same ignorance elsewhere on the subject of the majority of
our alimentary vegetables. Whence comes wheat, the blessed grain which
gives us bread? No one knows. You will not find it here, except in the
care of man; nor will you find it abroad. In the East, the birthplace
of agriculture, no botanist has ever encountered the sacred ear growing
of itself on unbroken soil.

Barley, oats, and rye, the turnip and the beet, the beetroot, the
carrot, the pumpkin, and so many other vegetable products, leave us in
the same perplexity; their point of departure is unknown to us, or at
most suspected behind the impenetrable cloud of the centuries. Nature
delivered them to us in the full vigour of the thing untamed, when their
value as food was indifferent, as to-day she offers us the sloe, the
bullace, the blackberry, the crab; she gave them to us in the state of
imperfect sketches, for us to fill out and complete; it was for our
skill and our labour patiently to induce the nourishing pulp which was
the earliest form of capital, whose interest is always increasing in the
primordial bank of the tiller of the soil.

As storehouses of food the cereal and the vegetable are, for the greater
part, the work of man. The fundamental species, a poor resource in their
original state, we borrowed as they were from the natural treasury of
the vegetable world; the perfected race, rich in alimentary materials,
is the result of our art.

If wheat, peas, and all the rest are indispensable to us, our care, by a
just return, is absolutely necessary to them. Such as our needs have
made them, incapable of resistance in the bitter struggle for survival,
these vegetables, left to themselves without culture, would rapidly
disappear, despite the numerical abundance of their seeds, as the
foolish sheep would disappear were there no more sheep-folds.

They are our work, but not always our exclusive property. Wherever food
is amassed, the consumers collect from the four corners of the sky; they
invite themselves to the feast of abundance, and the richer the food the
greater their numbers. Man, who alone is capable of inducing agrarian
abundance, is by that very fact the giver of an immense banquet at which
legions of feasters take their place. By creating more juicy and more
generous fruits he calls to his enclosures, despite himself, thousands
and thousands of hungry creatures, against whose appetites his
prohibitions are helpless. The more he produces, th