LUTHER BURBANK 



clerical amateur was carried out was one in which 

 such men as Erasmus Darwin, the poet Goethe, 

 and the French biologist Lamarck were advocating 

 the idea of the mutability of species. And no 

 doubt the Rev. Herbert had some of their theories 

 in mind as he went about his plant experiments in 

 the gardens of the Manchester Deanery. 



Yet in the main he was probably quite uncon- 

 scious of the full significance of the experiments 

 that he was performing. 



The particular experiments that are of interest 

 to us in the present connection are those in which 

 he hybridized one species of Gladiolus with 

 another, and in so doing not only produced new 

 races of gladiolus, but proved to his own satisfac- 

 tion that these new races were altogether fertile. 



Almost half a century later Charles Darwin in 

 his "Origin of Species" had occasion to quote the 

 opinion of the Rev. Herbert, based on his experi- 

 ences with this flower and several others, to the 

 effect that hybrids are not necessarily sterile — a 

 point that was still ardently in debate. He even 

 cites Herbert as having claimed that the hybrids 

 gained in fertility over the original species — a fact 

 which Herbert himself regarded as being "a 

 strange truth", but regarding which Darwin, writ- 

 ing with fuller knowledge, asserts that it was by 

 no means so strange as it would appear. 



[168] 



