NEW CREATIONS IN PLANT LIFE 
comrade had the same chance, but one of 
them was a hustler and the other was not. 
“The fact is too often lost sight of, or not 
known at all, that the tops of the trees abso- 
lutely govern the roots. The leaves are the 
lungs and the stomach of the tree. The food 
is digested, so to speak, in the leaves and 
there made accessible for the tree as a whole. 
If a tree be fine of foliage it will be powerful 
in all its parts, because it has the capacity to 
take so much nourishment from the air,— 
four-fifths of it being nitrogen, which is the 
chief source of supply for plant-food. The 
sun, too, plays its important part,—condensed 
sunshine and condensed air are the chief 
articles of the tree’s diet. 
“Each tree, too, has its own individual 
characteristics and traits, as well as being 
absolutely unlike all other trees in form and 
structure, and these traits must be studied and 
taken carefully into consideration. Take the 
one act of fruit-bearing. I find that in certain 
instances I have bred trees to bear too much 
fruit, the matter was overdone. It came about 
by constantly selecting from seedling trees 
which were heavy fruit-bearers, all the time 
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