pted only by the treeless sea. Here too we hunt, and trap, and
eat berries of the undergrowth, like Algonkins or Tacitean Germans, many
of whom had no more skill in cattle than Algonkins. But we have not the
place to ourselves, like the tundra folk and the Algonkins. Our forest
world is in ever-present danger of disintegration, and our wood-craft
with it. Fond folk with tame animals (poor sport, both of them, for
sportsmen like us) come blundering in off the parkland away south, up
the grassy glades, trampling undergrowth and scaring the game. People
are saved from all that 'over there', because no one can tame the
prairie buffalo and drive _him_ over the hunting grounds; some sport,
too, the prairie buffalo! And worse still, there are the people who come
hacking and burning our great trees, and tearing up the turf and
underwood, and all to plant their fancy grasses with the fat seeds, that
the deer like to browse over; and that is the only thing to make those
people show fight, if we or the deer go among their fat-grass plots.
Those people come up, too, from the south and the south-east, and have
to go back thither for seed if their sowings fail. Of course they like
their animals tame, like the other fellows; but the grasses are their
first string, as we bow-men say.

Southward, enveloping the Alpine ridges, except where the snow peaks
perforate its carpet covering, the Woodland changes its character,
rather than gives place to anything fresh along the shores of the Lake
Region of the Old World. Here and there, in detached plateaux enfolded
among the ranges (like the Salt Lake basin and the Shoshonean plateaux
in America), there are isolated grassy plains, repeating on a smaller
scale the great grassland which skirts the Black Sea and the Caspian.
Examples are the heart of Spain and of Asia Minor, and the miniature
grasslands of the Balkan Peninsula, such as Thessaly and Eastern Thrace.

It is in the southern third, or thereabouts, of the continuous Woodland,
where the deciduous forest trees begin to give place to evergreens, as
they themselves replaced the conifers further north, that the minutely
subdivided horticulture and arboriculture begins, which characterize the
Mediterranean region. To call it agriculture would be to exaggerate its
scale. It is more like a northerly extension of tropical _Hackbau_, as
the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough
and spade, and employ only mattocks o