THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



150 



and a few of the seeds planted. In 1950, or seventy-one 

 years after the seeds were gathered, some from an evening 

 primrose, a yellow dock and a moth mullen came up. 



Botanists agree that the layman's favorite story about the 

 flourishing of the wheat recovered from an Egyptian 

 mummy, or of the corn from an Indian clijff dwelling has 

 never been authenticated and until comparatively recently 

 they were inclined to be very skeptical of all alleged cases 

 of viability which endured for centuries. But in 1923 the 

 most extraordinary case ever definitely established made 

 the mummy stories seem again v^thin the range of re- 

 motely possible fact. In that year a Japanese botanist f oimd 

 in a bog in Manchuria the seeds of a species of lotus extinct 

 in that region. When he planted them they grew, and he 

 guessed that they were at least several hundred years old. 

 But we now know that he was overconservative. Tested by 

 the new radioactive carbon method, they turned out to 

 have been produced by a plant which was growing ap- 

 proximately one thousand years ago. Seeds are almost cer- 

 tainly not immortal. But they are certainly more enduring 

 than scientists used to beheve. 



