HISTORY. 



The world is very old. For more ages than we 

 dream men have lived and loved, toiled, sown and 

 reaped. The history of the race is written in the 

 form, variation and characteristics of animals and 

 plants much more than in tablets of stone or pieces 

 of clay. Would you ask how long men have lived 

 on earth? Ask when first hornless cattle were kept. 

 Records in Egypt show them to have been common 

 thousands of years before the time of Christ. 

 Ask when sheep were first tamed and their fleeces 

 developed. The very race of wild sheep has per- 

 ished from the face of the earth and the sheep of 

 Abraham's day were highly developed. Ask when 

 wheat was taken from being a wild grass and made 

 a cultivated plant; when the banana ceased to have 

 seeds; the apple gathered sweetness and the vine 

 began to hang down with luscious clusters of pur- 

 pling grapes. Ask, too, when it was that animals 

 became the subjects and friends of men; when men 

 began to feed them, to gather forage for them, to 

 cultivate plants for them, to perceive which plants 

 were the best plants and which best fed the animals. 

 Ask, too, when men first saw that soils grew worn, 

 that certain plants fed soils, that other plants caused 

 them to become infertile. 



(46) 



