of the heartsease,
rose, pelargonium, dahlia, and other plants, when compared with the
older varieties or with their parent-stocks. No one would ever expect to
get a first-rate heartsease or dahlia from the seed of a wild plant. No
one would expect to raise a first-rate melting pear from the seed of a
wild pear, though he might succeed from a poor seedling growing wild,
if it had come from a garden-stock. The pear, though cultivated in
classical times, appears, from Pliny's description, to have been a
fruit of very inferior quality. I have seen great surprise expressed
in horticultural works at the wonderful skill of gardeners, in having
produced such splendid results from such poor materials; but the art,
I cannot doubt, has been simple, and, as far as the final result is
concerned, has been followed almost unconsciously. It has consisted in
always cultivating the best known variety, sowing its seeds, and, when
a slightly better variety has chanced to appear, selecting it, and so
onwards. But the gardeners of the classical period, who cultivated
the best pear they could procure, never thought what splendid fruit we
should eat; though we owe our excellent fruit, in some small degree,
to their having naturally chosen and preserved the best varieties they
could anywhere find.

A large amount of change in our cultivated plants, thus slowly and
unconsciously accumulated, explains, as I believe, the well-known fact,
that in a vast number of cases we cannot recognise, and therefore do
not know, the wild parent-stocks of the plants which have been longest
cultivated in our flower and kitchen gardens. If it has taken centuries
or thousands of years to improve or modify most of our plants up to
their present standard of usefulness to man, we can understand how it
is that neither Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region
inhabited by quite uncivilised man, has afforded us a single plant worth
culture. It is not that these countries, so rich in species, do not by
a strange chance possess the aboriginal stocks of any useful plants, but
that the native plants have not been improved by continued selection up
to a standard of perfection comparable with that given to the plants in
countries anciently civilised.

In regard to the domestic animals kept by uncivilised man, it should
not be overlooked that they almost always have to struggle for their
own food, at least during certain seasons. And in two countries very
diff