Propagation of Plants 105 
same way when I painfully rake up my walks, I note the large 
way she sweeps a whole hillside with one touch of her winds. 
T love her magnificent operations. They are superb, inimi- 
table, perfect!” 
Adam was in a critical mood. “TI think she is very imper- 
fect,” he responded. ‘“Sheneedsa man. Unaided she works 
in a blundering brutal way: she averages well: her cloud- 
bursts and washouts and her parching droughts give us a 
fairly uniform average rainfall. Remember she wrecks and 
destroys as well as vivifies. She is a great extremist. She is 
far from perfect,”—and he spoke as a man who had thrown 
down the gauntlet. 
I, who am a blind and ardent worshipper of Nature, 
dropped down into the arena and picked up the glove. “How 
so?” J inquired, determined that he should make good his 
charge. 
“ Her great cosmic laws are not applicable to the individual. 
She is a wild untamable force. She does not strive for per- 
fection. Where do you find a perfect plant, or even a perfect 
leaf? She begins well, but grows absent-minded about de- 
tails,” continued he, warming to the argument. 
“How about the exquisite and perfect mechanisms re- 
vealed by the microscope? It opens a whole world of unap- 
proachable beauty, harmony and symmetry,” I questioned. 
“That may be true,” replied he, ‘but her vast forces on one 
hand and her minute details on the other reveal also the very 
painful gap that lies between. Given perfect atoms and per- 
fect forces, we should have perfect creations, which we cer- 
tainly don’t have: something is wrong. Nature unaided 
blunders sadly. Nature plus man is Art; Nature plus man is 
Progress; Nature plus an able assistant produces a relative 
approach to perfection. For example: compare wild natural 
fruit with the Spitzenberg apple or the Albemarle pippin; the 
