Introductory o 



the world over — and he certainly does not do more at 

 present— what becomes of the other nine-tenths? It is 

 not a desert, it does not lie idle; with but few excep- 

 tions, indeed, it is covered with crops of one sort or 

 another; for the world is a green world, not a brown one. 



But where crops are grown century after century, 

 millennium after millennium, no matter whether they be 

 wild or not, there must needs be tillage, and that of the 

 most thorough kind, fully deserving the name of farming, 

 though it may be carried on without steel plows, and so 

 quietly as to escape our notice. 



There are vast pasture-lands here, there are extensive 

 forests there; there are woods, jungles, heaths, moors, 

 downs, but they have all been planted; and the soil was 

 prepared in the first instance, and has been renewed since, 

 by laborers who are not less truly deserving of the name 

 of laborer than the plowman, though they do not work 

 with his implements. 



When Captain, afterwards Sir, Francis Head, traveled 

 nine hundred miles across the Pampas, he saw to his 

 surprise, first, one hundred and eighty miles of the most 

 luxuriant clover and wild artichokes; then an unbroken 

 stretch of long grass, four hundred and fifty miles wide, 

 without a weed; and finally, growing up to the base of 

 the Cordillera, a grove of low trees and shrubs. 



Man had had no hand in preparing the soil for this 

 grass and clover; man had neither sowm them nor cared 

 for them in any way: yet there they were, just as good 

 food for his cattle as if they had been grown on the most 

 orderly of human farms. Surely, then, the lands of the 

 Pampas had been "farmed" most successfully, by one 

 means or another. For the word ''farm" is said to be 



