VEGETABLE POWER OF ACCOMMODATION. 
65 
Europe have been imported from America, Japan and other 
remote Oriental countries, within a century and a half, and, in 
fine, there are few vegetables of any agricultural importance, 
few ornamental trees or decorative plants, which are not now 
common to the three civilized continents. 
The statistics of vegetable emigration exhibit numerical 
results quite surprising to those not familiar with the subject. 
The lonely island of St. Helena is described as producing, at 
the time of its discovery in the year 1501, about sixty vege¬ 
table species, including some three or four known to grow 
elsewhere also. At the present time its flora numbers seven 
hundred and fifty species. Humboldt and Bonpland found, 
among the unquestionably indigenous plants of tropical 
America, monocotyledons only, all the dicotyledons of those 
extensive regions having been probably introduced after the 
colonization of the Hew World by Spain. 
The faculty of spontaneous reproduction and perpetuation 
necessarily supposes a greater power of accommodation, within 
a certain range, than we find in most domesticated plants, for 
it would rarely happen that the seed of a wild plant would fall 
into ground as nearly similar, in composition and condition, to 
that where its parent grew, as the soils of different fields arti¬ 
ficially prepared for growing a particular vegetable are to each 
other. Accordingly, though every wild species affects a hab¬ 
itat of a particular character, it is found that, if accidentally 
or designedly sown elsewhere, it will grow under conditions 
extremely unlike those of its birthplace.* Cooper says : “We 
not European scenery. The accessories of the picture would probably de¬ 
termine that question.— Athenazum, No. 1859, June 13, 1863. 
Muller, Das Buck der PJianzenwelt , p. 86, asserts that in 1802 the an¬ 
cestor of all the mulberries in France, planted in 1500, was still standing 
in a garden in the village of Allan-Mont61imart. 
* The vegetables which, so far as we know their history, seem to have 
been longest the objects of human care, can, by painstaking industry, be 
made to grow under a great variety of circumstances, and some of them— 
the vine for instance—prosper nearly equally well, when planted and 
tended, on soils of almost any geological character; but their seeds vege¬ 
tate only in artificially prepared ground, they have little self-sustaining 
6 
