LUTHER BURBANK 



give a fresh stimulus to the imagination, in the 

 case of human beings both individually and 

 collectively, so the transplantation of a plant to 

 new soil sometimes brings out unsuspected racial 

 tendencies and stimulates variation in such a way 

 as greatly to improve individual specimens and 

 quite to transform their progeny. 



I had seen instances of this as applied to many 

 different species of plants from the time of my 

 first coming to California. I myself felt the mental 

 uplift of new surroundings, and seemed to find 

 evidence that plants that had come from the east- 

 ern United States, even as I had come, were not 

 unmindful of a similar influence. 



No species of plant or bird or animal is quite 

 the same on the Atlantic and the Pacific seaboard. 

 We have but to compare specimens of such famil- 

 iar birds as the robin, quail, and meadow-lark, or 

 of plants of any garden variety to note the evi- 

 dence of beginning transformation. 



My early letters from California told of my 

 astonishment in seeing "great rose trees, thirty 

 feet high; veronica trees, and geranium trees." 



Of course in those cases where the species has 

 been long resident in California the change has 

 progressed so far that representatives of what 

 were once members of the same clan no longer 

 are to be classified as of the same species. 



[8] 



