Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/62

 Angeles claim that their products make good food for the American table. John the Baptist and the Prodigal Son might easily have fared worse.

The bean-producing carob tree is one member of a group of leguminous trees all of which are equipped to gather nitrogen from the air and make sugars from earth materials and air and to make forage for beast (if not food for man) in nearly all the climates that circle the globe in the latitude of Washington, St. Louis, Santa Fé, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Kabul, Teheran, Jerusalem, Rome, and Gibraltar. In the southern hemisphere a similar band of bean-tree climate covers large areas in Australia, South Africa, Argentina, and Chile.

Three entirely different types of climate are found in this bean zone. See map in this book (Fig. 136.)

The Mediterrancan climate, on the western coasts in middle latitudes. This climate has a mild, slightly frosty winter with some rain which is followed by a hot dry summer. Here the carob thrives.

On the eastern coasts of the continents in middle latitudes, the American Cotton Belt, and South China, also southeastern Australia, southeastern Africa, and southern Brazil, is a climate with a frosty winter and rainy, humid, hot summer. This is the climate of the honey locust tree (gleditsia), bearing beans a foot or more in length, and also good for forage.

Type Between these two type regions. California and the Cotton Belt, is an area of arid interior, typified by Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas. In the Old World this between-region of drought includes large areas of Syria, Persia, and Afghanistan, with similar regions of large size in Argentina,