60 TEANSFEE OF VEGETABLE LIFE. 



Trcmsfer of Yegetdble Life. 



It belongs to vegetable and animal geography, wbicb are almost 

 sciences of themselves, to point out in detail what man has done 

 to change the distribution of plants and of animated life, 

 and to revolutionize the aspect of organic nature ; but some of 

 the more important facts bearing on the first branch of this sub- 

 ject may pertinently be introduced here. Most of the cereal 

 grains, the pulse, the edible roots, the tree fruits, and other im- 

 portant forms of esculent vegetation grown in Europe and the 

 United States are beheved, and — if the testimony of Phny and 

 other ancient naturahsts is to be depended upon — many of them 

 / are historically known, to have originated in the temperate cli- 

 - mates of Asia. The agriculture of even so old a country as Egypt 

 has been almost completely revolutionized by the introduction of 

 foreign plants, within the historical period. " With the excep- 

 tion of wheat," says Hehn, " the Nile valley now yields only new 

 products, cotton, rice, sugar, indigo, sorghum, dates," being all 

 unknown to its most ancient rural husbandry.* The wine grape 

 has been thought to be truly indigenous only in the regions bor- 

 dering on the eastern end of the Black Sea, where it now, partic- 

 ularly on the banks of the Rion, the ancient Phasis, propagates 



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 orig- 

 inals of some domesticated vegetables may not be now extinct and unrepre- 

 sented in the existing wild flora. See, on this subject, Humboldt, Ansichten 

 der Natur, I., pp. 208, 209. 



The Adams of modern botany and zoOlogy 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. I have 

 elsewhere noticed Asagrwa and Qaylussacia as, to say the least, very odd des- 

 ignations of species. It is much to be wished that some bold neologist would 

 devise English technical equivalents for the German verwildert, run-wild, and 

 teredelt, improved by cultivation. 



* On these points see the learned work of Hehh, Kultur Pflanzen una 

 Thieve in ihrem Uebergang aus Asien. 1877, On the migration of plant* 

 generally, see Lyell, Principles of Qeology, 10th ed., vol. ii., c. 



