SELECTIVE EVOLUTION ^15 



into every step of its accomplishment, and it 

 enters into the production of every succeeding 

 plant which represents that accomplishment. 



If you believe that nature makes no mistakes, 

 and has no lapses, how can you account for the 

 evident unfitness of so many individual plants 

 to survive — how can you account for the waste- 

 fulness and extravagance which is apparent 

 throughout all forms of plant life? 



Leaving nature out of it for the moment, l6t 

 us look at the work which I have been doing here 

 for fifty years. There has hardly been a time 

 during this period when I have had less than 

 twenty-five hundred experiments under way, and 

 there have been seasons when frOm three tO five 

 thousand were in process. Estimating that Oil 

 this three-acre home tract, considerably more 

 than one hundred thousand definite, separate 

 experiments in plant life have been conducted, 

 in all. 



Some of the experiments which have taken the 

 mOst time and cost the most money have pro- 

 duced no apparent result; and some of the re- 

 sults which seem most important have been 

 achieved in the simplest way, with the least ex- 

 penditure of effort. 



Out of the entire total of experiments tried, 

 there have been not more than a few hundred 



