Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/99

 80 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS eminently an observer as well as a man of rare intuition and wonderful memory. He not only notes those essentially ob- vious characteristics which the average man may see, and assigns them unerringly to their proper place, but he looks farther on and deeper into the subtler life of nature, and as unerringly assorts and eliminates and assigns. He adds all these manifestations of nature to the sum of all his experi- ences and from them all he draws for his material for his own mental furnishing and equipment. ' ' Mr. Burbank is a member of the CaUfomia Academy of Sciences ; was elected the first honorary member of the Plant and Animal Breeder's Association of the United States and Canada ; and is a Fellow of the Americtm Association for the Advancement of Science. The degree of Doctor of Science has been conferred upon him by Tufts College. He is a lec- turer on scientific plant-evolution in Leland Stanford Uni- versity. Dr. Hugo de Vries, of the University of Amsterdam, Hol- land, says that Mr. Burbank is the greatest breeder of plants the world has ever known. The magnitude of his work excels everything that has ever been done before. Dean Brink of the £[ansas State Agricultural College declares that he is en- titled to be counted not only one of the geniuses of our time, but one of the benefactors of the race. Ex-Governor Pardee of California says that Burbank, like Columbus, has shown us the way to new continents, new forms of life, new sources of wealth, and we, following in his footsteps, will profit by his genius. March 6, Mr. Burbank 's birthday, has been set apart by the State of California as Burbank Day. To-day, at the age of sixty-five, Luther Burbank **ha8 be- stowed upon the world a greater increment of values, in things done and things inevitable, which are for the permanent betterment of civilization, than any score of celebrities in this decade or in any previous decade or century, and this wiU clearly appear when the facts are submitted to ultimate an- alysis. . . Is it too much to say that among the great bene- factors of the race Luther Burbank will be unique in the splen-