298 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIX No. 1265 



Moreover, horticulture is one of the later 

 and therefore, one of the finer fruits of civi- 

 lization. "When ages grow to civility and 

 elegancy, ' ' says Lord Bacon, in his essay on 

 gardens, "men come to build stately sooner 

 than to garden finely ; as if gardening were 

 the greater perfection." The domestica- 

 tion and cultivation of plants is intimately 

 bound up with the time when men, hitherto 

 accustomed to roam, and to depend upon a 

 chance supply of food from wild plants and 

 animals, first began to take up permanent 

 abodes in communities, and therefore found 

 it, not only convenient, but essential to have 

 a local supply insured ; yet from all we can 

 learn of the most ancient civilizations, there 

 were no gardens as we now know them. 

 Culinary vegetables, for example, were 

 raised in ancient Egypt, as we learn from 

 inscriptions on the pyramid of Cheops, and 

 from other sources; but while accounts of 

 the splendor of Memphis speak of statues, 

 temples, and palaces, no mention is any- 

 where made of gardens. 



In his letter to Gallus, describing his Lau- 

 rentian estate," Pliny's mind is chiefly occu- 

 pied with the details of his villa, and while 

 he refers to his tennis court, to an exercise 

 ground with a border of boxwood and rose- 

 mary, and to "a terrace walk that is frag- 

 rant with violets," mention of his garden 

 seems quite incidental, and all we learn of it 

 is that it "is clad with a number of mul- 

 berry and fig-trees" ; in other words it does 

 not appear to be a garden, as we understand 

 the term, nor to loom large in the mind of 

 its owner as one of the chief attractions of 

 his summer home. 



Even as late as the middle of the eight- 

 eenth century Horace Walpole said (in a 

 letter to Conway), "I lament living in so 

 barbarous an age, when we are come to so 

 little perfection in gardening." But gar- 

 dens and the domestication and cultivation 



2 "Letters," 1st Ser., Bk. 2, Letter XVII. 



of plants, were the inevitable, logical se- 

 quence of the establishment of homes and 

 gradually they make their appearance and 

 begin their evolution as one of the finer ex- 

 pressions of civilization. 



"Happy is the man who loves flowers," 

 wrote Henry "Ward Beecher, and in plead- 

 ing for more effective writing in American 

 horticultural magazines, he referred to hor- 

 ticulture as "this elegant department of 

 knowledge." Not only may the study of 

 the science itself become an avenue of cul- 

 ture and refinement, but a studj^ of its ori- 

 gins (as a phase of agriculture), and of its 

 historical development leads into some of 

 the most fascinating and illuminating chap- 

 ters in the history of civilization. If the 

 artificial production of fire is conceded to be 

 one of the greatest steps forward in the in- 

 tellectual ascent of man, the domestication 

 of wild animals and plants is second only in 

 ianportance, and the historical study of this 

 wonderful achievement has ramifications 

 that carry one back to the very dawn of 

 civilization, and laterally into enriching 

 contact with archeology, ethnology, geology, 

 plant geography, ancient and modern his- 

 tory, evolution, philosophy and other de- 

 partments of knowledge. 



"We know that some of our economic 

 plants were cultivated by the lake-dwellers 

 of Switzerland while they were yet in the 

 neolithic stage of culture, some three thou- 

 sand years or more before the Christian 

 Era. "Farmers of Forty Centuries" is 

 the fascinating title of Professor King's 

 study of the agriculture of China ; that is, 

 some of our cultivated plants — a date or a 

 grain of rice — represent an unbroken line 

 of living protoplasm, and of human aspira- 

 tion and upward struggle, extending back 

 some 5,000 or 6,000 years. Like any depart- 

 ment of human knowledge, the study of hor- 

 ticulture, thoroughly pursued in all its van- 



