of dogs were native
also to the Juan Fernandez and the Falkland Islands.

Mr. Edward John Payne is doubtless correct in maintaining, in his
"History of the New World called America," that the backwardness of the
American aborigines was largely due to their lack of animals suitable
for draft or travel or producing milk or flesh good for food. From the
remotest antiquity Asiatics had the horse, ass, ox and cow, camel and
goat--netting ten times the outfit in useful animals which the
Peruvians, Mexicans, or Indians enjoyed.

The vegetable kingdom of Old America was equally restricted, which also
helps explain its low civilization. At the advent of the Europeans the
continent was covered with forests. Then, though a few varieties may
have since given out and some imported ones run wild, the undomesticated
plants and trees were much as now. Not so the cultivated kinds. The
Indians were wretched husbandmen, nor had the Mound-builders at all the
diversity of agricultural products so familiar to us. Tobacco, Indian
corn, cocoa, sweet potatoes, potatoes, the custard apple, the Jerusalem
artichoke, the guava, the pumpkin and squash, the papaw and the
pineapple, indigenous to North America, had been under cultivation here
before Columbus came, the first four from most ancient times. The manioc
or tapioca-plant, the red-pepper plant, the marmalade plum, and the
tomato were raised in South America before 1500. The persimmon, the
cinchona tree, millet, the Virginia and the Chili strawberry are natives
of this continent, but have been brought under cultivation only within
the last three centuries.

The four great cereals, wheat, rye, oats, and rice, constituting all our
main food crops but corn, have come to us from Europe. So have cherries,
quinces, and pears, also hops, currants, chestnuts, and mushrooms. The
banana, regarded by von Humboldt as an original American fruit, modern
botanists derive from Asia. With reference to apples there may be some
question. Apples of a certain kind flourished in New England so early
after the landing of the Pilgrims that it is difficult to suppose the
fruit not to have been indigenous to this continent. Champlain, in
1605 or 1606, found the Indians about the present sites of Portland,
Boston, and Plymouth in considerable agricultural prosperity, with
fields of corn and tobacco, gardens rich in melons, squashes, pumpkins,
and beans, the culture of none of which had they apparently learned from