Where is it, this original pea, in the world of spontaneous vegetation?
Our own country has nothing resembling it. Is it to be found elsewhere?
On this point botany is silent, or replies only with vague
probabilities.

We find the same ignorance elsewhere on the subject of the majority of
our alimentary vegetables. Whence comes wheat, the blessed grain which
gives us bread? No one knows. You will not find it here, except in the
care of man; nor will you find it abroad. In the East, the birthplace
of agriculture, no botanist has ever encountered the sacred ear growing
of itself on unbroken soil.

Barley, oats, and rye, the turnip and the beet, the beetroot, the
carrot, the pumpkin, and so many other vegetable products, leave us in
the same perplexity; their point of departure is unknown to us, or at
most suspected behind the impenetrable cloud of the centuries. Nature
delivered them to us in the full vigor of the thing untamed, when their
value as food was indifferent, as to-day she offers us the sloe, the
bullace, the blackberry, the crab; she gave them to us in the state of
imperfect sketches, for us to fill out and complete; it was for our
skill and our labor patiently to induce the nourishing pulp which was
the earliest form of capital, whose interest is always increasing in the
primordial bank of the tiller of the soil.

As storehouses of food the cereal and the vegetable are, for the greater
part, the work of man. The fundamental species, a poor resource in their
original state, we borrowed as they were from the natural treasury of
the vegetable world; the perfected race, rich in alimentary materials,
is the result of our art.