10 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FARM 
and shears were of steel. Their chief dependence for food 
was placed in cereals and vegetables whose seeds they brought 
with them from across the seas. Their social habits were 
those of a people that had long known the arts of tillage and 
husbandry: their civilization was based on settled homes. 
But they brought with them into the wilderness only a few 
weapons, a few tools, a few seeds and a few animals, and for 
the balance and continuance of their living they relied upon 
the bounty of the woods, the waters and the soil. 
A little earlier there lived in your locality a race of red men 
whose cruder tools and weapons were made of flint, of bone 
and of copper; who planted native seeds (among them the 
maize, the squash, and the potato), and whose traditions were 
mainly of war and of the chase. These were indeed children 
of nature, dependent upon their own hands for obtaining from 
mother earth all their sustenance. There was little division 
oflabor among them. Each must know (at least, each family 
must know) how to gather and how to prepare as well as how 
to use. 
Today you live largely on the products of the labors of 
others. You get your food, not with sickle and flail and 
spear, but with a can-opener, and you eat it without even an 
inkling of where it grew. So many hands have intervened 
between the getting and the using of all things needful, that 
some factory is thought of as the source of them iustead of 
mother earth. Suppose that in order to realize how you have 
lost connection, you step out into the wildwood empty- 
handed, and look about you. Choose and say what you will 
have of all you see before you for your next meal? Where 
will you find your next suit of clothes and what will it be like? 
Ah, could you even improvise a wrapping, and a string with 
which to tie it, from what wild nature offers you? 
These are degenerate days. One had to know things in 
order to live in the days of the pioneer and the Indian. But 
