"Nature generally struggles against this treatment for a while, until her powers seem in a great measure exhausted, when she quietly yields to the power of the art"
About this Quote
“Nature” is cast here as a stubborn body being broken in, not a system being understood. Fortune’s phrasing stages a small drama of domination: nature “struggles,” her “powers” are “exhausted,” and only then does she “quietly yield” to “the power of the art.” The verbs do the ideological work. This isn’t neutral observation; it’s a justification narrative for intervention, framed as inevitable once resistance is worn down.
Fortune wrote in the 19th century, when botany, horticulture, and “improvement” were braided tightly with empire and commerce. His career is inseparable from the plant-hunting world that fed European markets and colonial projects. In that setting, “art” doesn’t mean galleries and novels. It means technique: cultivation, acclimatization, grafting, selective breeding, greenhouse control - the engineered environment that makes foreign species profitable and portable. “Treatment” implies a procedure applied to a patient; the experimenter becomes a clinician, and nature’s resistance becomes a symptom to be managed.
The subtext is also gendered. Nature is “her,” and her capitulation is described with a Victorian calm that makes coercion sound like progress. Exhaustion reads as proof of superiority: if nature gives in, it’s because human craft has earned authority. That rhetorical move flatters the practitioner and reassures the reader that transformation is not violence but refinement.
What makes the line effective is its cool confidence. Fortune doesn’t argue for control; he narrates control as the natural endpoint of a contest, letting the cadence of struggle-then-surrender turn manipulation into destiny.
Fortune wrote in the 19th century, when botany, horticulture, and “improvement” were braided tightly with empire and commerce. His career is inseparable from the plant-hunting world that fed European markets and colonial projects. In that setting, “art” doesn’t mean galleries and novels. It means technique: cultivation, acclimatization, grafting, selective breeding, greenhouse control - the engineered environment that makes foreign species profitable and portable. “Treatment” implies a procedure applied to a patient; the experimenter becomes a clinician, and nature’s resistance becomes a symptom to be managed.
The subtext is also gendered. Nature is “her,” and her capitulation is described with a Victorian calm that makes coercion sound like progress. Exhaustion reads as proof of superiority: if nature gives in, it’s because human craft has earned authority. That rhetorical move flatters the practitioner and reassures the reader that transformation is not violence but refinement.
What makes the line effective is its cool confidence. Fortune doesn’t argue for control; he narrates control as the natural endpoint of a contest, letting the cadence of struggle-then-surrender turn manipulation into destiny.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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