NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 



insistently, aggressively awake, for here from 

 dawn to dark a life of the most tense activity 

 is lived where things must be done with the 

 regularity of a machine and the persistence of 

 the sun in its course. Here the field experi- 

 ments are carried on, and here Mr. Burbank 

 does his largest work. Flowers are raised here 

 by the hundred thousand, by the half million 

 indeed, waiting the eye of the master of them 

 all who shall say what one out of all their vast 

 number shall be saved. Here seeds of all 

 manner of fruits are planted by the hundreds 

 of thousands if needs be, apples, pears, peaches, 

 quinces, nectarines, plums, prunes, — a list as 

 long as the list of the world's best known 

 fruits. Here are long rows of young trees, 

 hardly saplings in size, from two to five years 

 old and from three to five feet in height, 

 standing in serried rows so close to one an- 

 other that the tiny branches intertwine. They 

 will all be scrutinized one of these days, and 

 the best of them all, one perhaps out of a 

 hundred thousand, will be saved. The rest 

 will be dug up and burned in great brush 

 heaps. Sometimes there have been as many as 

 fourteen of these huge heaps, comprising from 



250 



