Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/468

452 from the barbaric hoe to the civilized plow is to be seen as it first took place in the world. Egypt may possibly have been the birthplace of the plow; but so many forms of rude plows are to be found represented on coins and sculptures of the ancient world, that it is safer to be content with the general idea that they are enlarged and transformed hoes, without attempting to fix the date, place, and nation to which this inventive transformation belongs. The following figures



are selected from those copied by Ginzrot and Rau. The old Syracusan form (Fig. 6), as likewise some old Etruscan patterns, is remarkable as being so close to the original hoe pattern as not to have the tail or handle. This want is supplied in other rude forms of ancient Italy, of which Fig. 7 shows one. A more angular Roman form is thought to represent the ceremonial plow, with which the wall-line was traced in founding a new city, and Fig. 8 is another archaic form; the projection of the pole behind was for the plowman's foot to press the share down:

Fig. 9 is Greek, from an early MS. of Hesiod's "Works and Days." Looking at forms of plow as rude as these to be seen at this day in Asia and in backward countries of Europe, one wonders to find that already in classic ages the husbandman had plows of construction far



more nearly approaching that of our best modern implement-makers. Pliny (xviii, c. 48), after describing the simpler kinds of plow, mentions that in Rhætia a plow with the addition of two small wheels had