Cultivated Plants. That the history of material progress is directly connected with and measured by man's increasing utilisation of the vegetable and animal, no less than of the mineral world, is an idea of common experience, which the researches of archaeologists in all parts of the world have amply confirmed. The whole subject forms, indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of the history of civilisation. Primitive man, acquiring his acquaintance with useful plants by slow and often bitter individual experience at the very margin of subsistence, offers a striking contrast with the experimental organiser of new and in every sense remotely productive cultures like that of the cinchona-tree in the Himalayas,—a contrast which spans the whole range alike of the practical resources and the scientific culture of the human race.
Without speculation as to the precise steps by which man passed from the hunting or merely pastoral to the agricultural state, we find positive evidence of the existence of agriculture long before written records. Thus, though the 'kitchen-middens' of northern countries contain no trace of cultivated plants, the deposits of Swiss lake-dwellings have yielded remains of fruits, of cereal and other seeds, and of linen fabrics, showing the existence of a considerable agriculture before the use of metals. Ancient traditions and ceremonials of China also bear witness to the remoteness of cultivation there. The earliest Egyptian picture-writings and the greater number of cultivated species have arisen in that central cradle of civilisation which may be broadly marked off by drawing lines from the delta of the Nile to the head of the Persian Gulf, and from the Dardanelles to the Caspian—i.e. between 30° and 40° lat. From this region the majority of European plants are derived. Another great centre of ancient agriculture, however, is China; while the third is intertropical America, where the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians practised the culture of not a few plants, of which some have become almost cosmopolitan since the epoch-making voyage of Columbus.
Since the rise of modern botany (see BOTANY), our knowledge of species at least possibly useful has been greatly extended, yet there seems little risk of displacement of the established cereals, fruit-trees, &c., since these have the advantage of an enormous past of artificial selection, which has in many cases practically transformed them into new species, apparently distinct from their wild congeners, and incapable of continued existence in the uncultivated state—e.g. wheat, barley, maize, pea, sugar-cane, yam, &c., and probably also bean, tobacco, manioc, &c. Moreover, such long cultivated plants usually exhibit greater variability than naturally wild species, and thus in every way new cultures tend to be innumerable. Hence the majority of species of primary nutritive importance to man at present are among those which have been in cultivation for the past 2000 years; and the progress which is now being made is essentially on lines which merely supplement these; the newer plants, cultivated for less than 2000 years, being, according to De Candolle, chiefly artificial fodders, which the ancients scarcely knew; then bulbs, vegetables, medicinal plants (cinchona); plants with edible fruits or nutritious seeds (buckwheat), or aromatic seeds (coffee). Here, of course, the demand for variations in food and drink, for narcotics and medicines, for textiles and timber, all combine towards progress; in most of these the demand is at bottom more largely æsthetic than utilitarian, while this becomes exclusive in the newest but extending department of flower gardening.
See the articles AGRICULTURE, GARDENING, FRUIT, PASTURE, PLANTS (MEDICINAL), &c.; those on special plants—e.g. BARLEY, COCA, DATE, MAIZE, &c.; also De Candolle, Origin of Cultivated Plants (Inter. Sc. Series, 1884); and Hehn's Wanderings of Plants and Animals (1886).