24 THE BUSINESS OF FAEMING 



sterility. In vain her Calumella sounded the 

 warning and pointed out the way for the soil's 

 restoration, but his warning and advice were 

 spurned, "the produce of the land was only four- 

 fold," the soil suffered from greater neglect, 

 remunerative crops were no longer harvested, 

 and the nation went into decay. It is no wonder 

 then that Borne 's greatest poet became imbued 

 with the hopeless creed of the fatalist when sing- 

 ing of the degeneracy of agriculture, and ex- 

 claimed : 



"'Tis thus by destiny, all things decay 

 And retrograde, with motion unperceived." 



The wise statesman Joseph gathered and gar- 

 nered corn as the sand of the sea from the fer- 

 tile valleys of the Nile, and so have generations 

 since, yet these lands would have ages ago felt 

 the blight of neglect had not old Nature sent 

 down each year from the headwaters of the Nile 

 the silt-laden floods to engulf, renew, and enrich 

 them. 



China, standing forth in the list of agricultural 

 countries, whose philosophy likens prosperity to 

 a tree with agriculture as its roots, and industry 

 and commerce as its branches and leaves, if the 

 roots suffer the tree dies, has a vast area of 

 abandoned farms once fertile and productive, the 

 reclamation of which has been called the "Prob- 

 lem of China." But even China is making a tre- 

 mendous effort to maintain the fertility of most 

 of her lands in cultivation, but she has done it 

 by using a mixture of human excrement with fat 

 marl, and by carefully saving every substance 



