LUTHER BURBANK 



become an actual working factor, a necessary 

 tool, without whicli it is impossible to do the 

 day's work. 



Whether plant improvement be taken up as a 

 science, or as a profession, or as a business — or 

 whether it be considered merely a thing of general 

 interest, an idle hour recreation — there is ever 

 present the need to understand Nature's methods 

 and her forces in order to be able to make use of 

 them — to guide them — there always stares us in 

 the face that solitary question: 



"Where — and how — did life start?" 

 ***** 



We have seen in this volume a color photograph 

 of corn as it grew four thousand years, perhaps, 

 before the days of Adam and Eve. 



It took less than eight seasons to carrj' this 

 plant backward those ten thousand years. 



How this plant was first taken back to the 

 stage in which it was found by the American 

 Indians, thus revealing the methods which thej' 

 crudely used to improve it — and how it was taken 

 back and back and back beyond the Pharaohs and 

 then back forty centuries before the time of man — 

 how we know these things to be true — and how, as 

 a result of these experiments we are about to 

 see it carried forward by several centuries — all of 

 these things are reserved for a later chapter where 



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