ON BOYHOOD DAYS 



It must not be forgotten, to be sure, that my 

 father had a cousin, Professor Levi Sumner Bur- 

 bank, who was a man of strong scientific proclivi- 

 ties, and who, indeed, was in part responsible for 

 stimulating my love of nature, inasumch as he 

 lived with us at times, and I often rambled with 

 him in the woods and gained from him a knowl- 

 edge of the names of rocks and flowers and trees. 



This Burbank cousin was a friend of Agassiz. 

 He was an early member of the American Associa- 

 tion for the Advancement of Science. He wrote 

 books on technical aspects of geology, one of these, 

 it is recalled, being entitled "The Eozonal Lime- 

 stones of Eastern Massachusetts. He often took 

 long trips with Agassiz to places of scientific inter- 

 est. He was for some time curator of geology of 

 the Boston Society of Natural History, and he had 

 a large and well selected geological collection. 

 Through him I gained a certain knowledge of 

 geology, and in particular of the work of Agassiz, 

 although I met the great scientist himself on one 

 occasion only. 



THE HEREDITARY BACKGROUND 

 I mention this scientific Burbank cousin as sug- 

 gesting that there were certain proclivities that 

 might in part account for the instincts of a plant 

 developer in the strains of Burbank heredity. But, 

 as what has just been said will further suggest, 



