CHAPTER XXVIII. 



DISEASES AND INSECT ENEMIES OF SMALL FRUITS. 



"VTATURE is very impartial. It is evidently her intention that we 

 1M shall enjoy all the fruits for which we are willing to pay her price, 

 in work, care or skill ; but she seems equally bent on supplying the 

 hateful white grub with strawberry roots, and currant worms with succu- 

 lent foliage. Indeed, it might even appear that she had a leaning 

 toward her small children, no matter how pestiferous they are. At any 

 rate, under the present order of things, lordly man is often their servant, 

 and they reap the reward of his labors. 



Did not Nature stumble a little when man fell ? She manages to 

 keep on the right side of the poets and painters ; for it would seem 

 that they see her only when in moods that are smiling, serious or 

 grand. The scientist, too, she beguiles, by showing under the micro- 

 scope how exquisitely she has fashioned some little embodiment of evil 

 that may be the terror of a province, or the scourge of a <icntinent While 

 the learned man is explaining how wonderfully its minute organs are 

 formed, for mastication, assimilation, procreation, etc., practical people, who 

 have their bread to earn, are impatiently wishing that the whole genus 

 was under their heels, confident that the organs would become still 

 more minute. 



The horticulturist should be cast in heroic mold, for he not only must 

 bear his part in the fight with moral wrong, like other men, but must 

 also cope with vegetable and insect evil. Weeds, bugs, worms what 



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