BENJAMIN McNEIL MURDOCK
1
MURDOCK is not yet in Who's Who, though he ought to be. He has produced a potato as big as a turnip, the "Murdock Manitoba," and a huge peach with a stone no larger than a cherry-pit, the "Cantaloup Alberta." These alone might not entitle him to anything more than honorable mention in a seed-catalogue, but the experiments by which he achieved his potato and his peach have had another issue—they threaten to modify the Darwinian theory of the origin of species.
This is a serious matter—more serious than has been apprehended by the newspaper men who have been head-lining Murdock as the "Burbank of New Jersey." He has obtained his new species not merely by cross-fertilization and encouraging "sports," but by opposing his plants with adversities which they have had to overcome in order to survive. He got the idea, I understand, by observing how flowers will grow a long stalk in order to reach sunlight; but from that beginning he has worked to the point of proving an adaptiveness in plants that amounts almost to unconscious intelligence. Consequently he appears to find the cause
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