38 THE BOOK OF NATURE STUDY 



One other point must, however, be touched upon. Man depends 

 largely upon the vegetable kingdom for his food. Now, as we 

 all know by experience, other things being equal, plants, within 

 limits, grow faster the higher the temperature. But the absence 

 of summer rains in places with the Mediterranean type of rain- 

 fall checks growth, and thus, without man's intervention, the 

 part of the year when growth ought to be most rapid is lost. If 

 man does not intervene, we say ; but in that vast region round 

 the Mediterranean, where civilisation rose at a very early period, 

 man learnt to intervene, learnt to supply the water without 

 which summer crops were impossible. That great Mediterranean 

 civilisation, the civilisation from which we inherited ours, was 

 nourished, in the literal sense, from irrigated land. Then, those 

 great plains in western North America which now feed Europe 

 lay uncultivated, and the men of the Old World learnt, slowly 

 and painfully, the skill, the ingenuity, the foresight, which make 

 irrigation on a considerable scale possible. The races which have 

 received their inspiration from that old Mediterranean stock, 

 have carried on the same tradition, and are noted now for their 

 engineering skill, the skill which has enabled them to bring the 

 wheat of the New World to the Old by methods which make 

 the cost of transport inconsiderable. Various interesting points 

 in this connection will be found discussed in Mr. Chisholm's pre- 

 face to The Atlas of the World's Commerce, and in the same author's 

 Commercial Geography. We need only notice here in passing the 

 contrasting conditions which occur in the monsoon regions of 

 the Far East. Here again the rainfall is seasonal, as contrasted 

 with our uniform type ; but the rainy season is the warm season, 

 so that the plants find the two necessary conditions warmth and 

 moisture co-existing. The result is that over much of the 

 area agriculture is a comparatively simple matter, and thus food 

 is relatively easy to obtain, and the population has thus become 

 enormously dense. In the East, then, another type of civilisation 

 arose, different from that of the West. Until quite recently, how- 

 ever, it was conscious of no inferiority, and no inferiority probably 

 existed, until the enormous development of machinery and methods 

 of mechanical transport occurred in the West. It is not perhaps 

 too fanciful to see in the absence of this development in the East 



