Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyrame de Candolle

“ There are many gradations between the custom of gathering fruits, seeds, or roots in the field and that of regularly cultivating the plants which yield such products. A family may scatter seeds around its home, and the next year seek the same product in the forest. Some fruit-trees may be growing around a house, and we not know whether they have been planted there, or the hut has been built near them for convenience of access to them. Wars and hunting often interrupt efforts at cultivation. Rivalries and jealousies may make one tribe slow in imitating another. ”

“ So little advanced a condition of agriculture in that eastern part of Europe is in opposition to the hypothesis, based on some words of the ancient historians, that the Aryans sojourned first in the region of the Danube, and that Thrace was civilized before Greece. Notwithstanding this example, agriculture seems to have been generally more ancient in the temperate part of Europe than we would be ready to believe from the accounts of the Greeks, who were disposed, like some modern peoples, to make all progress appear to start from their nation. ”

“ THE traditions of the ancient peoples, embellished by the poets, have commonly attributed the first steps in agriculture and the introduction of useful plants to some divinity, or at least to some great emperor or inca. Reflection teaches us that this is not probable, and the observation of the agricultural efforts among the savages of our own age indicates that the real facts in the case are quite different. Generally, in the progressive steps that lead to civilization the beginnings are weak, obscure, and narrow. ”

“ The law of events (force des choses) introduces then a variation in the intensity of every disease, except that it does not act upon diseases of which people rarely die, or which fall principally upon the aged. The more fatal a disease among youth, the quicker is the work of the law of selection, and the more prompt the diminution of the malady. ”

“ When an epidemic falls upon a population for the first time, the. greater part of the individuals disposed to receive the disease are attacked. They die in great numbers. Subsequent births are the offspring of persons who did not contract the disease, or, at the least, who contracted, yet survived it; that is to say, of persons better constituted than others to resist the disease. By virtue of the ordinary resemblance of children to their parents, the new generation will be less disposed to suffer from the epidemic. ”

“ Medical history proves, on the subject of epidemic and contagious maladies, a marked fatality at the time of their first appearance, followed by slowly-decreasing violence from generation to generation. In our own memory the epidemic visits of cholera have diminished in frequency and intensity within a short period of time. ”

“ The various causes which favor or oppose the beginnings of agriculture will explain why some regions have been for thousands of years populated by cultivators, while others are still inhabited by wandering tribes. Rice and several legumes in Southern Asia, barley and wheat in Mesopotamia and Egypt, several grain-plants in Africa, maize, the potato, the yam, and the manioc in America, were evidently easily and soon cultivated under the inducements offered by their obvious good qualities and favorable climatical conditions. ”

“ When men can live without working, that is what they prefer. Besides, the element of chance in hunting and fishing tempts primitive men—and some civilized ones too—more than do the difficult and regular labors of agriculture. To return to the species which savages may be disposed to cultivate. ”

“ In the north of Asia, Europe, and America, the temperature is unfavorable, and the indigenous plants are sparsely productive; but, as the resources of hunting and fishing are available, the introduction of agriculture could be delayed, and the people could do without the valuable species of the South without suffering much. ”

“ If some great personage ordains the cultivation of a plant and institutes some ceremony in demonstration of its utility, it is probably after obscure persons have spoken of it and successful experiments have been made upon it. ”

“ If a first invasion, for instance, destroys a moiety of the population below marriageable age, the survivors should be very little liable, in their physical or physiological conditions, to the disease, and the children born to them will profit by their immunity. If the disease is less fatal, the purification will be less. We thus discover, I do not say the cause, but a cause why pestilences and other very serious maladies attack populations at intervals, and are, as it is said, epidemic ”

“ Unless a people is cantoned in an island or in some place difficult of access, it will speedily receive those plants discovered elsewhere whose advantageous qualities are evident, and this will divert them from the cultivation of the inferior species of their own country. ”

“ Agriculture seems, then, to have been as ancient in China as in Egypt. The constant intercourse of the latter country with Mesopotamia justifies us in presuming that cultivation was almost contemporaneous in the regions of the Euphrates and the Nile. ”

“ Such are the clear laws—one might add the rigid laws—which rule in diseases, to produce aggravation or diminution, independently of all these natural circumstances. Without doubt there may be other circumstances, physical or physiological, and physicians may discover preventive or curative means which exert influence upon them. ”

“ They find them sometimes in their own country, but frequently they receive them from neighboring people who are more favored by natural conditions than they, or have already entered upon some degree of civilization. ”

“ The most backward savages are acquainted with the plants of their own country; but the Australians and Patagonians are examples to show that, if they do not judge them productive and easy to raise, they do not think of putting them under cultivation. ”