LUTHER BURBANK 



ingenuity and a fitness to survive which may have 

 cost ten thousand generations of patient struggle. 



The sweetness of our cherries, our grapes, our 

 plums, has been developed only through ages 

 and ages of response to environment, with some 

 environments so oft repeated that they have 

 hardened into heredity. 



The flowers on our lawns may have acquired 

 their colors in Germany, or in Ecuador, or in 

 Siberia; our nuts reflect flavors picked up through 

 a world- wide migration; and even our early 

 vegetables show traits which hark back to times 

 before animals and men came into their lives. 



So, just as the earth has stored up limestone 

 in Indiana, and marble in Italy, and brick-clay in 

 New York, and ten-thousand-year-old redwoods in 

 California, for the architect to draw upon, just so, 

 in a world full of plants, representing an infinity 

 of ancestry with its infinity of heredity, will we 

 find an infinity of traits with which to build. 



If we wish to change the color of a flower, or 

 its scent, or its size, or its adaptability to climate 

 if we have it in mind to transform a tree or its 

 fruit, or to give any plant a new trait or a new 

 habit the most practical way is to dig the quality 

 we want out of the mass of heredity about us. 

 * * * * * 



"I thought," says some one, "that plants could 



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