Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/376

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372
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
Heuchera Leaves made Crested by Selection of Varying Seedlings.

the individual giving this perfume was carefully hunted out. No farther selecting was done; this plant was the single ancestor of the fragrant new race.

And so one might go on for pages, but with slight variations in detail all these pages would tell only the same story: the stimulating or inducing of variability by environmental influences and by hybridizations; the search after, and keen recognition of, promising special variations; the selection of the plants showing these variations; rearing new generations from them, repeated selection, and new hybridizations to eliminate this characteristic or introduce that, and on until a desirable combination is found. Then the careful fixing of this form or type by repeated selection through several generations.

But an end must be made of this. Let us, in a paragraph, simply sum up the essential things in the scientific aspects of Burbank's work. No new revelations to science of an overturning character; but the revelation of the possibilities of accomplishment, based on general principles already known, by an unusual man. No new laws of evolution, but new facts, new data, new canons for special cases. No new principle or process to substitute for selection, but a new proof of the possibilities of the effectiveness of the old principle. No new categories of variations, but an illuminating demonstration of the possibilities of stimulating variability and of the reality of this general variability as the fundamental transforming factor. No new evidence either to help the Darwinian factors to their death-lied, or to strengthen their lease on life; for the 'man' factor in all the selecting phenomena in Burbank's gardens excludes all 'natural' factors. Here are some of