6/8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



powers to an end not beyond man's reach ; it develops invention 

 and the imaginative faculties; it distracts the mind from the 

 vexed question, never wholly to be put aside, of man's own ul- 

 timate destiny ; it gives him rest ; it gives him hope that, even 

 as from the work of his own hands here there arise things of 

 beauty and of use, so from his whole life's work there may arise 

 in the "hereafter," which in some sense may be only another 

 form of the "present," a something of even greater use and 

 greater beauty still. 



It is in this wise that I commend to you all the life of the 

 workman, of the workman working in little in the spirit of the 

 whole. 



THE BEGINNINGS OF AGRICULTURE. 



By M. LOUIS BOUEDEAU.* 



THE appropriation of the riches of the vegetable world is ac- 

 complished in two ways, according as our principal effort is 

 to make use of the spontaneous products of wild plants or to 

 multiply them by cultivation. The former, which constitutes the 

 system of selection, reduces itself to mere taking possession, and, 

 as it is executed by the most simple means, it can be practiced by 

 all animals. The second method, which is applied to the produc- 

 tion of resources that are needed, alone achieves a conquest and 

 a durable empire. But it requires superior capacity and a degree 

 of intelligence and reflection to which no other animal than man 

 has risen. Cultivation might therefore serve, as does the use of 

 fire, to mark the precise boundary where reason is separated from 

 instinct and passes beyond it. 



During an initial period of very long duration, man, destitute 

 of knowledge and without power to act upon Nature, had to sat- 

 isfy himself with utilizing the spontaneous products of plants, 

 while he was incapable of adding to them by his industry. Like 

 all plant-eating animals he subsisted on the resources of a hazard- 

 ous collection. This sort of life demanded nothing more than an 

 attentive search and the instinct to profit by happy finds. Exist- 

 ence was passed in wandering in quest of nutritious plants and 

 gathering their fruits. The numerous families of monkeys and 

 even some human tribes still live in this way. 



So simple a method of exploitation is necessarily very re- 

 stricted. Man did not in the beginning know the value of all the 

 productions that abounded around him. First of all, he had to 



* From his book, Conqueie du Monde Vegetal (Conquest of the Vegetable World). Felix 

 Alcan, Paris, publisher. 



