THE ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 787 



The constant intercourse of the latter country with Mesopotamia 

 justifies us in presuming that cultivation was almost contemporaneous 

 in the regions of the Euphrates and the Nile. Why may it not have 

 been quite as ancient in India and the Indian Archipelago ? The his- 

 tory of the Dravidian and Malaysian people does not go back very 

 far, and is very obscure ; but there is no reason for presuming that 

 cultivation, particularly on the banks of the rivers, did not begin 

 among them a very long time ago. 



The ancient Egyptians and the Phoenicians propagated numerous 

 plants in the region of the Mediterranean ; and the Aryan peoples, 

 whose migrations toward Europe began nearly twenty-five hundred 

 or, at latest, two thousand years before Christ, spread many species 

 which had already been cultivated in Western Asia. We shall see, in 

 studying the history of particular species, that some plants were proba- 

 bly already cultivated in Europe and Northern Africa. This is indi- 

 cated by names in languages that prevailed before the Aryans came : 

 the Finnish, Basque, Berber, and Guanche (of the Canary Islands). 

 The remains, called Kjokkenmoddings, of the ancient habitations of 

 Denmark have, however, as yet furnished no traces of cultivation, 

 and no evidence of the possession of a metaL The Scandinavians of 

 that period lived entirely by fishing, hunting, and, perhaps accessorily, 

 on indigenous plants — such as those of the cabbage kind — ^which were 

 not of a nature to leave traces of themselves in the manure-heaps, and 

 which, perhaps, did not require cultivation. The absence of metals 

 does not imply, in those northern countries, a greater antiquity than 

 the age of Pericles, or even of the best period of the Roman Repub- 

 lic. Agriculture was finally introduced later, after bronze had become 

 known in Sweden, a country then still far from civilized lands. A 

 sculpture of a plow, drawn by two oxen and guided by a man, has 

 been found in the remains of that epoch. 



The ancient inhabitants of Switzerland cultivated several plants, 

 some of which originated in Asia, when they had instruments of pol- 

 ished stone, but not of metals. M. Heer has shown that they were in 

 communication with the countries situated to the south of the Alps. 

 They may, in this way, have received cultivated plants from the Ibe- 

 rians, who occupied Gaul before the Celts. In the period when the 

 lake-dwellers of Switzerland and Savoy were in possession of bronze, 

 their cultivated plants were more varied. Apparently, even the lake- 

 dwellers of Italy cultivated fewer species when they had that metal 

 than the people of the lakes of Savoy — a fact which may have been 

 connected with a greater antiquity, or with local circumstances. The 

 remains of the lake-dwellers of Laybach and of the Mondsee, in Aus- 

 tria, also attest a quite primitive agriculture ; no cereals have been 

 found at Laybach, and only a single grain of wheat at the Mondsee. 

 So little advanced a condition of agriculture in that eastern part of 

 Europe is in opposition to the hypothesis, based on some words of the 



