NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 
potatoes varied much in a given hill, rendering 
them unsatisfactory for marketing without 
selection. Mr. Burbank will obviate this by 
making them all practically of the same size. 
Uniformity will also be more satisfactory for 
cooking purposes. 
While the potato and the tomato are very 
closely allied in family ties, being, indeed, not 
far separated blood relation, they are as far 
apart as the poles when it comes to any satis- 
factory amalgamation. Mr. Burbank has found 
many similarly strange instances where two 
plants which, by all the probabilities, should 
be the very ones to be most hospitable to each 
other, utterly refuse to join. 
But some very remarkable results developed 
in his attempts to cross the two. For ex- 
ample, he has produced tomatoes from the 
seeds of plants pollinated from potato pollen 
only. He has produced what he has aptly 
called “aérial potatoes,” most peculiar in form, 
growing on a Burbank potato vine grafted on 
a Ponderosa tomato plant. These open-air 
potatoes are of many different shapes and sizes, 
as well as colors. Some of them assume gro- 
tesque forms and appear quite like little pigs. 
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