The Earth as Modified by Human Action eBook

not consisting, however, by any means, exclusively of articles new to commerce. [Footnote:  Many of these articles would undoubtedly have been made known to the Greeks and Romans and have figured in their commerce, but for the slowness and costliness of ancient navigation, which, in the seas familiar to them, was suspended for a full third of the year from the inability of their vessels to cope with winter weather.  The present speed and economy of transportation have wrought and are still working strange commercial and industrial revolutions.  Algeria now supplies Northern Germany with fresh cauliflowers, and in the early spring the market-gardeners of Naples find it more profitable to send their first fruits to St. Petersburg than to furnish them to Florence and Rome.]

FOREIGN PLANTS, HOW INTRODUCED.

Besides the vegetables I have mentioned, we know that many plants of smaller economical value have been the subjects of international exchange in very recent times.  Busbequius, Austrian ambassador at Constantinople about the middle of the sixteenth century—­whose letters contain one of the best accounts of Turkish life which have appeared down to the present day—­brought home from the Ottoman capital the lilac and the tulip.  The Belgian Clusius about the same time introduced from the East the horse chestnut, which has since wandered to America.  The weeping willows of Europe and the United States are said to have sprung from a slip received from Smyrna by the poet Pope; and planted by him in an English garden; Drouyn de l’IIuys, in a discourse delivered before the French Societe d’Acclimatation, in 1860, claims for Rabelais the introduction of the melon, the artichoke and the Alexandria pink into France; and the Portuguese declare that the progenitor of all the European and American oranges was an Oriental tree transplanted to Lisbon, and still living in the last generation. [Footnote:  The name portogallo, so generally applied to the orange in Italy, seems to favor this claim.  The orange, however, was known in Europe before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, and therefore, before the establishment of direct relations between Portugal and the East.—­See Amari, Storia del Musulmani in Sicilia, vol ii., p. 445.

The date-palms of eastern and southern Spain were certainly introduced by the Moors.  Leo Von Rozmital, who visited Barcelona in 1476, says that the date-tree grew in great abundance in the environs of that city and ripened its fruit well.  It is now scarcely cultivated further north than Valencia.  It is singular that Ritter in his very full monograph on the palm does not mention those of Spain.

On the introduction of conifera into England see an interesting article in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1864.

Muller, Das Buch der Pfianzenrodt, p. 86, asserts that in 1802 the ancestor of all the mulberries in France, planted in 1500, was still standing in a garden in the village of Allan-Montelimart.] The present favorite flowers of the parterres of Europe have been imported from America, Japan and other remote Oriental countries, within a century and a half, and, in fine, there are few vegetables of any agricultural importance, few ornamental trees or decorative plants, which are not now common to the three civilized continents.