BREEDING FOR PERFUME 
the magnolia while still retaining all its other 
good qualities; and then he knew that the 
battle was won. It might be long until the 
perfumed dahlia was fully fixed, and longer 
yet to introduce the new flower to the world, 
but the chief object had been reached,—the 
offensive odor had been driven out and in its 
place had been established a rare and lasting 
perfume: it was the working of a modern 
miracle. 
“It is not so difficult,” Mr. Burbank says of 
the new scented dahlia, “to teach a plant to 
transmit other characteristics, and, once its 
new traits have been fixed, it has no difficulty 
in keeping on in the new way. When the 
dahlia once learned to be double, for example, 
and had had a term of years in which to fix 
itself in this new form, it was easy enough to 
go onward in the same way. But it was a new 
thing for the dahlia to change its odor, it took 
a long time for it to get used to it. All its life 
habits through thousands of generations had 
to be broken up. It was its lifelong habit to 
bear a disagreeable odor. It was no ordinary 
thing in its life to make the change; it could 
not easily give up its old ways. At first, prob- 
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