In some years, Spain actually makes more pounds of olive oil per person than we in the United States make of butter. In central Tunis, on the edge of the desert, where the rainfall is less than ten inches in a year, olive trees cover the plain as far as the eye can see. (Fig. 459.) The French and the Arabs of.Tunis are beginning to restore orchards that were very large in Roman times. In those ancient times, tribute-ships crossed the Mediter ranean with oil from Tunis and wheat from Egypt with which to feed the people of Rome.
The olive tree is one of the most enduring pieces of property that men can possess. It is said that olive trees which stood in the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem at the time of Christ are still standing there. This is perhaps uncertain, but it is known that olive trees which were planted in Tunis by the Romans before 648 A. D., are still producing fruit.
557. Figs and we had a Mediterranean garden, we should eat figs just as people in America eat apples and peaches. In the villages near the port of Smyrna, on the coast of Asia Minor, Turkish farmers raise quantities of figs, many of which go to New York. Figs are also the chief export from certain of the hilly districts of Algeria and from parts of eastern Spain.
Many of the almonds which we import come from the Balearic Islands and the neighboring parts of Spain. In what parts of the United States do almonds and olives grow? (Sec. 197.) 558. Industries moved to and plants can be moved from one part of the world to another part that has similar climatic conditions. It was from the Old World California that the people of our own California received the first trees and vines and seeds of many crops that are now grown in California. We are raising more and more of all these crops which we once imported entirely from Europe.
559. Tree crops on the mountains.—Since trees can thrive in steep and rocky land, if rainfall and temperature are suitable, the Mediterranean peoples have built up a rich tree-crop agriculture on steep mountainsides. Besides the olive, the chief tree crops of the mountains are the chestnut, the cork oak, and the acorn oak, and sometimes the Eng lish walnut. The chestnut is the most wide spread of all the tree crops. These trees are of choice varieties, and yield nuts nearly half as large as an egg. As food, chestnuts are to the Mediterranean moun taineers what corn is to the mountaineer of the southern Appalachians— providing material for bread and porridge, food for animals, and also a crop to sell. Schools
are closed during chestnut season, because boys and girls, as well as men and women, are busy picking up the nuts that fall in the groves. For a long time a mountainside chestnut orchard of Spain, France, Italy, Sicily, or Corsica, has sold for as much per acre as the best corn land of Illinois, or for even more.
In all the Mediterranean countries there is much land that is now pro ducing only poor pasture or poor forest, which if put to tree crops would yield several times as much food as it now does. (Fig. 437.) 560. half of the world's supply of cork comes from the forests of oak trees in Portugal, and most of the rest of the cork comes from Spain,Algeria,and Tunis.
Cork is the light outer bark which protects the tree from the sun's heat and from fire.
A valuable harvest is secured every nine or ten years. Then the barefooted corkgatherer climbs the tree to strip off the thick bark. Between cork har vests, the shepherd pastures his goats beneath the trees and the swineherd leads his pigs out to fatten themselves on the acorns of the cork oak tree. Indeed, more than half of the pork of Portugal is produced on acorns, instead of on corn as in America, or on potatoes as in Germany.
561. Animals of the dry dry climate of the Mediterranean has forced its people to use dry-land animals as well as dry-land crops. The horse and the cow require good pasture or rich hay. Since these foods are scarce in the Mediterranean world, that region is not as well suited to horses, cows, and sheep as it is to goats (Sec. 575) and donkeys. The goat can live on poor, dry herbage and still give much good milk. In many sections the entire milk supply is furnished by goats. The donkey is kept instead of the horse or the mule. Donkeys, like goats, can live on poor food and climb to rough pasture land.
562. Intensive the Med iterranean world, the people, in order to get a living, must use their land more fully than we do. In doing this they have in many lo calities what may be called "two-story farms". This means that wheat, beans, vegetables, and other crops are grown under crop-yielding trees such as chestnuts, walnuts, olives, cherries, almonds, figs, oaks, or mulberries. In the Spanish island of Majorca about nine tenths of all the cultivated land regularly produces these two sets of crops, one above the other.