LUTHER BURBANK 



the combination between the two, instead of 

 between the pollen grains and the eggs of a single 



blossom. 



***** 



Which is exactly what the Mother Geranium 



intended we should do. 



***** 



If the stigma of a blossom were at its receptive 

 stage when the pollen packages around it burst 

 open, there would probably be combined in the 

 seeds of its egg chamber below, only the charac- 

 teristics of one parent plant — only the tendencies 

 of a single line of ancestry. 



The geraniums growing from those seeds would 

 be so like in their tendencies of heredity that they 

 would differ, individually, only as their individual 

 environments differed. 



But when those eggs have brought to them 

 the pollen from another plant, there are, confined 

 within them, the tendencies and characteristics of 

 two complex lines of ancestry; so that the plants 

 into which they grow will be encouraged into 

 variation and individuality, not as a result of 

 environment alone, but as a result of the countless 

 tendencies inherited from two separate lines of 

 parentage. 



What a scheme for pitting the old tendencies of 

 heredity against the new tendencies of environ- 



[76] 



