MILPA AGRICULTURE—COOK. 321 
sufficient for grasses. Trees, shrubs, and many perennial plants have 
deeper roots than the grasses and are more resistant under desert con- 
ditions. Many regions too dry for grasses support a growth of 
“scrub” or open forest. With the menace of fire removed and with 
time enough, the forest always becomes dominant and eventually 
drives out the grasses entirely, except from very rocky or broken 
country. The small annual grasses that spring up in the short rainy 
season of deserts are not to be confused with the perennial grasses of 
more humid regions. 
PASTORAL PERIODS SECONDARY. 
In view of the biological limitations of the grassland type of vege- 
tation, wide areas of open country in tropical and subtropical regions 
should be considered as generally resulting from previous agricul- 
tural occupation. In the Old World as well as in the New, agricul- 
tural activity traces back to the prehistoric period, as shown by the 
wide distribution of agricultural terraces and megalithic stonework 
from the Malay region and southern Arabia to the British Isles. 
Pastoral Semites overran decaying oriental civilizations in early 
times, much as Rome was submerged in later centuries by the northern 
barbarians. 
All through the history of China we meet with the same old tale, such as the 
experiences of Egypt, Syria, and Persia have made familiar, of a never-ending 
conflict between the desert and the sown. * * * China is the tilled land, the 
home of a settled agricultural and commercial people, with farms and villages 
and market towns, rich with cornfields, orchards, rice fields, planted with sugar 
cane, cotton, and mulberry, whose rivers and roads swarm with traffic and the 
busy competition of peaceful industry and trade. But all through their long 
history this people has been engaged with varying fortune in an unending strug- 
gle with the wandering, pastoral tribes beyond the borders of cultivation; 
* * ¥*, These people gather as the clouds gather and burst as the clouds break 
in rain, but they have no enduring form or substance. From first to last they 
are combinations of the same wild, elemental, lawless, tent-dwelling wanderers, 
strong with the animal strength of a free, open-air life, who follow their flocks 
and herds wherever the grass is sweet and the water sufficient, but never settle 
down in fixed habitations anywhere to learn habits of industry * * *,5 
In the opening chapters of the Dawn of History, Myers also has 
gone further than most historians in recognizing that higher types 
of agriculture or of civilization are not likely to have been developed 
by pastoral peoples, but does not consider that the pastoral state may 
be a secondary development, consequent upon the formation of grass- 
lands and the domestication of animals in earlier agricultural periods. 
Many of the regions that have been given over to the nomads in 
historic times are known to have been the seats of former agricultural 
5 Clennell, W. J., 1917, The Historical Development of Religion in China, pp. 161-163. 
