PLUMS AND PRUNES 
deficiencies. If present plums are too small, 
larger ones must be made; if bearing scantily, 
more prolific ones; if injured by early frosts 
and adaptable only to certain regions, then a 
hardening of fruit and tree and an expansion 
of the zone of culture. Or it may be that the 
aim is to make a plum which assembles all 
these essentials in itself. 
To accomplish all of this is not the work 
of a day nor a year, perhaps not of a decade. 
Very often the whole world will be searched 
for a plum which has one certain characteristic 
essential to the building of the plum under 
process. It may be, too, that when this for- 
eign plum is found, apparently filling all the 
requirements, it may turn out no better than, 
perhaps not so good as, some plum of domes- 
tic growth. The mental pattern is made just 
as real and definite as the pattern of an in- 
ventor or the model of a sculptor. If the 
inventor, as his work advances, discovers some 
new feature which will make the invention 
more valuable, he will be quick to make use 
of it; and even the sculptor, in modeling his 
clay, may be in no small measure influenced 
by the living model before him. But even 
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