NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 
tell how a given experiment may end. Some- 
times, even in his own work, carried on upon 
so vast a scale and with apparently a command 
of every possible avenue of knowledge leading 
up to a given test, a plant will now and then 
burst forth in some new and wholly unex- 
pected direction and accomplish marvelous 
results. It is much as though the spirit of the 
plant had been waiting in embryo all these 
years for some one to bring it forth to life. 
He lays special stress, too, upon the fascina- 
tion of the work. Here is a man who has 
been engaged in plant-breeding for nearly 
forty years, who has created more new forms 
of plant life than any other man who has ever 
lived, who has been what one might almost 
call surfeited by successes, but who takes up 
each new experiment with as great a zest as 
ever, whose eye sparkles and whose face glows 
over a new development or the solution of a 
problem as vividly as it did when he began 
the work many years ago. For a man who is 
accustomed to the cold hard facts of the 
every-day, dealing with problems whose chief 
factors are dollars and cents, —for such a man 
to be able to take a life and train it into new 
244 
