The Distinction "wild" and "cultivated"
Interest in the distinction between wild and cultivated plants dates back to antiquity. Botanical historian Alan Morton notes that wild and cultivated plants (cultigens) were of intense interest to the ancient Greek botanists (partly for religious reasons) and that the distinction was discussed in some detail by Theophrastus (370–285 BCE) the "Father of Botany". Theophrastus was a pupil of both Plato and Aristotle and succeeded the latter as head of the Peripatetic School of Philosophy at the Lyceum in Athens. Theophrastus accepted the view that it was human action not divine intervention that produced cultivated plants (cultigens) from wild plants and he also "had an inkling of the limits of culturally induced (phenotypic) changes and of the importance of genetic constitution" (Historia Plantarum III, 2,2 and Causa Plantarum I, 9,3). He also noted that cultivated varieties of fruit trees would degenerate if cultivated from seed.
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Famous quotes containing the words distinction, wild and/or cultivated:
“There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating; accumulators act at random. The Collyer brothers, who died among the tons of newspapers and trash with which they filled every cubic foot of their house so that they could scarcely move, were a classic example of accumulators, but there are many of us whose houses are filled with all manner of things that we “can’t bear to throw away.””
—Russell Lynes (1910–1991)
“You did not expect to find such spruce trees in the wild woods, but they evidently attend to their toilets each morning even there. Through such a front yard did we enter that wilderness.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)