BIOLOGY OF MAN 1181 



own way not a little elephant-educated. "Chivalry", and throughout 

 the world, from Rajput and Arab to the historic West, is rightly so 

 termed; since so especially horse-educated; for only in later times, 

 with the mechanisation of speed, and its pecuniarisation too, has 

 the chivalrous given place to the "horsey". Mohammed's teaching, 

 and his dominance as well, arose not a little from his long leadership 

 of the camel-caravan: and so the youth of one Saul, a tent-maker 

 at Tarsus, by "the Cilician Gates", that greatest of old caravan- 

 junctions and passes, counts for not a little in his later life and 

 travels, as Paul the Apostle. 



CULTIVATED PLANTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE.— 



The two foremost cereals, wheat and rice, seem merely of different 

 money exchange-values to their buyers and sellers, and to such 

 classical economists as still only know "the market". Yet these 

 have also different physical and physiological values, each broadly 

 permanent for their consumers; so these are all that arithmetic, 

 physics, and physiology can inquire into. But beyond and above all 

 these there have arisen throughout their long cultivated past, their 

 very different and distinctive civilisation-results and values. 

 How so ? 



Corn. — ^W^heat — and of course with it our kindred cereals too, 

 oats, barley, etc. — has not only yielded the essential staff of life to 

 our Western world, but has been also the central type and source 

 of real life-education too, for its correspondingly fundamental 

 social class, its peasants, farmers, squires, and lords, all so agricul- 

 turally associated. Note, then, this basal labour-experience ; and as 

 strongly, and even peculiarly, individual. Each man must plough 

 alone and sow alone ; and even when harvest comes, women are but 

 minor assistants, and children are apt to be in the way. Thus the 

 property of the fields becomes increasingly individual, since thus 

 found most efficient; and the old-world spirit, with its institutions 

 of communitary life, falls away; with individual land-hunger, and 

 its adjustments, taking their place. The general attitude towards life, 

 its essential organisation and law, and with these its social philosophy 

 (often, indeed, its religious faith as well), thus becomes increasingly 

 individjialistic. Hence our old-world villages had become sources, 

 before they were sufferers, of that individualism which has next 

 been advanced with the mechanistic advances of the industrial age, 

 and well-nigh perfected as these again became subordinate to the 

 yet more potent pecuniary culture, in these times culminant. 



Rice. — But now turn eastwards to the rice-fields, and realise them 

 from Himalayas to Ceylon, and on to China, Japan, and other 

 lands, in each and all their prime resource. A fundamentally different 

 agriculture becomes manifest to every eye, yet is seldom more than 

 superficially understood by us Westerners ; still, take so much first. 



