214 An American Fruit-Farm 



choice. The younger Mill's life was prescribed for 

 him, rigidly, by his father, yet the younger Mill 

 is not measured as a wholly normal man. 



The tree drops its seeds and none can tell which 

 shall grow and which shall not. It is the seed 

 in the right environment that becomes the tree. 

 For the visible forest innumerable seeds perished 

 by the way. The planet on which we live is not 

 large enough to grow to maturity all the seeds that 

 fall to the ground. One pair of rats, unchecked, 

 in a few years, it is said, would overrun the globe. 

 Nature maintains the balance of life by a system 

 of survivals, — which we are wont to call evolution. 

 Nor is man exempt from the operation of the law. 

 It is this law which is recognized, quite uncon- 

 sciously, when the old folks say: " We want to 

 leave something for the children." What is really 

 meant is that the parents want their children to live, 

 to survive, to perpetuate the stock. The domi- 

 nant instinct of man, like the dominant force in 

 the plant, is to perpetuate each after its kind. To 

 be father of a line of kings was Macbeth*s heart's 

 desire. Napoleon yearned to found a dynasty; 

 Sir Walter Scott enslaved his genius and worked 

 himself into senility to establish a family. Alex- 

 ander, Caesar, Napoleon left each a son, who each 

 came to an untimely end and dissipated an im- 

 perial dream. There is not now living a direct 

 male descendant of any one of the world's most 

 eminent men down to the time of Charles Darwin. 

 Who to-day has the blood of Plato? Aristotle? 



