The grape disease has operated severely on small cultivators whose vineyards only furnished a supply for domestic use, but Sicily has received a compensation in the immense increase which it has occasioned in both the product and the profits of the sulphur mines. Flour of sulphur is applied to the vine as a remedy against the disease, and the operation is repeated from two to three or four—and even, it is said, eight or ten times—in a season. Hence there is a great demand for sulphur in all the vine-growing countries of Europe, and Waltershausen estimates the annual consumption of that mineral for this single purpose at 850,000 centner, or more than forty thousand tons. The price of sulphur has risen in about the same proportion as that of wine.—Waltershausen, Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau, pp. 19, 20.
[57] Some recent observations of the learned traveller Wetzstein are worthy of special notice. "The soil of the Haurân," he remarks, "produces, in its primitive condition, much wild rye, which is not known as a cultivated plant in Syria, and much wild barley and oats. These cereals precisely resemble the corresponding cultivated plants in leaf, ear, size, and height of straw, but their grains are sensibly flatter and poorer in flour."—Reisebericht über Haurân und die Trachonen, p. 40.
[58] This remark is much less applicable to fruit trees than to garden vegetables and the cerealia. The wild orange of Florida, though once considered indigenous, is now generally thought by botanists to be descended from the European orange introduced by the early colonists. The fig and the olive are found growing wild in every country where those trees are cultivated. The wild fig differs from the domesticated in its habits, its season of fructification, and its insect population, but is, I believe, not specifically distinguishable from the garden fig, though I do not know that it is reclaimable by cultivation. The wild olive, which is so abundant in the Tuscan Maremma, produces good fruit without further care, when thinned out and freed from the shade of other trees, and is particularly suited for grafting. See Salvagnoli, Memorie sulle Maremme, pp. 63-73. See Appendix, [No. 12].
Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit, pp. 35-38, gives, upon the authority of Link and other botanical writers, a list of the native habitats of most cereals and of many fruits, or at least of localities where these plants are said to be now found wild; but the data do not appear to rest, in general, upon very trustworthy evidence. Theoretically, there can be little doubt that all our cultivated plants are modified forms of spontaneous vegetation, but the connection is not historically shown, nor are we able to say that the originals of some domesticated vegetables may not be now extinct and unrepresented in the existing wild flora. See, on this subject, Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur, i, pp. 208, 209. The following are interesting incidents: "A negro slave of the great Cortez was the first who sowed wheat in New Spain. He found three grains of it among the rice which had been brought from Spain as food for the soldiers. In the Franciscan monastery at Quito, I saw the earthen pot which contained the first wheat sown there by Friar Jodoco Rixi, of Ghent. It was preserved as a relic."
The Adams of modern botany and zoology have been put to hard shifts in finding names for the multiplied organisms which the Creator has brought before them, "to see what they would call them;" and naturalists and philosophers have shown much moral courage in setting at naught the laws of philology in the coinage of uncouth words to express scientific ideas. It is much to be wished that some bold neologist would devise English technical equivalents for the German verwildert, run-wild, and veredelt, improved by cultivation.
[59] Could the bones and other relics of the domestic quadrupeds destroyed by disease or slaughtered for human use in civilized countries be collected into large deposits, as obscure causes have gathered together those of extinct animals, they would soon form aggregations which might almost be called mountains. There were in the United States, in 1860, as we shall see hereafter, nearly one hundred and two millions of horses, black cattle, sheep, and swine. There are great numbers of all the same animals in the British American Provinces, and in Mexico, and there are large herds of wild horses on the plains, and of tamed among the independent Indian tribes of North America. It would perhaps not be extravagant to suppose that all those cattle may amount to two thirds as many as those of the United States, and thus we have in North America a total of 170,000,000 domestic quadrupeds belonging to species introduced by European colonization, besides dogs, cats, and other four-footed household pets and pests, also of foreign origin.
If we allow half a solid foot to the skeleton and other slowly destructible parts of each animal, the remains of these herds would form a cubical mass measuring not much short of four hundred and fifty feet to the side, or a pyramid equal in dimensions to that of Cheops, and as the average life of these animals does not exceed six or seven years, the accumulations of their bones, horns, hoofs, and other durable remains would amount to at least fifteen times as great a volume in a single century. It is true that the actual mass of solid matter, left by the decay of dead domestic quadrupeds and permanently added to the crust of the earth, is not so great as this calculation makes it. The greatest proportion of the soft parts of domestic animals, and even of the bones, is soon decomposed, through direct consumption by man and other carnivora, industrial use, and employment as manure, and enters into new combinations in which its animal origin is scarcely traceable; there is, nevertheless, a large annual residuum, which, like decayed vegetable matter, becomes a part of the superficial mould; and in any event, brute life immensely changes the form and character of the superficial strata, if it does not sensibly augment the quantity of the matter composing them.
The remains of man, too, add to the earthy coating that covers the face of the globe. The human bodies deposited in the catacombs during the long, long ages of Egyptian history, would perhaps build as large a pile as one generation of the quadrupeds of the United States. In the barbarous days of old Moslem warfare, the conquerors erected large pyramids of human skulls. The soil of cemeteries in the great cities of Europe has sometimes been raised several feet by the deposit of the dead during a few generations. In the East, Turks and Christians alike bury bodies but a couple of feet beneath the surface. The grave is respected as long as the tombstone remains, but the sepultures of the ignoble poor, and of those whose monuments time or accident has removed, are opened again and again to receive fresh occupants. Hence the ground in Oriental cemeteries is pervaded with relics of humanity, if not wholly composed of them; and an examination of the soil of the lower part of the Petit Champ des Morts at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the observer that it consists almost exclusively of the comminuted bones of his fellow man.
[60] It is asserted that the bones of mammoths and mastodons, in many instances, appear to have been grazed or cut by flint arrow-heads or other stone weapons. These accounts have often been discredited, because it has been assumed that the extinction of these animals was more ancient than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it highly probable, if not certain, that this conclusion has been too hastily adopted. Lyell observes: "These stories * * must in future be more carefully inquired into, for we can scarcely doubt that the mastodon in North America lived down to a period when the mammoth coexisted with man in Europe."—Antiquity of Man, p. 354.
On page 143 of the volume just quoted, the same very distinguished writer remarks that man "no doubt played his part in hastening the era of the extinction" of the large pachyderms and beasts of prey; but, as contemporaneous species of other animals, which man cannot be supposed, to have extirpated, have also become extinct, he argues that the disappearance of the quadrupeds in question cannot be ascribed to human action alone.