24 Evolution in the Orchards. 
are after 100,000 or 200,000 years, and the result is quite satisfac- 
tory. 
The bribe that the pear and apple offered at first to the birds 
and animals is largely withdrawn from them and offered now to 
man. They don’t care whether animals like them or not, if they 
can only gratify our palates. I mean they don’t much care, the 
really civilised members of the family do not. The apple, espe- 
cially, has got quite used to catering for our markets. And the 
pear will after awhile get to be of the same mind. Of course 
there are a good many barbarous branches of the family, as there 
are savage tribes of men; and they will just be grafted, for it 
won’t pay to work at them in the slower way of natural selection. 
Still once ina while the survival of the fittest gives us a Seckel 
pear right out of a wild tribe like Red Jacket or Scenondo among 
aborigines. So the apples, pears, and berries of to-day are such 
as suit the palates of men and not of the birds. 
But that is not all; they do not any longer have to protect 
themselves against being eaten up, and so they have stopped grow- 
ing thorns. The apple tree has found out that it is safe enough 
without growing thorns. _ It is men’s interest to protect it. And 
the pear after a few hundred years more, or may be less, will find 
out the same fact. A good many have already settled down to a 
thornless way of growing. Gradually everything takes into con- 
sideration man’s habits and tastes and fits to them. 
Will the roses shed their thorns also? Some of them, those 
longest in man’s company, have already done so ; but the tendency 
in some species or varieties to revert to thorns in seedlings is 
yet very marked. This will all be forgotten in time. And by and 
by our gardens will surely contain only varieties of berries that any 
lady can pick without being troubled with a survival of barbarous 
characteristics. The thorns will all be gone. 
Now, I want you to observe the tendency of evolution in 
another way. It works in the same way with apples, and pears, 
and roses,and men. I mean the tendency to individualise or 
concentrate its form, not on number, but on quality. This inno- 
vation came in when man was created, but it was passed over 
slowly to everything else that comes into man’s closer association. 
Here is a wild-thorn apple growing beside a Northern Spy. In 
May they are equally profuse in bloom, because blossoms are for 
the eyes of insects as well as men; and the insects must be attrac- 
ted to do an enormous amount of fertilising, and take their pay in 
beauty and honey. But in June the flowers are all off. The 
Northern Spy forgets about the birds and thinks only of man. So 
it throws away nine blossoms, and with the remaining one it goes 
to work at producing a great apple that shall be picked in October 
by man, and eaten by him, and so please him that he will protect 
