Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/40

36 of the wheat would always remain unknown and that our cultivated species had been so greatly modified by cultivation that they scarcely resembled the wild species which served our prehistoric parents in their conscious or unconscious attempts at artificial selection. This transformation, it was said, had required ages of time, and it was not overlooked that it had also required extraordinary perspicacity on the part of these half savages who succeeded in producing from an insignificant grass the vigorous and precious cereal of to-day. It was admitted, thus, that prehistoric man was endowed with a divining sense more remarkable than that of the scientists of the present time, who, in the domain of agriculture, have never achieved results equal to this. To support this idea it might be maintained that the more primitive the people the more acute is its sense of observation. Book science very often sterilizes the excellent mentality natural to youth and also limits the imagination.

However, I remember that when for the first time I found wild cabbage growing on rocks at the seashore remote from all cultivated fields, I was struck by the fact that even with my limitations of an educated man and with all the mental deformation attendant on scientific specialization which leads one away, they say, from common sense, I should nevertheless, it seemed to me, not have hesitated, in case of need, to try this plant as food, so inviting was its appearance. Last year, in my botanical trip along the coast of Portugal, I was able to see that the Portuguese peasant, who has kept so many vestiges of the past in his dress, his domestic animals (long-horned cattle), his cart and his customs, still uses the cabbage (Covo-gallego) as primitive peoples would; the flower tops are simply boiled. There is a far cry from this cabbage still so near its primitive state to the numerous varieties which the agriculturists have introduced into our European cultivation.

There is, then, reason to believe that primitive man found the plants suitable for cultivation already showing the principal attributes which make them useful; he found the cereals, he did not create them. In other words, cereals are the cause of civilization, not civilization the cause of cereals.

Alphonse de Candolle, the illustrious father of the president of the Société des Arts, in his classic work on the origin of cultivated plants, in 1883, says: