626 SOME OF THE POSSIBILITIES OF: ECONOMIC BOTANY. 
examples have been selected. The varieties which he accepts are suf- 
ficiently well distinguished to admit of description, and in most instances 
of delineation, without any danger of confusion. The potato has, he 
says, innumerable varieties, of which he accepts forty as easily distin- 
guishable and worthy of a place in a general list, but he adds also a 
list, comprising of course synonyms, of thirty-two French, twenty-six 
English, nineteen American, and eighteen German varieties. The fol- 
lowing numbers speak for themselves, all being selected in the same 
careful manner as those of the potato; celery more than twenty ; carrot 
more than thirty; beet, radish, and potato more than forty; lettuce and 
onion more than fifty ; turnip more than seventy; cabbage, kidney bean, 
and garden pea more than one hundred. 
The amount of horticultural work which these numbers represent is 
enormous. Hach variety established as a race (that is, a variety which 
comes true to seed) has been evolved by the same sort of patient care 
and waiting which we have seen is necessary in the case of cereals, but 
the time of waiting has not been as a general thing so long. 
You will permit me to quote from Vilmorin* also an account of a com- 
mon plant, which will show how wide is the range of variation and how 
obscure are the indications in the wild plant of its available possibili- 
ties. The example shows how completely hidden are the potential 
variations useful to mankind. 
‘Cabbage, a plant which is indigenous in Europe and western Asia, 
is one of the vegetables which has been cultivated from the earliest 
time. The ancients were well acquainted with it, and certainly pos- 
sessed several varieties of the head-forming kinds. The great antiq- 
uity of its culture may be inferred from the immense number of varieties 
which are now in existence, and from the very important modifications 
which have been produced in the characteristies in the original or parent 
plant. 
‘The wild cabbage, such as it now exists on the coasts of England 
and France, is a perennial plant with broad-lobed, undulated, thick, 
smooth leaves, covered with a glaucus bloom. The stemattains aheight 
of from nearly 24 to over 3 feet, and bears at the top a spike of yellow 
or sometimes white flowers. All the cultivated varieties present the 
same peculiarities in their infloresence, but up to the time of flowering 
they exhibit the most marked differences from each other and from the 
original wild plant. In most of the cabbages it is chiefly the leaves 
that are developed by cultivation; these for the most part become im- 
bricated or overlap one another closely, so as to form a more or less 
compact head, the heart or interior of which is composed of the central 
undeveloped shoot and the younger leaves next it. The shape of the 
head is spherical, sometimes flattened, sometimes conical. All the va- 
rieties which form heads in this way are known by the general name of 
* Loe. cit., English edition, p. 104., 
