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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