Page:Natural history of the farm.djvu/14

10 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 of labor 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 instead 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