ON HURRYING EVOLUTION 
orange together and securing, in the pink one, an 
immediate blend of their divergent heredities. 
But it requires no stretch of the imagination 
to believe that, had we left them to their course, 
the same end would have been accomplished a 
century, or a thousand centuries, from now; that 
the same migratory tendency which took the 
white daisies into the woods would, in time, have 
brought them out of the woods and into the 
sunshine; or that the same tendency which got 
one division of the family into the woods would 
eventually have taken other divisions to the same 
woods; and that, sooner or later, there would have 
been white daisies growing alongside of orange 
daisies, so that, through the slow processes of 
nature, the same result which we produced by 
artificial means would have been achieved. 
And so, in all of our experiments with plants, 
we shall find that we are not working against 
evolution, but with it; that we are merely pro- 
viding it with short-cuts into the centuries to 
come—short-cuts which do not change the final 
result, but only hasten its accomplishment. 
And who shall say that we, helping our plants 
to do in 1913 what without our help they might not 
be able to do before 3913—who shall say that we 
are not elements in evolution just as the bees, and 
the birds, and the butterflies, and the winds, and 
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