Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/72

62 flowers and leaves may yield new perfumes and flavors? What probability is there that new remedial agents may be found among plants neglected or now wholly unknown? The answer which I shall attempt is not in the nature of a prophecy; it can claim no higher rank than that of a reasonable conjecture.

At the outset it must be said that synthetic chemistry has made and is making some exceedingly short cuts across this field of research, giving us artificial dyes, odors, flavors, and medicinal substances of such excellence that it sometimes seems as if before long the old-fashioned chemical processes in the plant itself would play only a subordinate part. But although there is no telling where the triumphs of chemical synthesis will end, it is not probable that it will ever interfere essentially with certain classes of economic plants. It is impossible to conceive of a synthetic fiber or a synthetic fruit. Chemistry gives us fruit-ethers and fruit-acids, and after a while may provide us with a true artificial sugar and amorphous starch; but artificial fruits worth the eating or artificial fibers worth the spinning are not coming in our day.

Despite the extraordinary achievements of synthetic chemistry, the world must be content to accept, for a long time to come, the results of the intelligent labor of the cultivator of the soil and the explorer of the forest. Improvement of the good plants we now utilize, and the discovery of new ones, must remain the care of large numbers of diligent students and assiduous workmen. So that, in fact, our question resolves itself into this: Can these practical investigators hope to make any substantial advance?

It will be well to glance first at the manner in which our wild and cultivated plants have been singled out for use. We shall in the case of each class, allude to the methods by which he selected plants have been improved, or their products fully utilized. Thus, looking the ground over, although not minutely, we can see what new plants are likely to be added to our list. Our illustrations can, at the best, be only fragmentary.

We shall not have time to treat the different divisions of the subject in precisely the proportions which would be demanded by an exhaustive essay; an address on an occasion like this must pass lightly over some matters which other opportunities for discussion could properly examine with great fullness. Unfortunately some of the minor topics which must be thus passed by possess considerable popular interest; one of these is the first subordinate question introductory to our task, namely. How were our useful cultivated and wild plants selected for use?

A study of the early history of plants employed for ceremonial purposes, in religious solemnities, in incantations, and for