WOOD INJURED BY CULTURE. 311 



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. One 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 ex- 

 pense of the other parts. Compare a crab -stick 

 with a similar portion of an apple-tree, a hazle- 

 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 

 observation, might have shown us that that must 

 have been the case; and had we taken that 

 trouble, and very small trouble it is, we should 



