LUTHER BURBANK 



He had simply "gone back to the blanket stage 

 of existence." The pull of past heredities was too 

 strong upon him. The transitory influence of a 

 few years of education could not efface the racial 

 instincts that had been implanted through thou- 

 sands of generations of breeding of a more 

 primitive sort. 



And so it is with the prunes. Through 

 extreme specialization in recent times they have 

 developed certain properties that were not of 

 value to their ancestors, and, like the Indian, they 

 are very ready to throw these off and revert to 

 their blanket stage of existence. 



So when we hybridize a prune with some fine 

 variety of plum, or even cross two varieties of 

 prunes, in the hope of getting a larger and more 

 productive prune, we very commonly secure a fine 

 fruit a fruit sometimes that is in many ways 

 superior to either parent but a fruit that is not a 

 prune at all in the technical sense; a fruit, in 

 short, lacking the refinements of large sugar con- 

 tent and peculiar quality of covering; being, 

 therefore, a mere plum in a word, a blanket 

 Indian. 



And all this tends to show that we are right in 

 assuming that the peculiar property of depositing 

 a large quantity of sugar in the fruit is one that 

 was not inherent with the ancestors of the prune 



[84] 



