824 MODIFICATIONS OF ASPECTS OF ORGANIC NATURE 



America. Wliat is of importance, however, to point out, is that to 

 anybody living, not merely before the time of Columbus — whose 

 discovery has been said to have acted upon the Old World much 

 as the approximation of a new heavenly body, planet, or other, 

 might act upon the whole earth — but before the time, say, of 

 Tacitus and Agricola, what Africa and India had given him in the 

 way of cultivated plants, would have seemed just as insignificant 

 as what, putting the ass and the gallinacean birds out of sight, 

 they had given him in the way of domestic animals. He might, 

 if living in Italy, have said, as did Columella (iii. 9. 5, cit. Hehn, 

 p. 423, 1. c), ' Curae mortalium obsequentissima est Italia, quae 

 paene totius orbis fruges adhibito studio colonorum ferre didicit,' 

 and pointed out beforehand the airy inaccuracy of Goldsmith's 

 apostrophe to that country in his 'Traveller.' He might, I am 

 inclined to think, with the evidence available to him, have pointed 

 out, and correctly, that the middle zone of deciduous trees which 

 girdled then, as now, so many of the Italian hills with a belt of 

 chestnuts, and much, therefore, of its distinctive character, was due 

 to the intercourse of Rome withPontus and Galatia in pre-Christian 

 times. And he might have drawn thence the same conclusions 

 which we may, I think, also draw as to the area on the world's 

 surface whence man set forth westward on his career of occupation, 

 having, as he had, available for his wants, vegetables, plants, and 

 trees of no less value, and of no less prominence in the landscape, 

 than are these of Palaeartic, though not of Italian, origin, viz. 

 wheat, barley, rye, oats, spelt, buckwheat, millet (Panicmn), peas, 

 beans, hemp, flax, cabbage, turnip, plum, walnut, vine, cherry, 

 olive. Of tea, coffee, sugar, even of rice, of oranges, and of several 

 other of the gifts of the Indian region ; or of coffee, or any one of 

 the three, or four if we include Musa ensefe, now flourishingly 

 growing in Sicily, gifts of Africa proper, a man living at that 

 time had as little knowledge as he could have had of the gifts 

 to come from the still undiscovered New World, of the potato, 

 of maize, of the pineapple, to which his all alien stone pine was to 

 lend its name, of the equally incorrectly named artichoke, of the 

 tomato, now somewhat variously obtrusive or intrusive in Mediter- 

 ranean regions, or of tobacco, or of the prickly pear, or of the 

 agave, though of the two latter in reference to what was then, and 

 is still, such a large part of human activities, it can be said, as by 



