Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/704

686 in which their cultivation was established as the center whence it radiated to different quarters. By this induction we are authorized to affirm that agriculture was first established in that part of the ancient world which also furnished the most useful species of animals for domestication. Asia has, in fact, contributed most of our fruit trees, cereals, and economical and industrial plants. The fertile valleys of the Euphrates, the Nile, the Ganges, and the Yang-tse-kiang were acquired to agricultural civilization very early. While we are not able to say which is entitled to priority, we can distinguish two principal centers of cultivation in the ancient continent—one in the southwest of Asia (Mesopotamia and Egypt), and the other in the east (China, India, and Indo-China). The former, which seems to have been the more important, propagated barley, wheat, the vine, flax, etc. The second acquired rice, tea, sugar cane, the mulberry, cotton, etc. A third center, more tardily constituted in intertropical America, gave us Indian corn, the potato, tobacco, etc. The north of Asia, Europe, South America, the United States, and Australia have furnished very little.

Without regarding the negroes and the American populations, which, continuing nearly in their original savagery, and having not even risen to the pastoral system, could give only an extremely limited aid to the establishment of agriculture, the credit of having introduced high cultivation can be disputed only by the three races which shared the dominion of the ancient continent. The claims of the Mongolian race are distinct enough in consequence of its long isolation. Some of its peoples have preserved their nomadic customs. Only China and its annexes adopted the new method of living. Yet, although agriculture has been long honored there, its general advance has been less evident than elsewhere, and the Middle Kingdom has hardly got beyond the practice of a highly perfected gardening. The claim of the Semitic race is based upon the record of the two ancient empires, Chaldea and Egypt, which were truly initiators. Yet, although it seems to have given the first example, it had not the honor of making the most decisive advances. Both pastors and cultivators, the Semites perhaps made the most material contribution to the passage from the former kind of life to the other. The pre-eminent agricultural race was that of the Aryans, which only exceptionally ever led a pure pastoral existence, and the name of which is associated with a root from which is derived also the word arare, to plow—as if the Aryans, to distinguish themselves from the nomads who surrounded them, desired to give themselves the characteristic appellation of plowmen In Europe, and under