ON ADAPTATION 
The pear trees which have pleased us have 
received our care and cultivation—and we have 
multiplied them. The pear trees which have failed 
to produce fruit up to our ideals we have neglected 
and allowed to die—so that they have practically 
disappeared from our orchards. 
The Orientals, their tastes and likes running in 
opposite directions from ours, have discouraged 
pear trees which bore the kind of fruit we prefer, 
and have selected, and saved, and fostered, and 
propagated those which gave them the hard, bitter 
fruit of their ideals. 
And so the struggle for adaptation set in 
motion by the soil, the warmth, the cold, the 
moisture, and the winds, was supplemented by the 
bees, and then by the birds, until now we can 
read, in the result, our own influence and that of 
the Japanese. 
There are differences between our dress and 
the dress of the Orientals; between our religions 
and the religions of the Orientals; between our 
ambitions and the Oriental ambitions; between 
our architecture and the architecture of the Orient 
—all reflecting the national or racial differences 
between the ideals of the two peoples. 
And just as surely as the ideals of a people 
influence the architecture with which they sur- 
[125] 
