“You perhaps imagine that from the beginning of time, in view of our need of food, the pear-tree was eager to bear large fruit, plump and juicy; that the potato, just to accommodate us, stuffed its big tubers with farinaceous matter; that the cabbage, in its desire to gratify us, conceived the idea of gathering those beautiful white leaves into a compact head. You imagine that wheat, pumpkins, carrots, grapes, beets, and no one knows what besides, possessed with a great interest in man, have always worked for him of their own accord. You think that our grapes of to-day are like those from which Noah extracted the juice that made him drunk; that wheat, ever since it appeared on the earth, has never failed to yield its annual harvest of grain; that the beet and the pumpkin had at the beginning of the world the plumpness that makes them prized by us now. You imagine, in short, that our food-plants came to us originally just as we have them now. Undeceive yourselves: the wild plant is usually of very little nutritive value to man. His is still the task of so cultivating it as to derive advantage from its natural aptitudes by improving them. “In its native country, on the mountains of Chile and Peru, the potato in its wild state is a poor diminutive tuber about as large as a hazel-nut. Man takes the worthless wild stock into his garden, plants it in rich soil, tends it, waters it; and behold, from year to year the potato thrives more and more, gaining in size and in nutritive properties, and finally becoming a farinaceous tuber as large as your two fists. “On the sea-coasts, exposed to all the winds that blow, there grows a wild cabbage with a tall stalk and a few green leaves of bitter taste and rank odor. But beneath its rude exterior it may perhaps hide invaluable aptitudes. Apparently this suspicion occurred to him who first, so long ago that the record of it is lost, took the sea-coast cabbage under cultivation. The suspicion was well-founded. The wild cabbage has been improved by man’s incessant care: its stalk has become firmer and its leaves have multiplied, whitened, acquired tenderness, and massed themselves in a compact head, so that we have the crisp and succulent cabbage of to-day as the admirable result of this notable metamorphosis. There on the sea-coast rock was the first beginning of the excellent plant; here in our gardens is its present attainment. But what about its intermediate forms which, through the centuries, marked the gradual development of the species to its present high state of perfection? Each of these forms was a step forward, and each had to be preserved, kept from degenerating, and made the subject of still further improvement. Who could tell the story of all the labor and pains it has taken to produce the cabbage-head as we now have it?