GRASSLAND AND FARMLAND—SMITH 365 
anything outside the three great valleys. The Chinese method of 
cultivating rice in the paddy fields conserves soil perfectly and adds 
a touch of fertilizing mud. The other fertility device is that of col- 
lecting human excrement and returning it to the land. The Chinese 
have systematically applied this device for many centuries. It is 
well-nigh impossible to overestimate its importance as a means of 
support to Chinese civilization. Thus, fertility, enduring or pre- 
served, stands out as the basis for the development and endurance of 
the Chinese civilization. These factors gave to these people the 
combination of time and continuity similar to that which accompanied 
the rise of cultures in Egypt and Mesopotamia. 
The Chinese received many culture aids from the outside, but they 
devised their own system of writing and made many important inven- 
tions on the basis of their own native wit and the stimuli from the 
ancyiciser 
Whi GRASSLANDD 
Ficure 6.—The Eurasian grassland, as shown by Mackinder in “Democratic Ideals 
and Reality,” Henry Holt & Company. Note the scale of miles. 
Near East and India. China may be regarded as one of three subse- 
quent cultures that leaned heavily in their beginnings on culture ele- 
ments from the three great irrigated valleys. 
Culture elements traveled northwestward as well as northeastward 
from the centers of its beginning. Between 2000 B. C. and 1400 B. C. 
the Island of Crete was one of the most highly civilized places in the 
world. There is evidence that the people of Crete learned from the 
people of Mesopotamia by way of Anatolia and the stepping stones 
furnished by the Aegean Islands. Knowledge also must have traveled 
by direct voyages to Egypt, only 340 miles distant, there is so much 
evidence of interchange between the isle and the Nile. 
The Aegean culture was spreading from island to island, and had 
produced the famous cities, Tiryns and Mitylene, on the mainland of 
Greece, whose cultural remains, so unlike those of the Classic Greeks, 
