LUTHER BURBANK 



ledger is balanced, for there are other produc- 

 tions, among them the cactus, that loom large in 

 prospective value. 



So in the end perhaps the economic rank of 

 the plums, among the total of my plant produc- 

 tions, will not be more than one-twentieth. 



Yet when I state that from among the almost 

 countless new varieties that have developed in 

 my plum orchard, sixty-two have been thought 

 worthy of introduction, and that some thousands 

 of races are still undergoing tests, an inkling of 

 the work involved will be gained. And when I 

 add that the Burbank plums make up about one- 

 third of the total export of the plums from Cali- 

 fornia year by year, and that my proteges are as 

 popular in South Africa, in Australia, and in nu- 

 merous other remote regions of the globe as they 

 are in the state where they originated, something 

 of the economic importance of the experiments 

 in plum development will be revealed. 

 SPECIFIC RESULTS 



Some glimpses have been given in earlier 

 chapters of the methods of experimentation 

 through which particular races of new plums 

 have been developed; and fuller details of the 

 methods and results will be given in subsequent 

 chapters of the present volume. Here let me 

 briefly outline some of the earlier results of my 



[68] 



