CHAPTER II 



THE BRAIN OF THE EARTH 



"¥^7" HEN the grass is wet with dew and the 

 " ^ sun is coming up over the wide reaches 

 of prairie and hill, and there is a song in the 

 throat of every bird, the farmer of the Old 

 Earth gives scant thought to the soil beneath 

 his feet, the most wonderful factor in the pro- 

 duction and sustaining of the life of the world. 

 Its strange functions, the activities of the teem- 

 ing life shut up in its dark chambers, the life 

 history of the myriads of workmen in its silent 

 factories preparing food for his wheat or his 

 barley or his corn, — all this is to him a sealed 

 volume. To him it is merely the soil his fore- 

 bears plowed, the same soil the moccasined feet 

 of the Indians softly pressed not many years 

 gone by, — a little more shopworn, so to speak, 

 than when he took it from his father, but the 

 same prosaic, uninteresting earth which he has 

 disliked from boyhood, from which he wrests 

 sometimes a generous but more often a scant 



7 



