IMPROVEMENT OF VEGETABLE RACES. 



purple species is a hardy herbaceous border flower — and perhaps hybrids might be 

 raised between it and the scarlet sorts, that would be lasting and invaluable ornaments 

 to the garden. So with the gooseberry. This fruit shrub, so One in the damp climate 

 of England, is so unsuited to the United States generally — or at least most of the 

 English sorts are — that not one bush in twenty, bears fruit free from mildew. And 

 yet, so far as we know, no horticulturist has attempted to naturalise the cultivated 

 gooseberry in the only way it is likely to become naturalised, viz — by raising new va- 

 rieties from seed in this country, so that they may have American co7istitutio7is , adap- 

 ted to the American climate — and therefore not likely to mildew. The same thing is 

 true of the foreign grape. Millions of roots of the foreign grapes have, first and last, 

 been planted in the United States. Hardly one can be pointed to that actually "suc- 

 ceeds" in the open air culture — not from want of heat or light — for we have the great- 

 est abundance of both ; but from the want of constitutional adaptation. And still the 

 foreign grape is abandoned, except for vineries, without a fair trial of the only modes 

 by which it would naturally be hoped to acclimate it, viz — raising seedlings here, and 

 crossing it with our best native sorts. 



Every person interested in horticulture, must stumble upon facts almost daily, that 

 teach us how much may be done by a new race or generation, in plants as well as men, 

 that it is utterly out of the question for the old race to accomplish. Compare, in the 

 Western States, the success of a colony of foreign emigrants in subduing the wilder- 

 ness and mastering the land, with that of another company of our own race — say of 

 New-Englanders. The one has to contend with all his old-world prejudices, habits of 

 labor, modes of working; the other being "to the manor-born," &c., siezes the Yan- 

 kee axe, and the forest, for the first time, acknowledges its master. While the old- 

 countryman is endeavoring to settle himself snugly, and make a little neighborhood 

 comfortable, the American husbandman has cleared and harvested a whole state. 



As in the man, so in the plant. A race should be adapted to the soil by being 

 produced upon it, of the best possible materials. The latter is as indispensable as the 

 first — as it will not wholly suffice that a man or a tree should be indigenous — or our 

 American Indians, or our Chickasaw Plums, would never Tiave given place to either 

 the Caucassian race, or the luscious " Jefferson ;" — ^but the best race being taken at the 

 starting point, the highest utility and beauty will be found to spring from individuals 

 adapted by birth, constitution, and education, to the country. Among a thousand na- 

 tive Americans, there may be nine hundred no better suited to labor of the body or 

 brains, than so many Europeans — but there will be five or ten that will reach a higher 

 level of adaptation, or to use a western phrase, "climb higher and dive deeper," than 

 any man out of America. 



We are not going to be led into a physiological digression on the subject of the in- 

 extinguishable rights of a superior organization in certain men and races of men, which 

 nature every day re-affirms, notwithstanding the socialistic and democratic theories of 

 our politicians. But we will undertake to say, that if the races or plants were as much 

 improved as they might be, and as much adapted to the various soils and climates of 

 the Union, as they ought to be, there is not a single square mile in the United States, 



