THE FOOD OF MANKIND 29 



Animal Food. Practically every species of animal is acceptable: 

 Worms, scorpions, moths, grasshoppers, sandflies, crickets, locusts, 

 centipedes, caterpillars, grubs, insects and reptiles, white ants, 

 frogs, toads, lizards. Big game forms the chief supply deer, 

 antelope, elk, lion, and hyaena though most of these are but 

 seldom procurable. The Esquimaux practically live on the seal, 

 walrus, and whale ; and the Fuegians on the seal and porpoise. 

 Fish of all kinds, salmon, shellfish, clams, etc., are all made use 

 of by precibicultural maritime tribes. 



Vegetable Foods. Boots : Root-digging is a most important 

 source of food. Small seeds : It is suggested that the recognition 

 of the high nutritive value of grass seeds led to the cultivation of 

 cereals (wheat, barley, oats, rice, maize, and millets), a step which 

 was in all likelihood a forerunner of civilization. Large seeds 

 and nuts : Acorns, sunflower, cactus, water-melon, and several 

 species of pine and leguminous plants. Fruits : Many varieties 

 of fruits and berries are eaten. Green vegetables : These are 

 chiefly valued for their component salt and water. 



Fungi, seaweed, and gum are all made use of. 



The precibiculturists store their vegetable foods. He con- 

 sumes a large part of it in a raw state, while cibiculturists cook 

 nearly all vegetable foods. No existing precibiculturist has 

 learned yet how to extract starch or sugar from his vegetable 

 food materials. 



Honey forms a most important item of nutriment, except in the 

 case of the Esquimaux and Fuegians. 



THE CIBICULTUEAL EPOCH. " A great step forward was taken 

 when man began to produce food artificially, when, instead of 

 having to search laboriously for fruits, roots, and seeds, he took 

 to cultivating them ready to his hand, and when, in place of 

 spending long hours in the hunt which at best could yield but a 

 very limited supply of animal food, he learned to raise on his 

 own account flocks and herds of oxen, sheep, goats, and pigs, and 

 to breed birds of many varieties." One of the effects of the 

 cultivation of food has been to make man more vegetarian than 

 carnivorous, inasmuch as the land yields a more prolific supply 

 of vegetable materials than of animal. 



During the migratory period of agriculture, when patches of 

 virgin soil were planted and abandoned for new ones as soon as 

 the harvest was reaped, no great advance in civilization was made. 

 Man still remained a hunter, combining hunting and fishing with 

 desultory agriculture, and he still subsisted largely on the 



