The Earth as Modified by Human ActionMarsh, George P. (George Perkins)
History
The Earth as Modified by Human Action
Marsh, George P. (George Perkins)
Conservation of natural resources; Human geography; Nature -- Effect of human beings on; Physical geography
The statistics of vegetable emigration exhibit numerical results quite
surprising to those not familiar with the subject. The lonely island of
St. Helena is described as producing, at the time of its discovery in
the year 1501, about sixty vegetable species, including some three or
four known to grow elsewhere also. [Footnote: It may be considered very
highly probable, if not certain, that the undiscriminating herbalists of
the sixteenth century must have overlooked many plants native to this
island. An English botanist, in an hour's visit to Aden, discovered
several species of plants on rocks always reported, even by scientific
travellers, as absolutely barren. But after all, it appears to be well
established that the original flora of St. Helena was extremely limited,
though now counting hundreds of species.] At the present time its flora
numbers seven hundred and fifty species--a natural result of the
position of the island as the half-way house on the great ocean highway
between Europe and the East. Humboldt and Bonpland found, among the
unquestionably indigenous plants of tropical America, monocotyledons
only, all the dicotyledons of those extensive regions having been
probably introduced after the colonization of the New World by Spain.
The seven hundred new species which have found their way to St. Helena
within three centuries and a half, were certainly not all, or ever in
the largest proportion, designedly planted there by human art, and if we
were well acquainted with vegetable emigration, we should probably be
able to show that man has intentionally transferred fewer plants than he
has accidentally introduced into countries foreign to them. After the
wheat, follow the tares that infest it. The woods that grow among the
cereal grains, the pests of the kitchen garden, are the same in America
as in Europe. [Footnote: Some years ago I made a collection of weeds in
the wheatfields of Upper Egypt, and another in the gardens on the
Bosphorus. Nearly all the plants were identical with those which grow
under the same conditions in New England. I do not remember to have seen
in America the scarlet wild poppy so common in European grainfields. I
have heard, however, that it has lately crossed the Atlantic, and I am
not sorry for it. With our abundant harvests of wheat, we can well
afford to pay now and then a loaf of bread for the cheerful radiance of
this brilliant flower.] The overturning of a wagon, or any of the
thousand accidents which befall the emigrant in his journey across the
Western plains, may scatter upon the ground the seeds he designed for
his garden, and the herbs which fill so important a place in the rustic
materia medica of the Eastern States, spring up along the prairie paths
but just opened by the caravan of the settler. [Footnote: Josselyn, who
wrote about fifty years after the foundation of the first British colony
in New England, says that the settlers at Plymouth had observed more
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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