WOOD INJURED BY CULTURE. 291 



Jack, that the brown loaf was beef, and mutton, and 

 venison, and custard ; and, as we are always very 

 willing to believe ourselves, we are far more ready 

 believers than Lord Peter's brothers. 



Now, in all our cultivations of vegetables, there is 

 none save that of timber trees in which the quality 

 of the wood is any consideration ; and there is, per- 

 haps, none of them in which the wood is not actually 

 deteriorated by the culture. In the grain plants that 

 is decidedly the case. Straw is very inferior to hay, 

 in strength, in flavour, and in every quality. The 

 more highly, too, that the grain plant is cultivated, 

 and the more abundantly it produces seeds the 

 grand object of the culture the straw is always the 

 worse. In the cold districts, where the crops of 

 stunted oats are barely worth the gathering in, and 

 would not be worth it at all in a place where labour 

 was high, the straw is rich and sugary, whereas the 

 straw of barley or wheat grown upon land in high 

 condition is perfectly insipid. The former, too, is 

 tough and firm, the latter soft and brittle, with little 

 or no substance in it of any kind. 



It is the same with all the plants. Our object is 

 to obtain a certain part Of the plant more abundantly, 

 and in higher perfection, than it exists naturally, and 

 we can obtain that only at the expense of the other 

 parts. Compare a crab-stick with a similar portion 

 of an apple-tree, a hazel-twig with one of filbert, 

 a black-thorn with a plum (if any or all of these be 

 respectively the wild plant and the cultivated of the 

 same species), and see how inferior the wood of the 

 cultivated tree is to that of the other. " The wild 

 wood" is just as superior in life as it is in strength. 

 We have difficulty in keeping the cultivated plants 

 " rooted in," and we have as much in getting the wild 

 ones "rooted out." A very little observation of 

 nature, and a few very simple reflections on that ob- 

 servation, might have shown us that that must have 

 been the case ; and had we taken that trouble, and 



