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ORIGIISr OF OUR KITCHEN GARDEN PLANTS. 
BY HARLAND COULTAS, 
LECTURER ON BOTANY AT THE CHARING-CROSS HOSPITAL. 

1 POR a long time it was tRouglit to be impossible to discover 
- the origin of those nutritive species of plants commonly 
cultivated by man ; some writers maintaining that their primi- 
tive habitat had been destroyed, that they originated on lands 
over which the ocean now rolls its waters, whilst others, equally 
fanciful, supposed a miraculous intervention of the Deity, and 
that mmn received directly from the gods the first seeds of the 
cerealia and other plants, which he cultivates as sources of food. 
The prevailing opinion upon this great question, even among 
enlightened persons, and so late as the commencement of the 
present century, may be gathered from the following passage 
from HumboldPs Essay upon the Geography of Plants {Essai 
SUV la Geograj^Tde cles Plantes, 1807, p. 28) : — 
The coiuitry in which originated the vegetables most useful to man is a 
secret as impenetrable as the first dwelling-place of our domestic animals. 
We are ignorant of the country in which the grasses first originated which 
furnished nutriment to the Mong;olian and Caucasian races. We know not 
in wiiat country our cerealia grow spontaneously— onr wheat, oats, and rye. 
The plants which constitute the natural riches of the inhabitants of the 
tropics, the banana, papaw, cassava, and maize, have never yet been found 
in a wild state. The potato presents the same phenomena. 
Since the time wlien tlie above passage was written by tins 
illustrious author, the wild potato has been found growing in 
the greatest abundance in South America ; the papaw, by 
Marcgr-aaf, in the forests of Brazil ; and Olivier and Bruguim’es, 
in travelling through Western Asia — the cradle of the 
European race — have found wild rye and barley. Thus year 
by year the progress of geographical and botanical researches 
conduces to more certain and simple ideas on the origin of 
cultivated plants, so that our best naturalists now, instead of 
supposing, as formerly, miraculous phenomena, or revolutions in 
the physical geography of the planetary surface, are all agreed 
that it is highly probable that all our cultivated plants have 
originally descended from some wild form ; and that probably 
VOL. IV. — NO. XIV. 0 
