10 



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'NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FARM 



and shears were of steel. Their chief dependence for food 

 was placed in cereals and vegetables whose seeds they brought 

 with them from across the seas. Their social habits were 

 those of a people that had long known the arts of tillage and 

 husbandry: their civilization was based on settled homes. 

 But they brought with them into the wilderness only a few 

 weapons, a few tools, a few seeds and a few animals, and for 

 the balance and continuance of their living they relied upon 

 the bounty of the woods, the waters and the soil. 



A little earlier there lived in your locality a race of red men 

 whose cruder tools and weapons were made of flint, of bone 

 and of copper; who planted native seeds (among them the 

 maize, the squash, and the potato), and whose traditions were 

 mainly of war and of the chase. These were indeed children 

 of nature, dependent upon their own hands for obtaining from 

 mother earth all their sustenance. There was little division 

 of labor among them. Each must know (at least, each family 

 must know) how to gather and how to prepare as well as how 

 to use. 



Today you live largely on the products of the labors of 

 others. You get your food, not with sickle and flail and 

 spear, but with a can-opener, and you eat it without even an 

 inkling of where it grew. So many hands have intervened 

 between the getting and the using of all things needful, that 

 some factory is thought of as the source of them instead of 

 mother earth. Suppose that in order to realize how you have 

 lost connection, you step out into the wildwood empty- 

 handed, and look about you. Choose and say what you will 

 have of all you see before you for your next meal ? Where 

 will you find your next suit of clothes and what will it be like ? 

 Ah, could you even improvise a wrapping, and a string with 

 which to tie it, from what wild nature offers you? 



These are degenerate days. One had to know things in 

 order to live in the days of the pioneer and the Indian. But 



