IIAYMAKIXG nEGIXS. 105 



kales, BiU'^scls sprouts, and fifty other varieties as well. 

 Over-feed and ovcr-brccd the leaves, and you <;et at last 

 a cabbage ; over-nourish the flower-buds, and you get 

 at last a cauliflower. y\gain, this other scrubby plant, 

 with tails to its leaves clasping the stem, is the origin of 

 all our turnip kinds In itself, it differs almost inappre- 

 ciably from the ancestor of the cabbages ; but its tap- 

 root is just a trifle fuller and rounder ; and hence, when 

 primitive man first pulled it up, he did not eat its 

 prickly leaves, but boiled its round underground knob 

 instead. So, too, when he began to cultivate the two 

 weeds in his little garden patch, he selected his cabbages 

 for their hearts and his turnips for their roots. But so 

 plastic are all these forms, that while later man has made 

 the wild root turn into a cultivated turnip for himself 

 and his sheep, he has made it turn equally at will into a 

 swede for his cattle, and he has developed it into a rape- 

 seed for the manufacture of his colza oil. Let any one 

 of these artificial varieties alone on its own resources, 

 and after a few generations it will revert to the original 

 wild cabbage or wild turnip, as the case may be. But if 

 we found the different cultivated plants all growing in a 

 wild state we should say not only that they were good 

 species, but also that they were much better species than 

 the wild cabbage or the wild turnip from ^vhich they 

 sprang. The cultivated varieties differ more amongst 

 themselves than their wild originals differ from one 

 another. 



Now, unconsciously and involuntarily, man has simi- 

 larly altered many wild plants which grow, or once 

 grew, upon his cultivated plains. By tilling almost all 

 the alluvial lowlands and prairie stretches of Europe and 



