Origin of Cultivated Plants

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

THE knowledge of the origin of cultivated plants is interesting to agriculturists, to botanists, and even to historians and philosophers concerned with the dawnings of civilization.

I went into this question of origin in a chapter in my work on geographical botany; but the book has become scarce, and, moreover, since 1855 important facts have been discovered by travellers, botanists, and archæologists. Instead of publishing a second edition, I have drawn up an entirely new and more extended work, which treats of the origin of almost double the number of species belonging to the tropics and the temperate zones. It includes almost all plants which are cultivated, either on a large scale for economic purposes, or in orchards and kitchen gardens.

It

I have always aimed at discovering the condition and the habitat of each species before it was cultivated. was needful to this end to distinguish from among innumerable varieties that which should be regarded as the most ancient, and to find out from what quarter of

the globe it came.
appears at first sight.
the middle of the present authors made little account
of it, and the most able have contributed to the pro-
pagation of erroneous ideas. I believe that three out
of four of Linnæus' indications of the original home of
cultivated plants are incomplete or incorrect. His state-
ments have since been repeated, and in spite of what
modern writers have proved touching several species,
they are still repeated in periodicals and popular works.
It is time that mistakes, which date in some cases from
the Greeks and Romans, should be corrected. The actual
condition of science allows of such correction, provided
we rely upon evidence of varied character, of which
some portion is quite recent, and even unpublished; and
this evidence should be sifted as we sift evidence in his-
torical research. It is one of the rare cases in which
a science founded on observation should make use of
testimonial proof. It will be seen that this method
leads to satisfactory results, since I have been able to
determine the origin of almost all the species, sometimes
with absolute certainty, and sometimes with a high
degree of probability.

The problem is more difficult than it
In the last century and up to

I have also endeavoured to establish the number of centuries or thousands of years during which each species has been in cultivation, and how its culture spread in different directions at successive epochs.

A few plants cultivated for more than two thousand years, and even some others, are not now known in a

spontaneous, that is, wild condition, or at any rate this

condition is not proved.

Questions of this nature are

distinction of species, require

subtle. They, like the

much research in books and in herbaria. I have even been obliged to appeal to the courtesy of travellers or botanists in all parts of the world to obtain recent information. I shall mention these in each case with the expression of my grateful thanks.

In spite of these records, and of all my researches, there still remain several species which are unknown wild. In the cases where these come from regions not completely explored by botanists, or where they belong to genera as yet insufficiently studied, there is hope that the wild plant may be one day discovered. But this hope is fallacious in the case of well-known species and countries. We are here led to form one of two hypotheses; either these plants have since history began so changed in form in their wild as well as in their cultivated condition that they are no longer recognized as belonging to the same species, or they are extinct species. The lentil, the chick-pea, probably no longer exist in nature; and other species, as wheat, maize, the broad bean, carthamine, very rarely found wild, appear to be in course of extinction. The number of cultivated plants with which I am here concerned being two hundred and forty-nine, the three, four, or five species, extinct or nearly extinct, is a large proportion, representing a thousand species, out of the whole number of phanerogams. This destruction of forms must have taken

place during the short period of a few hundred centuries, on continents where they might have spread, and under circumstances which are commonly considered unvarying. This shows how the history of cultivated plants is allied to the most important problems of the general history of organized beings.

GENEVA, 1882.

CONTENTS.

PART I.

CHAPTER

GENERAL REMARKS.

I. IN WHAT MANNER AND AT WHAT EPOCHS CULTIVATION BEGAN

IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES

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PAGE

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8

II. METHODS FOR DISCOVERING OR PROVING THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES