Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/465

Rh want of tillage. The turning-point in the history of agriculture seems to be not the first thought of planting, but the practical beginning by a tribe settled in one spot to assist nature by planting a patch of ground round their huts. Not even a new implement is needed. Wandering tribes already carry a stick for digging roots and unearthing burrowing animals, such as the katta of the Australians, with its point hardened in the fire (Fig. 1), or the double-ended stick which



Dobrizhoffer ("Abipones," part ii, chap, xiii) mentions as carried by the Abipone women to dig up eatable roots, knock down fruits or dry branches for fuel, and even, if need were, break an enemy's head with. The stick which dug up wild roots passes to the kindred use of planting, and may be reckoned as the primitive agricultural implement. It is interesting to notice how the Hottentots in their husbandry break up the ground with the same stone-weighted stick they use so skillfully in root-digging or unearthing animals (J. G. Wood, "Natural History of Man," vol. i, p. 254.) The simple pointed stake is often mentioned as the implement of barbaric husbandry, as when the Kurubars of south India are described as with a sharp stick digging up spots of ground in the skirts of the forest, and sowing them with ragy (Buchanan, "Journey through Mysore, etc.," in Pinkerton, vol. viii, p. 707); or where it is mentioned that the Bodo and Dhimál of north-east India, while working the ground with iron bills and hoes, use a four-foot two-pointed wooden staff for a dibble (B. H. Hodgson, "Aborigines of India," p. 181). The spade, which is hardly to be reckoned among primitive agricultural implements, may be considered as improved from the digging-stick by giving it a flat, paddle-like end, or arming it with a broad, pointed metal blade, and afterward providing a foot-step (see the Roman spade in Smith's "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities," s. v. "pala"). In the Hebrides is to be seen a curious implement called caschrom, a kind of heavy bent spade with an iron-shod point, which has been set down as a sort of original plow (Rau, "Geschichte des Pflugs," p. 16; Macculloch, "Western Islands," Plate 30); but its action is that of a spade, and it seems out of the line of development of the plow. To trace this, we have to pass from the digging-stick to the hoe.

All implements of the nature of hoes seem derived from the pick or axe. Thus the New Caledonians are said to use their wooden picks both as a weapon and for tilling the ground (Klemm, "Culturwissenschaft," part ii, p. 78). The tima, or Maori hoe (Fig. 2), from R. Taylor's "New Zealand and its Inhabitants," p. 423, is a remarkable curved wooden implement in one piece. It is curious that of all this class of agricultural implements the rudest should make its appearance in