LUTHER BURBANK 



"Rest and a change of climate." It was a 

 magical prescription as applied to the twelve 

 plum seedlings from Japan. 



And as to the plant physician who gave the 

 prescription for him personally the results were 

 perhaps as notable as any other events in his life. 



Already, when scarcely more than a boy in 

 New England, he had had the good fortune to 

 develop a new race of potatoes that had proved 

 of vast economic importance, supplanting all 

 other varieties of its tribe in widely extended 

 regions, and making its way triumphantly round 

 the entire world. 



Now he was enabled, practically at the outset 

 of his work as a professional plant developer, to 

 introduce races of plums that followed and even 

 out-distanced the potato, revolutionizing a great 

 fruit industry in widely scattered regions of two 

 hemispheres and preparing the way for other 

 conquests in fruit development of which even 

 now the limits are quite unpredictable. 



Visionary indeed must have been the dreams 

 of the would-be plant developer if his forecast of 

 the possible result of his importation of the 

 twelve little plum seedlings was more than a faint 

 adumbration of the actual denouement. High 

 hopes he had, yet doubtless in this case he builded 

 better than he knew. 



[12] 



