CHAPTER V 

 Thei Wilj> Wheat of Palestine 



I. The Importance and Antiquity of Agriculture 



Foe some hundreds of thousands of years primitive 

 man was a hunter who knew nothing of either cultivated 

 plants or domesticated animals. Towards the end of the 

 long Stone Age, the way to civilization was opened through 

 the introduction of agriculture and through the taming 

 of the dog, the ox, the sheep, the pig, the horse, and other 

 denizens of the woods and plains. 



The cultivation of plants and the breeding of animals 

 for food greatly diminished the danger of starvation, and 

 enabled primitive man to give up his nomadic habits and 

 to live in villages. The grouping of families together in 

 settled communities led to the development of an ever more 

 complex social existence and consciousness with the re- 

 sult that there have been differentiated such remarkable 

 social organisms as those represented by France, Italy, 

 the United States, and Great Britain, with their dense 

 populations, their innumerable towns and cities, their 

 complex civic life, their public buildings, their literatures, 

 their laws, their art, their science, their music, their manu- 

 facturing machinery, and their wonderful means of com- 

 munication and transportation. Without the discovery 

 and introduction of agriculture by primitive man it is 

 certain that not one of the world's great cities, nor even 

 a town of one thousand inhabitants, could ever have come 



into existence. 



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