LAWS OF VEGETATION. 71 



the attention of the man who would improve agriculture, must 

 in the first place, be directed to the cultivation of the plant. 



It is a fact, that the luxuriance of the tropics, the original 

 heavy woodlands stretching across our plains, flanking the hill- 

 sides and shading the dells, the expanse of meadows covered 

 with waving grass, the prairies expanding ocean-like, in one 

 continuous vegetating turf, (though as we repeat them, they 

 seem abundant,) afford only a precarious supply to savage 

 beasts and savage men. Civilization cannot take a step without 

 the cultivation of the plant, and the production in it of those 

 changes which cultivation effects. 



Low in the scale of civilized life as was the aboriginal Ameri- 

 can, he cultivated patches of maize, and beans and peas. Lazy, 

 careless and improvident of the future as savages are, in most 

 climes, they are compelled by the necessities of mere existence 

 to cultivate the soil to supply those wants which the spontane- 

 ous productions will not supply. This necessity for cultivating 

 the plant also exists in respect to those animals that accompany 

 man, and upon whose existence his happiness very much 

 depends. God has provided the plant for food wherever the 

 animal could exist. The elephant and the rhinoceros luxuriate 

 in the abundance of the tropics, and the reindeer paws his 

 moss from beneath the snows ; the herbivorous fish is provided 

 with vegetable forage in the depths of the ocean, and insects 

 feed upon vegetables in the boiling geysers ; but if we w^ould 

 have the horse and the ox serviceable to us in the winter, when 

 the green leaf is dead, and the fruit is fallen and covered with 

 snow, we must cultivate and store away for them an abundance 

 of their vegetable aliment. Would you change the lean, 

 sinewy, bony, savage wild boar of the forest into that sleepy 

 grunter — that roll of all delicious juices, and all tender meats 

 and steaks — the Berkshire pig, you must stuff his stomach with 

 cultivated vegetables ; would you transform the spirited bucks 

 of the mountains into the innocent doughfaces that nip the ver- 

 dure of jour hills in summer, and claim the protection of your 

 sheds in winter, — would you clothe yourself with their beautiful 

 fleece and regale yourself upon smoking mutton chops, you 

 must cultivate for him the vegetable ; would you eat the golden 

 pippen instead of the acid and indigestible crab ; would you 

 press to your lips the blushing peach and suck its delicious 



