TRANSFER OF VEGETABLE LIFE. 61 
proved fact, that they ever did exist, or could exist, independ- 
ently of man.* 
Transfer of Vegetable Life. 
It belongs to vegetable and animal geography, which are 
almost sciences of themselves, to point out in detail what man 
has done to change the distribution of plants and of animated 
* This remark is much less applicable to fruit trees than to garden vegeta- 
bles and the cerealia. The wild orange of Florida, though once considered 
indigenous, is now generally thought by botanists to be descended from the 
European orange introduced by the early colonists. On the wild apple trees 
of Massachusetts see an interesting chapter in THOREAU, Hacursions. The 
fir and the olive are found growing wild in every country where those trees 
are cultivated. The wild fig differs from the domesticated in its habits, its 
season of fructification, and its insect population, but is, I believe, not spe- 
cifically distinguishable from the garden fig, though I do not know that it is 
reclaimable by cultivation. The wild olive, which is so abundant in the Tus- 
can Maremma, produces good fruit without further care, when thinned out 
and freed from the shade of other trees, and is particularly suited for graft- 
ing. See SALVAGNOLI, Memorie sulle Maremme, pp. 63-73. The olive is indi- 
genous in Syria and in the Punjaub, and forms vast forests in the Himalayas 
at from 1,400 to 2,100 feet above the level of the sea.—CLEGHORN, Memoir 
on the Timber procured from the Indus, ete., pp. 8-15. 
Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit, pp. 35-38, gives, upon the 
authority of Link and other botanical writers, a list of the native habitats of 
most cereals and of many fruits, or at least of localities where these plants 
are said to be now found wild; but the data do not appear to rest, in general, 
upon very trustworthy evidence. Theoretically, there can be little doubt that 
all our cultivated plants are modified forms of spontaneous vegetation, 
though the connection is not historically shown, nor are we able to say that 
the originals of some domesticated vegetables may not be now extinct and 
unrepresented in the existing wild flora. See, on this subject, HUMBOLDT, 
Ansichten der Natur, i., pp. 208, 209. 
The Adams of modern botany and zodlogy have been put to hard shifts in 
finding names for the multiplied organisms which the Creator has brought 
before them, ‘‘to see what they would call them ;” and naturalists and phi- 
losophers have shown much moral courage in setting at naught the laws of 
philology in the coinage of uncouth words to express scientific ideas. It is 
much to be wished that some bold neologist would devise English technical 
equivalents for the German verwildert, run-wild, and veredelt, improved by 
cultivation. 
