as good a brain as Edison, but has not the opportunity to develop it
and show its capabilities. The same analogy is applicable to plant
life. Under adverse conditions a plant or vegetable cannot put forth
its best efforts. In a scrawny, impoverished soil, and exhausted
atmosphere, lacking the constituents of nurture, the plant will become
dwarfed and unproductive, whereas on good ground and in good air, which
have the succulent properties to nourish it the best results may be
expected. The soil and the air, therefore, from which are derived the
constituents of plant life, are indispensably necessary, but they are
not the primal principles upon which that life depends for its being.
The basis, the foundation, the origin of the life is the seed which
germinates in the soil and evolves itself into the plant.

A dead seed will not germinate, a contaminated seed may, but the plant
it produces will not be a healthy one and it will only be after a long
series of transplantings, with patience and care, that at length a
really sound plant will be obtained. The same principle holds good in
regard to the human plant. It is hard to offset an evil ancestry. The
contamination goes on from generation to generation, just as in the
case of the notorious Juke family which cost New York State hundreds
of thousands of dollars in consequence of criminality and idiocy. It
requires almost a miracle to divert an individual sprung from a corrupt
stem into a healthy, moral course of living. There must be some powerful
force brought to bear to make him break the ligatures which bind him
to ancestral nature and enable him to come forth on a plane where he
will be susceptible to the influence of what is good and noble. Such
can be done and has been accomplished.

Burbank is accomplishing such miracles in the vegetable kingdom, in
fact he is recreating species as it were and developing them to a full