LUTHER BURBANK 



"Poor man ! Whatever may have been thought 

 of his good taste, or his tact, or his judgment, I 

 could hardly take offense at his sentiments for 

 they really reflected the thought of that day. 



"Poor man! He could not see that our plants 

 are what they are because they have grown up 

 with the birds, and the bees, and the winds to help 

 them; and that now, after all these centuries of 

 uphill struggle, man has been given to them as 

 a partner to free them from weakness and open 

 new doors of opportunity. 



"He could not see that all of us, the birds, and 

 the bees, and the flowers, and we, ourselves, are 

 a part of the same onward-moving procession, 

 each helping the other to better things; nor could 

 many of the others of his time see that. 



"And the botanists of that day, less than four 

 short decades ago, found their chief work in the 

 study and classification of dried and shriveled 

 plant mummies, whose souls had fled rather than 

 in the living, breathing forms, anxious to reveal 

 their life histories. 



"They counted the stamens of a dried flower 

 without looking at the causes for those stamens; 

 they measured and surveyed the length and 

 breadth of truth with never a thought of its 

 depth -they charted its surface, as if never 

 realizing that it was a thing of three dimensions. 



[2281 



