Luther Burbank quotes
Luther Burbank was an American botanist and horticulturist known for developing over 800 varieties of plants. His innovative methods greatly influenced modern agriculture and plant breeding. He dedicated his life to improving fruits, vegetables, and flowers through selective breeding. Here are 41 of his quotes:
When certain hereditary tendencies are almost indelibly ingrained, environment will have a hard battle to effect a change in the child; but that a change can be wrought by the surroundings we all know. The particular subject may at first be stubborn against these influences, but repeated application of the same modifying forces in succeeding generations will at last accomplish the desired object in the child as it does in the plant.
Luther Burbank
Heredity is not the dark specter which some people have thought-merciless and unchangeable, the embodiment of Fate itself. This dark, pessimistic belief which tinges even the literature of to-day comes, no doubt, from the general lack of knowledge of the laws governing the interaction of these two ever-present forces of heredity and environment wherever there is life.
My own studies have led me to be assured that heredity is only the sum of all past environment, in other words environment is the architect of heredity; and I am assured of another fact: acquired characters are transmitted and-even further-that all characters which are transmitted have been acquired...
Luther Burbank
The plant, unlike the animal, has provided a special mechanism-a unique laboratory-through which it is able to manufacture from the crude salts in watery solution, with the aid of another element taken from the air, a new compound which will serve the protoplasmic cell with food.
That is to say, the plant organism as a whole comprises a laboratory for compounding the crude elements, which by themselves cannot be used as nourishment, into a substance that can be used as nourishment. ...The plant is the only place in the world where foodstuffs are manufactured, and that no animal of any kind could live without nourishment that was originally manufactured by some plant, the vital importance of the matter will be manifest.
Luther Burbank
Power to vary in plants or animals is itself a feature as readily transmissible as is stability of character. The quality of varying to meet varying environments is therefore one of the hereditary traits which the plant breeder must consider, and which may itself be extended or overcome by the processes of crossing and selection.
Luther Burbank
Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water-bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud-turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in, water-lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hay-fields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education.
By being well acquainted with all these they come into most intimate harmony with nature, whose lessons are, of course, natural and wholesome.
Luther Burbank
During the course of many years of investigation into the plant life of the world, creating new forms, modifying old ones, adapting others to new conditions, and blending still others, I have constantly been impressed with the similarity between the organization and development of plant and human life.
Luther Burbank
In manufacturing food for its own cells, the plant is producing a supply of food that will be available for the sustenance of animal cells also. Thus the entire animal World may be said to be a vast parasitic colony as absolutely dependent upon the vegetable colony for its essential food supplies as any other parasite is dependent upon its host.
Luther Burbank
A knowledge of Mendelism is recognized by me as only the ABC to the broader knowledge of heredity necessary for success in animal and plant improvement, and all variations and all mutations of every nature are responses to environment which, by repetition and combination, are slowly but surely fixed in heredity and at last made tangible, most often through the crossing of varieties, species, or genera, either by nature or that part of nature called man.
Luther Burbank
Pick out any trait you want in your child... By surrounding this child with sunshine from the sky and your own heart, by giving the closest communion with nature, by feeding this child well-balanced, nutritious food, by giving it all that is implied in healthful environmental influences, and by doing all in love, you can thus cultivate in the child and fix there for all its life all of these traits.
Luther Burbank
But with those who are mentally defective-ah, here is the hardest question of all!-what shall be done with them? ...In the case of human beings in whom the light of reason does not burn... shall they be eliminated from the race? Go to the mother of an imbecile child and get your answer. ...For these helpless unfortunates, as with those who are merely unfortunate from environment, I should enlist the best and broadest state aid.
Luther Burbank