170 HOW TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY 



It is hardly just that we lay so much emphasis 

 on animal loyalty and forget what the plant world 

 has done and is doing for us and with us. I hold an 

 apple in my hand, gold on one side and crimson 

 blushes on the other. I know that inside it is a mass 

 of cells, each filled with nectar fit for a Jovian assem- 

 bly. Was it an apple that caused the Trojan war? 

 Well it might, for Nature, in tens of millions of years, 

 has brought about nothing nobler than a Northern 

 Spy unless it be a Golden Pippin, or a Jonathan, 

 or a King David. Nothing has entered more into 

 our human progress than the apple and its cousins, 

 the pear and the cherry. Now we have also the 

 orange, and it will soon be everybody's fruit, and 

 the persimmon, so long in disgrace, will very shortly 

 become the third in the trinity. 



This business of cooperation with animals and 

 birds and plants is not half understood. Except 

 for four families of plants, mammals, including man, 

 could not continue to exist, certainly could not make 

 progressive evolution. These four are the Rose, 

 the Cereal, the Solanum, and the Palm. From the 

 first of these we get nearly all our common fruits, 

 from apples to strawberries; from the second we 

 get rye and wheat for our bread, rice and oats and 

 corn for both ourselves and our domestic animals; 

 from the third we get the greatest of all esculent 

 roots, the potato, as well as the tomato and tobacco; 

 while from the palm family we have not less than 

 one thousand varieties of useful fruits and fibers. 



