The gentle cabbage submitted without protest. It began by persuading the wild cabbage to discard its wretched leaves, beaten by the sea-winds, and to replace them by others, ample and fleshy and close-fitting. Progressing by infinitesimal degrees, culture wrought miracles.
He had need of a rare inspiration who first showed faith in this rustic clown and proposed to improve it in his garden-patch. Spontaneous vegetation supplied us with the long-stalked, scanty-leaved, ill-smelling wilding, as found, according to the botanists, on the ocean cliffs. The cabbage of our modern kitchen-gardens is a semi-artificial plant, the produce of our agricultural ingenuity quite as much as of the niggardly gifts of nature.
Jean-Henri FABRE Wonders of Instinct - Chap.
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