20 WHAT THE SISTER ARTS 



such, I have no doubt, has been the burden of Agricultural admo- 

 nition and exhortation from the days of Homer and Moses. It 

 seems incredible to modern skepticism that millions of Hebrews 

 could have for ages inhabited the narrow and rocky land of Judea ; 

 and it would be hard to believe, if we were ignorant of the Agra- 

 rian law of Moses, under which, as population increased, the ina- 

 lienable patrimony of each family became smaller and smaller, 

 and the cultivation of course better and better. Very few of us 

 are at all aware of the average capacity of an arable acre, if sub- 

 jected to thorough scientific culture. Many a family of four or 

 five persons has derived a generous subsistence for year after 

 year from a single acre. The story of a farmer who was com 

 pelled to sell off half his little estate of eight or ten acres, and 

 was most agreeably surprised by finding the reward of his labor 

 quite as large when it was restricted to the remaining half as 

 when it was bestowed on the whole, was very current in Roman 

 literature two thousand years ago. Why it is that men persist in 

 running over much land, instead of thoroughly cultivating a little, 

 defying not only Science, but Experience, the wisdom of the fire- 

 side as well as that of the laboratory, can only be accounted for 

 by supposing that men have a natural passion for annexation, a 

 pride in extended dominion, or else a natural repugnance to fol- 

 lowing good advice. Surely, if Wisdom ever cried in the streets, 

 she has been bawling herself hoarse these twenty-five centuries 

 against the folly of maintaining fences and paying taxes on a 

 hundred acres of land in order to grow a crop that might have 

 been produced from ten. 



But the sinners against light and knowledge in our day have 

 far less excuse than their remote ancestors, or even their own 

 grandfathers. It was always well to urge deep plowing and the like ; 

 but so long as the plow was but a forked log or stick, with one 

 prong sharpened for a coulter, and the other employed as a beam, 

 it was hardly possible to plow thoroughly. In our day, however, 

 the advance from wooden plows through iron points nnd iron 

 mold-boards, to iron plows, steel points, steel plows, and subsoil- 

 ing, has been so signal and decisive that the shiftless creature 

 who with his two lean ponies skims and skins over the fields he 



