HISTORY OF THE POTATO. 39 



It is a well-known fact, that we are perfectly 

 ignorant of the native sites of nearly all those 

 gramineous plants, distinguished by Linnaeus as 

 Cerealia, whose seeds have from the earliest periods 

 of time served for the food of man, such as wheat, 

 rye, barley, rice, maize, oats : perhaps we must 

 except the two last, as the oat was discovered by 

 Bruce growing under the culture of nature alone ; 

 and he was too good a botanist to have mistaken 

 the identity of Avena sativa and Indian corn may 

 have been found. That some of them were produced 

 in those regions first inhabited by mankind, we 

 have every reason to believe, and the warrant of 

 something like obscure tradition ; but our ignorance 

 of the first habitats of these plants is the less to be 

 wondered at, when we consider that it is more than 

 probable that culture and the arts of man have so 

 infinitely changed the form, improved the nature, 

 and obscured the original species, that it is no 

 longer traceable in any existent state. There ap- 

 pears to be a permission from Nature to effect certain 

 changes in vegetables, yet she retains an inherent 

 propensity in the plant to revert to its original 

 creation, which is very manifest in this particular 

 race ; for the sorts which we now make use of will 

 not endure the thraldom of our perversion without 

 the artifices, the restraints of man, but have a 

 constant tendency to return to some other nature, 

 or to run wild, as we call it. Man bears them with 



