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from which position she was called to be dean of women at the University of Oregon. Always an intimate friend of Mrs. Mills, the latter chose her in 1909 to be her successor as president.

Dr. Carson has traveled widely in this country and Europe. Recently she visited all the women's colleges of the Eastern States. She is also a writer. Her best known work is a "Handbook of English Composition" which has been adopted by Wellesley College, and by the public schools of New York City. Lela Angier Lenfest.

A Plant-Master and His Power

THE story of how Luther Burbank, by pollenation and selection, has created species of plants is not a new one; but very few even of his intimate friends know what a delicately sensitive human organism his intense study of plant-life has made of him, or how close in touch he is, as a result of his study, with life principles. To understand these things, a glance at his general method in the nursery is necessary. Having cross-fertilized, for example, the wild Siberian blackberry with the California wild blackberry, he collects and saves the myriads of tiny seeds, plants them and grows thousands of seedling, puts them in the nursery, and selection and rejection begins.

When he is thus at work his rapidity is marvelous. With quick glances at individual vines he moves down the long rows saying "Kill, keep; kill, keep," while three or four trained employees follow him, marking the plants to be saved. When he finds a specimen of striking and unusual promise, one almost or quite ready to be sent to the world, his well-known mark, a sort of a double cross, is made with his own hand. The rejected plants are immediately destroyed, for no plant of poor quality is allowed to remain and blossom, as its pollen might be carried by the industrious insect to the promising fruit and thus vitiate the good bloom. It is in this work of selection that one of the mysteries of Mr. Burbank's genius is to be seen; for his is the instinct that know: by the "look" or perhaps "feel" of the plant whether it promises good or bad. Curious experts have proved that the instinctive judgment of the plant-grower seldom errs. These have taken the trees discarded by the plant—creator, grown them by the side of the good trees and satistied themselves that the experimenter knows what he is about.

There is no doubt that Burbank's extreme sensitiveness as regards touch, sight and hearing, explains in a large degree his power to so unerringly select the plant best suited to survive as a producer for human welfare. But it is not the full explanation. Burbank not long ago in a conversation with the writer called attention to the well-known fact that some people attract each other, others repel. Domestic animals often have instinctive likings for some people, for others instinctive dislikes. Plants flourish under the care of some who try to garden. Other people, try as they may, are unable to make a plant flourish. The important point is that plants feel just as animals do, but in less degree, the kindly care or love bestowed upon them by their cultivators. Burbank's explanation of this strange instinctive power is interesting:

"There is," he says, "a magnetism, a life principle, not yet well understood, which plays under sympathetic conditions between human and human, between human and animal, between human and plant. The common carrier of this magnetism may be electricity—electricity, I repeat, being merely the carrier."

It is this hypothetical magnetism transported on electricity that enables the Plant-Master, aided by his highly developed sensitiveness, to judge of the fitness of a plant to survive. Yet on the other hand it is this power, so refined as to make it appear the gilt of the gods, which causes the ordinary visitor at the Santa Rosa gardens, or the average reader of results obtained in creating species, to shake heads and mutter "Alchemist!" "wizard!" terms which Mr. Burbank in no manner deserves to have applied to him. He is human, the same as others, only he is a human far ahead of the time in development of sense-power and soul.

Once understanding these qualities both mental and physical, one is prepared to accept many of the marvels of Burbank's work-life; for, frail in body as the Plant-Master appears, what he does, and his output of work, is no less wonderful than the wonders of his gardens. For example, because of his close use of eyesight in observation of plants during the day, it becomes