LUTHER BURBANK 



among a billion creations may show the way 

 toward a single improvement in a race. 



* * * * * 



In this hurried backward glance, we have, by 

 no means, gone back to the beginning of things. 

 Even the moving picture of Nature's course from 

 the salt-water cell to us, covering what seems an 

 infinity of time, may be but a single stationary 

 film in a still greater moving picture and that, 

 too, but a part of a greater whole. 



Indeed, the further we go into our subject, the 

 more we are convinced that instead of having 

 followed the thread of life to its beginning, we 

 have merely been following a raveling which leads 

 into one of its tiny strands. 



The more we learn definitely about the process 

 which we trace back to the simple salt-water cell, 

 the more we are led to inquire into those other 

 forms of energy into the chemical reactions 

 into the vibrations which manifest themselves to 

 us as sound, heat, light into electricity and those 

 manifestations whose discovery is more recent, 

 and whose nature is less well understood. 



The more we observe the phenomena in our 

 own fields of activity, the more we realize the 

 futility of trying, in a single lifetime, to explore 

 Infinity. 



The more content we feel, instead, to learn as 



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