94 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



and before the words trade and commerce had been invented. Shall we 

 start with the Garden of Eden near the eastern end of the Mediterranean or 

 shall we be more modern and commence on the plateaus of Tibet? Shall 

 we be ultra-modern and assume that those precursors which ultimately 

 became man might, like plants, have started at several places on the earth, 

 provided conditions were right? It makes little difference in the present 

 discussion, although in passing we might point out a fallacy in the story 

 of Eden. Tradition today has it that the apple was the cause of the down- 

 fall. Botanists tell us, however, that this fruit had its origin in cooler 

 climates, northern Europe and especially northern Asia. The apricot ap- 

 pears to have been the more likely contender for the honor, since it ap- 

 pears to be indigenous to Asia Minor. One might argue that if the apple 

 story is true, the Garden of Eden was not in Asia Minor but more nearly 

 at the site now more widely accepted as the cradle of the human race. 

 Parenthetically, however, the Bible makes no mention of an apple. It merely 

 alludes to the fruit of the tree of knowledge. 



We might use the apple as an example of the method of propagation and 

 distribution of foods. It seems improbable that all varieties of apple came 

 from a single ancestral tree. Today there are thousands of varieties within 

 this genus. Mains. Some are edible, while others are not. It seems probable 

 that, under proper conditions, plants closely resembling each other and 

 now all grouped within the apple genus took their origins independently, 

 in the same way that the wheat of today was derived from the wild grasses 

 of Asia Minor, while Indian corn was developing entirely independently 

 from the teosinte grass of Mexico or from another local ancestral grass. 



The crab apple of North America is indigenous to the New World 

 and presumably was developing independently while the finer edible 

 apples were evolving in Eurasia. But the point to be made is that those 

 varieties which came to be used as foods usually took their origins from 

 some unusually fortuitous specimen and have been distributed across the 

 continents from this original source. Today North America is the great- 

 est apple region in the world. We have our indigenous members of the 

 genus, most of which are still wild and scarcely edible, but the cultivated 

 apple of North America was originally imported into this country from 

 Europe and more remotely from its original habitat in the cooler climates 

 of the Old World. To be sure, man has improved the fruit by fertilization, 

 selection and cross-breeding, until there are now hundreds of more deli- 

 cious varieties descended from the original parent. 



But the happy fact is that most of those foods cultivated for use by man 

 may be traced back through historical records to an approximate original 

 source, even though there are inferior domestic varieties which are prob- 

 ably indigenous to particular areas. 



It makes a rather thrilling picture to visualize nomadic tribes wandering 

 here and there within rather restricted areas; coming by accident upon an 



