Man may be the most adaptable of all the animals on earth, but his adaptability cannot compare with the way in which plants will change to survive in a world controlled by men. When anyone who lives in a modern industrialised country comes face to face with a land plant, he can be almost certain that it is not entirely as nature would have it, but what man has made it. Only the plants in the oceans have lived and developed throughout time more or less untroubled by the ambitions of mankind.
When you look at a field of waving corn, it is not the original wild corn from the upland slopes of Asia Minor. It is a new species developed by selection and cross-fertilisation to produce a bigger grain for the feeding of men and their domestic animals. Even the grass of meadow and pasture is not the wild scrub of the tundra. It has grown from selected seed, cleaned of the interloping weed and the fungal pest.
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