4 TILLEES OF THE GBOUND CHAP. 



"happen to us if we had to live upon wild straw- 

 berries, wild crab-apples, sloes, acorns, beech-nuts, 

 and the other wild fruits and nuts of Britain. 



When we take our leave then of the old Aus- 

 tralian woman sitting huddled in her Government 

 blanket in her Government hut, we may think with 

 sympathy of the hard life led by her grandmother 

 and mother, but with our sympathy we must mingle 

 a little admiration. Her ancestors had learnt two 

 facts which our ancestors had also to learn, two 

 facts without which our life would be impossible. 

 Those ancestors had learnt something about the 

 way plants grow, that was the beginning of what 

 the botanist calls plant physiology ; they had 

 learnt also that the life of plants changes with the 

 seasons till that lesson was learnt man could 

 neither sow nor reap. 



Let us travel far away from Australia, cross 

 another sea, till we come to the forest lands of 

 Bengal, near the great Brahmaputra river. Here 

 in the dense jungles we may come upon a simple 

 people, which seem like living fossils amid the 

 civilisation of the East. These Korwas, as they 

 are called, live in little clearings of the forest. 

 They make huts of branches of the trees, and the 

 men hunt all sorts of animals in the forest as the 

 Australians hunt in the bush. In the same way 

 the women collect roots, fruits, seeds, and leaves, 



