DEVELOPING CHARACTERS 177 



ingenuity and fitness to survive which may 

 have cost ten thousand generations of patient 

 struggle. 



The sweetness of our cherries, our grapes, our 

 plums, has been developed only through ages 

 and ages of response to environment, with some 

 environments so oft repeated that they h*. e 

 hardened into heredity. 



The flowers on our lawns may have acquired 

 their colors in France, or in Ecuador, or in Si- 

 beria; our nuts reflect flavors acquired through 

 a world-wide migration; and even our early 

 vegetables show traits which hark back to 

 times before animals and men came into 

 their lives. 



So, just as the earth has stored up limestone 

 in Indiana, and marble in Italy, and brick-clay in 

 New York, and five-thousand-year-old redwoods 

 in California, for the architect to draw upon, just 

 so, in a world full of plants, representing an 

 infinity of ancestry with its infinity of heredity, 

 will we find an infinity of traits with which to 

 build. 



If we wish to change the color of a flower, or 

 its fragrance, its size, or its adaptability to 

 climate — if we have it in mind to transform a tree 

 or its fruit, or to give any plant a new trait or a 

 new habit — ^the most practical way is to accumu- 



