kely you
have made a _persistent struggle_ to change your characteristics. You
honestly have tried hard to grow, and to increase your man capacity.
Consequently your failure may have left you rather hopeless about ever
succeeding as you once expected to succeed. 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. Desire, will, and persistence were but preliminary steps
toward the complete accomplishment of his purpose with the prune.

[Sidenote: Luther Burbank's Method]

Burbank worked out in his mind and by actual experiments _distinctive
methods_ of development--_development and changes along particular,
definite lines._ He selected for the prune he _wanted to produce,_ (an
imagined, ideal prune) certain desirable qualities of the plum--the best
plum characteristics. He studied _what produced these particular
qualities in plums_. Then with his exact, scientific knowledge of the
_similarity in nature_ of the plum and the prune, and his equally
definite knowledge of the _differences in their characteristics_,
supplemented by his knowledge of _exactly what produced_ the difference
in the two fruits, he started his experiments with natural prune trees.

He led specimens through a pre-determined scientific process of
training. He succeeded in getting his experimental prune trees to
develop discriminatively, almost as if they had the power of choice,
_particular plum qualities in preference to o