HAYMAKING BEGINS. 103 



prickly leaves, but boiled its round underground knob 

 instead. So, too, when he began to cultivate the two 

 weeds in his little garden patch,- he selected his cabbages 

 for their hearts and his turnips for their roots. But so 

 plastic are all these forms, that while later man has made 

 the wild root turn into a cultivated turnip for himself 

 and his sheep, he has made it turn equally at will into a 

 swede for his cattle, arift he has developed it into a rape- 

 seed for the manufacture of his colza oil. Let any one 

 of these artificial varieties alone on its own resources, 

 and after a few generations it will revert to the original 

 wild cabbage or wild turnip, as the case may be. But if 

 we found the different cultivated plants all growing in a 

 wild state we should say not only that they \ :re good 

 species, but also that they were much better species than 

 the wild cabbage or the wild turnip from which they 

 sprang. The cultivated varieties differ more among 

 themselves than their wild originals differ from one 

 another. 



Now, unconsciously and involuntarily, man has simi- 

 larly altered many wild plants which grow, or once 

 grew, upon his cultivated plains. By tilling almost all 

 the alluvial lowlands and prairie stretches of Europe and 

 Asia, and still later of America, he has produced such a 

 series of changes in the native plants that many of them 

 have become at last pure weeds of cultivation. There 

 are some, like pimpernel and shepherd's-purse, that we 

 only know in this form ; they grow always on culti- 

 vated ground or waste patches, and their truly wild 

 types are now utterly extinct and irrecoverable. None 

 are more peculiar in this respect than the weeds that 

 frequent cornfields and meadows ; and perhaps their 

 most marked peculiarity is their exact synchronism with 

 the grass or the wheat among which they grow. All of 



