6o2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



STEPPES, DESERTS, AND ALKALI LANDS. 



By Prof. E. W. HILGAED. 



THE average reader feels but a moderate interest in the sub- 

 ject of steppes, which he usually associates with roving herds 

 and Tartar or Indian tribes, whose periodic raids have in the past 

 been a standing source of disquiet to civilization, whether in the 

 Occident or Orient. The predatory habits of these people seemed 

 to be proof sufficient of the fact that the countries occupied by 

 them are not able to support permanently a population devoted to 

 agricultural and industrial pursuits, and that their inhabitants 

 are under more or less natural stress toward levying forced con- 

 tributions upon their neighbors in order to eke out their existence 

 in a satisfactory way, as in the case of the tribes of the deserts 

 properly so called. 



As to alkali lands, so far as they are known and considered at 

 all, they are regarded only as obstacles to the settlement and cul- 

 tivation of the otherwise desirable lands whose continuity they 

 mar, aside from the discomfort their pungent dust and saline 

 water causes to the overland traveler ; while their Old World 

 equivalents, the " salt steppes " of southeastern Russia, central 

 Asia, and northern Africa, are among the most disconsolate 

 images conjured up by the imagination of those who traverse or 

 read about them. Moreover, it is currently supposed that these 

 regions owe their saline soil to the evaporation of former salt 

 lakes or seas, and that an indefinite amount of similar salts lurks 

 below the surface, ready to replace whatever may be removed in 

 any attempt to reclaim the lands for cultivation. 



From this point of view it is hard to understand why the peo- 

 ple foremost in ancient civilizations should have chosen for their 

 abodes, and should have developed their civilization rather pre- 

 dominantly, in regions either adjacent to deserts, or having, dur- 

 ing a considerable portion of the year, the aspect and character of 

 the ill-reputed steppe. Egypt is the example nearest to Europe, 

 but Asia Minor, Syria (including Palestine, the "land where milk 

 and honey flows "), Persia, Arabia, and (crossing the Indus) north- 

 ern India, the classic ground of the Vedas and Mahabharata, are 

 more or less tainted with " the breath of the desert," as well as 

 with its actual presence to a greater or less degree. Looking 

 westward, we again find the old Carthaginian and later Moorish 

 civilization on the borders of the desert. Crossing the Atlantic, 

 we find the empire of the Incas on the steep, bare, uninviting 

 western slope of the Andes, when just across the divide there lay 

 the rich countries now forming the Colombian republics and 

 typically exuberant Brazil. In North America, likewise, the civ- 



