SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. 123 



ballot to headquarters. But nine of the list received a majority 



vote. These were: 



Buttercup, Portia, Hellen Keller, 



Daybreak, Lizzie McGowen, Edna Craig, 



Grace Wilder, Tidal Wave, Sweetbrier. 



These were the princes and princesses of the royal blood of 

 the dynasty of Dio anthos that ruled the world of flowers in 

 1895. They were the elective product of half a million seedlings, 

 and the strennous labor of hundreds of men with tactful fingers 

 for twenty years to enthrone beauty on the mountain's top, where 

 flora with flowers teaches worldlings the idiom of angels. 



Every carnation that reaches general fame passes through 

 a crucial ordeal and runs a gauntlet of criticism to which no other 

 flower is subjected. Aristocracy in cross- fertilization cuts no 

 figure in its final make up. Silver flagons, gold medals and 

 special premiums of any peregrinating society, mutually admiring 

 each other's products, count for naught on the synthesis of a grand 

 carnation nor settle the toga it will wear. 



Nature ''adapts by selection" by a similar method, but to a 

 different end. The persistence of the species is its pivotal purpose, 

 the hills and dales are its beds and benches, the clouds its fonts of 

 water, the sun its ceaseless thermal source and the deep blue bend- 

 ing sky its glorious dome of glass. A thousand carnation seeds are 

 scattered by the winds on congenial soil, they germinate and grow, 

 a long drouth occurs and the weakest die, a protracted wet ensues 

 and another lot sickens and succumbs. A protracted freeze hap- 

 pens and the tender ones fall, the weeds choke them, and all but a 

 few of the strongest abandon the struggle for life; vicissitudes of one 

 kind and another assail them until but one is left that is the "sur- 

 vival of the fittest," and the strongest to perpetuate itself. It sows 

 its seed and they are again subjected to the same selective process 

 for generations, and thus the clove-scented species of carnation be- 

 came established on the shores of the Mediterranean. This is 

 nature's method of "adaptation by selection" and originating 

 Species, while heredity slowly follows and fixes their permanency. 



