Of new vegetables Burbank has introduced, besides the Burbank and several other new potatoes, new tomatoes, sweet and field corn, squashes, asparagus, etc. Perhaps the most in teresting of his experiments in this field is the successful production of a whole series of giant spineless and spiculess cactus, both for forage and fruit (the spicules are the minute spines, much more dangerous and harder to get rid of than the conspicuous long, thorn-like spines), edible for stock, and indeed for man. This work is chiefly one of pure selection, for the cross-bred forms often seem to tend strongly to revert to the ancestral spiny con dition.
Among the many new flower varieties origi nated by Burbank may be mentioned the Peach blow, Burbank, Coquito and Santa Rosa roses, the Splendor, Fragrance (a fragrant form) and Dwarf Snowflake callas, the enormous Shasta and Alaska daisies, the Ostrich plume, Waverly, Snowdrift and Double clematises, the Hybrid Wax myrtle, the Nicotunia, a hybrid between a large, flowering Nicotiana and a petunia, numerous hybrid Nicotianas, a hundred or more new gladioli, an ampelopsis, numerous amaryllids, various dahlias, the Fire poppy (a brilliant flame-colored variety), striped and carnelian poppies, a blue Shirley (obtained by selection from the Crimson field poppy pf Europe), the Silver lining poppy (obtained by selection from an individual of Pa paver umbrosium showing a streak of silver inside) with silver interior and crimson ex terior, and a crimson California poppy (Eseholt sia) obtained by selection from the familiar golden form. Perhaps his most extensive ex perimenting with flowers has been done in the hybridizing of lilies, a field in which many botanists and plant breeders have found great difficulties. Using over half a hundred vari eties as a basis of his work, Burbank has produced a great variety of new forms. "Can my thoughts be imagined,'" he says, in his 'New Creations) of 1893, "after so many years of patient care and labor (he had been working over 16 years) as, walking among them (his new lilies) on a dewy morning, I look upon these new forms of beauty, on which other eyes have never gazed? Here a plant six feet high with yellow flowers, beside it one only six inches high with dark red flowers, and further on one of pale straw, or snowy white, or with curious dots and shadings; some de liciously fragrant, others faintly so; some with upright, others with nodding flowers, some with dark green, woolly leaves in whorls, or with polished, light green, lance-like, scattered leaves.°
So far no special reference has been made to the more strictly scientific aspects of Bur bank's work. Burbank has been primarily in tent on the production of new and improved fruits, flowers, vegetables, trees, grains and grasses for the immediate benefit of mankind. But where biological experimentation is being carried on so extensively it is obvious that there must be a large accumulation of data of much scientific value in its relation to the great problems of heredity, variation and species-forming. Burbank's experimental gar dens may be looked on from the point of view of the biologist and evolutionist as a great laboratory in which, at present, masses of valuable data are, for lack of time and means, being let go unrecorded. Of Burbank's own particular scientific beliefs touching the "grand problems° of heredity we have space to record but two; first, he is a thorough believer in the inheritance of acquired characters, a condition disbelieved in by the Weismann school of evolutionists; second, he believes in the con stant mutability of species, and the strong individuality of each plant organism, holding that the apparent fixity of characteristics is a phenomenon wholly dependent, for its degree of reality, on the length of time this character. istic has been ontogenetically repeated in the phylogeny of the race. See PLANT-BREEDING.
For other accounts of Burbank and his work, consult articles in the illustrated maga zines; 'New Creations in Plant Life,' by W. S. Harwood. Burbank has written 12 large vol umes, 'Luther Burbank, His Methods and Dis coveries and Their Practical Application' ; 'The Training of the Human Plant' ' • and his series of catalogues, 1893-1901, called 'New Crea and has several other volumes under preparation covering an enormous amount of experimental data on plant life in all its aspects.