ave been cultivated and its seeds
occasionally sown; so that there will have been some selection from an
extremely remote period, but without any prefixed standard of excellence or
thought of the future. We at the present day profit by a course of
selection occasionally and unconsciously carried on during thousands of
years. This is proved in an interesting manner by Oswald Heer's researches
on the lake-inhabitants of Switzerland, as given in a former chapter; for
he shows that the grain and seed of our present varieties of wheat, barley,
oats, peas, beans, lentils, and poppy, exceed in size those which were
cultivated in Switzerland during the Neolithic and Bronze periods. These
ancient people, during the Neolithic period, possessed also a crab
considerably larger than that now growing wild on the Jura.[522] The pears
described by Pliny were evidently extremely inferior in quality to our
present pears. We can realise the effects of long-continued selection and
cultivation in another way, for would any one in his senses expect to raise
a first-rate apple from the seed of a truly wild crab, or a luscious
melting pear from the wild pear? Alphonse De Candolle informs me that he
has lately seen on an ancient mosaic at Rome a representation of {216} the
melon; and as the Romans, who were such gourmands, are silent on this
fruit, he infers that the melon has been greatly ameliorated since the
classical period.

Coming to later times, Buffon,[523] on comparing the flowers, fruit, and
vegetables which were then cultivated, with some excellent drawings made a
hundred and fifty years previously, was struck with surprise at the great
improvement which had been effected; and remarks that these ancient flowers
and vegetables would now be rejected, not only by a florist but by a
village gardener. Since the time of Buffon the work of improvement has
steadily and rapidly gone on. Every florist who compares our present
flowers with those figured in books published not long since, is astonished
at the change. A well-known amateur,[524] in speaking of the varieties of
Pelargonium raised by Mr. Garth only twenty-two years before, remarks,
"what a rage they excited: surely we had attained perfection, it was said;
and now not one of the flowers of those days will be looked at. But none
the less is the debt of gratitude which we owe to those who saw what was to
be done, and did it." Mr. Paul, the well-known horticulturist, in writing
of the sa