548 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



the soil. The history of agriculture is the history of civilization. Man in 

 a garden was perfect, but the farther he got away from it the more he retro- 

 graded into weakness and barbarism. Antseus-like, when he touches the 

 soil he is strong again. We may conceive of a time when man subsisted 

 upon the spontaneous productions of the soil and the easy spoils of the 

 chase, which were obtained with little exertion in that temperate and fertile 

 region, where, all agree, the human race was cradled, under the Orient 

 heaven. The first great want was food and drink. As Christianity was 

 cradled in a manger, so our material civilization was born of a sensation 

 and received its first impulse from the clamor of a physical appetite. The 

 next want was clothing and habitation, and so the second generation of 

 man began to rear animals for their skins, for domestic purposes, and for 

 food. The first agriculture was without implements. In the rich valleys 

 of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris, humanity's childhood home, 

 the lands were overflowed each year, and the primitive man sowed his 

 treasured grain upon the soft alluvium left by the subsiding waters, and 

 with his hands gathered his first harvests. Perhaps for one thousand years 

 in the history of our race no advancement was made in the art of tilling 

 the soil. It took a long time for man by experience to learn the nutritious 

 qualities of the various cereal grains. It was ages before domestic animals 

 or fertilizers were used as auxiliaries to husbandry, or implements were 

 invented to supplement the strength of human hands. The introduction 

 of implements into Egyptian agriculture can be traced in the hieroglyphics 

 upon its ancient tombs. Egypt was the cradle of agriculture, and there- 

 fore of civilization. Upon her fertile plains men first left a nomadic and 

 tribal condition to become owners of the soil and to organize society. The 

 Israelites, a race of nomadic shepherds, were kept in Egypt by Divine 

 Providence four hundred years, to learn the art of agriculture and to pre- 

 pare themselves to occupy permanently the fertile region of Palestine. 

 And so, after the exodus, we find them no longer a pastoral but an agri- 

 cultural people. 



From Egypt agriculture was introduced into Greece, where we find it in 

 a flourishing state in the time of the historian Hesiod, 1000 B. C, who 

 describes a plow used in his day, which differed in no respect from some I 

 saw the Mexicans farming with in New Mexico, in the year of grace 1881 — 

 which shows that the Mexicans are three thousand years behind the times, 

 and present an authentic case of arrested race development. The Greeks 

 had fine imported breeds of horses, cattle, sheep, and swine, three thou- 

 sand years ago. They understood drainage, fertilization, and subsoiling, 

 and raised most of the varieties of fruit now produced in the same lati- 

 tude. Much of their literature, too, was bucolic in character. The treatise 

 of Xenophon on husbandry called " Economics," shows that the Greek 

 farmers were an intelligent and reading class, and doubtless the work of 

 that dilettante man of letters on practical agriculture was as much laughed 

 at by them as was Horace Greeley's "What I Know About Farming," in 

 our day. 



Greece, however, never carried the cultivation of the soil to such perfec- 

 tion as did Rome in her palmy days. The Greek farmer had to struggle 

 against an intractable soil, to reclaim swamps and morasses and to clear 

 forests, while the unsettled state of society concentrated the population of 

 the Grecian states in the cities, to the detriment of agricultural pursuits. 

 But the farming industry was fostered from the first by the constitution 

 and laws of Rome. A tract of land was granted to every citizen by the 

 State, and each freehold was restricted to about fifty acres, which led to 

 a system of thorough culture, which is only practicable when the land is 



