THE BEGINNINGS OF AGRICULTURE. 679 



learn to distinguisli the useful plants among those which were 

 not useful. It is not an easy task to pick out, in the three or four 

 hundred thousand species of which the existing flora is composed, 

 those most suitable for satisfying various wants especially when 

 we recollect that most of the uses we make of them, instead of 

 being naturally indicated, are suggested by previous discoveries, 

 and that there is no motive to impel one to seek in things a util- 

 ity which is not suspected. 



Primitive man was doubtless put in the way of making such 

 discoveries by pressing necessities and the suggestion of chance. 

 The terrible famines to which savages are exposed, which force 

 them to eat the most insignificant berries, grasses, roots, and even 

 the leaves of trees, caused them to learn by repeated trials the 

 productions which could best afford them nourishment. Atten- 

 tion was fixed upon the most advantageous and least repulsive of 

 them. Such experimentation, marked by disgusting and perilous 

 features for many poisonous plants proffer baits to greedy appe- 

 tites by which they are sometimes caught was accomplished at 

 the instigation of hunger, with the assistance of instincts then 

 more formal or better minded than now, comparable to those 

 which guide animals so surely in the choice of their food. At a 

 later date, nascent reason discovered various useful qualities in 

 plants. Fortunate observations and trials followed by success 

 showed what profit could be derived from products long neglected. 

 The uses of wood assigned an increasing importance to it, first as 

 a combustible, beginning with the discovery of fire, then as a sub- 

 stance that could be made serviceable in infinite ways. In time, 

 men learned to separate, twist, spin, and weave bark and fibers, to 

 color them in various shades, and to extract oil, wine, and sugar. 

 Casual cures revealed the medicinal properties of simples. Every 

 age saw an increase in the number of useful products which one 

 could draw from plants. Even now, after the many investiga- 

 tions that have been pursued through thousands of ages, we are 

 far from having made available all the resources which the vege- 

 table world might furnish us ; and its fertility holds in reserve 

 for us many treasures of which we are still ignorant. 



All the plants that have come into cultivation among us were 

 first used wild, for their value had to be recognized before the 

 thought of multiplying them could take shape. As long as they 

 were naturally abundant enough to suffice for the necessities of 

 sparse populations, no pains would be taken to propagate them. 

 This phase of absolute uncultivation, the longest that the human 

 species has traversed, appears to have continued from the origin 

 of the race to the present geological period. Nothing, in fact, in 

 the vestiges that have come down to us of that age reveals any 

 signs of cultivated plants or of modes of cultivation ; and such are 



