THE PLANT WORLD 145 



NOTES ON THE ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS.* 



THE APPLE. 

 By F. H. Knowlton. 



IT is my iutention to begin herewith a presentation of a series of 

 notes* on the origin of certain cultivated plants, not so much with 

 the idea of making any original contribution to the subject as to 

 present to our readers some of the more or less well-known facts regard- 

 ing the origin of plants that have become, in one way or another, useful 

 to man. As most of the commonly cultivated plants have been under 

 culture from a very early period, their original home, and the manner 

 of their introduction into cultivation, is often little known. In other 

 cases this introduction has been so recent, comparatively speaking, that 

 we can find all the steps duly recorded. 



It seems probable that when man was merging from the so-called 

 pre-human state into the human state, he crudely classified the plants 

 by which he found himself surrounded and on which he largely sub- 

 sisted, into two categories : those useful and those not useful, which lat- 

 ter groups he doubtless soon learned to further subdivide into those 

 distinctly injurious, and those simply without useful properties. 



In certain tropical countries where plant life is so luxuriant that little 

 actual cultivation is necessary, the above classification, or something 

 akin to it, may still prevail, but in temperate lands man must sooner or 

 later have come to appreciate the dangers of depending on the uncer- 

 tain supply from plants in nature, and so began, in a crude way, the 

 cultivation of the kinds of plants he had found most useful. From that 

 hypothetical time to the present there is almost every step. 



At first thought it might seem a reasonably easy task to determine 

 the original home of a plant. One may, indeed, obtain much valuable 

 information on this subject by stiidying collections of dried plants, man- 

 uals of botany, or works of travel or history, but these sources are often 

 inconclusive. It is not infrequently found, on consulting herbaria, that 

 the collectors of plants have too often neglected to state whether a par- 

 ticular plant was obtained in an absolutely natural condition, or under 

 conditions that might have been due to pre\dous culture or introduction 

 by man. Thus the tuna (Opuntia) is now wild everywhere in the Holy 

 Land, yet it is an American plant and was introduced there within the 

 last three hundred years, and iho, Mexican Ageratum of common house- 

 hold cultivation is an abundant weed in the Eastern Himalayas, whither 

 it has gone within the last fifty years. Manuals of botany, partioularlj^ 

 those covering countries known or supposed to be the home of certain of 



*These will be presented at irregular intervals, and not in a continuous series. — Ed. 



