The Scientific Aspects of Luther Burbank’s Works
“The Scientific Aspects of Luther Burbank’s Works,” by David Starr Jordan, and Vernon L. Kellogg. A. M. Robinson, San Francisco. This is a beautifully printed and nicely illustrated work. The letter press is magnificent and of itself invites reading. It is written by Doctors Jordan and Kellogg from the evolutionary standpoint; but the wonderful facts that are presented concerning Mr. Burbank’s work are splendidly told and hold the interest of the reader clear through to the end. It is Dr. Jordan’s contention that Mr. Burbank is not a wizard, and it is utterly unjust to call him so; it really belittles his work; but that he is working from a purely scientific standpoint and in perfect harmony with nature; using four different methods, natural selection, crossing, hybridization, and mutation or saltation. “Natural selection” is the selection of the very finest specimens and constantly breeding from those. “Crossing” is the union of two plants of the same species; “hybridization,” of different species; and “mutation” or “saltation” is the utter breaking up of the law of the plant, leaping over, so to speak, nature’s processes and producing something entirely different. Oftentimes monstrosities come from the breaking up of the law of the plant. The scientists seek to account for all these various changes and mutations, by the hypothesis of evolution. It seems so much easier to us to account for them in the great fact of sin and its perversion of law on every plane of life. Nothing which evolution teaches but that can be explained from the purely Biblical viewpoint. But entirely apart from the evolution theory, the book is worth reading by all who are interested in plant growth, and this is especially so just at this time when Mr. Burbank is entering upon work of a larger scale. We are told in this work how some of the finest products of Mr. Burbank’s work have been produced. How the wonderful results which Mr. Burbank obtained by crossing of all sorts of beans; of the hybridization of apples and blackberries, the product of which came out essentially apples in foliage and growth, entirely thornless, bearing rose-colored flowers, but no fruit. There are a large number of illustrations, especially of the spineless cacti which bids fair to become a marvelous blessing to the arid regions of the earth.