The Pea-Weevil: The Eggs 
impenetrable mist of the ages. Nature 
delivered them to us in the full vigour of 
things untamed, when they were of little 
value as food, as she nowadays offers us the 
wild blackberry and the sloe; she gave them 
to us in a rudimentary and incomplete state; 
and it was for our husbandry and ingenuity 
patiently to hoard the nutritive pulp, that 
earliest form of capital, with dividends 
always increasing in the most excellent bank 
of the tiller of the soil. 
As storehouses of provisions, the cereal 
and the garden vegetable are, for the most 
part, the work of man. ‘The founders of 
the species, a poor resource in their original 
condition, we borrowed as we found them 
from nature’s green treasury; the improved 
race, rich in nourishing matter, is the result 
of our art. 
But, if wheat, peas and the rest are in- 
dispensable to us, our care, in fair exchange, 
is absolutely necessary to their maintenance. 
Such as our needs have made them, incapable 
of resistance in the savage conflict of living 
things, these plants, if left to themselves, 
without cultivation, would rapidly disappear, 
despite the numerical immensity of their 
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