PROM CULTIVATED PRODUCTS.
These may be derived from either the animal or vegetable world. The latter gives rise to agriculture, the former to the breeding of domestic animals.
ethnologist of ability, Mr. Charles Pickering, has maintained that the history of the progress of mankind can be distinctly traced by the extension of the areas of cultivated plants ; and the learned work which he published to support this opinion presents au astonishing mass of testimony to the influence which a knowledge of such plants has exerted.
Age and Distribution of Food-Plants.—The beginnings of agriculture are lost in antiquity. Of many of the plants cultivated for food we know neither the original habitat nor the wild form. Rice, for example, was, According to the annals of the Chinese, extensively cultivated by them two thousand eight hundred years before the Christian era ; barley was familiar to the Egyptians before the earliest recorded dynasties ; rye was sowed and reaped during the remotest epochs of the Age of Bronze in Europe. These grains must have been cultivated food-plants long before the earliest of these dates, as they had already been trained to a character quite different from that natural to them, and had been carried long distances from their native homes. So in America the Zca Mays was found by the first explorers from lat. 45° N. to lat. 45° S., yet the only plant from which it could have been derived by cultivation is a native of Guatemala.
Certain food-plants have so long been propagated in an artificial man lier that they have lost all power of independent reproduction, their seeds having disappeared or changed into fleshy fibres. This is the case with most varieties of bananas and with the Jatropha Manihot, which furnishes the cassava bread. They must be propagated by cuttings, having no longer the power of developing seeds. This is almost the case with the date-palm of the Sahara Desert ; it has still the capacity to produce seeds, but has lost that of sexual union, and to assure a crop the male and female flowers have to be brought together by human agency.
Such facts as these testify to the great antiquity of the agricultural arts. They are also more widely distributed than many have supposed. It is rare to learn of any tribe wholly without some cultivated plant. Most of the so-called hunting tribes of America were agricultural to a limited degree, maize, beans, and pumpkins being known widely over the continent.
Agricultural Arts.—The pursuit of agriculture even in the most sim ple manner involves a variety of minor arts. Implements must be invented for clearing the field, for turning up the soil, for weeding, for cutting the stalk, curing the grain, and for grinding or otherwise pre paring it for use. Something equivalent to the hoe occurs far back in the Stone Age. Broad and well-chipped hoe-blades, intended to be fastened to wooden handles, were in use in the Mississippi Valley many ages ago. The brush was frequently burned from the ground and the soil scratched by means of a wooden stick. A crooked branch of a tree was no doubt the primitive form of a plough. Dragged at first by a man or two, the fanner soon learned to utilize for this purpose the greater strength of the horse or the ox where these animals were known. Wher ever the cereals were cultivated the sickle, the flail, and the coru-mill were soon invented for the preparation of the grain. Corn-crushers of stone are among the most numerous relics of the Neolithic Age, and large stone mortars, in which the grain was reduced to coarse meal, are seen in most cabinets. The application of water-power to machinery was probably first devised to lighten the labor of grinding corn, and was grad ually improved and extended to other purposes.
Domesticated tribes draw their food-supply chiefly from domestic animals, some being nomadic herdsmen wandering from pasture to pasture, like the Tartar hordes of the Oriental steppes, others remaining stationary and storing up the food for their animals against the cold or dry seasons. We can easily overlook, in the midst of our varied food-supply, the enormous importance of his flocks and herds to the early man. But if we turn to the pages of the Zend Avesta or to the songs of the Rig Veda, we appreciate how all-absorbing to those primitive herds men was the care of their cows. The gods were likened to them, and in Egypt, India, and elsewhere the animals themselves were deemed divine. They constituted the principal form of personal riches, and the Latin word for money, tecunia, remains to testify that they were the measure of value of possessions of all kinds. In the Veda " the cowherd " is a royal title.