LUTHER BURBANK 



I am merely assuming their number at a thousand 

 individual units for the sake of illustration. 



In our former views, when we considered the 

 transmission of complex qualities by the infinitesi- 

 mal pollen grain the thing seemed utterly inscrut- 

 able and mysterious. But now with the aid of the 

 new facts that the physicist has supplied us, the 

 mystery is somewhat clarified. He shows that the 

 smallest visible bit of protoplasm must contain at 

 least twenty billion atoms. 



So there would be enough of these atoms to 

 supply no fewer than twenty million to make up 

 the structure of each individual hereditary factor. 



Now twenty million bricks, of ordinary size, 

 piled solidly together, would make a mass 100 feet 

 square and 300 feet high. 



So the structure of each hereditary factor of all 

 the thousand in our infinitesimal speck of germ 

 plasm may be as complex as any building that 

 could be made with such a pile of bricks as that 

 and more complex, no doubt. 



Add that each individual atom in our germ 

 plasm structure is no crude brick but is conceived 

 by the best informed students of physical science 

 to be "at least as complex as a piano", and we 

 gain a yet clearer conception of the possible intri- 

 cacies of the mechanism of each of our imagined 

 thousand hereditary factors. 



[238] 



