Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action

by George P. Marsh

According to Bigelow, the United States had, on the first of June, 1860, in round numbers, 163,000,000 acres of improved land, the quantity having been increased by 50,000,000 acres within the ten years next preceding.[41] Not to mention less important crops, this land produced, in the year ending on the day last mentioned, in round numbers, 171,000,000 bushels of wheat, 21,000,000 bushels of rye, 172,000,000 bushels of oats, 15,000,000 bushels of pease and beans, 16,000,000 bushels of barley, orchard fruits to the value of $20,000,000, 900,000 bushels of cloverseed, 900,000 bushels of other grass seed, 104,000 tons of hemp, 4,000,000 pounds of flax, and 600,000 pounds of flaxseed. These vegetable growths were familiar to ancient European agriculture, but they were all introduced into North America after the close of the sixteenth century.

Of the fruits of agricultural industry unknown to the Greeks and Romans, or too little employed by them to be of any commercial importance, the United States produced, in the same year, 187,000,000 pounds of rice, 18,000,000 bushels of buckwheat, 2,075,000,000 pounds of ginned cotton,[42] 302,000,000 pounds of cane sugar, 16,000,000 gallons of cane molasses, 7,000,000 gallons of sorghum molasses, all yielded by vegetables introduced into that country within two hundred years, and—with the exception of buckwheat, the origin of which is uncertain, and of cotton—all, directly or indirectly, from the East Indies; besides, from indigenous plants unknown to ancient agriculture, 830,000,000 bushels of Indian corn or maize, 429,000,000 pounds of tobacco, 110,000,000 bushels of potatoes, 42,000,000 bushels of sweet potatoes, 39,000,000 pounds of maple sugar, and 2,000,000 gallons of maple molasses. To all this we are to add 19,000,000 tons of hay, produced partly by new, partly by long known, partly by exotic, partly by native herbs and grasses, an incalculable quantity of garden vegetables, chiefly of European or Asiatic origin, and many minor agricultural products.

The weight of this harvest of a year would be not less than 60,000,000 tons—which is eleven times the tonnage of all the shipping of the United States at the close of the year 1861—and, with the exception of the maple sugar, the maple molasses, and the products of the Western prairie lands and some small Indian clearings, it was all grown upon lands wrested from the forest by the European race within little more than two hundred years. The wants of Europe have introduced into the colonies of tropical America the sugar cane, the coffee plant, the orange and the lemon,[43] all of Oriental origin, have immensely stimulated the cultivation of the former two in the countries of which they are natives, and, of course, promoted agricultural operations which must have affected the geography of those regions to an extent proportionate to the scale on which they have been pursued.

American Plants grown in Europe.

America has partially repaid her debt to the Eastern continent. Maize and the potato are very valuable additions to the field agriculture of Europe and the East, and the tomato is no mean gift to the kitchen gardens of the Old World, though certainly not an adequate return for the multitude of esculent roots and leguminous plants which the European colonists carried with them.[44] I wish I could believe, with some, that America is not alone responsible for the introduction of the filthy weed, tobacco, the use of which is the most vulgar and pernicious habit engrafted by the semi-barbarism of modern civilization upon the less multifarious sensualism of ancient life;[45] but the alleged occurrence of pipe-like objects in Sclavonic, and, it has been said, in Hungarian sepulchres, is hardly sufficient evidence to convict those races of complicity in this grave offence against the temperance and the refinement of modern society.

Modes of Introduction of Foreign Plants.

Besides the vegetables I have mentioned, we know that many plants of smaller economical value have been the subjects of international exchange in very recent times. Busbequius, Austrian ambassador at Constantinople about the middle of the sixteenth century—whose letters contain one of the best accounts of Turkish life which have appeared down to the present day—brought home from the Ottoman capital the lilac and the tulip. The Belgian Clusius about the same time introduced from the East the horse chestnut, which has since wandered to America. The weeping willows of Europe and the United States are said to have sprung from a slip received from Smyrna by the poet Pope, and planted by him in an English garden; and the Portuguese declare that the progenitor of all the European and American oranges was an Oriental tree transplanted to Lisbon, and still living in the last generation.[46] The present favorite flowers of the parterres of Europe have been imported from America, Japan and other remote Oriental countries, within a century and a half, and, in fine, there are few vegetables of any agricultural importance, few ornamental trees or decorative plants, which are not now common to the three civilized continents.

The statistics of vegetable emigration exhibit numerical results quite surprising to those not familiar with the subject. The lonely island of St. Helena is described as producing, at the time of its discovery in the year 1501, about sixty vegetable species, including some three or four known to grow elsewhere also. At the present time its flora numbers seven hundred and fifty species. Humboldt and Bonpland found, among the unquestionably indigenous plants of tropical America, monocotyledons only, all the dicotyledons of those extensive regions having been probably introduced after the colonization of the New World by Spain.

The faculty of spontaneous reproduction and perpetuation necessarily supposes a greater power of accommodation, within a certain range, than we find in most domesticated plants, for it would rarely happen that the seed of a wild plant would fall into ground as nearly similar, in composition and condition, to that where its parent grew, as the soils of different fields artificially prepared for growing a particular vegetable are to each other. Accordingly, though every wild species affects a habitat of a particular character, it is found that, if accidentally or designedly sown elsewhere, it will grow under conditions extremely unlike those of its birthplace.[47] Cooper says: "We cannot say positively that any plant is uncultivable anywhere until it has been tried;" and this seems to be even more true of wild than of domesticated vegetation.

The seven hundred new species which have found their way to St. Helena within three centuries and a half, were certainly not all, or even in the largest proportion, designedly planted there by human art, and if we were well acquainted with vegetable emigration, we should probably be able to show that man has intentionally transferred fewer plants than he has accidentally introduced into countries foreign to them. After the wheat, follow the tares that infest it. The weeds that grow among the cereal grains, the pests of the kitchen garden, are the same in America as in Europe.[48] The overturning of a wagon, or any of the thousand accidents which befall the emigrant in his journey across the Western plains, may scatter upon the ground the seeds he designed for his garden, and the herbs which fill so important a place in the rustic materia medica of the Eastern States, spring up along the prairie paths but just opened by the caravan of the settler.[49] The hortus siccus of a botanist may accidentally sow seeds from the foot of the Himalayas on the plains that skirt the Alps; and it is a fact of very familiar observation, that exotics, transplanted to foreign climates suited to their growth, often escape from the flower garden and naturalize themselves among the spontaneous vegetation of the pastures. When the cases containing the artistic treasures of Thorvaldsen were opened in the court of the museum where they are deposited, the straw and grass employed in packing them were scattered upon the ground, and the next season there sprang up from the seeds no less than twenty-five species of plants belonging to the Roman campagna, some of which were preserved and cultivated as a new tribute to the memory of the great Scandinavian sculptor, and at least four are said to have spontaneously naturalized themselves about Copenhagen.[50] In the campaign of 1814, the Russian troops brought, in the stuffing of their saddles and by other accidental means, seeds from the banks of the Dnieper to the valley of the Rhine, and even introduced the plants of the steppes into the environs of Paris. The Turkish armies, in their incursions into Europe, brought Eastern vegetables in their train, and left the seeds of Oriental wall plants to grow upon the ramparts of Buda and Vienna.[51] The Canada thistle, Erigeron Canadense, is said to have sprung up in Europe, two hundred years ago, from a seed which dropped out of the stuffed skin of a bird.[52]