146 PLANTS AND MAN 
pleasure, from the vegetable than from the animal 
kingdom. Flesh, whether derived from mammals, 
birds, or fishes; wool, silk, leather, oils, and so on, bulk 
much less than the grains, vegetables, fruits, timber, 
fibres, fodder plants, and other vegetable products 
which we use in our daily life. On the esthetic side, 
again, while the beauty of birds and insects is a source 
of frequent delight, flowers play a part in daily life 
that the more delicate and sensitive animals can never 
do. Again, in the number of different species used, 
whether for profit or pleasure, the plant world takes 
precedence. This is especially the case as regards our 
farms and pleasure grounds, plants lending themselves 
much more readily to domestication than animals do. 
And so a suburban house may have a hundred or a 
thousand different plants in kitchen garden and flower 
plot, orchard, and shrubbery, while its animal depen- 
dents consist of a horse, a couple of dogs, a cat, some 
fowl, and a canary. So again a Botanic Garden may 
easily possess as many thousands of different species 
as a Zoological Garden contains hundreds. 
This army of plants which human beings collect 
about themselves may be grouped under two cate- 
gories—useful and ornamental. On a previous page 
(p. 136) a suggestion has been made as to how the 
cultivation of useful plants may have arisen. As now 
practised, this industry is the largest in the world, and 
with the growth of means of transport has ceased to 
be only or even mainly of local importance: we use 
every day wheat from Australia, rice from China, tea 
from India, cotton from the United States, timber 
from Norway. In some cases, as in the last, these 
materials are harvested as they occur in the wild state, 
