I do not know that chemistry, searching for protoplasm, is able to
discover the tendency of vegetables. It can only be found out by
outward observation. I confess that I am suspicious of the bean, for
instance. There are signs in it of an unregulated life. I put up
the most attractive sort of poles for my Limas. They stand high and
straight, like church-spires, in my theological garden,--lifted
up; and some of them have even budded, like Aaron's rod. No
church-steeple in a New England village was ever better fitted to draw
to it the rising generation on Sunday, than those poles to lift up my
beans towards heaven. Some of them did run up the sticks seven feet,
and then straggled off into the air in a wanton manner; but more than
half of them went gallivanting off to the neighboring grape-trellis,
and wound their tendrils with the tendrils of the grape, with a
disregard of the proprieties of life which is a satire upon human
nature. And the grape is morally no better. I think the ancients, who
were not troubled with the recondite mystery of protoplasm, were right
in the mythic union of Bacchus and Venus.
Talk about the Darwinian theory of development, and the principle of
natural selection! I should like to see a garden let to run in
accordance with it.
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