ON FACT VS. THEORY 
accomplishment; that combinations between the 
next higher divisions, genera, were beyond the 
power of man to effect. 
“Then, when I was able, after a time, to take 
parents of two different genera, like the crinum 
and the amaryllis, or the peach and the almond, or 
a score of others which might be mentioned, and 
to effect successful seed-producing combinations 
between them, I began to hear less and less about 
laws and rules. 
“The fact is that the laws and the rules are all 
man-made. 
“Nature, herself, has no hard and fast mode of 
procedure. She limits herself to no grooves. She 
travels to no set schedule. 
She proceeds an inch at a time—or a league— 
moving forward, always, but into an unmapped, 
uncharted, trackless future. 
“T like to think of Nature’s processes as end- 
lessly flowing streams; streams in which varied 
strains of heredity are ever pouring down through 
river beds of environment; streams which, for 
ages, may keep to their channels, but each of 
which is apt, at any time, to jump its banks and 
find a different outlet. 
“Just about the time we decide that one of 
these streams is fixed and permanent, there is 
likely to come along a freshet of old heredity, or 
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