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BOTANY. 117 
2. Others hive come to man full flavored, and nearly all that he 
has done has been to increase their size and abundance, or extend ° 
their season. Currants and gooseberries, raspberries and black- 
berries, chestnuts, and above all, strawberries, are of this class. 
3. But most of the esteemed and important fruits, as well as 
the grains, have not so much been given to man as:made by him. 
The gift outright was mainly plastic—raw material, time and op- 
portunity. -As to the cereal grains, it is only of the oat that we 
probably know the wild original; of wheat there has been an 
ingenious conjecture, ‘partly, but insufficiently, confirmed by ex- 
periment ; of the rest, no wild stock is known which is not most 
likely itself an escape from cultivation. Of some of them, such 
especially as maize, not only can no wild original be indicated, 
but in all probability none exists. 
So of the staple fruits; of some the wild dttataale can be pretty 
well made out; of more, they are merely conjectural; of some 
they are quite unknown and perhaps long ago extinct. 
To cite examples in confirmation or illustration of these points, — 
to note how very ancient some of our varieties of- common fruits 
are, and how very recent certain others—to consider how they have 
originated, with or without man’s conscious agency, and how they 
have been perfected, diversified and preserved, mainly under man’s 
direct care—would be to expand this note into an essay, and yet 
to say nothing with which pomologists are not familiar. 
It would be curious to speculate as to what our pomology would ‘ 
have been if the civilization from which it, and we ourselves, have 
“sprung had had _its birthplace along the southern shores of our 
great lakes, the northern of the Gulf of Mexico, and the inter- 
’ vening Mississippi, instead ‘of the Levant, Mesopotamia and the 
Nile, and, our old world had been open to us as a new world less 
than four hundred years ago. 
Seemingly, we should not have as great a variety of choice 
_ fruits as we have now, and they would mostly have been different, l 
but probably neither scanty nor poor. In grapes, at least, we 
= should have been gainers. Our five or six available species, of 
Which we are now just beginning to know the capabilities, would 
have given us at least as many choice sorts and as wide a diversity 
-a8 we now have of pears; while pears would be a recent acquisition, 
a somewhat as our American grapes now are. Our apples would 
have been developed from Pyrus coronaria: and might have 
