Complimentary Banquet to Luther Burbank 



Q 



and grafting bushes, then pulling them up and burning them 

 by the thousand, meanwhile growing poorer every year, for 

 the harder he worked the less his financial returns then 

 people said again he was a fool. Later, when wonderful 

 blooms, gorgeous roses, vigorous walnuts, and flowers and 

 fruits undreamed of, sprang up at Santa RoseV people the 

 world over came to see them and him and said, "Burbank 

 is a wizard." 



But when men of science, men like De Vries and his 

 associates, came to see Burbank, they knew him 

 for a man of science. A man of science is one who takes 

 knowledge seriously; who, believing in the truth of human 

 experience, trusts his life to it, and has the courage to use it 

 in his business. All the world knows Burbank now, but there 

 are two who found him out earlier than any one else, and 

 who had faith in his work and his future before any one else 

 had realized what he was doing. These two men are Judge 

 Leib of San Jose and Professor Wickson of the University 

 of California. 



I am asked to speak of Burbank's relation to the science 

 of organic evolution, and to the five factors of evolution 

 heredity, variation, environment, selection and isolation, on 

 the inter-relation of which the movements of life depend. 



To understand his relation to these, we must first look at 

 Burbank's method. It is simplicity itself. You can all do 

 the same things in your own gardens. First choose the best 

 of the plants you wish to develop. This is selection, the 

 "magician's wand," as Youatt calls it, by which the breeder 

 can summon up any form of animal or plant he may need 

 for his use or his pleasure. Choose the best; destroy the 

 others ; Nature will do the rest. Like produces like ; that is 

 heredity. But heredity can be helped along by another ele- 



. 26 . 



