42 BIRDS AND POETS 
rial, not expressed by exhaustless. Did you think 
Niagara a great exhibition of power? What is that, 
then, that withdraws noiseless and invisible in the 
ground about, and of which Niagara is but the lift- 
ing of the finger ? 
Nature is thoroughly selfish, and looks only to 
her own ends. One thing she is bent upon, and 
that is keeping up the supply, multiplying endlessly 
and scattering as she multiplies. Did Nature have 
in view our delectation when she made the apple, 
the peach, the plum, the cherry, ete.? Undoubt- 
edly; but only as a means to her own private ends. 
What a bribe or a wage is the pulp of these delica- 
cies to all creatures to come and sow their seed ! 
And Nature has taken care to make the seed indi- 
gestible, so that, though the fruit be eaten, the germ 
is not, but only planted. 
God made the crab, but man made the pippin; 
but the pippin cannot propagate itself, and exists 
only by violence and usurpation. Bacon says, “It 
is easier to deceive Nature than to force her,” but 
it seems to me the nurserymen really force her. 
They cut off the head of a savage and clap on the 
head of a fine gentleman, and the crab becomes a 
Swaar or a Baldwin. Or is it a kind of deception 
practiced upon Nature, which succeeds only by be- 
ing carefully concealed? If we could play the same 
tricks upon her in the human species, how the great 
geniuses could be preserved and propagated, and the 
world stocked with them! But what a frightful 
condition of things that would be! No new men, 
