BURBANK'S HORTICULTURAL NOVELTIES 235 



plete reminiscences of the breeder, and a basis might be 

 worked out, from which scientific conclusions of the highest 

 importance could be drawn. Burbank often claims that 

 the production of a single novelty requires much time and 

 much labor and a considerable amount of space in his garden 

 during a series of years. The scientific repetition and de- 

 scription of such a mutation experiment would, however, 

 require perhaps ten times as much time and labor as the 

 practical production of the same variety. 



In one instance I have had the good fortune of producing 

 experimentally a variety, the exact counterpart of which has 

 been produced industrially by Burbank. I refer to the 

 origin of a double marigold. Burbank is doubling his Shasta 

 daisy, and in my garden I observed and guided the springing 

 up of a double form of the vellow corn-marigold (Chrysan- 

 themum segetum). Although Burbank's description of this 

 selection is only very short and succinct, there cannot be the 

 least doubt concerning the parallelism of the two cases. 

 The Shasta daisy is, as I have already pointed out, a hybrid 

 between a Japanese, an American, and an English species of 

 the genus Chrysanthemum. Among them, at least the 

 English ancestor is highly variable, and it is evident that the 

 fluted rays, and some other remarkable deviations which 

 occurred in the hybrids, may be due to this source. The 

 same holds good for the doubling. Ten or fifteen years ago 

 Burbank discovered a slight degree of augmentation in the 

 number of the ray-florets of some of his hybrids. He care- 

 fully isolated them, observed an increase in the deviation 

 and repeated the selection until the flower heads became as 

 double as those of any other double variety among the Com- 

 posites. 



In the case of my yellow corn-marigold the selection has 

 been accompanied by the counting of the ray-florets for all 

 the plants of the succeeding generations. The first indica- 



