The
Water-Ousel Plucks Moss From The Riverbank To Build Its Nest, But Is
Does Not Improve The Moss By Plucking It.
We pluck feathers from
birds, and less directly wool from wild sheep, for the manufacture of
clothing and cradle-nests, without improving the wool for the sheep,
or the feathers for the bird that wore them.
When a hawk pounces upon
a linnet and proceeds to pull out its feathers, preparatory to making
a meal, the hawk may be said to be cultivating the linnet, and he
certainly does effect an improvement as far as hawk-food is concerned;
but what of the songster? He ceases to be a linnet as soon as he is
snatched from the woodland choir; and when, hawklike, we snatch the
wild sheep from its native rock, and, instead of eating and wearing it
at once, carry it home, and breed the hair out of its wool and the
bones out of its body, it ceases to be a sheep.
These breeding and plucking processes are similarly improving as
regards the secondary uses aimed at; and, although the one requires
but a few minutes for its accomplishment, the other many years or
centuries, they are essentially alike. We eat wild oysters alive with
great directness, waiting for no cultivation, and leaving scarce a
second of distance between the shell and the lip; but we take wild
sheep home and subject them to the many extended processes of
husbandry, and finish by boiling them in a pot - a process which
completes all sheep improvements as far as man is concerned. It will
be seen, therefore, that wild wool and tame wool - wild sheep and tame
sheep - are terms not properly comparable, nor are they in any correct
sense to be considered as bearing any antagonism toward each other;
they are different things. Planned and accomplished for wholly
different purposes.
Illustrative examples bearing upon this interesting subject may be
multiplied indefinitely, for they abound everywhere in the plant and
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.
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