106 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 
wild strawberry with the Belmont; or to come on to your own 
ground, compare the common wild rose with your fine garden 
roses—the Sharman-Crawford, the Mrs. John Laing.” 
“Mere hybrids—all of them,” I defended. “Man destroys 
the balance utterly. He sacrifices everything to size and 
color. We think them beautiful, but are they? Man is 
blighting with his megalomania all fruits, increasingly beauti- 
ful to look upon, but with less and less flavor. How about the 
Ben Davis apple, the Keifer pear? Man’s flowers have color, 
but no fragrance; size, but no fertility. A modern rose has no 
seed; it has to be budded to be reproduced. Man sacrifices 
all proportion to attain any given end, whether he breeds 
poultry, cattle, fruits or flowers; he weakens the vitality and 
makes them a prey to a thousand civilized pests. Do you 
call that perfection? But has not Nature herself provided the 
peculiar condition that man merely seizes upon to exaggerate? 
If you call it utility I grant it. Man has learned to take an ac- 
cidental sport of Nature, and by artificial means to reproduce 
it. She furnishes both the sport and the man of wit to use it, 
but the moment he relaxes his vigilance Hybrid Perpetual 
roses revert to the manetti, the original stock upon which 
they were budded; the suckers below the graft of Spitzen- 
berg apples revert to wild stock; highly civilized nations are 
becoming sterile.” 
Adam is as little convinced by my defense as I am by his 
arraignment. I find ample corroboration of his point of view 
on every hand. Every where I come close to the defeats and 
imperfect types that Nature casts aside as if they were broken 
experimental molds, not quite adapted to her use of them as 
final expressions or manifestations of Spirit; yet, when I close 
my eyes to the outward form and meditate on the purpose of 
creation, and Nature’s ideals in her use of matter, I hear faith 
singing low in my heart, and I know that all is well. 
