LUTHER BURBANK 



"Some of tlie experiments which have taken 

 the roost time and cost the inost money have 

 produced no apparent result; and some of the 

 results which seem most important have been 

 achieved in the simplest way, with the least 

 expenditure of effort. 



"Out of the entire total of experiments tried, 

 there have been not more than two or three 

 thousand which, so far, have resulted in a better 

 fruit, or a better flower, or a more marketable nut, 

 or a more useful plant. 



"On the other hand, I should feel repaid for all 

 the work I have done if only a dozen of my 

 experiments had turned out to be successes. It 

 is the nature of experimentation — we must try 

 manj' things in order to accomplish a few. 



"And this is just exactly what is going on in 

 nature all the time — excepting that where we 

 might get one success out of forty failures, there 

 might be but one out of a thousand or a million 

 if the plants were left to work out their own 

 improvement, unaided. 



"Then, after all, the unsuccessful experiments 

 are failures only in a comparative sense. 



"If you have ever watched the bridge builders 

 constructing a concrete causewaj^ you must have 

 seen the false construction which was necessarj' — 

 the stout wooden structure into which the plastic 



[190] 



