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 



