2 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



and different stages of civilization, and also as it is practiced at 

 the present time in various climates and among various peoples. 

 Such knowledge is fascinating, it is cultural, and it is practical 

 all in the highest degree ; it therefore has three important quali- 

 ties which should entitle it to a place in any system of education. 

 It is fascinating because it acquaints us with the basic facts of 

 human experience, not only during that brief span of human life 

 commonly called the historical period but during that vastly greater 

 and more important period which lies back of the dawn of re- 

 corded history. The efforts of our ancestors for untold genera- 

 tions to wrest a living from nature have exercised their inventive 

 faculties and strained their powers of reason and imagination 

 more than any other group of problems, not even excepting those 

 of war and religion. By some mysterious process, or the alchemy 

 of heredity, we have deposited somewhere in our present human 

 nature a fundamental instinct for contrivance which delights to 

 exercise itself in the study of these oldest human problems. Not 

 even the city dweller, born and bred in the pent-up quarters of a 

 town, can rid himself of these elemental human instincts. Just as 

 the squirrel in captivity continues to obey the primal impulse to 

 hoard ; just as the captive bird feels an impulse to migrate with 

 the recurrence of the migratory season ; so the city dweller every 

 spring, with the recurrence of the planting season, feels within 

 himself an irresistible impulse to dig. Let us not be too hasty 

 in ridiculing his feeble efforts to make things grow in a city back 

 yard. He can no more help doing what he does than a young 

 man can help falling in love or a young woman can help fluffing 

 her hair when she thinks that someone is looking at her. By a 

 similar elemental impulse the student finds a rare fascination in 

 the study of the plow that oldest and most perfect tool known 

 to the human race ; and the ox yoke in its various forms 

 the oldest implement by means of which man has utilized other 

 sources of power than his own muscles to do his work. The 

 evolution of the plow and the various forms in which it is still 

 found in operation, the multitudinous forms in which the ox yoke 

 is fashioned, and a study of the reasons for each form are among 

 the most fascinating subjects with which the mind can occupy itself. 



