THE ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 785 



local and ephemeral trials must have passed. DeterminiDg influences 

 were needed to incite these trials, to secure their renewal, and bring 

 them to success. We can easily understand what they were. 



The first thing necessary was to have within reach some plant 

 offering qualities desirable to all men. The most backward savages 

 are acquainted with the plants of their own country ; but the Austra- 

 lians and Patagonians are examples to show that, if they do not judge 

 them productive and easy to raise, they do not think of putting them 

 under cultivation. Other conditions are quite evident : a climate not 

 too rigorous ; in hot countries, freedom from too long drought ; some 

 degree of security and fixedness ; and, last, a pressing necessity result- 

 ing from failure of resources in fishing, hunting, or the production of 

 the nutritious fruits of native plants, such as the chestnut, the date, 

 the banana, or the bread-fruit. When men can live without working, 

 that is what they prefer. Besides, the element of chance in hunting 

 and fishing tempts primitive men — and some civilized ones too — more 

 than do the difficult and regular labors of agriculture. To return to 

 the species which savages may be disposed to cultivate. They find 

 them sometimes in their own country, but frequently they receive 

 them from neighboring people who are more favored by natural con- 

 ditions than they, or have already entered upon some degree of civil- 

 ization. Unless a people is cantoned in an island or in some place 

 difficult of access, it will speedily receive those plants discovered else- 

 where whose advantageous qualities are evident, and this will divert 

 them from the cultivation of the inferior species of their own coun- 

 try. History teaches us that wheat, maize, the yam, several species 

 of the genus Panicum, tobacco, and other plants — particularly annual 

 ones — ^became widely diffused before the historical period. These 

 good species encountered and arrested the timid efforts which might 

 have been made here and there with less productive or less agreeable 

 plants. In our own days, we see, in different countries, wheat taking 

 the place of rye, maize preferred to buckwheat, and many grains, vege- 

 tables, and economical plants falling into neglect because other spe- 

 cies, often brought from a distance, offer more advantages. The dis- 

 proportion in value is, however, less between plants already cultivated 

 and improved than formerly existed between cultivated plants and 

 quite wild ones. Selection — that grand factor which Darwin has had 

 the merit so fortunately to introduce into science — plays an impor- 

 tant part when agriculture is once established ; but in every period, 

 and especially in the beginning, the quality of the species is more im- 

 portant than the selection of varieties. 



The various causes which favor or oppose the beginnings of agri- 

 culture will explain why some regions have been for thousands of 

 years populated by cultivators, while others are still inhabited by 

 wandering tribes. Rice and several legumes in Southern Asia, bar- 

 ley and wheat in Mesopotamia and Egypt, several grain-plants in 



VOL. XXV. — 50 



