Luther Burbank 



UTHER BURBANK is a modest, quiet, 

 devoted worker in science, with a keen 

 eye, a deft hand, a broad intelH^ence and a 

 sensitive soul. He has taken up as his 

 hfe-work the modification of plant life by 

 the processes of crossing and selection. 

 He has devoted himself whole-souled to this work, and with 

 an industry amazing and almost without parallel. For years he 

 has kept thousands of different experiments going, acting on 

 the mechanical certainty that in plant-crossing there will be as 

 many gains as losses, as many tremendous improvements as 

 utter failures. For the sake of the one great gain, he ean burn 

 a ton of vegetable debris made up of plants which failed or 

 only partly succeeded. 



Mr. Burbank has no patent on his methods. They are as 

 open as the day. Thousands have used them before, as thous- 

 ands will use them later. But not one in a hundred thousand 

 has or will use them with like intelligence, deftness and skill. 



It is Darwin who first gave us the knowledge on which all 

 this work rests. The origin of species demands variation, 

 selection, segregation, and behind all this the law of heredity, 



ix 



