518 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1963 



crofter, the New England farmer, the "Okies" of the 30's, the Chinese 

 and the Indian peasant, and many others, have often been unable to 

 do, that is, he has survived on farming alone. He has on a trial-and- 

 error basis devised a system of agriculture valid for his cultural 

 equipment in his physical milieu — by planting the right crop or crops 

 at the right time, tlie subsistence farmers of the world have achieved 

 survival advantage for themselves and their descendants; those who 

 failed to follow the routine were weeded out as impartially as a sieve 

 retains those particles larger than its mesh. Hence, the problem is 

 not one of survival — they have survived — but rather one of whether 

 they are to play the role of the Trojan Horse in the Harlems, Notting 

 Hills, and their equivalents in the less-developed areas of the world, 

 or whether they will be economically, socially, and politically inte- 

 grated into our modern scientific, technological society. According 

 as this integration is or is not effective, millions of subsistence farmers 

 will achieve levels of living to which human beings in this modern 

 world are justified in aspiring, or they will continue to lead obscure, 

 poorly rewarded lives — either in the almost trackless forests or in the 

 growing slums of great cities — that are marginal to the powerful cur- 

 rents of modern technology. 



I have, for more than three decades, observed the way of life of 

 humble, primitive agriculturalists, from Mesico to Patagonia; it 

 seems fitting to close with a quotation from Eene Dubos in which he 

 uses part of a sentence from Lucretius's De Rerum Natura: 



Men come and go, but however limited their individual strength, small 

 their contribution, and short their life span, their efforts are never in 

 vain because, like runners in a race, they hand on the torch of life.* 



SELECTED GENERAL REFERENCES 



Anderson, Edgar. 



1952. Plants, man, and life. Chapter IX. Little, Brown, and Co., Boston. 

 Bareau, Jacques. 



1958. Subsistence agriculture in Melanesia. Bull. 219, Bishop Museum. 

 Honolulu, Hawaii. Ill pp. 

 Bartlett, H. H. 



1956. Fire, primitive agriculture, and grazing in the tropics. Pp. G92-720. 

 In Man's role in changing the face of the earth, edited by W. L. 

 Thomas, Jr., University of Chicago Press. 

 Bennett, Merrill K. 



1963. Longer and shorter views of the Malthusian prospect. Food Research 

 Institute Studies, vol. IV, No. 1. Stanford, Calif. 



* Rene Dnbos, "The Torch of Life." Focket Book Edition, New York, 1962, p. 152. 



