GENERAL METHODS OF WORK 
morally, by the influence of those who are 
born and reared in country places, so, many 
times, a plant which has long lived in a care- 
less civilization having lost its vitality, needs a 
new infusion of blood. Mr. Burbank has ever 
been a close student of all the outward forms 
of nature, as well as of all her strange inner_ 
life. All through all the years he has been 
working upon the flowers and plants he has 
found in the open, using them frequently for 
this very purpose to strengthen the strain of 
some over-civilized plant needing the fresh 
impulse of the wild, strong neighbor of the 
mountains or forest. Collectors in all quarters 
of the world, too, are steadily on the lookout 
to provide him with plant life from their re- 
gions, sometimes wild, sometimes tame, with 
which to make combinations or developments. 
So he is confined to no one species nor to 
any one line of combinations. The whole 
world is his field, and he makes his selections 
and forms his combinations in absolute dis- 
regard of all precedent. The end in view is 
the point, how to reach it most directly. It 
may be along so-called scientific lines, it may 
be in absolutely new and original paths,— 
35 
