Varieties and Principles

Abstract

Fruit varieties and human behavior have in them the varieties and behavior of the past and will live in the varieties and behavior of the future. Probably the variety of whose great age we can be most certain is the Black Corinth or Zante grape, from which currants are made. The seedling, or mutant shoot, from which it was propagated may have grown before the time of Christ, certainly grew before Pliny wrote in the first century A.D. The variety was at least a century old when Marcus Aurelius, noblest of emperors and probably the noblest flower of the Stoic philosophy, was setting down, such expressions as “If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, thou shalt live happy,” or “Be like a promontory around which the waves continuously break, but it stands and tames the fury of the water around it.”