68o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



not found till the period of the station at Robenhausen, the most 

 recent of the prehistoric ages. A similar condition has persisted 

 among many peoples, not only savages reduced to the sorry re- 

 sources of the animal searching, like the Hottentots, Bushmen, 

 Fuegians, etc., but hunters, like a number of American tribes, In- 

 dians and Eskimos, and even pastoral people like the populations 

 in Asia and Africa which live solely on the products of their flocks. 

 Several peoples of Europe were found in a similar condition at no 

 very ancient date. Tradition preserved among the Greeks and 

 Romans the memory of a time when their ancestors, given over 

 solely to pastoral industry, could neither till nor plant.* At the age 

 represented by the kitchen middens and the oldest lake stations, 

 the aborigines of Denmark and those of Switzerland were not 

 aquainted with any sort of cultivation. A large part of England 

 was, not less than twenty centuries ago, plunged in the same state 

 of savagery. " The two most numerous peoples of Great Britain," 

 says the abridger of Dio Cassius, "the Caledonians and the Meati, 

 to whom all the others are related, live on uncultivated moun- 

 tains or in desert plains, where they have neither cities nor cul- 

 tivated lands. They subsist on milk, game, and wild fruits." f 

 The narrative of the circumnavigation achieved by Other in the 

 ninth century, on the shores of the Baltic, describes populations 

 which lived by fishing, and makes no mention of agricultural 

 products. X Even with peoples who have given agriculture its 

 widest developments, a notable part of the resources is always 

 borrowed from the products of the wild flora. We need only cite 

 forest, woods, and pasture lands. Half of the territory of France 

 has not yet been put under regular cultivation, and it is estimated 

 that in the whole world the plants propagated by man do not 

 occupy the tenth part of the surfaces which they might fructify. 



Thus man has by the system of gathering become acquainted 

 with and taken possession of the resources of which Nature offers 

 him the gratuitous enjoyment. Although this mode of exploita- 

 tion is anterior and appears strange to agricultural civilization, 

 we should not fail to appreciate how necessary it was to the estab- 

 lishment of that condition. It has furnished valuable suggestions 

 as to what the vegetable kingdom contained that was useful or 

 capable of being made useful that is, has indicated all the species 

 which it was profitable to cultivate. 



While the appropriation of the products of wild flora presented 

 few other difficulties than those of trying and searching, it can 



* Varro, De Re Ricitiea, i, 2. 



f- Xiphilin, Abridjiment of the Roman History of Dio Cassius. 



X Periplus of Other, inserted in the introduction to Paul Grose's version by Alfred Le 

 Grand. 



