The Pea-Weevil: The Eggs 



impenetrable mist of the ages. Nature 

 delivered them to us in the full vigour of 

 things untamed, when they were of little 

 value as food, as she nowadays offers us the 

 wild blackberry and the sloe ; she gave them 

 to us in a rudimentary and incomplete state ; 

 and it was for our husbandry and ingenuity 

 patiently to hoard the nutritive pulp, that 

 earliest form of capital, with dividends 

 always increasing in the most excellent bank 

 of the tiller of the soil. 



As storehouses of provisions, the cereal 

 and the garden vegetable are, for the most 

 part, the work of man. The founders of 

 the species, a poor resource in their original 

 condition, we borrowed as we found them 

 from nature's green treasury; the improved 

 race, rich in nourishing matter, is the result 

 of our art. 



But, if wheat, peas and the rest are in- 

 dispensable to us, our care, in fair exchange, 

 is absolutely necessary to their maintenance. 

 Such as our needs have made them, incapable 

 of resistance in the savage conflict of living 

 things, these plants, if left to themselves, 

 without cultivation, would rapidly disappear, 

 despite the numerical immensity of their 

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