26 MAN THE ANIMAL 



soil is the native country of the genuine Tartar." Little in the 

 way of sociality is developed, though it goes somewhat farther 

 in this way than the hunting type. Beginning elements of thrift 

 and deliberate conservation of resources are a definite and im- 

 portant part of its plan. 



The agricultural way of living represents in all respects an 

 enormous advance over the two preceding types. Its philosophy 

 is much more profound. In the first place it fundamentally ex- 

 ploits directly the chemical resources of the earth as well as the 

 strictly biological resources. The soil is the farmer's '^country." 

 The underlying reasoning is as though the primitive farmer 

 said to himself something like this: "Why not always have 

 plenty of plant food, and other desirable things that come from 

 plants, for myself and my animals, by the simple device of sav- 

 ing seed each year and planting it the next. Then I shall not 

 have to work so hard to get a living. I can fix myself up a nice 

 comfortable place to live in and not have to be always packing 

 up and moving." In putting the case in this way it is not intended 

 to imply that any great number of actual farmers ever con- 

 sciously thought thus cogently and consecutively, either in the 

 dim evolutionary past or now. But however vaguely sensed this 

 is the philosophy of agriculture. It still remains at bottom, like 

 its cultural predecessors, biologically a predaceous way of living, 

 but the predacity is now ordered and controlled. The only hap- 

 hazard element theoretically left in it is what rests on vagaries 

 of climate and weather — what man has long been accustomed, 

 in one form of language or another, to call "acts of God," though 

 now to some extent improperly so. As the great legal authority 

 Wharton once {Law of Negligence 557, p. 435, 1878) said: 

 "Why is a hurricane an act of God, when by our weather-signals 

 we are able to anticipate hurricanes?" 



The advantages of the agricultural way of life over its prede- 

 cessors are manifold. It achieves much greater economic security 

 with less physical labor. The total expenditure of human labor 

 is reduced partly because of the nature of the agricultural proc- 

 ess itself, and partly because fixation to a definite territorial 



