing or 

 in the presentation of any number of illustra- 

 tions drawn from the records of fossil forms or 

 the theoretical reconstruction of the genealogies 

 of species of past eras. 



