NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 
pre-natal influences are immeasurably more 
powerful than the physical ones. So that 
while the future no doubt holds much for the 
good of the race in the matter of an improved 
human stock, these influences are at present, 
at least, far too diverse and powerful to be 
mastered or even taken clearly into account. 
A single and apparently very slight thing may 
influence a whole human life, indeed, may 
influence many lives directly and indirectly 
through generations. Not so with a tree. Its 
life is more fixed and stable. It has been fol- 
lowing the same influences and never depart- 
ing to any extent from a given course for 
centuries upon centuries. It does not yield 
easily. It is stubborn, persistent, it must be 
pressed upon harder and harder. 
“But when it yields, it yields unreservedly. 
Supply the right amount of pressure and the 
thing is done. Then, when its new life is fixed, 
it will persist in the new way as it has in the 
old. Take, for example, a tree which produces 
pitch, or maple-sugar, or tannin, or camphor, 
or quinine. Now if the ability of any one of 
these trees for producing its valuable product 
is fixed, but its capacity meager, this capacity 
58 
