THEORIES AND CONCLUSIONS 
any law or other force governing these 
peculiar mutations,— which mutations, it has 
been held, produce new and stable varieties 
from which Nature selects those which are 
fit.— Mr. Burbank, times without number, 
has produced these strange mutations at 
will. They can be produced, he says, by 
anybody who systematically sets to work to 
disturb the life habits of the plants. Thus 
the peculiar phenomena which scientific ob- 
servers on a small field have so sedulously 
studied, and have at last come to consider 
the result of a supreme act of Nature, are 
entirely within the province of any market- 
gardener or amateur plant-breeder. In ad- 
dition to this, he has demonstrated that 
that which the scientists have called mutations 
are not periods in the plant life at all, but 
only states or conditions, the result of heredi- 
tary tendencies and environments. 
Putting the matter in condensed form 
he says: 
“By crossing different species we can form 
more variations and mutations in a _ half 
dozen generations than will be developed by 
ordinary variations in a thousand generations.” 
345 
