Man holds the pea in high esteem. Ever since the days of antiquity, he has tried, by devoting greater and greater attention to its cultivation, to make it produce larger, tenderer, and sweeter varieties. The adaptable plant, gently entreated, has complied with his desires and has ended by giving us what the gardener’s ambition aimed at obtaining. How far we moderns have progressed beyond the crop of the Varros [53] and Columellas, [54] how far, above all, beyond the original peas, beyond the wild seeds confided to the soil by the first man who thought of scraping the earth, maybe with a jaw-bone of the Cave-bear, [55] whose mighty canine did duty as a ploughshare! Where is this plant, the first source of the pea, in the world of spontaneous vegetation? Our regions possess nothing like it. Is it to be found elsewhere? On this point botany is silent, or replies only with vague probabilities. For that matter, the same ignorance prevails on the subject of most of our edible plants. Whence comes wheat, the blessed grain that gives us bread? No one knows. Except in the fields tilled by man, you need not look for it in this country. You need not look for it abroad either. In the East, where agriculture had its birth, no botanist ever came across the sacred ear increasing of its own accord on ground not broken by the plough. Barley, oats and rye, the turnip and the radish, the beet, the carrot, the pumpkin leave us in a like uncertainty: their origin is unknown, or at most suspected behind the impenetrable mist of the ages. Nature delivered them to us in the full vigour of things untamed, when they were of little value as food, as she nowadays offers us the wild blackberry and the sloe; she gave them to us in a rudimentary and incomplete state; and it was for our husbandry and ingenuity patiently to hoard the nutritive pulp, that earliest form of capital, with dividends always increasing in the most excellent bank of the tiller of the soil. As storehouses of provisions, the cereal and the garden vegetable are, for the most part, the work of man. The founders of the species, a poor resource in their original condition, we borrowed as we found them from nature’s green treasury; the improved race, rich in nourishing matter, is the result of our art. But, if wheat, peas and the rest are indispensable to us, our care, in fair exchange, is absolutely necessary to their maintenance. Such as our needs have made them, incapable of resistance in the savage conflict of living things, these plants, if left to themselves, without cultivation, would rapidly disappear, despite the numerical immensity of their seeds, even as the silly Sheep would shortly disappear were there no sheepfolds.