Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/702

684 to diminish that wealth will force the herdsmen to seek a supplement to their subsistence in temporary cultivations. Compelled to periodical migrations, they would adopt, in preference to fruit trees propagated from the wild state by sedentary hunters, a few plants of rapid vegetation, like the cereals, and particularly barley, which matures in a short time. Fields are thus occasionally sown around provisional encampments, an intermittent kind of agriculture, consistent with the care of the herds, as appears among Arabs of the Tell in Algeria. In especially favorable regions agriculture gained the preponderance, and the richness of the harvests, accruing more rapidly than that of the herds, attaching man at last to the ground, caused him to change his method of life.

Still, the first men who gave themselves up to regular consecutive work in the fields did not take their place without difficulty in a barbarous world. Antagonism and war would not fail to break out between the pastoral populations, jealous of their rights of way and of pasturage, and the agricultural populations, which, appropriating the ground put under cultivation by them, assumed to reserve the fruits to themselves. The contest between these rival interests and opposing customs occupied a period in the history of the ancient peoples, In the long run the agriculturists, more civilized, more numerous, and better united, at last carried the day, took possession of the most fertile lands, and drove the herdsmen into the steppes and the deserts, the only regions where their system could be perpetuated in its primitive purity. So, when pasturage and agriculture were developed in concert, a marked classification was worked out between the two professions; and while, in the beginning, such gods as Apollo, Mercury, and Pan, or such kings as those of the Vedic age in India and of the Homeric cycle in Greece, were not degraded by keeping herds, the shepherds lost in consideration as the agricultural system became more prevalent, and the business of attending to the cattle fell more and more to the farm servants.

The moment when man sought the chief support of his life in agriculture is one of the most important dates of history, and opened the decisive era of civilization. Till then, hunter or fisherman, he lived chiefly upon his catches, free or domesticated, and, superior to carnivorous species, he differed from them only in having a more intelligent method of hunting. When he became an agriculturist, he rose above all the animals by a manner of living without analogy among them. He made the land his domain, cut down the forests, plowed the ground, and propagated by industry the plants useful for his wants. From that time he had at his disposal incomparably vaster resources than he could draw from animals. His comfort, henceforth assured, depended