LUTHER BURBANK 



cumbrance to the plant, he is obliged, as it were, 

 to swim upstream against the hereditary current 

 of the ages. Ten, fifteen, twenty years these are 

 but moments of time when working against ten- 

 dencies that are fixed by thousands of repetitions 

 under conditions that remained unchanged for 

 numberless generations, and until the immediate 

 present. 



Bearing this in mind, we gain a more vivid 

 impression of the difficulties that confront the 

 plant developer who would endeavor to relieve 

 the plum of its burdensome stone. 

 AID FROM NATURE 



But here as elsewhere Nature will sometimes 

 seem to forget for a moment the very funda- 

 mentals of her plan; and through such a lapse the 

 hereditary mechanism of a given organism may 

 be changed more radically, perhaps, in a single 

 generation, than it could be changed by almost 

 any number of generations of selective effort on 

 the part of man. 



Such a lapse was made, we do not know jusl 

 when, in the case of a minor variety of plum thai 

 chanced to grow in Central Europe. Through 

 this momentary lapse in Nature's memory, this 

 plant found itself with a seed for which the ci 

 tomary stony covering had been nearly half for- 

 gotten. Only about half remained of the shell 



[148] 



