ON HURRYING EVOLUTION 



orange together and securing, in the pink one, an 

 immediate blend of their divergent heredities. 



But it requires no stretch of the imagination 

 to believe that, had we left them to their course, 

 the same end would have been accomplished a 

 century, or a thousand centuries, from now; that 

 the same migratory tendency which took the 

 white daisies into the woods would, in time, have 

 brought them out of the woods and into the 

 sunshine; or that the same tendency which got 

 one division of the family into the woods would 

 eventually have taken other divisions to the same 

 woods; and that, sooner or later, there would have 

 been white daisies growing alongside of orange 

 daisies, so that, through the slow processes of 

 nature, the same result which we produced by 

 artificial means would have been achieved. 



And so, in all of our experiments with plants, 

 we shall find that we are not working against 

 evolution, but with it; that we are merely pro- 

 viding it with short-cuts into the centuries to 

 come — short-cuts which do not change the final 

 result, but only hasten its accomplishment. 



And who shall say that we, helping our plants 

 to do in 1913 what without our help they might not 

 be able to do before 3913 — who shall say that we 

 are not elements in evolution just as the bees, and 

 the birds, and the butterflies, and the winds, and 



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