SECOND REPLY. 169 



because it exhibits the prominent peculiarities in the most 

 striking manner. 



Our careful culture is confined to a certain relatively 

 small number of vegetables, and the selection of them, left 

 to accident in earlier times, but now not unfrequently con- 

 ducted with knowledge according to definite principles, 

 becomes especially determined by one primary consi- 

 deration. 



Our cultivated plants collectively exhibit characters which 

 they do not possess in a wild condition, but which are 

 exactly those which give them value to us. The sweet, 

 juicy Altringham Carrot, weighing from five to six pounds, 

 is in a wild condition, a dry, slender root, unfit for food ; 

 the delicate, well-flavoured Vienna Glass-kohl -rabi, as large 

 as a man's fist, is a slender, woody, dry stem when wild ; 

 the white, soft, aromatic Cauliflower, is in its natural 

 locality, in its natural habit, a thin, branched flowering 

 stem, with little green, bitter flower-buds, and so with the 

 rest. All these various properties, through which the 

 plants have become such important attendants of human 

 economy, have been called forth by a peculiar chemical 

 process originally foreign to the plant, the necessary con- 

 ditions of which lie, not in those organic elements which 

 are the same for all plants, and are almost equally distri- 

 buted in all, but in the inorganic constituents present in 

 the soil and taken up by the roots. Wherever the soil is 

 rich in the various salts occurring most abundantly in 

 plants, the characters of the latter become altered ; varieties 

 and monstrosities originate which never occur in the wild 

 condition, where the plant always keeps to the soil exactly 

 agreeing to it. Plants, however, exhibit very varied dispo- 

 sitions to the alteration of their peculiar nature by such 

 external influence. While some retain exactly even the 



