America has partially repaid her debt to the Eastern
continent. Maize and the potato are very valuable
additions to the field agriculture of Europe and the
East, and the tomato is no mean gift to the kitchen
gardens of the Old World, though certainly not an adequate
return for the multitude of esculent roots and leguminous
plants which the European colonists carried with them.
[Footnote: John Smith mentions, In his Historie
of Virginia, 1624, pease and beans as having been cultivated
by the natives before the arrival of the whites, and
there is no doubt, I believe, that several common
cucurbitaceous plants are of American origin; but
most, if not all the varieties of pease, beans, and
other pod fruits now grown in American gardens, are
from European and other foreign seed.
Cartier, A.D. 1535-’6, mentions “vines,
great melons, cucumbers, gourds [courges], pease,
beans of various colors, but not like ours,”
as common among the Indians of the banks of the St.
Lawrence—Bref Recit, etc., reprint.
Paris, 1863, pp. 13, a; 14, b; 20, b; 31, a.] I wish
I could believe, with some, that America is not alone
responsible for the introduction of the filthy weed,
tobacco, the use of which is the most vulgar and pernicious
habit engrafted by the semi-barbarism of modern civilization
upon the less multifarious sensualism of ancient life;
but the alleged occurrence of pipe-like objects in
old Sclavonic, and, it has been said, in Hungarian
sepulchres, is hardly sufficient evidence to convict
those races of complicity in this grave offence against
the temperance and the refinement of modern society.
Lamentable as are the evils produced by the too general
felling of the woods in the Old World, I believe it
does not appear that any species of native forest
tree has yet been extirpated by man on the Eastern
continent. The roots, stumps, trunks, and foliage
found in bogs are recognized as belonging to still
extant species. Except in some few cases where
there is historical evidence that foreign material
was employed, the timber of the oldest European buildings,
and even of the lacustrine habitations of Switzerland,
is evidently the product of trees still common in
or near the countries where such architectural remains
are found; nor have the Egyptian catacombs themselves
revealed to us the former existence of any woods not
now familiar to us as the growth of still living trees.
[Footnote: Some botanists think that a species
of water lily represented in many Egyptian tombs has
become extinct, and the papyrus, which must have once
been abundant in Egypt, is now found only in a very
few localities near the mouth of the Nile. It
grows very well and ripens its seeds in the waters
of the Anapus near Syracuse, and I have seen it in
garden ponds at Messina and in Malta. There is
no apparent reason for believing that it could not
be easily cultivated in Egypt, to any extent, if there
were any special motive for encouraging its growth.
