Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/703

Rh on himself only, and populations increased rapidly. Under the influence of these new conditions all the elements of civilization were developed and advanced. Varied industries were constituted to give value to the productions of the earth, habits were regulated, and milder religions substituted for the bloody sacrifices of the pastoral phase peaceful offerings of wheat, meal, oil, and wine.

This memorable event of the adoption of the agricultural system by the first pioneer groups probably dated from the later prehistoric times, and could in no case have been anterior to the subjection of the auxiliary animals during the pastoral stage. The dawn of history shows us large empires, already flourishing, from three to four thousand years before the Christian era—Chaldea, Egypt, and China—enriched and civilized by agriculture. The point of beginning should undoubtedly be thrown some thousands of years still further back. Probably also the mythological traditions relative to the origin of husbandry, in which honor is rendered to deified personages, such as Ceres, Triptolemus, Minerva, Bacchus, Osiris, Noah, etc., refer not to the primary institution, which was probably effected by degrees and slowly, but to the extension of the processes, which may sometimes have been made in a very short time and would all the more strike the Imagination of the peoples. The agricultural system once fixed, the initiative of a leading innovator might introduce it by imitation into a country still barbarous, rapidly change the aspect of a district still uncultivated, and bring it, in less than a generation, to the point where territories that had already been transformed by cultivation had arrived after centuries of efforts. Those were undoubtedly benefits of this kind of which myths have transmitted the reminiscence to us. During these ages of ancient barbarity the fertility of the soils, suddenly revealed by practical sages, would appear miraculous to tribes that were acquainted only with the aridity of the steppes. The prodigy of making wheat and the vine grow where only grass and rushes had been would seem to partake of the divine, and it is conceivable that altars should have been erected to those who accomplished it. In the Oriental mythologies the conquest and distribution of domestic animals did not give rise to such legends; whence we may suppose that those achievements dated from an anterior cycle when religious conceptions, more closely related to primitive fetichism, induced the adoration of the animals themselves instead of those who subdued or introduced them, and of whom no recollection survived.

It is easier to indicate the countries in which the evolution occurred in which the pastoral system was supplanted by the agricultural. As our most valuable plants originated in regions now well determined by, botanical geography, we thus know the area