Word: plante
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...cave 140 feet deep and 50 wide sparkled brilliantly under the explorers' flashlights. They found stone hammers with the wooden handles preserved, bits of sandals, creosote-brush torches, even thousands of corncobs remaining from meals eaten by the prehistoric salt-miners, and hundreds of quids of a gummy plant chewed between meals. The explorers hoped to find mummies in this cave, the saline air of which might have preserved them better than all the oils and ointments of Egypt. The artifacts found seemed to date Pueblo Grande before the Aztec culture which Cortez and other Spaniards found flourishing...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...