ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC PLANTS. 69 



plants important as human aliment or as objects of agricultural ^ 

 industry, exist and propagate themselves uncultivated in the same 

 form and with the same properties as when sown and reared by 

 human art.* In fact, the cases are rare where the identity of a 

 wild with a domesticated plant is considered by the best authori- 

 ties as conclusively established, and we are warranted in affirming 

 of but few of the latter, as a historically known or experimentally 

 proved fact, that they ever did exist, or could exist, independently 

 of man.f 



ria medka of New England — such as pennyroyal, for example — are generally 

 much less aromatic and powerful when cultivated in gardens than when self- 

 sown on meagre soils. On the other hand, the cinchona, lately introduced 

 from South America into British India and carefully cultivated there, ia 

 found to be richer in quinine than the American tree. 



* Some recent observations of Wetzstein are worthy of special notice. 

 " The soil of the Hauran," he remarks, "produces, in its primitive condition, 

 much wild rye, which is not known as a cultivated plant in Sj^ria, and much 

 wild barley and oats. These cereals precisely resemble the corresponding cul- 

 tivated plants in leaf, ear, size, and height of straw, but their grains are sen- 

 sibly flatter and poorer in flour." — ReisebericM uber Haurdn und die Tracho- 

 nen, p. 40. 



Some of the cereals are, to a certain extent, self -propagating in the soil and 

 climate of California. " Volunteer crops are grown from the seed which falls 

 out in harvesting. Barley has-been known to volunteer five crops in succes- 

 sion." — Prayer-Ftiowd, Six Months in California, p. 139. 



f This rem ark 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, Excursions. The 

 fig 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 beheve, 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 and Sardinia, produces good fruit without further care, when 

 thinned out and freed from the shade of other trees, and is particularly suited 

 for grafting. See Salvagxoli, Memorie sidle Maremme, pp. 63-73. The 

 olive is indigenous 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, etc. , pp. 8-15. Prgevalsky 

 found the apple and some other orchard fruits growing luxuriantly in the 

 woods on the borders of Thibet. 



Fraas, Elima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit, pp. 35-88, gives, upon the 

 authority of Link and other botanical writers, a list of the native habitats of 



