10 berseem: forage and soiling CROP OF NILE valley. 



berseem or a bag full of it under his feet with whieh he feeds his horse 

 at the cab stand; every drayman has on top of his load a few hand- 

 fuls for his bullocks or horses, and the donkey boys carry a bag of the 

 freshly cut clover for their much-abused beasts. In the early morn- 

 ing all the avenues leading to Cairo are lined with long files of camels 

 and donkeys half hidden under loads of this green forage. (PI. IV, 

 figs. 1, 2, 3.) The fields on either side of the railway impress one as 

 the greenest and cleanest meadows he ever saw. Scarcely a weed is 

 in sight. (PI. VII, fig. 1.) Planters say that the culture of berseem 

 is very valuable for killing out many kinds of weeds. Not another 

 fodder crop is conspicuous enough to attract one's attention as one 

 gazes over the most beautiful agricultural checkerboard in the world. 

 It is the one great fodder crop of Lower Egypt, and about it, as it were, 

 all the other cultures are arranged. Over 940,000 acres of it were 

 grown as far back as 1891. This amount has been probably consider- 

 ably increased. 



To an American farmer clover is onty one of a number of fodder 

 crops, but to the Egyptian fellah his berseem furnishes not only his 

 principal fodder, but his principal manure as well. 



The great fertility of the Nile silt and its manurial value has been so 

 much written about that we have gotten accustomed to considering 

 Egyptian agriculture as the tillage of a perpetually renewed alluvium. 

 It will surprise some, especially farmers in the Mississippi Valley, to 

 learn that this Nile soil is so lacking in nitrogen that in most places 

 two good crops of Indian corn can not be raised in successive years off 

 the same field, and the culture of sugar cane is considered much too 

 exhausting for many Egyptian soils. This condition of affairs is not 

 to be wondered at, considering that most of the manure has for centu- 

 ries been collected by the "manure girls" and dried into cakes for 

 fuel and only the liquid elements returned to the land, mixed with dry 

 earth with which the stalls are strewn. This bad practice, carried on 

 as it has been for thousands of years, would have, according to our 

 present ideas, quite exhausted the fertility of the soil notwithstanding 

 the yearly deposits of silt had it not been for the culture of leguminous 

 crops. The action of soil bacteria is as yet too little understood to 

 demand recognition in the above statement, although it is highly prob- 

 able that bacteria play a most important part in the matter. The 

 writer never saw a region where the opportunities for soil studies 

 seemed so promising. According to Wilcox, in his Egyptian Irriga- 

 tion of 1899, no important soil analyses of Nile silt have been made 

 since 1875, and, so far as I know, no bacteriological examination has 

 ever been made of it. 



The ancient Egyptians doubtless cultivated several leguminous 

 crops, although the museums of Egyptology do not exhibit their seeds 

 because the plants seem in no way to have been connected with their 



