multiplying endlessly and scattering as she multiplies. Did Nature
have in view our delectation when she made the apple, the peach,
the plum, the cherry? Undoubtedly; but only as a means to her own
private ends. What a bribe or a wage is the pulp of these
delicacies to all creatures to come and sow their seed! And Nature
has taken care to make the seed indigestible, so that, though the
fruit be eaten, the germ is not, but only planted.

God made the crab, but man made the pippin; but the pippin cannot
propagate itself, and exists only by violence and usurpation. Bacon
says, "It is easier to deceive Nature than to force her," but it
seems to me the nurserymen really force her. They cut off the head
of a savage and clap on the head of a fine gentleman, and the crab
becomes a Swaar or a Baldwin. Or is it a kind of deception
practiced upon Nature, which succeeds only by being carefully
concealed? If we could play the same tricks upon her in the human
species, how the great geniuses could be preserved and propagated,
and the world stocked with them! But what a frightful condition of
things that would be! No new men, but a tiresome and endless
repetition of the old ones,--a world perpetually stocked with
Newtons and Shakespeares!

We say Nature knows best, and has adapted this or that to our wants
or to our constitution,--sound to the ear, light and color to the
eye; but she has not done any such thing, but has adapted man to
these things. The physical cosmos is the mould, and man is the
molten metal that is poured into it. The light fashioned the eye,
the laws of sound made the ear; in fact, man is the outcome of
Nature and not the reverse. Creatures that live forever in the
dark have no eyes; and would not any one of our senses perish and