The Earth as Modified by Human Action eBook

the vine-wood panels of the door of the chapter-hall of the church of St.

John at Saluzzo are not less than ten inches in width, and I observed not long since, in a garden at Pie di Mulera, a vine stock with a circumference of thirty inches.] But some species of the vine seem native to Europe, and many varieties of grape have been too long known as common to every part of the United States to admit of the supposition that they were introduced by European colonists. [Footnote:  The Northmen who—­as I think it has been indisputably established by Professor Rafn of Copenhagen—­visited the coast of Massachusetts about theyear 1000, found grapes growing there in profusion, and the wild vine still flourishes in great variety and abundance in the southeastern counties of that State.  The townships in the vicinity of the Dighton rock, supposed by many—­with whom, however, I am sorry I cannot agree—­to bear a Scandinavian inscription, abound in wild vines.  According to Laudonniere, Histoire Notable de la Florida, reprint, Paris, 1853, p 5, the French navigators in 1562 found in that peninsula “wild vines which climb the trees and produce good grapes.”]

OBJECTS OF MODERN COMMERCE.

It is an interesting fact that the commerce—­or at least the maritime carrying trade—­and the agricultural and mechanical industry of the world are, in very large proportion, dependent on vegetable and animal products little or not at all known to ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish civilization.  In many instances, the chief supply of these articles comes from countries to which they are probably indigenous, and where they are still almost exclusively grown; but in most cases, the plants or animals from which they are derived have been introduced by man into regions now remarkable for their successful cultivation, and that, too, in comparatively recent times, or, in other words, within two or three centuries.

Something of detail on this subject cannot, I think, fail to prove interesting.  Pliny mentions about thirty or forty oils as known to the ancients, of which only olive, sesame, rape seed and walnut oil—­for except in one or two doubtful passages I find in this author no notice of linseed oil—­appear to have been used in such quantities as to have had any serious importance in the carrying trade.  At the present time, the new oils, linseed oil, the oil of the whale and other largeo marine animals, petroleum—­of which the total consumption of the world in 1871 is estimated at 6,000,000 barrels, the port of Philadelphia alone exporting 56,000,000 gallons in that year—­palm-oil recently introduced into commerce, and now imported into England from the coast of Africa at the rate of forty or fifty thousand tuns a year, these alone undoubtedly give employment to more shipping than the whole commerce of Italy—­with the exception of wheat—­at the most flourishing period of the Roman empire. [Footnote:  A very few years since, the United States had more than six hundred large ships engaged in the whale fishery, and the number of American whalers, in spite of the introduction of many now sources of oils, still amounts to two hundred and fifty.