NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 
It has become the academic fashion to take 
the ground that, unless a man is a man of 
record, unless he keeps a close and systematic 
note-book, so that at any given time he can 
refer authoritatively to any given step in a 
given research and show precisely what the 
conditions and what the tendencies at that 
moment, he cannot be classed a scientist. In 
the unusual sweep of his lifework, unusual in 
its results as well as in his understanding of its 
inner life, Mr. Burbank has steadily set at 
naught this contention. He has not kept such 
records of his work as should have been kept, 
—and no one better than himself knows and 
laments this fact,—such records as his larger 
opportunities now provide; but the keeping of 
these records in the past would not have made 
him a scientific man,—they are incidental, 
even if important. He has not disdained rec- 
ords, he simply has not had time to make 
them himself or money to hire others to make 
them, and yet in his plan books, elsewhere 
noted,— books which probably not one man in 
ten thousand who has visited him ever heard 
of,—he has been eminently scientific, even 
from the standpoint of the academician 
356 
