ACCLIMATIZATION OF FOREIGN TREES AND 
PL 
BY ALFRED W. BENNETT. 
Tue introduction of new forms of vegetable life into our 
gardens and greenhouses has made considerable progress 
during recent years. The Acclimatization Societies of Paris 
and London have, it is true, paid more attention to the do- 
mestication of foreign animals than of plants; something, 
however, has been attempted in this direction, and with con- 
siderable success. This branch of acclimatization would, 
indeed, seem likely to be the most fertile in results beneficial 
to mankind. For one fresh animal introduced that will be 
of real utility, there will probably be a dozen plants that 
yield important economical products. The early races of | 
mankind appear to have exhausted our powers over the 
lower animals—the horse, the ass, the dog, the camel, the 
ox, the sheep, were all brought under subjection to man at 
the earliest period of his history ; and within historic times 
no important addition has been made to the number of our 
domestic animals. Not so with plants. A large number of 
the vegetable substances used as food at the present day, and 
of the vegetable articles of manufacture, were unknown to 
the ancients; and the field for farther extension of our utili- 
zation of the vegetable kingdom seems indefinitely large. 
The power of cultivation in modifying plants is also much 
greater than any corresponding power of domestication in 
modifying animals. The oldest extant drawings of the horse, 
the ox, or the camel, scarcely point out any distinctive fea- 
tures from their descendants now living; the potato and the 
apple, on the other hand, may almost be considered as man- 
Ahi: E 
i many hints of use to florists and gar- 
deners in the middle states e where many subtropical plants can with care be 
grow.— EDITORS 
(528) 
