Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/698

680 not found till the period of the station at Robenhausen, the most recent of the prehistoric ages. A similar condition has persisted among many peoples, not only savages reduced to the sorry resources of the animal searching, like the Hottentots, Bushmen, Fuegians, etc., but hunters, like a number of American tribes, Indians and Eskimos, and even pastoral people like the populations in Asia and Africa which live solely on the products of their flocks. Several peoples of Europe were found in a similar condition at no very ancient date. Tradition preserved among the Greeks and Romans the memory of a time when their ancestors, given over solely to pastoral industry, could neither till nor plant. At the age represented by the kitchen middens and the oldest lake stations, the aborigines of Denmark and those of Switzerland were not aquainted with any sort of cultivation. A large part of England was, not less than twenty centuries ago, plunged in the same state of savagery. "The two most numerous peoples of Great Britain," says the abridger of Dio Cassius, "the Caledonians and the Meati, to whom all the others are related, live on uncultivated mountains or in desert plains, where they have neither cities nor cultivated lands. They subsist on milk, game, and wild fruits." The narrative of the circumnavigation achieved by Other in the ninth century, on the shores of the Baltic, describes populations which lived by fishing, and makes no mention of agricultural products. Even with peoples who have given agriculture its widest developments, a notable part of the resources is always borrowed from the products of the wild flora. We need only cite forest, woods, and pasture lands. Half of the territory of France has not yet been put under regular cultivation, and it is estimated that in the whole world the plants propagated by man do not occupy the tenth part of the surfaces which they might fructify.

Thus man has by the system of gathering become acquainted with and taken possession of the resources of which Nature offers him the gratuitous enjoyment. Although this mode of exploitation is anterior and appears strange to agricultural civilization, we should not fail to appreciate how necessary it was to the establishment of that condition. It has furnished valuable suggestions as to what the vegetable kingdom contained that was useful or capable of being made useful—that is, has indicated all the species which it was profitable to cultivate.

While the appropriation of the products of wild flora presented few other difficulties than those of trying and searching, it can