ones 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.
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