This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ... No Two Living Things Exactly Alike Infinite Ingenuity The Price Of Variation WHERE do the flowers get their colors?" asked a visitor of Mr. Burbank one day. "From the bees, and the butterflies, and the birds," was the reply. "And from us." ***** Let us pick up a geranium, such as might be found in any dooryard in America, and see what Mr. Burbank meant. If we were to strip off its five brilliant petals soon after they have opened, and slice the base of the blossom in half, we should find ourselves looking into a tiny nest of geranium eggs--round, white, moist, mushy eggs with a soft skinny covering for shells. Carefully packed in a pulpy formation, these eggs, we should observe, are incased in a well protected nest, longer than its breadth, oval, except [volume I--Chapter III] that its top extends upward in the form of a single tiny stalk. Surrounding this neatly packed nest of geranium eggs with its single upright stalk, and hugging it closely all around, we should see ten modified leaves, a quarter of an inch or so in length, ending, each, in a pointed stalk as big around, perhaps, as a bristle out of a hair brush; ten such leaves in two rows--as if shielding the egg chamber and its central stalk from harmful intruders. At the tops of the ten surrounding stalks, we should see the crosswise bundles, nicely balanced, of beautiful golden-orange pollen dust, loosely held in half-burst packages. And at their base, we should find the syrup factory of the geranium--a group of tiny glands which manufacture a sticky confection that covers the bottom of the flower with its sweetness. Shall we take one of the egg-like seeds from its nest and plant it? We might as well plant a toothpick. Shall we take a package of the pollen, and put it in the...