climate.




CHAPTER XXVIII

DISEASES AND INSECT ENEMIES OF SMALL FRUITS


Nature is very impartial. It is evidently her intention that we shall
enjoy all the fruits for which we are willing to pay her price, in
work, care, or skill, but she seems equally bent on supplying the
hateful white grub with strawberry roots, and currant worms with
succulent foliage. Indeed, it might even appear that she had a leaning
toward her small children, no matter how pestiferous they are. At any
rate, under the present order of things, lordly man is often their
servant, and they reap the reward of his labors.

Did not Nature stumble a little when man fell? She manages to keep on
the right side of the poets and painters, for it would seem that they
see her only when in moods that are smiling, serious, or grand. The
scientist, too, she beguiles, by showing under the microscope how
exquisitely she has fashioned some little embodiment of evil that may
be the terror of a province, or the scourge of a continent. While the
learned man is explaining how wonderfully its minute organs are
formed, for mastication, assimilation, procreation, etc., practical
people, who have their bread to earn, are impatiently wishing that the
whole genus was under their heels, confident that the organs would
become still more minute.