Origin of Cultivated Plants (International Scientific Series). By Alphonse de Candolle, Foreign Associate Academie of Sciences, Institute of France, Foreign Member of the Royal Societies of London, Edinburgh and Dublin, etc., etc. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
M. De Candolle’s “Origin of Cultivated Plants” (No. 48 of the International Scientific Series) is a work calculated certainly to arouse the attention of agriculturists, botanists, and others aside from those interested in the dawnings of civilization from the historical or philosophical standpoint. The labors of both father and son in this field have made the name of De Candolle distinguished in science as worthy successors of Linnæus, and thirty years’ labor in the field of geographical botany have wrought results of the most important kind. There are few plants which are not adequately discussed in this book in spite of the fact that, owing to the great number of varieties which long cultivation has produced, and the remoteness of time when they were first reclaimed from nature, great difficulties are offered to any correct history of their origin. The author combats the erroneous opinions promulgated so widely by Linnæus, who, in spite of his greatness, oftentimes took things too much on trust. Many of these mistakes dated back to the times of the Greeks and Romans, and certainly it was time that some adequate hand should attempt a correction. The data of correction have been drawn from data of varied character, some of which is quite recent and even unpublished, and all of which has been sifted as men sift evidence in historical research. The author claims that, in spite of all the difficulties in his way, he has been able to determine the origin of almost all the species, sometimes with absolute certainty, sometimes with a very high degree of probability.
Some plants cultivated for more than two thousand years are not now known in a spontaneous state. This can be accounted for on one of these two hypotheses; either these plants, since history has begun, have changed so entirely in form in their wild as well as in their cultivated condition that they are no longer recognized as belonging to the same species, or they are extinct species. In case they are extinct, this extinction must have taken place of course during the short period (scientifically speaking) of a few hundred centuries, on continents where they might have spread, and under circumstances which are commonly considered unvarying. This shows how the history of cultivated plants is allied to the most important problems of the general history of organized beings. The study of plants by our author is divided into those cultivated for their subterranean parts, such as roots, tubercles or bulbs; those cultivated for their stems or leaves; those cultivated for their flowers or for the organs which envelop them; those cultivated for their fruits, and those cultivated for their seeds. In the process of investigation we readily observe that De Candolle, who appears a master of the tools of research in every branch of study, has not only used botanical resources, but those of history and of travel, of archæology, pæleontology, and of philology. The wealth of learning lavished by the author on his work is sometimes almost bewildering. One of the most striking results of the author’s researches is that certain species are extinct or are fast becoming extinct since the historical epoch, and that not on small islands, but on vast continents without any great modifications of climate. M. De Candolle tells us that in the history of cultivated plants he has noticed no trace of communication between the peoples of the old and new worlds before the discovery of America by Columbus. The Scandinavians, who had pushed their excursions as far as the north of the United States, and the Basques of the Middle Ages, who followed whales perhaps as far as America, do not seem to have transported a single species. Neither has the Gulf Stream produced any effect. Between America and Asia, two transports of useful plants, perhaps, took place, the one by man (the batata, or sweet potato), the other by the agency of man or of the sea (the cocoanut palm).
