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 Canada thistle, Erigeron Canadense, which is said to have
accompanied the early French voyagers to Canada from Normandy, is
reported to have been introduced into other parts of Europe two hundred
years ago by a seed which dropped out of the stuffed skin of an American
bird.
VEGETABLE POWER OF ACCOMMODATION.
The vegetables which, so far as we know their history, seem to have been
longest objects of human care, can, by painstaking industry, be made to
grow under a great variety of circumstances, and some of them prosper
nearly equally well when planted and tended on soils of almost any
geological character; but the seeds of most of them vegetate only in
artificially prepared ground, they have little self-sustaining power,
and they soon perish when the nursing hand of man is withdrawn from
them.
The vine genus is very catholic and cosmopolite in its habits, but
particular varieties are extremely fastidious and exclusive in their
requirements as to soil and climate. The stocks of many celebrated
vineyards lose their peculiar qualities by transplantation, and the most
famous wines are capable of production only in certain well-defined and
for the most part narrow districts. The Ionian vine which bears the
little stoneless grape known in commerce as the Zante currant, has
resisted almost all efforts to naturalize it elsewhere, and is scarcely
grown except in two or three of the Ionian islands and in a narrow
territory on the northern shores of the Morea.
The attempts to introduce European varieties of the vine into the United
States have not been successful except in California, [Footnote: In
1869, a vine of a European variety planted in Sta. Barbara county in
1833 measured a foot in diameter four foot above the ground. Its
ramifications covered ten thousand square feet of surface and it
annually produces twelve thousand pounds of grapes. The bunches are
sixteen or eighteen inches long, and weigh six or seven pounds.-Letter
from Commissioner of Land-Office, dated May 13, 1860.] and it may be
stated as a general rule that European forest and ornamental trees are
not suited to the climate of North America, and that, at the same time,
American garden vegetables are less luxuriant, productive and tasteful
in Europe than in the United States.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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