68 
THE) STORY OR THE OAK TREE 
nucleus grows and divides too, so that every cell in your 
body, muscle cell, brain cell, eye cell, hair cell, has in it, 
in a sense, a bit of the original egg-cell from which you 
came. It will set your imagination spinning to realize 
that everything you now are comes, with the aid of nur¬ 
ture, from that one first tiny bit of protoplasm. 
The story of inheritance and cross-fertilization is so 
fascinating and so useful to mankind that men have spent 
their lives at it. Out in California our own countryman, 
Luther Burbank, has acres upon acres of flowers and 
vegetables and fruits, all new varieties which he has 
created by careful crossing and hybridizing. He has 
grown beautiful plums and berries, bigger and juicier 
than any plums and berries ever tasted before, and he has 
done this by carefully selecting and cross-breeding or 
hybridizing those fruits which he knew would have 
healthy children. He took a dewberry and a raspberry 
and crossed them, and next season, up came a new berry 
—he called it “Primus”—which ripens before most black¬ 
berries and raspberries even commence to bloom. He 
laid the pollen from a staminate blackberry upon the 
pistil of a Crystal White berry and after patient waiting 
he found upon the bush the most beautiful snow-white 
berries, so clear that he could count the small seeds with¬ 
in them. These he called “Iceberg” berries. He grew 
seedless prunes and fragrant pansies—you know most 
