10 EEACTION OF MAIS" ON ISTATUKE. 



The physical revolutions thus wrought by man have not indeed 

 all been destructive to human interests, and the heaviest blows he 

 has inflicted upon nature have not been wholly without their com- 

 pensations. Soils to wliich no nutritious vegetable was indige- 

 nous, countries which once brought forth but the fewest products 

 suited for the sustenance and comfort of man — while the severity 

 of their climates created and stimulated the greatest number and 

 the most imperious urgency of physical wants — surfaces the most 

 rugged and intractable, and least blessed with natural facilities of 

 communication, have been brought in modern times to yield and 

 distribute all that supphes the material necessities, all that con- 

 tributes to the sensuous enjoyments and conveniences of civilized 

 life. The Scythia, the Thule, the Britain, the Germany and the 

 Gaul which the Roman writers describe in such forbidding terms, 

 have been brought almost to rival the native luxuriance and easily 

 won plenty of Southern Italy ; and, while the fountains of oil and 

 wine that refreshed old Greece and Syria and Northern Africa 

 have almost ceased to flow, and the soils of those fair lands are 

 turned to thirsty and inhospitable deserts, the hyperborean regions 

 of Europe have learned to conquer, or rather compensate, the 

 rigors of clunate, and have attained to a material wealth and va- 

 riety of product that, with all their natural advantages, the grana- 

 ries of the ancient world can hardly be said to have enjoyed. 



the inorganic surface of the globe ; and the history of the geographical revo- 

 lutions thus produced would furnish ample material for a volume. 



The modification of organic species by domestication is a branch of philo- 

 Bophic inquiry which we may almost say has been created by Darwin ; but 

 the geographical results of these modifications do not appear to have yet been 

 made a subject of scientific investigation. 



I do not know that the following passage from Pliny has ever been cited in 

 connection with the Darwinian theories, but it is worth a reference : 



" But behold a very strange and new fashion of them [cucumbers] in Cam- 

 pane, for there you shall have abundance of them come up in forme of a 

 Quince. And as I heare say, one of them chaunced so to grow first at a very 

 venture ; but afterwards from the seed of it came a whole race and progenie 

 of the like, which therefore they call Melopopones, as a man would say, the 

 ■Quince-pompions or cucumbers." — Flint, Nat. Hist., Holland's translation, 

 book xix., c. 5. 



The word cucumis used in the original of this passage embraces many of 

 the cucurbitacese, but the context shows that it here means the cucumber. 



