36 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



of the wheat would always remain unknown and that our cultivated 

 species had been so greatly modified by cultivation that they scarcely 

 resembled the wild species which served our prehistoric parents in their 

 conscious or unconscious attempts at artificial selection. This trans- 

 formation, it was said, had required ages of time, and it was not over- 

 looked that it had also required extraordinary perspicacity on the part 

 of these half savages who succeeded in producing from an insignificant 

 grass the vigorous and precious cereal of to-day. It was admitted, 

 thus, that prehistoric man was endowed with a divining sense more 

 remarkable than that of the scientists of the present time, who, in the 

 domain of agriculture, have never achieved results equal to this. To 

 support this idea it might be maintained that the more primitive the 

 people the more acute is its sense of observation. Book science very 

 often sterilizes the excellent mentality natural to youth and also limits 

 the imagination. 



However, I remember that when for the first time I found wild 

 cabbage growing on rocks at the seashore remote from all cultivated 

 fields, I was struck by the fact that even with my limitations of an 

 educated man and with all the mental deformation attendant on scien- 

 tific specialization which leads one away, they say, from common sense, 

 I should nevertheless, it seemed to me, not have hesitated, in case of 

 need, to try this plant as food, so inviting was its appearance. Last 

 year, in my botanical trip along the coast of Portugal, I was able to 

 see that the Portuguese peasant, who has kept so many vestiges of the 

 past in his dress, his domestic animals (long-horned cattle), his cart 

 and his customs, still uses the cabbage (Covo-gallego) as primitive 

 peoples would; the flower tops are simply boiled. There is a far cry 

 from this cabbage still so near its primitive state to the numerous 

 varieties which the agriculturists have introduced into our European 

 cultivation. 



There is, then, reason to believe that primitive man found the 

 plants suitable for cultivation already showing the principal attributes 

 which make them useful ; he found the cereals, he did not create them. 

 In other words, cereals are the cause of civilization, not civilization the 

 cause of cereals. 



Alphonse de Candolle, the illustrious father of the president of the 

 Societe des Arts, in his classic work on the origin of cultivated plants, 

 in 1883, says: 



The Euphrates region, lying about in the middle of the zone of cultivation 

 [of wheat] which formerly extended from China to the Canary Islands, was very 

 probably the principal habitat of the species in very early prehistoric times. 

 Perhaps it extended towards Syria, as the climate is very similar, but to the 

 east and to the west of western Asia wheat has never existed except in a culti- 

 vated state, antedating, it is true, any known civilization. 



