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reported, “to compensate which, he has a prodigious wide throat, so that a gizzard or liver of a hen passes down whole, and his weak stomach not being able to digest it, he voids in the same manner.”
    The Spanish Inquisition blamed the lack of an heir on witches, but their trials did nothing to help the king. It became clear he would die soon. Yet Charles managed to dither for months over whom to name as his heir. Finally, in October 1700, he selected the Duke of Anjou, the grandson of the king of France. Charles worried that the empire might collapse after his death, and so he issued a demand that his heir rule “without allowing the least dismemberment nor diminishing of the Monarchy founded with such glory by my ancestors.”
    But his monarchy soon began disintegrating anyway. The prospect of France and Spain forming an alliance prompted England to form an alliance of its own with many of the other great powers in Europe. Skirmishes began breaking out, both in Europe and in the New World. Eventually, the fighting would escalate into the War of Spanish Succession. The conflict would change the planet’s political landscape, leaving England ascendant and Spain broken.
    Yet Charles still dreamed that his empire would remain whole. He even added a codicil to his will stating his wishes that the Duke of Anjou would marry one of his Habsburg cousins in Austria. Not long afterward, he grewso ill that he could no longer hear or speak. Charles died on November 1, 1700. He was only thirty-five. There was no child left to inherit his empire, because of invisible things Charles had inherited from his ancestors. When doctors examined the king’s cadaver, they found that his liver contained three stones. His kidneys were awash in water. His heart, they reported, was the size of a small nut.

CHAPTER 2
Traveling Across the Face of Time
    I N 1904 , a fifty-five-year-old Dutchman, heavily built and sporting a graying beard, boarded a ship bound for New York. Hugo de Vries was a university professor in Amsterdam, but he was not a hothouse inhabitant of lecture halls. He spent much of his time wandering the Dutch countryside, scanning meadows for exceptional wildflowers. An English colleague once complained thathis clothes were foul and that he changed his shirt once a week.
    When de Vries’s ship docked in New York, he boarded a train that pushed its way across the country to California. The official reason for the journey was to visit scientists at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. De Vries dutifully gave his lectures and went to the required evening banquets. But as soon as he could manage, he escaped north.
    Fifty miles from San Francisco, de Vries arrived in a small farming town called Santa Rosa. With four fellow scientists in tow, he made his way from the train station to a four-acre plot ringed by low picket fences and crammed with gardens. A modest vine-covered house sat in the middle of the property, flanked by a glass-roofed greenhouse and a barn. A boxwood-lined path led from the street to the front porch of the house. Next to the path stooda blue-and-white sign informing visitors that all interviews were limited to five minutes unless they were by appointment.
    Fortunately, de Vries had one. A small, stooped man about his own age,outfitted in a rough brown suit, came out to greet the visiting party. His name wasLuther Burbank.
    Burbank shared the house in the middle of the garden with his sister and mother. He had been expecting de Vries’s arrival for months and set aside an evening and a day for the visit. He showed off his garden to the scientists and then took them to an eighteen-acre farm he tended in the Sonoma foothills. Those two plots of land, and the plants that sprouted from their soil, had made Burbank both rich and famous.
    “His results are so stupendous,” de Vries later wrote, “that they receive the admiration of the whole world.”
    This was no exaggeration. Each