When a traveller was relating, in Cowper’s presence, some prodigious
marvels, the poet smiled somewhat incredulously. “Well, sir, don’t you
believe me? I saw it with my own eyes.” “Oh, certainly, I believe it
if _you_ saw it, but I would not if I had seen it _myself_.” Even so
we feel about the thousand and one physiological fooleries which run
the monthly rounds of the papers.
How on earth do men suppose a fruit to receive its characteristic
quality? Is it from the root, trunk, pith, bark, branch, or leaf? One
would think that it made no difference which. We have long supposed
that the leaf digested the sap, returned it to the passages of
distribution to be employed in the formation of fruit, wood, tissue,
etc. Is this the function of the leaf? or have recent investigations
exploded this doctrine? If not, it will be apparent that all grafting
of scions together, cannot change the quality of fruit, unless the
leaves are also amalgamated. Is a red, green, yellow, and white fruit,
sweet, sour, or bitter, be put upon the same tree, each will maintain
its characteristics; because, each bud or scion has its own peculiar
leaves, from whose laboratory the fruit is sweetened or acidulated and
colored with all its hues. To be sure, fruits are affected by the
stock on which they are put; but their characteristic elements are not
altered, but only pushed along in the same line and made more perfect.
There is no doubt that trees indulge, occasionally, in rare antics. A
sober apple-tree will sometimes let down its dignity, in what
gardeners call a “sport,” _e. g._ a sweet apple may grow on a sour
tree, and _vice versâ_. An apple may on one side be sweet and on the
other sour. But, in such cases, the same general law is seen governing
yet. We all know that great changes of temperament occur in men. A
nervous temperament often becomes abdominal, and a little, wiry,
fussy, peevish, minikin, becomes a round, plump, rosy, corpulent spot
of good nature. Similar changes may occur, through disease, or the
peculiarity of the season, or from unknown causes, in the structure of
the leaves of a branch, and then the fruit will follow the change of
the leaf.
But the fruit itself digests still further the elaborated sap sent to
it from the leaf. If, then, from any hidden causes, the fruit should
in part change its structure, the juices elaborated would be altered.
If stamens and pistils may change to petals, if petals may change to
leaves, if leaves may extend to branches, we know of no reason why the
whole or the half of a fruit may not, also, alter its structure; and
with its peculiarity of function, also, of course, the character of
the fruit. While then we are not skeptical of “monsters,” “marvels,”
“sports,” “singularities,” we think we can trace the original law
through all the transmutations.