FOOT-PLOW AGRICULTURE COOK. 491 



seeing that the northern nations have become so largely dependent 

 upon a Peruvian plant (the potato), the same crop that was the 

 chief basis of foot-plow agriculture in Peru. That the laborious 

 native system of plowing the potato lands has survived the Spanish 

 conquest is easy to understand, since the Spanish colonists had noth- 

 ing better to take its place. Spanish methods of plowing with oxen 

 are now in general use in the dry intermediate valleys of Peru, where 

 maize and wheat are the principal crops; but these methods are 

 poorly adapted to the sod-lands of the potato belt in the higher alti- 

 tudes. The primitive plows of dry Mediterranean countries serve 

 merely for breaking and stirring the surface soil, not for cutting and 

 turning a tough sod. Even a name for sod seems to be lacking in 

 Spanish. The Quichua word is ckampa, but in Quichua-Spanish 

 dictionaries champa has to be explained as " turf of earth with roots " 

 (cesped tie ti-erra- con razees), or "clod of turf" (terron de cesped). 

 Although the potatoes and the other Andine crops are not con- 

 fined to the soils that have to be broken by the foot plow, this im- 

 plement may well symbolize the agriculture of the highlands. A 

 special problem was presented by the mountain grasslands, and w T as 

 solved by means of the taclla. The native hoe, or Tampa, sufficed for 

 the agriculture of the intermediate belt, and the axe or the cutlass 

 for the milpa system of the more tropical valleys where new clear- 

 ings are cut and burned each year. The foot-plow system is like 

 milpa agriculture in that the land is planted only at intervals, but 

 in other aspects — climate, soils, crops, implements, and methods of 

 farming — it is widely different. 



