Perhaps you have given up
your case as "too tough a job." We will assume that you are not so young
as you wish you were, and that you have committed to memory the
fatalistic, hoary lie, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." But
recall the fixed habit of bitterness the walnut had for centuries, the
color and size of the natural calla, the sour taste of the little wild
prune, which the plant wizard changed most radically without using any
"wizardry" at all. He just _applied scientific knowledge_ in his
training of walnut trees and callas and prunes and other forms of
vegetable life. Have you tried his method of development? Do you know
exactly what he did?
If Luther Burbank had merely _desired_ and _willed_ that the walnut
should give up its old bad habit, he never could have accomplished the
job of development. He might have _insisted persistently_ for a
life-time that the little, sour, dry prune should become more luscious
and larger than the plum; but it would have remained the same in size
and other characteristics as it always had been, despite his continued
determination.
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