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[1] and Columellas,[2] 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,[3] whose mighty canine did duty as a ploughshare!
Where is this plant, the first source of the pea, [[185]]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 [[186]]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.
They are our work, but not always our exclusive property. Wherever food is amassed, consumers flock from the four corners of the sky; they invite themselves to the copious feast; and, the richer the victuals, the greater their numbers. Man, who alone is capable of provoking agrarian luxuriance, becomes by this very fact the giver of an immense banquet whereat legions of guests take their places. By creating more palatable and more generous victuals, he willy-nilly summons to his granaries thousands and thousands of famished creatures against whose teeth his prohibitions battle in vain. The more he produces, the larger tribute he has to pay. Big crops and sumptuous hoards favour the insects, our rivals as consumers.
It is the prevailing law. Nature offers her mighty breast with equal zeal to all her children, [[187]]to those who live by others’ goods no less than to the producers. For us who plough and sow and reap, wearing ourselves out with toil, she ripens the wheat; she ripens it also for the little Corn-weevil, who, though exempted from the labour of the fields, will nevertheless settle in our granaries and with her pointed beak nibble the heap of corn, grain by grain, to the husk. For us who dig and weed and water, bent with fatigue and burnt by the heat of the day, nature swells the pea-pods; she swells them also for the Pea-weevil, who, doing no gardener’s work, will all the same take her share of the crop at her own time, when the earth is joyful with the new life of spring.
Let us watch the actions of this zealous tax-collector, who levies her tithes in green peas. I, a well-meaning rate-payer, will let her have her way: it is precisely for her benefit that I have sown a few rows of the beloved plant in my enclosure. With no other invitation from me than this modest seed-plot, she arrives punctually in the course of May. She has learnt that in this stony soil, unfitted for market-gardening, peas are flourishing for the first time. And she has hastened thither to exercise her privileges as an entomological revenue-officer.
Whence does she come? It is impossible to say exactly. She has come from some refuge or other where she has spent the winter in a state of torpor. The plane-tree, which strips itself of its own [[188]]initiative during the heat of summer, furnishes excellent shelters for homeless paupers under its patches of loose-hanging bark. I have often found our Pea-thief in one of these winter sanctuaries. Sheltered under the dead covering of the plane, or otherwise protected while the winter raged, she woke from her slumbers at the first kisses of a kindly sun. The almanac of the instincts has taught her; she knows as well as the gardener when the peas are in flower, and she comes to her plant more or less from every direction, ambling at a slow pace, but swift in flight.