LUTHER BURBANK 



acquired. The plants were here hefore there were 

 animals to feed on or destroy them, so there must 

 have been a time in their history when they had 

 no need for such defense. 



"It must be true, then, that away back in their 

 ancestry there were desert sagebrushes which 

 were not bitter, desert euphorbias which were not 

 poisonous, and desert cactus plants which had 

 not even the suspicion of a spine. It could only 

 be the long continued danger of destruction 

 which could have produced so radical a means of 

 defense. 



"We have, then, but to take these plants back 

 to a period in their historj^ before defense had 

 become a problem — in order to produce an edible 

 sagebrush, a non-poisonous euphorbia, a spineless 

 cactus." 



How, in a dozen j^ears, Mr. Burbank carried the 

 cactus back ages in its ancestrj% how he proved 

 beyond question by planting a thousand cactus 

 seeds that the spiny cactus descended from a 

 smooth slabbed line of forefathers — how he 

 brought forth a new race without the suspicion 

 of a spine, and with a velvet skin, and how he so 

 re-established these old characteristics that the 

 result was fixed and permanent — all of these 

 things will be explained in due course where the 

 discoveries involved and the working methods 



[12] 