The Adventures of Timias Terrystone. A Novel. By O. B. Bunce. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
Mr. Bunce, the author of several charmingly written works of the essay character, among which may be mentioned “Bachelor Bluff,” “My House an Ideal,”etc., again challenges the critical attention of the intelligent reading public, in a form this time which will command wider interest—the novel. The “Adventures of Timias Terrystone” is in no sense a romance; it is not a story of action, or in the least melodramatic; it is not in any wide or deep sense a novel of character, though the personages have well-marked individualities and act consistently with them. So far as the actual life depicted is concerned, the story glides pleasantly over the surface of things, not professing or caring to deal with the more deep and startling issues of life, but touching the facts of every-day happening with a light and graceful hand, and showing a very keen sensibility to the fresh and lovely aspects of youth. The hero is a young artist who, being a waif, did not know his own parentage, and being brought up in a very unconventional way, disdains even at the last, when he discovers his ancestry, all pride of birth and family. The adventures of the youthful painter, though chiefly of an amatory character, as his great personal beauty and freshness of character appear to exercise a great charm over the other sex, are manifold, and both interesting and amusing, he being a more refined and purer Gil Blas. But we doubt whether the main interest will be found in the mere story, though novel-readers will not go amiss of genuine enjoyment in this way. In the mouth of one of the characters, a bluff, easy-going, wandering Bohemian, our author places a great number of keen, incisive, critical, or eloquent observations, as the case may be. These thoughts are so full of pith that they can hardly fail to be widely quoted, and our readers will not have to draw on their good nature to pardon us if we give them some of these well-spiced plums: “A man who goes through the world with his eyes open learns something at every step; but one who immerses himself in a library simply converts himself into a catalogue.... What are reading and writing, anyway, but a prejudice of society? Do men get more character, more self-reliance, greater capacity for dealing with the problems of life, by filtering through the brain the dreams of the poets and the philosophers? I tell you that when our boys should be scouring through the woods, rolling down-hill, scaling the mountains, making themselves splendid young Apollos, we shut them up in a deadly school-room, which soon drives the color out of their cheeks, vigor out of their limbs, pluck out of their hearts, and snap out of their brains. Civilization is a bundle of absurdities—it is worse, it is a upas-tree, that is fast poisoning the race.”
“‘Men fall in love, they say, with beauty, with goodness, with gentleness, with intellectual qualities, with a sweet voice, with a smile, with an agreeable manner, with a lovable disposition, with many ascertainable and measurable things, and yet we find them continually falling in love with women who are not beautiful, nor good, nor wise, nor gentle, nor possessing any ascertainable or measurable thing. You’ll find a hundred reasons given for falling in love, or being in love, and rarely the right reason—which is commonly simply because a man cannot help it.... The philosophy of the thing is just here—a woman’s eye glances, or her lips smile, or her neck is white and well turned, or she has a pretty hand, or she flutters a fan gracefully, or she looks sympathetic, or she beckons, or some other trifle as light as gossamer, as valueless as a mote in the sun, as much without significance as the fall of a leaf, and the man is subdued, and immediately he begins to declare that the woman is lovely, when she is not; that she is gentle and good, when anyone can see the shrew in her eye; that she is wise and capable, when she is as perverse as a donkey, and as empty as an abandoned shell on the seashore; and so goes on manufacturing qualities and attributes for her out of air. To satisfy his judgment he creates an ideal, and tries with all his might to persuade himself there are good reasons for his passion—and so there are, but they are not written down in the catalogue of attractions. He is in love because a mysterious force of nature has touched him. The woman may be unbeautiful, heartless, selfish, cruel, untrue, coarse, frivolous, empty, but if the magic of nature—something of the magic, I suspect, that Puck used on the eyes of Titania—touches him, he sees not one of these things in their true aspect. Yes, the Titanias that have fallen in love with men crowned with donkey-heads, and the men that have fallen in love with serpents, thinking them doves, are many—and all because of a diabolism, or a mystic fury in nature that delights in bringing incongruous elements together for the sake of a dance of delirium.’”
“‘The reason why the world is as bad as it is, is because it has been lectured so much. Denunciation has never improved the morals of the world since the days of Jeremiah to the present hour. Many men are better for reading Emerson—none are better for reading Carlyle; in fact, the influence of your picturesque scold like Carlyle is to make fault-finding look like a virtue, and make people imagine that, if they are only vehement enough in denouncing other people’s sins, they will thereby clear their skirts of their own. It is the vice of a certain kind of piety that it is forever plunged into the deepest concern about other people’s iniquities. Your devout Catholic goes to church to confess his sins; your acrimonious Puritan goes to church to confess other people’s sins.’”