HYACINTH BULBS. 75 



it is obvious that these special reservoirs of energetic 

 material, which the plant intends as food for its own 

 flower or for its future offspring, are exactly those 

 parts which animals will be likely unfairly to appro- 

 priate to their personal use. What feeds a plant will 

 feed a squirrel, a mouse, a pig, or a man, just as well. 

 Each requires just the same free elements, whose 

 combination with oxygen may yield it heat and 

 movement. Thus it happens that the parts of plants 

 which we human beings mainly use as food-stuffs are 

 just the organs where starch has been laid by for the 

 plant's own domestic economy seeds, as in the pea, 

 bean, wheat, maize, barley, rice, or millet ; tubers, as 

 in the potato and Jerusalem artichoke ; corms, as in 

 the yam or tara; and roots, as in arrowroot, turnip, 

 parsnip, and carrot. In all these, and in many other 

 cases, the habit first set up by nature has been sedu- 

 lously encouraged and increased by man's deliberate 

 selection. What man thus consciously effects in a few 

 generations, the survival of the fittest has uncon- 

 sciously effected through many long previous ages of 

 native development. 



