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Show • 290 DANGER OF ANALOGIES. or varieties of the cabbage tribe are suf!icient to puzzle a novice ; and after a while ~he wild. plants from which we have bred the Camelha Japomca and the Dahlia will not be a matter to be settled at a glance. It is not very long since the wild roses of Scotland were bred double and so deep-coloured as some of them are ; and yet, to people that have some little knowledge of plants, their relations to the ones still wild are, even now, fully more matters of tes-timony than of ocular proof. . . Now, if people have been able to cultivate am-mals into greater size and strength and beauty, and also to make them have better flesh and finer wool; if they have been able to improve by culture the beauty of flowers, and the nourishing qualities of all manner of esculent roots, sterns, leaves, and fruits, it would be passing strange if their _culture could do nothing for an oak-tree, but make I_t more worthless timber. If all the earth were giVen to man for improvement, and he had improved much of it-as he actually has done,-it would be a perfect anomaly, if timber, which _is so very useful~ shou~d be the sincrle article on which he could not lay h1s hand of c~lture without doing it an injury. It is impossible to believe that such an anomaly can exist in nature· and therefore the only way 1s to catechise the' man who makes the attempt; and if he does not understand what he is doing, send him back to nature to inform himself as to what he should do. There is a custom, and a very inveterate custom, which we have, and that is the custom of generalizing analogies. If there. be a way in which ~ne thing answers very well w1th us, we are apt to t_hmk that same way will do as well in all other thmgs, even though the things are, in their nature, quite different. We go about to persuade ourselves that the way of doing one thing is the way of doing every thing, just as Lord Peter, in Swift's "Tale of a Tub," went about to persuade his two brothers, Martin and WOOD INJURED BY CULTURE. 291 . Jac~, that the brown loaf was beef, and mutton, and vemson, and custard; and, as we are always very wil~ing to believe ourselves, we are far more ready believers than Lord PP.ter's brothers. Now, in all our c~ltivations o~ vegetables, there is none save th~t of ttmbe: tree~ m which the quality of the wood IS any ?ons1~eratwn; and there is, perhaps, _none of them m whtch the wood is not actually ?eten?rated by the culture. In the grain plants that ~s dec1dedly t_he case. Straw is very inferior to hay, m stre~gth, m flavour, and in every quality. The more h1ghly, too, that the grain plant is cultivated and the . more abundantly it produces seeds-th~ grand object of the culture-the straw is always the worse. In the cold districts, where the crops of stunted oats are barely worth the gathering in and would. not be worth it at all in a place where l~bour was h1gh, the straw is rich and sugary, whereas the stra~ ?f b?-rley or wheat grown upon land in high conditwn IS perfectly insipid. The former, too, is tough and firm, t?e .latter soft and brittle, with little or no. substance m It of any kind. It IS. the sam~ with all the plants. Our object is to o~tan~ acertam pa~t of the ~lant more abundantly, and 111 h1ghe.r perfectiOn, than 1t exists naturally, and we can obta111 that only at the expense of the other parts. Compare a crab-stick with a similar portion rOf an apple-tree,-a hazel-twig with one of filbert a black:thorn with. a plum (if any or all of these b~ respechve~y the wild plant and the cultivated of the sarn.e spec1es), and see how inferior the wood of the culhvat~d .tree is to that of the other. "The wild wood" Is J~st as s~perior ~n life as it is in strength. ~ e have. d~~iculty 111 keepmg the . cultivated plants rooted m, and we have as much m cretting the wild ones. H rooted out." A very little ~bservation of nature_, and 3: few very simple reflections on that observatiOn, might have shown us that that must have been the case; and had we taken that trouble and |