284  Economic  Botany.  {Am,jSSe,Si!rm* 
We  have  many  things  to  blame  superstition  for ;  as  a  general 
thing  the  world  has  no  use  for  it,  but  it  is  well  to  recognize  the  fact 
that  it  has  not  always  been  wholly  evil  in  its  effects. 
But  the  foremost  cause  of  the  development  of  botany,  in  its 
earlier  years  at  least,  was  utility. 
Some  knowledge  of  plants  was  so  much  one  of  man's  necessities 
— to  know  what  plants  were  useful  and  what  ones  dangerous — that 
long  before  he  reached  the  stage  of  mental  development  when 
science  in  any  proper  sense  was  possible,  a  considerable  body  of 
facts  were  gotten  together  to  build  upon  when  the  proper  time 
should  come.  Thus,  as  we  are  well  aware,  the  use  and  cultivation 
for  food,  medicine  or  textile  materials  of  many  of  the  plants  we 
value  most,  extends  far  back  of  the  period  when  written  human  his- 
tory began.  This  is  the  case  with  wheat,  maize,  barley,  millet, 
sorghum,  the  opium  poppy,  cotton,  the  banana,  apricot,  orange, 
melon,  pumpkin,  bean,  pea,  manioc,  olive,  rice,  peach,  sweet  potato 
and  flax. 
In  many  of  these  instances,  in  fact,  as  with  maize,  we  are  abso- 
lutely ignorant  of  the  wild  plant  from  which  the  cultivated  form  is 
derived.  In  some  cases,  most  likely,  the  changes  brought  about  by 
the  ages  on  ages  of  cultivation  are  so  great  that  we  are  now  unable 
to  identify  the  cultivated  with  the  wild  parental  form  ;  it  has,  in 
fact,  been  developed  into  a  distinct  species.  This,  perhaps,  is  the 
case  with  wheat.  In  other  instances,  probably  the  parental  form 
has  perished  altogether,  as  DeCandolle  believed  to  be  the  case  with 
maize. 
In  one  sense,  then,  botany  began  as  economic  botany,  began  with 
the  utilities  in  far-off  times,  and  since  then  until  comparatively 
recent  times  has  chiefly  occupied  itself  with  them.  But  when  man 
reached  the  age  of  reason,  and  science  in  the  proper  sense  of  the 
term  became  a  possibility,  plants  came  to  be  studied,  not  solely  or 
chiefly  with  reference  to  their  uses,  but  from  a  desire  to  understand 
what  they  were  in  themselves,  what  were  their  relations  to  each 
other,  to  the  mineral  world  on  the  one  hand  and  to  the  other  half 
of  the  organic  world  on  the  other.  The  passion  to  know  plants  took 
possession  of  some  men  as  that  to  know  the  mechanism  of  the 
heavens  or  the  structure  and  development  of  the  earth  possessed 
others,  and  so  scientific  botany  became  a  reality. 
This  new  development  of  botany  may  be  said  to  have  begun 
