Page:The Cave Girl - Edgar Rice Burroughs.pdf/192

. Thandar desired to institute a scheme of community farming, but the works of the Cyclic Poets, with which he was quite familiar, seemed to offer little of value along agricultural lines. He regretted that he had not matriculated at an agricultural college west of the Alleghanies rather than at Harvard.

However, he determined to do the best he could with the meager knowledge he possessed of things practical—a knowledge so meager that it consisted almost entirely of the bare definition of the word agriculture.

It was a germ, however, for it presupposed a knowledge of the results that might be obtained through agriculture.

So Thandar found himself a step ahead of the earliest of his progenitors who had thought to plant purposely the seeds that nature heretofore had distributed haphazard through the agencies of wind and bird and beast; but only a step ahead.

He realized that he occupied a very remarkable position in the march of ages. He had known and seen and benefited by all the accumulated knowledge of ages of progression from the stone age to the twentieth century, and now, suddenly, fate had snatched him back into the stone age, or possibly a few eons farther back, only to show him that all that he had from a knowledge of other men’s