LETTUCE IS RELATED TO THE SUNFLOWER 
of many little ones put together. Break a sunflower or a 
daisy apart and it is easy to see these groups of small 
flowers bound into a circular bouquet. 
The fact that big, solid heads of lettuce are sold in the 
market is due to man’s cleverness in developing plants 
to serve his purposes. Man has been eating lettuce for 
many centuries. It probably started out as a plant not 
greatly different from the dandelion. Then man kept 
selecting the plants that were bunchiest for the seed for 
the next generation. Thus the heads of the lettuce kept 
getting more and more solid. They were much more 
compact in Caesar’s time than when Aristotle wrote about 
them 350 years earlier. Queen Elizabeth had yet choicer 
lettuce when Walter Raleigh came to her house to dine. 
Her salad, however, could not be compared to that served 
by the tall King Albert of Belgium, when he entertained 
an American aviator, equally tall, who had flown from 
New York to Paris without stopping. 
Lettuce has in fact, been steadily improved because 
man has used his intelligence as he plied his rake and hoe 
in the garden. 
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