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.

If wheat, peas, and all the rest are indispensable to us, our care, by a just return, is absolutely necessary to them.  Such as our needs have made them, incapable of resistance in the bitter struggle for survival, these vegetables, left to themselves without culture, would rapidly disappear, despite the numerical abundance of their seeds, as the foolish sheep would disappear were there no more sheep-folds.

They are our work, but not always our exclusive property.  Wherever food is amassed, the consumers collect from the four corners of the sky; they invite themselves to the feast of abundance, and the richer the food the greater their numbers.  Man, who alone is capable of inducing agrarian abundance, is by that very fact the giver of an immense banquet at which legions of feasters take their place.  By creating more juicy and more generous fruits, he calls to his enclosures, despite himself, thousands and thousands of hungry creatures, against whose appetites his prohibitions are helpless.  The more he produces, the larger is the tribute demanded of him.  Wholesale agriculture and vegetable abundance favor our rival, the insect.

This is the immanent law.  Nature, with an equal zeal, offers her mighty breast to all her nurslings alike; to those who live by the goods of others no less than to the producers.  For us, who plough, sow, and reap, and weary ourselves with labor, she ripens the wheat; she ripens it also for the little Calender-beetle, which, although exempted from the labor of the fields, enters our granaries none the less, and there, with its pointed beak, nibbles our wheat, grain by grain, to the husk.