LUTHER BURBANK 



less remote generation of progeny of the existing 

 cherries, a race that will furnish extreme 

 examples, through reversion, of the limits of 

 variation in each direction — and as regards each 

 particular quality of fruit— that any ancestor 

 reached. 



It will be obvious, then, that I am not preparing 

 to make bricks without straw. 



I am counting well the materials with which 

 I must work, just as the architect from the first 

 stroke of his pencil bears in mind the materials 

 of the future cathedral. 



I do not imagine that I can produce an apple 

 from my cherry stalks, any more than the architect 

 assumes that he can build a marble cathedral out 

 of bricks. I know that there are sharply defined 

 hereditary limitations beyond which the cherry 

 cannot be made to go within any such period of 

 time as that limiting my experiment. 



In other words, I do not ask the impossible, 

 although it has often seemed to my critics that 

 I have asked the highly improbable. 



But the results I have attained are in them- 

 selves sufficient answer to the critic. If my vision 

 has in some cases been the clearer, it is merely 

 that my knowledge of plant life, drawn from the 

 school of experience, has been wider. 



To the uninitiated observer it may have seemed 



[16] 



