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Show 370 a desert, he ended by pointing to a so-called desert which was really a garden; if Californians persisted in turning their flowerlands into agricultural deserts, then they still dismissed most of their lands, not realizing that these too were promised lands. As a proposal, Muir's plan for bee culture cut two ways, into both false vision and foolish practices of his fellow Californians. If they took him literally, as making a plea for bee culture, he told them that bee keeping was in its infancy and the domestic bee an immigrant. But then California was in its infancy, and the population largely immigrants. Perhaps the human immigrants were the least mature and least perceptive of all visitors to California. Like Moses, Muir was permitted to see the promised land, but his brothers would be the ones to take stewardship. So the prophet was unable to "measure the influence on bee interests likely to follow the destruction of the forests, now rapidly falling before forest fire and axe." Certainly, as he said earlier in the essay, the results of sheep and the attendant fires set by shepherds who hoped to "improve" the range, would set "in motion a long train of evils which will certainly reach far beyond bees and beekeepers." Hence he became a satirist in the tradition of Swift, when he concluded using the sentence which would become, twelve years later, the conclusion of |The Mountains of California: In short, notwithstanding the wide-spread deterioration and destruction of every kind already effected, |