786 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Africa, maize, the potato, the yam, and the manioc in America, were 

 evidently easily and soon cultivated under the inducements offered by 

 their obvious good qualities and favorable climatical conditions. Cen- 

 ters were thus formed, and hence the most useful species were dif- 

 fused. In the north of Asia, Europe, and America, the temperature 

 is unfavorable, and the indigenous plants are sparsely productive ; but, 

 as the resources of hunting and fishing are available, the introduction 

 of agriculture could be delayed, and the people could do without the 

 valuable species of the South without suffering much. It was other- 

 wise in Australia, Patagonia, and Southern Africa. The plants of the 

 temperate regions of our hemisphere could not reach these countries 

 on account of the distance, and those of the intertropical zone were 

 excluded from them by the excessive drought or the absence of high 

 temperatures. At the same time the native species were miserable 

 in quality. It was not want of intelligence or of security alone that 

 prevented the inhabitants from cultivating them. Their nature also 

 discouraged the effort to such an extent that the Europeans, during 

 the hundred years they have been in these countries, have only at- 

 tempted the cultivation of a single species, the tetragonia, an inferior 

 green herb. I do not forget that Sir Joseph Hooker has enumerated 

 more than a hundred Australian species that might be used in some 

 way ; but, in fact, they have not been cultivated, and they are not 

 cultivated, with all the improved processes which the English colonists 

 possess. This demonstrates the principle I have just announced, that 

 the quality of the species has an influence on the selection, and that 

 there must be real qualities in a wild plant to induce an effort to cul- 

 tivate it. 



Notwithstanding the obscurity that surrounds the beginnings of 

 agriculture in different regions, it is settled that the dates vary exceed- 

 ingly. One of the earliest examples of cultivated plants is drawn 

 from Egypt, in the shape of a design representing figs in one of the 

 pyramids of Gizeh. The date of the construction of the monument 

 is uncertain ; authors vary in assigning it to from fifteen hundred to 

 four thousand two hundred years before the Christian era. If we 

 assign it to two thousand years before Christ, we would have an anti- 

 quity of four thousand years for the fig. Now, the pyramids can have 

 been constructed only by a numerous people, organized and civilized 

 to a certain degree, who must consequently have had an established 

 agriculture, going back several centuries, at least, for its origin. In 

 China, twenty-seven hundred years before Christ, the Emperor Chen- 

 nung introduced a ceremony in which, every year, five species of 

 useful plants were sown — ^viz., rice, soja, wheat, and two kinds of 

 millet. These plants must have been cultivated for some length of 

 time in some places to have attracted the attention of the emperor at 

 this period. 



Agriculture seems, then, to have been as ancient in China as in Egypt. 



