Selecting the Farm 67 



machines should be by right husky men, well 

 conditioned for length of years. 



The coming of the machine has made the entire 

 Valley — like other valleys — an accessible neigh- 

 borhood and has shortened its length from fifty 

 miles to sixty minutes. And if the owner turns 

 tiu-tle, he may report by telephone at the first 

 farmhouse. So a stroke of invention has made 

 neighbors of us all. This too makes for health. 

 No longer the sickness that comes from isolation; 

 no more the bad fruit-farming that comes from 

 not knowing what your thoughtful neighbor is 

 doing. So the Valley is improving, if by no more 

 than by active imitation. The tradition that 

 farming is health is thus borne out. The weaklings 

 sell out and emigrate, and the fittest survive. For 

 more than half a century now the process of natural 

 selection has been active in the Valley, and to-day 

 the survivors themselves are passing through the 

 winnowing process. Clearly the Valley illustrates 

 the effect of domestication on man. Possibly the 

 process has been hurried a little with land at from 

 four hundred dollars to one thousand dollars an 

 acre; but at a thousand an acre some land in 

 the Valley is cheap; and at one dollar an acre 

 other land within it is expensive. It depends 

 upon climate and the man, rather than upon the 

 land. The man depends upon his health. Thus 

 again we come to the man, and this means, when 

 reduced to lowest terms, to the state of his health. 

 Invalidism may possibly be an avocation but never 



