LAWS OF INHERITANCE PUT TO USE 29 



to the stalk. He has also grown a potato so fine that the 

 United States Department of Agriculture says it is " adding 

 seventeen and a half million dollars a year to the farm incomes 

 of America alone." 



There is no question about wheat and corn and potatoes ; 

 man has changed them all for the better. And the list might 

 be made many times longer, for nowadays the same laws of in- 

 heritance are being used to improve tomatoes, watermelons, 

 apples, grapes, beans, peaches, and other edible things. 



Then, too, there is the case of cotton to be rescued from 

 the weevil. 



In the southern states of America the boll weevil is the 

 pest of the cotton crop. It is a flying insect that punctures 

 the flower buds and the bolls of cotton and lays its eggs 

 within. Here these eggs hatch out into small worms which 

 feed on the heart of the bud. This so damages the growing 

 flower that it loses its vitality and falls to the ground before 

 the cotton is formed. At last, however, a variety of cotton 

 plant has been developed which not only bears cotton that is 

 long and silky, but which flowers so early in the season that 

 the cotton itself is ready to be picked before the boll weevil 

 has harmed it. This single discovery will save thousands of 

 bales of cotton every year. 



Laws of inheritance have certainly been pressed into prac- 

 tical use in all sorts of directions. And now steps in Luther 

 Burbank to show what can be done in securing beauty. 



He took the plant amaryllis, with its slender stem and its 

 blossom two or three inches across, and from this he helped 

 nature evolve a new amaryllis with low, sturdy trunk about 

 eighteen inches high, and a blossom nearly a foot in diameter. 

 He took the common, everyday poppy, multiplied its hybrids 

 by tens of thousands, made careful selection of ancestors, kept 



