Purpose Served

As it moved through the world last week, Death came to a flowering spot in southern California where an old man lay who had kept gardens for many years. To this old man Death was no supernatural thing. He had seen it come hundreds of thousand of times for his plants when their juices were dried up and their stalks withered. He considered it was just a "state of being" that began when an organism's vital principle ceased functioning. He regarded himself as an organism differing from the many that he had studied only in his complexity. He entertained no idea that after his vital principle ceased functioning he would begin a new, disembodied life as a "soul" hovering through the universe under unearthly, eternal conditions of felicity or infelicity.

Yet he was content. Luther Burbank, plant wizard, received Death at 77 without any last minute decision to poultice his scientific philosophy, of life with hope for an after life. They conducted his funeral as he had wished, quietly, privately, with no religious rites -- and quoted over him his own words about reaching life's end: "If it has been a good life it has been sufficient. There is no need for another. Once here and gone the human life has served its purpose."

Burbank's purpose was to assist Nature to accomplish effects in the vegetable world which, left to chance, might not have come about within time measurable by man.

He was the 13th of 15 children born to a Scotch-English farmer of Lancaster, Mass. Crossed in love in his twenties, he turned his back upon the girl and went to California, where he hired himself out to farmers until able to acquire land of his own at Santa Rosa. In 1881, his small nursery business leapt to great proportions when a banker asked, in the spring, to have 20,000 prune trees for fall planting. Young Burbank bought almond seeds, sprouted them, grafted prune buds to the sprouts and delivered 20,000 prune shoots for the banker's fall planting -- thus fulfilling an unprecedented order that other gardeners of the day would have called impossible.

But the financial aspect of this deal delighted him nowhere nearly so much as the plant-breeding experiment it involved. Back in Massachusetts he had made a beginning in this line by discovering a seed ball of the Early Rose potato, which rarely bears seed. Continued experiments with this seed ball's progeny resulted in the Burbank potato, which has since spread to gardens all over the globe and is said to have exerted a greater influence on humanity's food supply than any other single plant.

He dropped the nursery business. He performed millions of experiments in plant-breeding, producing -- besides thousands of poor variations, fruitless hybrids, unfixed types and failures -- about 150 "creations", of which the most celebrated are the Shasta daisy, thornless cactus (cattle-fodder), mammoth blackberry, mammoth asparagus, everbearing mammoth artichoke and rhubarb, and the Burbank plum. Perhaps his quaintest anomaly was a plant which grew potatoes below ground, tomatoes above. This and similar freaks he did not submit for commercial growth. They soon revert to type.

A plant-breeder's best fruits are his last. Many of the Burbank experiments -- on nuts, forest trees, fruits, flowers -- were incomplete at his death. Only last year he announced that he expected the decade that lay before him to be his most valuable to society -- the fruition of work begun 10 and 15 years ago. It is 21 years ago that the Carnegie Institution awarded him $10,000 a year for ten years to carry on his work; 14 years since the Government turned over to him 7,680 acres of land. During his last illness (heart weakness induced by nervous strain and aggravated by gastrointestinal difficulties) he bade his gardeners toil on, and doubtless they will continue to do so, under the direction of the chartered Luther Burbank Society. Ten years ago he married his young secretary, Elizabeth J. Waters of Hastings, Mich. There were no children. To their home have come notables from every walk of life and Burbank's name, the most notable in his walk of life, has entered every household in civilization. Among his closest friends were Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison. His death was doubtless hastened by the furor that arose when he stated his religious views publicly, a statement excited by news of Henry Ford's alleged belief in theosophy, and inspired by his own belief that "the unpardonable sin of man is ignorance. . . . There is no salvation whatever except through science."