Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/805

Rh The constant intercourse of the latter country with Mesopotamia justifies us in presuming that cultivation was almost contemporaneous in the regions of the Euphrates and the Nile. Why may it not have been quite as ancient in India and the Indian Archipelago? The history of the Dravidian and Malaysian people does not go back very far, and is very obscure; but there is no reason for presuming that cultivation, particularly on the banks of the rivers, did not begin among them a very long time ago.

The ancient Egyptians and the Phœnicians propagated numerous plants in the region of the Mediterranean; and the Aryan peoples, whose migrations toward Europe began nearly twenty-five hundred or, at latest, two thousand years before Christ, spread many species which had already been cultivated in Western Asia. We shall see, in studying the history of particular species, that some plants were probably already cultivated in Europe and Northern Africa. This is indicated by names in languages that prevailed before the Aryans came: the Finnish, Basque, Berber, and Guanche (of the Canary Islands). The remains, called Kjökkenmöddings, of the ancient habitations of Denmark have, however, as yet furnished no traces of cultivation, and no evidence of the possession of a metal The Scandinavians of that period lived entirely by fishing, hunting, and, perhaps accessorily, on indigenous plants—such as those of the cabbage kind—which were not of a nature to leave traces of themselves in the manure-heaps, and which, perhaps, did not require cultivation. The absence of metals does not imply, in those northern countries, a greater antiquity than the age of Pericles, or even of the best period of the Roman Republic. Agriculture was finally introduced later, after bronze had become known in Sweden, a country then still far from civilized lands. A sculpture of a plow, drawn by two oxen and guided by a man, has been found in the remains of that epoch.

The ancient inhabitants of Switzerland cultivated several plants, some of which originated in Asia, when they had instruments of polished stone, but not of metals. M. Heer has shown that they were in communication with the countries situated to the south of the Alps. They may, in this way, have received cultivated plants from the Iberians, who occupied Gaul before the Celts. In the period when the lake-dwellers of Switzerland and Savoy were in possession of bronze, their cultivated plants were more varied. Apparently, even the lake-dwellers of Italy cultivated fewer species when they had that metal than the people of the lakes of Savoy—a fact which may have been connected with a greater antiquity, or with local circumstances. The remains of the lake-dwellers of Laybach and of the Mondsee, in Austria, also attest a quite primitive agriculture; no cereals have been found at Laybach, and only a single grain of wheat at the Mondsee. So little advanced a condition of agriculture in that eastern part of Europe is in opposition to the hypothesis, based on some words of the