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 fruition. Of course as in the case of the conversion of a sinner from his evil instincts, much opposition is met and the progress at first is slow, but finally the plant becomes fixed in its new ways and starts forward on its new course in life. It requires patience to await the development Burbank is a man of infinite patience. He has been five, ten, fifteen, twenty years in producing a desired blossom, but he considers himself well rewarded when his object has been obtained. Thousands of experiments are going on at the same time, but in each case years are required to achieve results, so slow is the work of selection, the rejecting of the seemingly worthless and the eternal choosing of the best specimens to continue the experiments. When two plants are united to produce a third, no human intelligence can predict just what will be the result of the union. There may be no result at all; hence it is that Burbank does not depend on one experiment at a time. If he did the labors of a life-time would have little to show for their work. In breeding lilies he has used as high as five hundred thousand plants in a single test. Such an immense quantity gave him a great variety of selection. He culled and rejected, and culled and rejected until he made his final selection for the last test. Sometimes he is very much disappointed in his anticipations. For instance, he marks out a certain life for a flower and breeds and selects to that end. For a time all may go according to his plans, but suddenly some new trait develops which knocks those plans all out of gear. The new flower may have a longer stem and narrower leaves than either parent, while a shorter stem and broader leaves are the desideratum. The experimenter is disappointed, but not disheartened; he casts the flower aside and makes another selection from the same species and again goes ahead, until his object is attained.