ON THE ORIGIN OF NEW SPECIES 
the plant life and the plant life upon the 
animal, each subsisting in certain measure 
upon the waste of the other. It is a compos- 
ite, so to speak,—half animal, half vegetable. 
Looking to the future, and taking into 
account what Mr. Burbank has already accom- 
plished in the creation of new life, will it be 
possible, granting the common protoplasmic 
basis of plant and animal life, eventually to 
interblend the two? Such union, should it 
come, must be scarcely more marvelous than 
the union here recorded, effecting creations 
which Nature, in the very amplitude of her 
powers, never could have achieved alone. 
225 
