144 THE BOOK OF USEFUL PLANTS 



The pods and seeds look and taste like those of 

 all mustard plants. 



We can imagine how the savage hunter, return- 

 ing to his cave at evening, nibbled a fleshy leaf of 

 wild cabbage to quench his thirst. The pungent, 

 watery juice was not unpleasant to the taste, and 

 the inner leaves of the end rosette were tender 

 and almost white. When the sons of those wild 

 hunters went with their fathers they learned the 

 berries and other wild fruits good to eat, and knew 

 how to pick out the largest, tenderest heads of the 

 wild cabbage plants. The next step may have 

 come centuries later — a kind of gardening. I can 

 fancy the women of the cave-dwellers gathering 

 little cabbages for food, and two neighbors claiming 

 a particularly good patch of the plants, and fight- 

 ing over it. The next step was to throw up some 

 sort of wall around it, to help the selfish victor to 

 defend his claim. Then we can believe that, while 

 the men were off and the women on watch, the 

 best plants were favored by a little digging of the 

 hard earth around their roots, and maybe watered, 

 if they suffered for a drink. Step by step, slow 

 as the passing of the centuries, came the saving 

 of seed of plants with the biggest, tender heads, 

 and weeding and tending of the young cabbages 

 with primitive tools. The best plants helped to 



