362 IVere i/ic I^ruits Made for Man, o?' didJfau make the F'riiits ? 



Were the Fruits made for Man, or did Man make 



the Fruits? 



litj I'rof. Asn Gray — Essay for Americati I'oiiiological Society, 



ri'lHESE need not be taken as mutually exclusive propositions; for as "God helps 

 -■- those who help themselves," andman's work in this respect is mainly, if not wholly 

 in directing the course or tendency of Nature, so there is a just sense in which we 

 may say, " the art itself is Nature," by which the greatest triumphs of horticultural 

 skill have been accomplished. Moreover, I am not one of those naturalists who 

 would have you believe that nothing which comes by degrees, and in the course of 

 nature, is to be attributed to Divine power. 



The answer I should give to the question, as we thus put it, is : 



1. Some fruits were given to man as they are, and he has only gathered and con- 

 sumed them. But these are all minor fruits, and such as have only lately come within 

 the reach of civilized man, or are not thought worth his trouble. Huckleberries and 

 Cranberries, Persimmons and Papaws are examples, taken from this country. 

 Whether even such fruits have or not been under a course of improvement irrespec- 

 tive of man, is another question. 



2. Others have come to man full flavored, and nearly all that he has done has been 

 to increase their size and abundance, or extend their season. Currants and goose- 

 berries, raspberries and blackberries, chestnuts, and above all, strawberries, are of 

 this class. 



3. But most of the esteemed and important fruits, as well as the grains, have not 

 so much been given to man as made by him. The gift outright was mainly plastic, 

 raw material, time and opportunity. As to the cereal grains, it is only of the oat 

 that we probably know the wild original; of wheat there has been an ingenious con- 

 jecture, partly but insufficiently confirmed by experiment; of the rest, no wild stock 

 is known which is not most likely itself an escape from cultivation. Of some of them, 

 such especially as Maize, not only can no wild original be indicated, but in all proba- 

 bility none exists. 



So of the staple fruits; of some the wild originals can be pretty well made out; of 

 more, they are merely conjectural ; of some they are quite unknown and perhaps long 

 ago extinct. 



To cite examples in confirmation or illustration of these points, to note how very 

 ancient some of our varieties of common fruits are, and how very recent certain 

 others — to consider how they have originated, with or without man's conscious 

 agency, and how they have been perfected, diversified and preserved, mainly under 

 man's direct care — would be to expand this note into an essay, and yet to say noth- 

 ing with which pomologists are not familiar. 



It would be curious to speculate as to what our pomology would have been if the 

 civilization from which it, and we ourselves, have sprung had had its birthplace along 

 the southern shores of our great lakes, the northern of the Gulf of Mexico, and the 

 intervening Mississippi, instead of the Levant, Mesopotamia and the Nile, and our 

 old world had been opened to us a new world less than 400 years ago. 



Seemingly, we should not have as great a variety of choice fruits as we have now, 

 and they would mostly have been different, but probably neither scanty nor poor. 



