Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/78

68 we may enumerate the following: turnip, onion, cabbage, purslane, the large bean (Faba), chick-pea, lentil, and one species of pea, garden pea. To these an antiquity of at least four thousand years is ascribed.

Next to these, in point of age, come the radish, carrot, beet, garlic, garden cress and celery, lettuce, asparagus, and the leek. Three or four leguminous seeds are to be placed in the same category, as are also the black peppers.

Of more recent introduction the most prominent are the parsnip, oyster-plant, parsley, artichoke, endive, and spinach.

From these lists I have purposely omitted a few which belong exclusively to the tropics, such as certain yams.

The number of varieties of these vegetables is astounding. It is, of course, impossible to discriminate between closely allied varieties which have been introduced by gardeners and seedsmen under different names, but which are essentially identical, and we must therefore have recourse to a conservative authority, Vilmorin, from whose work a few examples have been selected. The varieties which he accepts are sufficiently well distinguished to admit of description, and in most instances of delineation, without any danger of confusion. The potato has, he says, innumerable varieties, of which he accepts forty as easily distinguishable and worthy of a place in a general list, but he adds also a list, comprising, of course, synonyms, of thirty-two French, twenty-six English, nineteen American, and eighteen German varieties. The following numbers speak for themselves, all being selected in the same careful manner as those of the potato: celery, more than twenty; carrot, more than thirty; beet, radish, and potato, more than forty; lettuce and onion, more than fifty; turnip, more than seventy; cabbage, kidney-bean, and garden pea, more than one hundred.

The amount of horticultural work which these numbers represent is enormous. Each variety established as a race (that is, a variety which comes true to seed) has been evolved by the same sort of patient care and waiting which we have seen is necessary in the case of cereals, but the time of waiting has not been as a general thing so long.

You will permit me to quote from Vilmorin also an account of a common plant, which will show how wide is the range of variation and how obscure are the indications in the wild plant of its available possibilities. The example shows how completely hidden are the potential variations useful to mankind: