Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/467

Rh was dragged by hand, making small furrows; this "furrow-crook" is still used for sowing. Afterward was introduced the "plow-crook," made in two pieces, the share with the handle and the pole for drawing. The share was afterward shod with a three-cornered iron bill,



but the implement was long drawn by hand, till eventually it came to be drawn by mares or cows (Hyltén-Cavallius, part ii, p. 111). Thus in comparatively modern times a transformation took place in Sweden remarkably resembling that of which we have circumstantial evidence as having happened in ancient Egypt. The Egyptian monuments show a plow, which was practically a great hoe, being dragged by a rope by men (see Denon, "Antiquités de l'Egypte," vol. i, PI, 68), Still more perfect is the plowing scene here copied in Fig, 5 (see Rosellini, "Monumenti dell' Egitto," Pl 32, 33; Wilkinson, "Ancient Egyptians," chap, vi). Here the man who follows the plow to break up the clods is working with the ordinary Egyptian hoe, remarkable for its curved wooden blade longer than the handle, and prevented



from coming abroad by the cord attaching the blade to the handle half-way down. This peculiar implement, with its cord to hold it together, reappears on a larger scale in the plow itself, where the straight stick is lengthened to form the pole by which the oxen draw it, and a pair of handles are added by which the plowman keeps down and guides the plow. The valley of the Nile, where the lightness and richness of the alluvial soil are favored by the inundations with their fresh deposit of river-mud, was no doubt one of the regions where the higher agriculture earliest arose, and, looking at this sketch of hoeing and plowing, we might be tempted to think that here the transition