Luther Burbank’s Accomplishments

This series has six easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: What Did Burbank Do?.

Introduction
Luther Burbank was a pioneer horticulturist who grafted different plants together to make hybrids. The first clear public recognition of his remarkable work of came in 1905, when the Carnegie Institution, in recognition of what he had already accomplished, gave him a large annual fund with which to carry his experiments further and on a broader scale.

Since then Mr. Burbank has gone on from one step to another in his creation of new forms of vegetable life. He has made for us many different fruits and vegetables and flowers; and has shown us that by the judicious intervention of man, Nature can be made almost as plastic as art itself. Mr. Burbank started without a scientific training, and so European botanists were slow to admit the value of his work; but now even the most renowned of them visit Burbank’s California farm to learn from him.

A popular account of what the work means to ordinary men is first given by the contempory scientific writer, Garrett P. Serviss. The final estimate of the learned world upon Burbank’s work is here expressed by a scholar of international repute, President Jordan, of Leland Stanford University.

The selections are from:

• an article in Cosmopolitan Magazine by Garrett P. Servtss.
• an article in Popular Science Magazine by David Starr Jordan.

For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

There’s 4.5 installments by Garrett P. Servtss and 1.5 installments by David Starr Jordan.

We begin with Garrett P. Servtss (1851-1929). He was a science writer who explained topics to the general public.

Place: Santa Rosa, California

Behold. I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree bearing seed.”

And to man, at the same time, was dominion assured over every living thing which is upon the earth.

Why, then, should anybody marvel at the achievements of Luther Burbank? If we do marvel, it is because we have not comprehended the real meaning nor the extent of the control over the life of this globe which is the birthright of humanity.

After a visit in California to Mr. Burbank’s wonder gardens — as people persist in deeming them and after inti mate talks with their master, who has no use or time for mere curiosity-seekers, the only marvel that I can see is the fact that man should have been so tardy in beginning to direct the infinite life-forces placed at his command. The Burbank experiments prove that the plant-world is plastic to human touch, and that we may shape it at our will. We hold a master hand in the game of evolution. We need not go on generation after generation eating the same fruits with the same flavors, smelling the same fragrances, admiring the same flowers with the same colors arrayed in the same order; we need not forever make our bread from the same grains grown under the same conditions that have limited tillage and husbandry in the past; there is no fiat compelling us to dwell as long as our race shall endure under the same rooftrees; the face of the landscape may be made a mirror of the human mind, not simply in the alternation of cultivated fields and woodlands, and the arti ficial arrangement of nature’s forms, but in the character of the forms themselves. The shapes shall be of our choosing, and the colors, the perfumes, and the flavors shall reflect our preferences.

An almost religious reverence has hitherto hedged about the conception of “species. “The old idea was that species were fixed from the beginning by special act of the Creator; Darwinism taught us that species arose only through slow ages of change by the gradual process of natural selection accumulating its effects for thousands and even millions of years; but Luther Burbank shows that man can produce species and do it in a dozen summers!

All this was implied in the declaration of the Hebrew writer concerning the gift of dominion to Adam, but how slow we have been to understand it! Now, however, the proof lies open in those Californian gardens.

It has been averred that these experiments have upset cherished scientific doctrines, but it would be more correct to say that they have flowed all around certain conceptions of formal science, leaving them like islands in the stream, and thus revealing their inadequacy and the partial character of such truth as they do contain.

Let us see what Mr. Burbank has actually done. But first a few words about the man himself, for he is certainly one of the most remarkable men living. In straightforward simplicity of character he excels all the distinguished men I have ever met. In that simplicity is the evidence of rare power. Only a man of that kind can get close to nature, and in his closeness to nature lies his whole secret. He does not create, but he guides nature in creating. According to the testimony of the men of science who have visited him — and many of the most famous have lately made that pilgrimage — his insight into the latent forces and tendencies of plant-life is truly marvelous, amounting to genius of a high and unique order. In this work of producing new plants, as in every other form of human endeavor, it is the personality of the worker that is of the first importance. Having shattered a plant by “hybridization” into a myriad of variant forms, he runs his eye over the multitudinous product, in which the individuals are as different as the faces in a crowd, and with amazing quickness and sure ness of judgment picks out a few, a very few — sometimes but a single one from among thousands — and decrees that these only shall live and have an opportunity to propagate their kind, while all the others go to the brush-heap! Horticulturists with a lifetime of experience find themselves unable to imitate, or even to understand, this swift intuition. It is what has given to Mr. Burbank the popular reputation of a scientific “wizard,” at which he is good-naturedly amused. When he made his famous “white blackberry,” he selected just one plant out of the sixty-five thousand which sprang from the crossings! Anybody can cross plants and get variations, but it is the subsequent selection that forms the test. An army alone is not sufficient to win a victory, there must be also the discriminating and directing eye of a Caesar or a Napoleon. The power of insight has been given to few as fully as it has been given to Luther Burbank, and therein lies the explanation of the strange fact that he, in half a human lifetime, has done more to change the forms of plant-life than all the farmers, gardeners, horticulturists, florists, and savants since the be ginning of history.

And now what, precisely, are the feats of Luther Burbank, about which all the world is vaguely talking? He is giving to mankind new plants, new fruits, new flowers, new trees, such as have never been known before. Some of these, it is true, are only varieties, akin to those that everybody has seen in gar dens and cultivated fields — for in a timid, half-hearted way man has long been imparting à faint impress of his ideas to the plant world. But the more remarkable ones are so different from any preexisting forms that they can only be described as new creations. Some of them bridge the supposed impassable chasms between species and between genera, and in every way they indicate that there is practically no limit to the number and variety of new plant-forms that can be produced by artificial crossing and selection.

David Starr Jordan begins here.

More information here and here and below.

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