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
grass of a manured meadow. In one the staple is deficient in length,
in another in fineness; while in all there is a constant tendency
toward disease, rendering various washings and dippings indispensable
to prevent its falling out. The problem of the quality and quantity
of the carcass seems to be as doubtful and as far removed from a
satisfactory solution as that of the wool.
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