28th April.
Burbank? Who is Burbank? The question is as certain as the coming of the sue, and we may answering the first place that Burbank's is a name which will go down to posterity in the honoured list of those who through great tribulation have arrived at complete success, who have party coaxed, and partly forced nature (o yield her secrets and show to man the manner in which she may most effectively be wooed and won. Copernicus, Newton, Dar-wie, Palissy the Potter, snd Goodyear, each in his way, earned this distinction, this immortality, and Burbank belongs to the same noble family. To the question we would then reply by a quotation from a paper in the current number of the "Century Magazine:"—He is the man "who has known what it is to feel the cruel pangs of hunger, who has slept in noisome places when he could call no roof his own, and who has done the most repugnant and disagreeable labour to earn a pittance to keep soul and body together, who has fought off fever when he had not money enough to pay for the pint of milk which stood between him and possible death, who has steadily denied himself all the minor luxuries of life and many of its comforts, the man who until a few years ago never had a microscope, so important an instrament in his work.
Who has sacrificed at every ible point, and made constant inroads upon his hard-earned savings after coming perilously near complete physical breakdown as a result of overwork, and all that he might beautify and glorify the habitable world around him." of Palissy in his search for the glaze Those acquainted with the story
which ever since has beautified our earthenware, or of Goodyear in his ardent experiments for an india-rubber that would not melt with heat, will need no more than the foregoing to enable them to picture down to its minutest details the struggle in which for many years Burbank of Santa Rosa has been engaged. tething now remains, however, but to perfect the system already proved possible, and to blazon forth to the world, not by advertisement, that is unnecessary, but by the universal dispersion of its blessings, the great things which this newest of great men has done for the good of the human race for all time to come.
Burbank of Santa Rosa is the wizard who has found out. how to produce stoneless fruits, coreless apples, seedless oranges, and many more "miracles" in the world of fruit and flowers. To rend the story one would think that there was nothing wonderful in his achievements, It is only when one tries to imagine the effect upon an o'd-fashioned farmer of the news that such things are possible, that one realises the vast stride onward that Burbank has made. And yet, it is beyond human nature to repress that impatient exclamation which has followed such discoveries since the beginning, Why was it not done before? There is nothing new under the sun; there is nothing new in the theories of Burbank. For a long time we have known that, in the vegetable world as in the animal, there are male and female, and what careful selection and crossing can do in the latter has been plain ever since we have had variety in. the breeds of horses, dogs, and cattle. The new discoverer has but applied these principles to the world of plants, and just as from the diminutive wild pony we have bred the British dray-horse, so from a tiny plum he has produced a new variety with fruit as big as a pear. Did we say a new variety? Not one, but 300,000! Three hundred thousand distinct varieties of plums are now growing in the gardens of the new wizard in California, And plums, of course, are but one of the many fruits and other plan's on which the new treatment is being tried. White blackberries, bursting with juicy richness, tempt the thirsty visitor to taste for the first time a new "creation." The "primus" berry, 'a cross between the raspberry and blackberry, looks still more promising, while the " plumcot," the produce of a union between the plumand the apricot far out distances either of its parents. Nor isit only in size that there is this wonderful advance. Mr. Barbaok thinks nothing of if they show signs of going in the course of Nature. direction he would not have them go. He is therefore as keen on the producing of a good flavour as he is on the growth in size, 5 How isitalldone? Fora detailed answer to this question we must refer our readers to the "Century Magazine," but to anyone who under= stands the operations of plants when left to themselves, it is enough to say that the application of a little pollen to the stigma of a different though allied plant is all that is required in the first instance. The resulting progeny may be something monstrous and only fit for destruction, but there will be some plants of promise, and repetition of the same treatment in such cases, when done under the eye of one who sees farther into plant life than ever did man before him, is a'l that is necessary. Others can follow where Burbank leads the way, and the cry of the pessimist, that the world was becoming overpeopled and that in the not far ant future men would only be able to exist by cutting each other's throats, has been shown to be less true than the confident hope of the optimist that before that crisis arrived a man would come who would feed the world as Moses fed the wandering Israelites. The man has come. The food is here. Even the desert will henceforth support a teeming population, for the Californian wonder has tamed the cactus. Its spines are gone. Its woody fibre has been developed into healub-giving food, its fruit toa well-flavoured sustenance fit for the support of man or beast.
Tt is most satisfactory to learn that for ten years to come this magician of the garden will have at his disposil for experimental purposes $10,000 gold from the Carnegie Institution, As has ever been the case, when the fight is over there is no lack of volunteers. We cannot forbear to mention a characteristic incident in Burbank's career. From time immemorial orthodoxy has been hard on discoverers, Burbank has had to bear his share of obloquy from this source. A minister of the Gospel one day invited him to Church, and getting him there proceeded to denounce bim as a foe to God and men because sacrificing a whole field full of plants his experiments tended to upset the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.