Vegetable substances used for the food of man / [Edwin Lankester. Revised and partly rewritten].

  • Edwin Lankester
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vegetable substances used for the food of man / [Edwin Lankester. Revised and partly rewritten]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the cultivation of which man has been enabled to localize himself, to reap and to store up harvests ; and by thus becoming freed from an incessant call upon his physical energies for the su]>ply of his necessities, to acquire the motives and the means for becoming something higher and better in the scale of l)eing. Vegetables form the primary source of sustenance to everything that lives. Were the earth without them and bare—and but for cultivation, how much of it would be in that state—the efiects of heat and cold, of drought and rain, would be so violent, that, apart from all con- siderations as to food, the whole world would speedily become uninhabitable. Frosts and drought would break, and the returning water would wash away, the surface, until the whole would become one wide and swampy w'aste. The presence of vegetation prevents this deso- lating action, and converts what otherwise would be destructive agents into ministers of abundance. No vege- table productions tend so much to bring about this beneficial result as those which are cultivated for human food. By the shade which they afford to the ground in the hot season, they check that evaporation, and prevent that excessive hai’dening of the surface, which in an exposed wild remler the soil impervious and inert; while, on the other hand, the humidity which they im- bibe during the rainy season is again given out by con- tinual and gradual evaporation, and they minister to the refreshment and the ])roductivcncss of all around them. In countries which are uncultivated the weather is mostly in extremes. Rain, when it comes, takes the form of an overwhelming flood, not gently entering into and moistening the soil, but rushing along the surface, tearing u]> one place, strewing another with the debris, and reducing both to a state of indiscriminate ruin ; while scarcely has the flood gone by, when the return- ing heat eva[)oratcs the little moisture which is left be- hind, and burns up the coarse and scanty vegetation which the rains had fostered. 'I'hesc efl'cetsof the unmitigated action of the elements are most strongly marked in those ])arts of the world
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