636 BACTERIAL DISEASES OF PLANTS 



natural world, if he would fathom its meaning. Seeing is not 

 enough but it is the first step, the beginning of all the others. 

 How to see with the eyes of a Darwin, a Pasteur, or an Asa Gray, 

 that is the question! Poets are said to be born, not made, and 

 inheritance must also play no inconsiderable part in the lives of 

 all great men of science. Yet another saying has it that genius 

 counts only for one-tenth while hard work is nine-tenths of 

 every man's success. These are extreme statements and the 

 truth lies somewhere between the two. Both environment 

 and heredity are important. Certain it is, however, given some 

 basis of good material to work upon, that patience and perse- 

 verance will do much to cultivate and sharpen the seeing eye. 

 This must be so, otherwise the amateur would be as efficient 

 as the highly trained man and we know that this is not the case 

 in any field of endeavor. As every teacher knows, it is hopeless 

 to try to make students out of many persons because ''It isn't 

 in them," as the saying goes. They carry an insurmountable 

 inheritance of dullness. On the contrary, long pondering on a 

 subject with oft-repeated observations of the physical phe- 

 nomena involved gradually enables the right sort of a person to see 

 definite principles quickly and clearly in that which was at first 

 only a maze of obscurity and uncertainty. The plainest things 

 are often the hardest to see because all our seeing and all our 

 thinking runs, or is apt to run, in stereotyped channels and the 

 older we grow the greater the danger. Strive, then, to keep an 

 open mind and to enlarge your horizon as you grow old. 



But the first inertia is the most difficult to overcome — 

 c'est le premier pas qui coute. The new and strange are always 

 hard to comprehend and interpret. For this reason the first 

 foreign language, especially if it is Latin or some other much 

 inflected tongue, is I believe, always hardest for English-speak- 

 ing persons. A Chinese student once told me that Latin was 

 easy for him (because inflected, I presume) but English ''very 

 hard." For the same reason first impressions of a strange coun- 

 try are always most vivid but generally very inaccurate, witness 

 many books. Every one has heard the story of Agassiz's stud- 

 ent to whom a fish was given that he might point out its most 

 conspicuous feature. The bilateral symmetry of the fish was 



