Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/90

 the "lobster" cactus. And it is a coincidence that one of Mr. Burbank's greatest achievements has been the "making over" of the spine-protected cactus, ridding it of its needle-like thorns, compelling it to give mankind and animals food in- stead of poison, and making it earn for its growers fifteen times what they formerly made out of alfalfa.

As the boy grew he showed more and more, a love for the beautiful things in the world around him. His teachers say he was an apt scholar. But even as a boy of twelve, nature 's lessons were to him more interesting than any culled from books. To this nature-teaching he added the information of all the books within his command that would give any additional nature-knowledge. The trend of his mind could have been forecast from the fact that among his favorite authors was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Even in his teens Mr. Burbank showed those tendencies whose development in after years led to the hundreds of plant, fruit, and flower inventions—concerning most of which the world has never even heard. After young Luther had finished common school he was sent to the academy at Lancaster.

Nothing in Luther Burbank 's nature stands out more strongly than his singleness of purpose, his never-wavering aim to make practical his ideal, and his wonderful capacity for work — persistent, never-tiring work ! One of the editors of Luther Burbank, His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application has said in reference to this:

"Some of us do one thing at a time and feel content if we manage to do that one thing well: some of us count eight hours a working day, and limit our labor to that. Luther Burbank is in the habit of doing things by the thousand : his work days average fourteen hours; and he has kept up this steady pace throughout four decades.

"During these forty years he has made a hundred thousand definite experiments in plant life, involving in all the planting, observation, selection, pollination, and propagation or destruction of more than a billion individual plants. A hundred thousand experiments, so well done that the practical