AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS OF THE UNITED STATES. 73 
accidentally or designedly sown elsewhere, it will grow under 
conditions extremely unlike those of its birthplace. Cooper 
says: “We cannot say positively that any plant is uncultivable 
anywhere until it has been tried;” and this seems to be even 
more true of wild than of domesticated vegetation. 
The wild plant is much hardier than the domesticated vege- 
table, and the same law prevails in animated brute and even hu- 
man life. The beasts of the chase are nore capable of endur- 
ance and privation and more tenacious of life, than the domesti- 
cated animals which most nearly resemble them. The savage 
fights on, after he has received half a dozen mortal wounds, the 
least of which would have instantly paralyzed the strength of his 
civilized enemy, and, like the wild boar, he has been known to 
press forward along the shaft of the spear which was trans- 
piercing his vitals, and to deal a deathblow on the soldier who 
wielded it. 
True, domesticated plants can be gradually acclimatized to 
bear a degree of heat or of cold, which, in their wild state, 
they would not have supported ; the trained English racer out- 
strips the swiftest horse of the pampas or prairies, perhaps even 
the less systematically educated courser of the Arab; the 
strength of the European, as tested by the dynamometer, is 
greater than that of the New Zealander. But all these are 
instances of excessive development of particular capacities 
and faculties at the expense of general vital power. Expose 
untamed and domesticated forms of life, together, to an entire 
set of physical conditions equally alien to the former habits of 
both, so that every power of resistance and accommodation 
shall be called into action, and the wild plant or animal will 
live, while the domesticated will perish. 
Agriculiural Products of the United States. 
According to the census of 1870, the United States had, on 
the first of June in that year, in round numbers, 189,000,000 
acres of improved land, the quantity having been increased by 
