animal kingdoms wherever culture has reached. Recurring for a moment
to apples. The beauty and completeness of a wild apple tree living
its own life in the woods is heartily acknowledged by all those who
have been so happy as to form its acquaintance. The fine wild
piquancy of its fruit is unrivaled, but in the great question of
quantity as human food wild apples are found wanting. Man, therefore,
takes the tree from the woods, manures and prunes and grafts, plans
and guesses, adds a little of this and that, selects and rejects,
until apples of every conceivable size and softness are produced, like
nut galls in response to the irritating punctures of insects. Orchard
apples are to me the most eloquent words that culture has ever spoken,
but they reflect no imperfection upon Nature's spicy crab. Every
cultivated apple is a crab, not improved, BUT COOKED, variously
softened and swelled out in the process, mellowed, sweetened, spiced,
and rendered pulpy and foodful, but as utterly unfit for the uses of
nature as a meadowlark killed and plucked and roasted. Give to Nature
every cultured apple--codling, pippin, russet--and every sheep so
laboriously compounded--muffled Southdowns, hairy Cotswolds, wrinkled
Merinos--and she would throw the one to her caterpillars, the other to
her wolves.

It is now some thirty-six hundred years since Jacob kissed his mother
and set out across the plains of Padan-aram to begin his experiments
upon the flocks of his uncle, Laban; and, notwithstanding the high
degree of excellence he attained as a wool-grower, and the innumerable
painstaking efforts subsequently made by individuals and associations
in all kinds of pastures and climates, we still seem to be as far from
definite and satisfactory results as we ever were. In one breed the
wool is apt to wither and crinkle like hay on a sun-beaten hillside.
In another, it is lodged and matted together like the lush tangled