94 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



long as they lived by sheep-farming and marauding, prohibited 

 agriculture under pain of death. This severe interdict of a peace- 

 ful pursuit originated, not as some have supposed in the desire to 

 foster the warlike spirit of the people, but rather in a perception 

 of the fact that "the man who plowed up a bit of land infringed 

 thereby on his neighbor's right of pasturage." By this act he 

 became in a certain sense guilty of treason against pastoral 

 society, the very foundations of which, the green sod, he broke up 

 and destroyed with his plowshare. He not only restricted and 

 reduced the actual area of grazing, but also struck a blow at the 

 life of a cattle-rearing community. The practical workings of 

 this crude and clannish conception of patriotism are recorded, as 

 Mr. Wallace observes, on the pages of Byzantine annalists and 

 old Russian chroniclers, who describe the periodical havoc of 

 farmsteads committed by the nomadic tribes which from time 

 immemorial had roamed the vast plains north of the Black and 

 Caspian Seas, razing the houses, ravaging the fields, and leaving 

 the bodies of the husbandmen as food for vultures. 



The roving Bedouins, dwellers in the desert, as their name im- 

 plies, despise the cultivators of the soil and call them contemptu- 

 ously fellahin (plowers, boors) ; and their kinsmen the Anasis 

 (andst, men) hover on the borders and levy blackmail on the vil- 

 lages of Syria. It is also significant for the persistency of this 

 primitive point of view that the Arabic word for agriculture 

 (faldhat), should also mean "fraudulent traffic/' as though the 

 permanent possession of a piece of land and the exclusive use or 

 sale of the products of the soil were in themselves swindling 

 operations. 



These facts of to-day suffice to show the kind of opposition 

 which Zarathustra had to face in his efforts to establish the Ira- 

 nians in fixed settlements and to accustom them to the acquisition 

 and proper utilization of landed property. In order to accomplish 

 this purpose it was necessary to teach the holiness of husbandry 

 and to invest seedtime and harvest with the sanctity of religion. 



The Mormons, after their migration to Salt Lake, where the 

 very existence of the community depended upon converting the 

 desert into a garden, inaugurated the same policy, declaring 

 through the mouth of their prophet that the human race could 

 be redeemed and paradise regained only by means of tillage and 

 making agriculture a sacred vocation and the pursuit of it a 

 prominent part of their creed. 



The priests of the old deva cult, the progenitors of the Brah- 

 man s, on the other hand denounced Zarathustra as a schismatic 

 and a renegade, a contemner of the gods and blasphemer, a scorner 

 of ancient custom and subverter of social order. They therefore 

 opposed the innovation and fought for the faith of their fathers 



