Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/466

450 Europe. Tradition in south Sweden points to waste pieces of once-tilled land in the forests and wilds as having been the fields of the old "hackers," and within a generation there was still to he seen in use on forest farms the "hack" itself (Fig, 3), made of a stake of spruce-fir, with, at the lower end, a stout projecting branch cut short and pointed (Hyltén-Cavallius, "Wärend och Wirdarne," part ii, p. 110; i, p. 43). Even among native tribes of America a more artificial hoe than this was found in use. Thus the hoe used by the North American women in preparing the soil for planting maize, after the old stalks had been burned, is described as a bent piece of wood, three fingers wide, fixed to a long handle (see Charlevoix, "Nouvelle France," Letter 23; Lafitau, "Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquains," vol. ii, p. 76, and Plate 7). (I do not venture to copy the hoe shown in this plate: a mere fancy picture.) In other North American tribes the women hoed with a shoulder-blade of an elk or buffalo, or a piece of the shell of a tortoise fixed to a straight handle (see Loskiel, "Mission of the United Brethren in North America," p. 66; Catlin, "American Indians," vol. i, p. 121). From this stage we come up to implements with metal



blades, such as the Caffre axe, which, by turning the blade in the handle, becomes an implement for hoeing (Lane Fox, "Lectures on Primitive Warfare," No. 2, p. 10). The heavy-bladed Indian hoe (Sanskrit, kudddála), called kodâly in Malabar (Klemm, "Culturwissenschaft," part ii, p. 123), which is shown in Fig. 4, is one example of the iron-bladed hoe, of clumsy and ancient type. The modern varieties of the hoe need no detailed description here.

That the primitive plow was a hoe dragged through the ground to form a continuous furrow, is seen from the very structure of early plows, and was accepted as obvious by Ginzrot ("Wagen und Fahrwerke der Griechen und Römer," vol. i, and Klemm, "Culturwissenschaft," part ii, p. 78). The evidence of the transitions through which agricultural implements have passed in Sweden during the last ten centuries or so, which was unknown to these writers, is strongly confirmatory of the same view. It appears that the fir-tree hack (Fig. 3) was followed by a heavier wooden implement of similar shape, which