To begin with, it may be as well to premise that the problem of the origin of cultivation is a far more complex one than appears at first sight. For we have not only to ask, as might seem to the enquirer unaccustomed to such investigations, “How did the early savage first find out that seeds would grow better when planted in open soil, already freed from weeds or natural competitors?” but also the other and far more difficult question, “How did the early savage ever find out that plants would grow from seeds at all?” That, I take it, is the real riddle of the situation, and it is one which, so far as I know, has hitherto escaped all enquirers into the history and origin of human progress. Fully to grasp the profound nature of this difficulty we must throw ourselves back mentally into the condition and position of primitive man. We ourselves have known so long and so familiarly the fact that plants grow from seeds--that the seed is the essential reproductive part of the vegetable organism--that we find it hard to unthink that piece of commonplace knowledge, and to realise that what to us is an almost self-evident truth is to the primitive savage a long and difficult inference. Our own common and {276}certain acquaintance with the fact, indeed, is entirely-derived from the practice of agriculture. We have seen seeds sown from our earliest childhood. But before agriculture grew up, the connexion between seed and seedling could not possibly be known or even suspected by primitive man, who was by no means prone to make abstract investigations into the botanical nature or physiological object of the various organs in the herbs about him. That the seed is the reproductive part of the plant was a fact as little likely in itself to strike him as that the stamens were the male organs, or that the leaves were the assimilative and digestive surfaces. He could only have found out that plants grew from seeds by the experimental process of sowing and growing them. Such an experiment he was far from likely ever to try for its own sake. He must have been led to it by some other and accidental coincidence. Now what was primitive man likely to know and observe about the plants around him? Primarily one thing only: that some of them were edible, and some were not. There you have a distinction of immediate interest to all humanity. And what parts of plants were most likely to be useful to him in this respect as foodstuffs? Those parts which the plant had specially filled up with rich material for its own use or the use of its offspring. The first are the roots, stocks, bulbs, corms, or tubers in which it lays by foodstuffs for its future growth; the second are the seeds which it produces and enriches in order to continue its kind to succeeding generations.