. Complimentary banquet in honor of Luther Burbank. Burbank, Luther, 1849-1926; Plant breeding. Complimentary Banquet to Luther Burbank mcnt, crossing. Breed the best with the best. Some of the progeny will have the good qualities of both parents, some the bad. If your crosses are wide apart you may get new combinations undreamed of. Select these again. Breed from the best; ruthlessly burn up the rest. A flower is Nature's advertising medium, calling the bees to fertilize her germ cells. There were no showy flowers, flowers with petals, until after there were insects, and to please the insects
. Complimentary banquet in honor of Luther Burbank. Burbank, Luther, 1849-1926; Plant breeding. Complimentary Banquet to Luther Burbank mcnt, crossing. Breed the best with the best. Some of the progeny will have the good qualities of both parents, some the bad. If your crosses are wide apart you may get new combinations undreamed of. Select these again. Breed from the best; ruthlessly burn up the rest. A flower is Nature's advertising medium, calling the bees to fertilize her germ cells. There were no showy flowers, flowers with petals, until after there were insects, and to please the insects is the flower's real purpose. You don't want the insects. You must manage the crossing yourself. So snip o£E the flowers, keep the bees away, and transfer the pollen to the right place with your own daint}^ fingers. This needs care, skill, patience, science—every virtue demanded by the finest art. And in this art no one has been more skillful than Luther Burbank. Crossing and selection, selection and crossing, this is the whole secret, as simple as any of all the secrets of Nature. It is her method of evolution. Arrange the conditions and Nature w^ill do the rest. But it is one of the finest of all fine arts to arrange these conditions, to bring out the results, results all unseen before, but capable of the exactest fore- cast. The commercial value of Burbank's work is great. It can be expressed only in figures far beyond its actual cost. But above all commercial values we must place Burbank's contributions to human knowledge. Among other things, and I can enumerate but very few, Burbank has shown the plasticity of Nature. Like produces like, but not necessaiy that which actually is. Children re- semble their parents in this way, that they tend to do like things, to develop in like ways under like conditions. Change these conditions and all results are changed. Make condi- tions better, and new structures and new powers burst out. . 27 . .. Please note that these images are
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