SANTA ROSA 249 



available with which to push my enterprise, and 

 it was necessary to feel the way, step by step. 



To be sure I could have appealed to my 

 brothers, and they would very gladly have 

 helped me, but I was averse to doing this, both 

 from an inherent sensitiveness about money, 

 which is almost as universal a New England 

 heritage as the Puritan conscience itself, and 

 because I knew that my relatives, in common 

 with such other people as knew of my project, 

 were skeptical as to the practicability of such 

 experiments in plant development as were con- 

 templated. 



Such skepticism was natural enough on the 

 part of practical men, for the things that I 

 hoped to do ran counter to all common experi- 

 ence. To think of changing the form and consti- 

 tution of living things in a few years seemed 

 grotesque even to many people who believed in 

 the general doctrine of evolution. 



It was not generally admitted at that time 

 that the plants under cultivation had been con- 

 spicuously modified by the efforts of man. 



And even those exceptional botanists who 

 believed that the cultivated plants owed their 

 present form to man's efforts were prone to em- 

 phasize the fact that the plants had been for 

 centuries under cultivation and to question 



