NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 
time building up more beautiful forms. It is 
interesting to note, in passing, that while the 
dahlia seeds which he has sent out to leading 
amateur gardeners in various parts of the 
world are the ones which he has discarded as 
not valuable enough to use in carrying forward 
his experiments,—reserving, of necessity, the 
very best ones for the work in hand,—yet he 
has received enthusiastic letters from those 
who have grown flowers from these discarded 
seeds, reciting the triumphs won in prizes and 
premiums at flower shows and county fairs. 
The dahlia, like many another flower, when 
first broken of an old habit of life and led into 
a new one, finds it sometimes hard to persist 
in the new way. Everything is strange. It is 
called upon to do things it never was called 
upon to do before. A million past tendencies 
are at work to keep it in the old paths. So, 
when any new and particularly desirable trait 
is developed, it is often hard to fix it. And in 
the fixing of this trait a thousand things must 
be taken into account,— incidents in its life 
history, peculiarities of environment, methods 
of growth and development, individual char- 
acteristics. 
176 
