102 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



Let us turn next to the third great area where, comparatively late, 

 a complex civilisation grew up, that of the forest belt of Central and 

 Western Europe. Here the conditions appear relatively so unfavour- 

 able that man could scarcely have solved the problem of fixing himself 

 permanently to particular areas, and adapting himself to them, were 

 it not for the help of the experience gained elsewhere. The great 

 agent in transmitting that exjDerience was, of course, first the Roman 

 Empire, and then the Church which was the direct heir of the empire. 



The essential difficulty here was that the characteristic plant 

 formation was the closed temperate forest. At first sight there appears 

 to be within it no line of weakness along which cultivated plants 

 can be intercalated, and thei establishment oi cultivation seems to depend 

 upon the complete destruction of the natural vegetation, involving the 

 slow and peculiarly laborious clearing of the forest. The significance 

 of this is admirably illustrated by Mr. Delisle Burns when, in his 

 ' Greek Ideals,' lie conti'asts Aristophanes' laudation of the agricultural 

 life in the ' Peace ' with that of the free and noble life in the forest 

 as set forth by Shakespeare in ' As You Like It. ' In the one case the 

 fig-cakes and the figs, the myrtle and violets by the well, the olives, 

 the beans, the barley and the grapes, the rain which God sends after 

 the sowing, which are the elements in the picture, all speak of man's 

 age-long endeavour to mould Nature; but the merry life under the 

 greenwood tree speaks of a thin scattered population, still finding, in 

 theory at least, that Nature unaltered yields all he needs. 



Had the temperate forest been in point of fact as continuous as 

 we are apt to assume, the problem would have been so difficult that 

 the hunter's life in the forest might have lasted much longer than it 

 did. We know, of course, that there were always ' islands ' in tlie 

 sea of gTeen, and of these the most important, from the point of view 

 of the development of cultivation, were the loess areas and the lower 

 uplands, especially those over chalk. In the former case the friable, 

 well-drained soil seems to have carried originally but scanty trees; 

 clearing was therefore fairly easy, and the cleared soil proved exceed- 

 ingly fertile. In the chalk uplands the local conditions made tree 

 growth difficult or impossible, so that land was again readily available 

 for crops or pasture. 



We have, therefore, as our starting-point in this case scattei'ed 

 settlements in tlie woods — not compact ones like those of the Mediter- 

 ranean region. In essentials these were doubtless quite comparable to 

 tliose made l)y fugitive Serbs in the Slnmiadja, from which modern 

 Serbia finally took origin, though the first foci were almost certainly 

 the natural clearings already mentioned. As in the case of the Serbs, 

 the basis of life was a combination of pastoral industries and arable 

 farming, the pig being the most important source of animal food, and 

 itself finding most of its food in the woods marginal to the settlement. 



As to tlie next stages, the surrounding wood must be regarded from 

 two points of view. Initially it formed a protection, the protective 

 influence being strongest where the land was ill-drained, owing to 

 the dense thickets which covered the marshy ground. But, in contrast 

 to both the types of region already considered, given the necessary 

 tools for the clearing of the land, the particular type of cultivation 



