Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/368

364 and generally favorable conditions. So-called new qualities are usually, if not always (the fact may sometimes not be obvious), simply new combinations of old qualities, both latent and obvious. To get a new and pleasing odor it may often be sufficient simply to lose one bad element in an old odor. So one might go on for some pages with specific conclusions or deductions reached by Burbank on a basis of experience. But it is true that he has at his command the knowledge of no new fundamental scientific principles to give him advantage over us. And yet none of us has done what Burbank has been able to do, although many of us have tried. What then is it that Burbank brings to his work of modifying organisms swiftly and extremely and definitely that others do not?

To answer this it will be advisable to analyze, in general terms, at least, the various processes which either singly, or in combinations of two or three, or all together, are used by Mr. Burbank in his work. We may roughly classify these processes and means. First, there is the importation from foreign countries, through many correspondents, of a host of various kinds of plants, some of economic value in their native land and some not, any of which grown under different conditions here may prove specially vigorous or prolific or hardy, or show other desirable changes or new qualities. Among these importations are often special kinds particularly sought for by Burbank to use in his multiple hybridizations; kinds closely related to our native or to already cultivated races which, despite many worthless characteristics, may possess one or more particular, valuable ones needed to be added to a race already useful to make it more useful. Such an addition makes a new race.

Second, the production of variations, abundant and extreme, by various methods, as (a) the growing under new and, usually, more favorable environment (food supply, water, temperature, light, space, etc.) of various wild or cultivated forms, and (b) by hybridizations between forms closely related, less closely related and, finally, as dissimilar as may be (not producing sterility), this hybridizing being often immensely complicated by multiplying crosses, i. e., the offspring from one cross being immediately crossed with a third form, and the offspring of this with still another form, and so on. These hybridizations are made sometimes with very little reference to the actual useful or non-useful characteristics of the crossed parents, with the primary intention of producing an unsettling or instability in the heredity, of causing, as Burbank sometimes says, 'perturbations' in the plants, so as to get just as wide and as large variation as possible. Other crosses are made, of course, in the deliberate attempt to blend, to mix, to add together, two desirable characteristics, each possessed by