LUTHER BURBANK 



To be sure, nothing revolutionary came directly 

 from the reverend horticulturist's experiments. 

 He produced interesting new varieties of flowers, 

 but the theoretical bearings of his work were 

 doubtless quite ignored by his fellow clergymen, 

 and, indeed, as I have already suggested, were 

 probably only vaguely realized by himself. 



Yet as we look back on this work now, from 

 the new point of vantage that Darwin gave us, we 

 can see that the work of this amateur horticul- 

 turist must have had its share in disturbing the 

 ideas of at least some of the persons to whose 

 attention it came, and in preparing the way for the 

 new view of the flexibility of species that now 

 seems so much a matter of course that we can 

 hardly realize how revolutionary it seemed to 

 our forebears of two generations ago. 



A demonstration made with a plant that grows 

 in everybody's garden, has force that comes home 

 to us more cogently than records of any number 

 of observations of animals and plants of tropical 

 forests and South Sea archipelagoes. And a num- 

 ber of new species of plants, gladioli among others, 

 that the Dean of Manchester created by hybridiz- 

 ing old ones made their way into the gardens of 

 Europe, and gave their message, we may be sure, 

 here and there to a receptive mind in substantia- 

 tion of the disputed evolutionary doctrine, which, 



[170] 



