Our Different Needs ii 



gathered together that they have to take the greatest 

 care about drinking water, in order to keep in good 

 health. To get pure water it is often necessary to bring it 

 many miles from mountainous regions where no one lives. 



Clothing is another thing that concerns us very much. 

 Our ancestors were not troubled about their clothing. In 

 the warm countries they went almost naked. Where it was 

 cold the skins of animals served very well. Changes of 

 fashion did not disturb them and cause them to throw away 

 warm covering. To supply ourselves now with clothing we 

 call upon Nature for many things. As she cannot, without 

 our help, furnish what we need, we have to keep a great 

 number of flocks, for their wool and skins, and cultivate vast 

 fields of cotton and flax. 



When Nature raised in her own way the berries, grains, 

 and roots that the first. men ate, no thought was given to 

 the soil in which these things grew. In truth, it was not 

 necessary to pay any attention to the soil. Nature is very 

 careful in her way and never makes the soil poor by grow- 

 ing more plants than it can support. In her own gardens 

 she always renews the foods in the soil which the plants re- 

 quire as fast as they take them away. 



The needs of men have increased so fast that the soil has 

 often been forced to grow more than it ought. Men have 

 been a long time in learning that they cannot keep on grow- 

 ing the same crops on the same soil year after year without 

 supplying to the soil extra foods, or fertilizers, as we call 

 them. The care of the soil is another thing to which we 

 have to give attention, but which did not worry our an- 

 cestors. 



Nature clothes the earth with a carpet of grasses, bushes, 



