1864.] KITCHEN-GARDEN PLANTS. 33 



ORIGIN OF OUR KITCHEN-GARDEN PLANTS. 



By Harland Coultas, 

 Lecturer on Botany at the Cbariug-Cross Hospital. 



For a long time it was thought to be impossible to discover the 

 origin of those nutritive species of plants commonly cultivated by 

 man ; some writers maintaining that their primitive habitat had 

 been destroyed, that they originated on lands oyer which the ocean 

 now rolls its waters ; whilst others, equally fanciful, supposed a 

 miraculous intervention of the Deity, and that man received 

 directly from the gods the first seeds of the cerealia and other 

 plants, which he cultivates as sources of food. The prevailing 

 opinion upon this great question, even among enlightened persons, 

 and so late as the commencement of the present century, may be 

 gathered from the following passage from Humboldt's Essay upon 

 tire Geography of Plants (Essai sur la Geograjyhie des Plantes, 

 1807, p. 28) :— 



" The country in which originated the vegetables most useful to 

 man is a secret as impenetrable as the first dwelling-place of our 

 domestic animals. We are ignorant of the country in which the 

 grasses fir-t originated which furnished nutriment to the Mongo- 

 lian and Caucasian races. We know not in what country our 

 cerealia grow spontaneously — our wheat, oats, and rye. The 

 plants which constitute the natural riches of the inhabitants of the 

 tropics, the banana, papaw, cassava, and maize, have never yet 

 been found in a wild state. The potato presents the same phen- 

 omena." 



Since the time when the above passage was written by this 

 illustrious author, the wild potato has been found growing in the 

 greatest abundance in South America ; the papaw, by Marcgraaf, 

 in the forests of Brazil ; and Olivier and Bruguieres, in travelling 

 through Western Asia — the cradle of the European race — have 

 found wild rye and barley. Thus year by year the progress of 

 geographical and botanical researches conduces to more certain and 

 simple ideas on the origin of cultivated plants, so that our best 

 naturalists now, instead of supposing, as formerly, miraculous 

 phenomena, or revolutions in the physical geography of the plane- 

 tary surface, are all agreed that it is highly probable that all our 

 cultivated plants have originally descended from some wild form ; 



Vol. II. c No. 1. 



