LUTHER BURBANK 



But, although an individual was at last found 

 that did combine all the desired qualities, the very 

 fact that this individual had been built up by 

 putting together this quality brought from one 

 parent and that quality from another, with the 

 rejection of antagonistic qualities in each case, 

 makes it inevitable that the perfected Shasta 

 should contain latent in its system a whole 

 coterie of tendencies which are fighting for recog- 

 nition, and which will make themselves felt in 

 subsequent generations. 



Hence it is that when seeds are gathered from 

 the perfected Shasta they will not give us a crop 

 of flowers like their parent. On the contrary, they 

 will show the utmost diversity of form and size 

 and color, making tangible thus the persistent 

 force of the hereditary tendencies that had been 

 transmitted from divers ancestors, but which 

 were submerged or made latent, simply because 

 they were momentarily subordinated to opposing 

 qualities, in the case of the perfect Shasta. 



The Shasta daisy, then, while individually 

 almost a perfect embodiment of the ideal at which 

 I aimed, is when reproduced, from seed, anything 

 but a fixed type. Had it not been possible to 

 propagate the plant by division and then by an 

 unending series of successive divisions to produce 

 an indefinite number of individuals, each precisely 



[232] 



