r hoes, which are little more than
earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which
the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work
their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a
cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how
truly in this kind of farming the ox is in place of a house-slave to a
poor man. For the house-slave could handle a _zappa_, the spadelike
Levantine hoe, where an ox would fail to turn round, yet where
food-plants could be coaxed to grow, and an olive-tree would luxuriate.

This kind of garden-cultivation indeed repeats very closely the
foodquest of the Muskogean cultivators in the South-eastern States, who
make up the so-called 'civilized tribes' and, almost alone among the
Redskins, 'are all self-supporting and prosperous'.[8] In the Old World,
as in the New, its distribution is closely defined by certain limits of
rainfall and temperature, and most of all by the extent to which the
rainfall is concentrated into a few winter months, so that a dry warm
summer is assured, which Man can mitigate and even exploit if he has
access to perennial water. It extended, therefore, in quite early times,
and still predominates, all round the mountainous shores of the
Mediterranean, from Syria by Southern Europe to Algeria and Tunis, and
penetrates inland and upland into the forests till summer clouds and
rainfall check it. In this region of its distribution Greek and Roman
legends betray the belief that grain-cultivation came late, and
superseded a staple diet of tree produce, chestnut, walnut, filbert, and
acorn.[9] And when the 'nobler grasses' came, it was barley and red
wheat that predominated, as indeed they predominate still.

But this is only one part of the distribution of the garden-culture. Far
north along the Atlantic seaboard, and as far inland as the mild
Atlantic climate is perceptible, the same type prevails. Its ancient
limit is traced meteorologically in Tacitus' complaints (for example) of
the austerity of the lands beyond the Rhine. In this northern region
grain crops pass from red to white wheat, from barley to oats, and from
both to rye. The ease with which the Muskogean potato and tomato have
been acclimatized, and their respective prevalence now in the Atlantic
and Mediterranean sections, illustrate exactly the place which primitive
hoe-culture held in the economy of the Old-World region. Early