NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 
own generalizations and resting them on 
the basis of his own knowledge. Within the 
range of his own experience he is an original 
and logical thinker, and his conclusions are 
in general most sound. He is not a physiolo- 
gist, still less a histologist, and the phenomena 
of heredity as shown in cell-division and 
cell- multiplication he has not studied for 
himself. The researches of Weismann and 
those suggested by his theories of heredity 
Burbank has given little attention to, and 
he has, therefore, a confidence in the inheri- 
tance of acquired characters, such as effects 
of environment, which most biologists of 
today do not share. On the other hand, many 
of the best of them would fully agree with 
Burbank. 
“In his field of the application of our 
knowledge of heredity, selection and crossing 
‘to the development of plants, he stands 
unique in the world. No one else, whatever 
his appliances, has done as much as Burbank, 
or disclosed as much of the laws governing 
these phenomena. Burbank has worked for 
years alone, not understood and not appre- 
ciated, at a constant financial loss, and for this 
366 
