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FOURTEENTH REPORT. 
PLANT BREEDING. 
As man eats plants, or other animals that live on plants, and as 
man must eat to live, the plant relation is the most fundamental in the 
history of the race. And as man advances in civilization and adds a 
hundredfold to his necessities as well as to his comforts and luxuries, 
this relation remains as dominant as ever tho far more complex.. The 
course of history, the evolution of society, the character of civilizations 
can better be interpreted in terms of this primary botanical relation- 
ship than by any other one factor. Primitive men, like the savages 
of the tropical jungles, are individually and socially at the mercy of the 
plants that surround them. More advanced but stationary societies 
exist where peculiar botanical conditions urge man to hopeless effort, 
as the Bedouin dependent on the desert oasis or the Eskimo whose 
only available food supply is the animal life that relies on the algae 
of the arctic seas for subsistence. Civilization began in regions where 
natural conditions were poor but where cultivation or irrigation offered 
a large and certain crop. Thus forced to work for a definite end all 
the great nations of antiquity arose in semi-arid countries Persia, 
Assyria, Egypt, Mexico, Peru led the way, till man learned to work 
not by necessity but by choice, when the power moved to lands of greater 
natural fertility or to those that controlled the trade routes. And 
so with the tribes and nations of all climes and ages, as they gained 
control of the plants or the product of plants so might they be prosper- 
ous and progressive. ‘‘The only conquests that have endured,’’ says the 
Italian historian Ferrero, are those of the plough.” 
It is perhaps a little humiliating to think that many of our useful 
plants and most of our domestic animals were brought into subjection 
before the dawn of history or even of tradition. Somewhere in the 
stone or bronze age the work was done and the centuries since cannot 
show its equal. But what is more strange, in some way those primi- 
tive men so changed the animal or plant that it was a new variety, made 
by man for his own needs. Often all trace of the wild ancestor and 
the place of its origin is lost. Where did our cat or dog or horse come 
from, our barley, apple or turnip? We can only speculate. Who first 
saw an ear of corn? The Indians cultivated maize over a wide area 
when America was discovered, but no such plant has been found in a 
wild state and it is only supposition to trace it to a cross between 
certain Mexican grasses. Perhaps the mystery of the origin of our 
greatest crop will never be solved. 
To separate intentional plant breeding from incidental or accidental 
is often impossible. It would seem that the art has been practiced by 
man quite unconsciously and without further aim than the immediate 
crop, flie ultimate result is quite uncertain but often very remarkable. 
On the sea-cliffs of Europe there grows a small straggling plant known 
to botanists as Brassica oJeracca, tho the leaves are edible it is an un- 
promising looking species for the garden and he must have been a 
daring and imaginative man who first planted a cabbage. Yet it was 
