[45] There are some usages of polite society which are inherently low in themselves, and debasing in their influence and tendency, and which no custom or fashion can make respectable or fit to be followed by self-respecting persons. It is essentially vulgar to smoke or chew tobacco, and especially to take snuff; it is unbecoming a gentleman, to perform the duties of his coachman; it is indelicate in a lady to wear in the street skirts so long that she cannot walk without grossly soiling them. Not that all these things are not practised by persons justly regarded as gentlemen and ladies; but the same individuals would be, and feel themselves to be, much more emphatically gentlemen and ladies, if they abstained from them.
[46] The name portogallo, so generally applied to the orange in Italy, seems to favor this claim. The orange, however, was known in Europe before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and, therefore, before the establishment of direct relations between Portugal and the East.
A correspondent of the Athenæum, in describing the newly excavated villa, which has been named Livia's Villa, near the Porta del Popolo at Rome, states that: "The walls of one of the rooms are, singularly enough, decorated with landscape paintings, a grove of palm and orange trees, with fruits and birds on the branches—the colors all as fresh and lively as if painted yesterday." The writer remarks on the character of this decoration as something very unusual in Roman architecture; and if the trees in question are really orange, and not lemon trees, this circumstance may throw some doubt on the antiquity of the painting. If, on the other hand, it proves really ancient, it shows that the orange was known to the Roman painters, if not gardeners. The landscape may perhaps represent Oriental, not European scenery. The accessories of the picture would probably determine that question.—Athenæum, No. 1859, June 13, 1863.
Müller, Das Buch der Pflanzenwelt, p. 86, asserts that in 1802 the ancestor of all the mulberries in France, planted in 1500, was still standing in a garden in the village of Allan-Montélimart.
[47] The vegetables which, so far as we know their history, seem to have been longest the objects of human care, can, by painstaking industry, be made to grow under a great variety of circumstances, and some of them—the vine for instance—prosper nearly equally well, when planted and tended, on soils of almost any geological character; but their seeds 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. In range of climate, wild plants are much more limited than domestic, but much less so with regard to the state of the soil in which they germinate and grow. See Appendix, [No. 9].
Dr. Dwight remarks that the seeds of American forest trees will not vegetate when dropped on grassland. This is one of the very few errors of personal observation to be found in that author's writings. There are seasons, indeed, when few tree seeds germinate in the meadows and the pastures, and years favorable to one species are not always propitious to another; but there is no American forest tree known to me which does not readily propagate itself by seed in the thickest greensward, if its germs are not disturbed by man or animals.
[48] 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.
[49] 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 than twenty English plants springing up spontaneously near their improvements.
Every country has many plants not now, if ever, made use of by man, and therefore not designedly propagated by him, but which cluster around his dwelling, and continue to grow luxuriantly on the ruins of his rural habitation after he has abandoned it. The site of a cottage, the very foundation stones of which have been carried off, may often be recognized, years afterward, by the rank weeds which cover it, though no others of the same species are found for miles.
"Mediæval Catholicism," says Vaupell, "brought us the red horsehoof—whose reddish-brown flower buds shoot up from the ground when the snow melts, and are followed by the large leaves—lægekulsukker and snake-root, which grow only where there were convents and other dwellings in the Middle Ages."—Bögens Indvandring i de Danske Skove, pp. 1, 2.