AMERICAN PLANTS IN EUROPE. 
63 
immensely stimulated the cultivation of the former two in the 
countries of which they are natives, and, of course, promoted 
agricultural operations which must have affected the geogra¬ 
phy of those regions to an extent proportionate to the scale on 
which they have been pursued. 
American Plants grown in Europe. 
America has partially repaid her debt to the Eastern conti¬ 
nent. Maize and the potato are very valuable additions to 
the field agriculture of Europe and the East, and the tomato is 
no mean gift to the kitchen gardens of the Old World, though 
certainly not an adequate return for the multitude of esculent 
roots and leguminous plants which the European colonists 
carried with them.* I wish I could believe, with some, that 
America is not alone responsible for the introduction of the 
filthy weed, tobacco, the use of which is the most vulgar and 
pernicious habit engrafted by the serni-barbarism of modern 
civilization upon the less multifarious sensualism of ancient 
life ; f but the alleged occurrence of pipe-like objects in Scla- 
description, as known to the ancients, but it does not satisfactorily appear 
that they were acquainted with the orange. 
* John Smith mentions, in his Historic of Virginia , 1624, pease and 
beans as having been cultivated by the natives before the arrival of the 
whites, and there is no doubt, I believe, that the pumpkin and several 
other cucurbitaceous plants are of American origin; but most, if not all 
the varieties of pease, beans, and other pod fruits now grown in American 
gardens, are from European and other foreign seed. 
t There are some usages of polite society which are inherently low in 
themselves, and debasing in their influence and tendency, and which no 
custom or fashion can make respectable or fit to be followed by self- 
respecting persons. It is essentially vulgar to smoke or chew tobacco, and 
especially to take snuff; it is unbecoming a gentleman to perform the 
duties of his coachman; it is indelicate in a lady to wear in the street 
skirts so long that she cannot walk without grossly soiling them. Not 
that all these things are not practised by persons justly regarded as gentle¬ 
men and ladies ; but the same individuals would be, and feel themselves to 
be, much more emphatically gentlemen and ladies, it they abstained from 
them. 
