LUTHER BURBANK 



For out of this compact grew the rivalry that 

 stimulated development and made possible the 

 evolution of the whole race of plants that bear 

 beautiful flowers and exhale sweet perfumes. But 

 for this eventful alliance, there would never have 

 developed in the world a conspicuously colored 

 or a scented flower of any kind. 



And it requires no argument to show that 

 a world without beautiful and sweet-scented 

 flowers would be a world robbed of a large share 

 of its attractions as an abiding place. 



But that is not all. The alliance between insect 

 and flower did not merely suffice to give us things 

 of beauty. It bespoke utility as well. It made 

 possible the bringing together of germ-plasms 

 from plants growing far apart, thus insuring virile 

 and variant strains; and this determined in large 

 measure the amount and direction of the evolu- 

 tion of the highest orders of plants. 



For it must be observed that, with rare excep- 

 tions, the higher plants are precisely those that 

 long ago entered into this cooperative scheme 

 whereby they trusted their fate absolutely to the 

 insects. They hazarded much for if anything 

 should lead to the destruction of a few insect 

 races, entire orders of plants would suffer race 

 suicide. But if they risked much, they also 

 profited much; for the cross-poll enizing effected 



[58] 



