VEGETABLE POWER OF ACCOMMODATIOlSr, 71 



tremely unlike those of its birthplace. Cooper says, " We can not | 

 say positively that cmy plant is uncultivable anywhere until it has 1 

 been tried "; and this seems to be even more true of wild than of \ 

 domesticated vegetation. 



As the wild plant is much hardier than the domesticated vege- \ 

 table, so the same law prevails in animated brute and even in hu- 1 

 man life. Nature fights in defence of her free children, but wars 

 upon them when they have deserted her banners and tamely sub- 

 mitted to the dominion of man.* The beasts of the chase are 

 more capable of endurance and privation, and more tenacious of 

 life, than the domesticated 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 civihzed enemy, and, like the wild boar, he 

 has been known to press forward along the shaft of the spear 

 which was transpiercing his vitals, and to deal a death-blow 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 i 

 not have supported ; the trained Enghsh racer outstrips the swift- 

 est horse of the pampas or prairies, perhaps even the less systemati- 

 cally educated courser of the Arab ; the strength of the European, 

 as tested by the dynamometer, is greater than that of the ISTew-Zea- 

 lander. 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, to- 

 gether, to an entire set of physical conditions equally alien to the 

 former habits of both, so that every power of resistance and ac- 

 commodation shall be called into action, and the wild plant or 

 animal will Kve, while the domesticated will perish.f 



* Tempests, violent enough to destroy all cultivated plants, frequently spare 

 those of spontaneous growth. I have often seen in Northern Italy, vineyards, 

 maize-fields, mulberry and fruit trees completely stripped of their foliage by 

 hail, v^hile the native forest trees scattered through the meadows, and the 

 shrubs and brambles which sprang up by the wayside, passed through the 

 ordeal with scarcely the loss of a leaflet. 



f " Considering weeds to be plants of the nature of herbs which tend to 

 take prevalent posses^iion of soil used for man's purposes, irrespective of 

 his will. Professor Asa Gray inquires, in a recent paper in Silliman's Journal 



