Page images
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][merged small]

vice of growing tree-crops. Since our dry farming has failed with grain-crops on ten inches of rain and upward, and theirs succeeded with tree-crops on ten inches of rain and downward, the lesson is most plain. We, too, should grow tree-crops. This preachment for the conquest of the American desert does not rest upon archæological evidence alone. It is buttressed by the much more certain fact of present practice. Olive-farming is now going on again with conspicuous success in a corner of this ancient Roman orchard. Right in central Tunis, rising above the Romant ruins, are tens of thousands of olive-trees, mature olive-trees, middle-aged olive-trees, young olive-trees, especially young olivetrees. In fact, a boom is on. Surely it will cause the American dry farmers and land-speculators to stand aghast and also cause their mouths to water when they learn that this boom has prosperously gone through a recent period of seven years when the total rainfall for the seven years was thirty-nine inches. To subsist in such drought is to us unthinkable, unless perchance we could go down into Egypt and buy grain as did Joseph's brethren. But these olive-growers, despite the thirty-nine inches of rain in seven years, did not go down into Egypt at all. They merely

stayed at home and cultivated their trees. They even planted more trees.

The

The secret is not hard to find. perennial plant, of which the tree is the highest type, is nature's great implement for fighting aridity. If there is deep water, the tree will send its roots for it. Recently an artesian-well-digger in Arizona brought up the live root of a small bush from the depth of eighty-three feet. If there is surface water at almost any season the perennial desert plant will seize it as a hungry dog seizes a bone and keep it securely for months or even years, supporting life and, if possible, maturing a crop of seed. Many and interesting are the devices by which plants have modified themselves to get and hold water in the fierce and merciless processes of adaptation, natural selection, and survival. The olive, for instance, is a deep rooter in moist subsoil or a far-reaching, shallow rooter if there is no water in the subsoil. Its leaves are glazed above and hairy beneath. If undisturbed, the foliage will completely shade its trunk, thus protecting it from the rays of the sun. Given one good drink, an olive-tree has shown its ability to survive two rainless desert summers with only a single shower between. That is why the dry farmers of Rome succeeded

[graphic][merged small]

fifteen hundred years ago, and their successors are succeeding now while our dry farmers have often failed through their dependence on the quick-growing, quickperishing annuals. In a similar extreme environment in the Mohave Desert of western Colorado and New Mexico the patient Hopi Indian fights along with a peculiar drought-resisting kind of corn. But he knows that July settles the fate of his crops. If it does not rain in July, his hope for harvest ends for a year. He must eat last year's corn or go without. No wonder he gets out his rattlesnakes and his holy men to dance before the rain god with all the combined charms of magic and religion. The stakes are great, July rain or hunger. In Africa they plow to kill all rival plants, and keep on plowing, to make the dust mulch of the dry farmer, for there is no such critical moment with the tree-crop, that natural engine of production and drought-resistance.

There is one more final piece of probable evidence that should go far to convince us that it is the present problem of the farmers in the American West that faced the ancient Roman provincials, the modern Arabs, and the French in Tunis. It is believed that in one little corner, at least, not only the Roman tree, but the

Roman olive industry, has also survived even to this day.

It takes much labor to make destruction complete. Parts of the original Carthage still stand despite its unctuous destruction by the Romans in 146 B.C. Similarly it is probable that the Roman olive industry was never so thoroughly obliterated but that each generation of Arabs has kept alive, practised, and handed on the precious knowledge of its technic. The conquering Arabs were chiefly nomads, but they were accompanied by men who wrote books about their conquests, who lived in towns, and went down to the sea in ships. The interior they devastated (El Djem and Sufetula were inland cities), but the seaports they inhabited, and held with difficulty against their marauding brethren who dwelt in tents and delighted to rob and pillage. Thus the port of Sfax on the Tunisian coast has one of the most beautiful and perfect city walls in existence. It was a necessary part of city life. up to 1881, when the French came into control. At that time, too, there were in the immediate environs of the city a few thousand acres of olive-orchard maintained, as it certainly had been for a generation or two, by a system of dry farming as perfect as that recommended by the

latest experiments in Australia, South Africa, or the American West, where the white man, for the first time in this age, has attacked the problem.

Those who know Tunis and the Arab believe for good reasons that this dry farming is a revival or survival of Roman methods. The truth or error of this claim as to origin does not, however, affect the American application, for it shows that now, as in times past, the scanty camelpasture, decked with thorn-bush and having a rainfall of less than ten inches a year, can become the home of the successful dry farmer.

What can we do about it? We can do as the Romans did. First, we can transplant these drought-resisting olive-trees to America. This has already been begun, and we are on the way to making oil in lands that we have called desert. But that is not the whole of it, but merely a type. What the Romans did was this: to take the best wild olive-tree they could find in all Africa and propagate thousands from it, as was done in the case of the one and only freak parent navel orange-tree. Most wild olive-trees are as worthless as any other thorn-bush. How many kinds of fruitful trees are there now growing wild in the world's arid lands? There are dozens, and of these dozens of kinds of trees there are several species that have specimens that are perhaps as worthy of propagation as was that one chance navel orange-tree.

We now

We have scarcely yet attacked the desert as a desert agricultural problem. We have tried to project the rain-land agriculture into it by irrigation. We have tried to conserve moisture in it by cultivation, just as we do in Illinois or Pennsylvania. That is only one half. need to turn squarely around and do the other half of it-search out from among the desert plants those that are worthy of domestication, and domesticate them to our needs. With regard to the domestication of desert trees, we are virtually in the position of primitive man when the dog was the only domesticated animal. Man knew those other big fleet-footed ani

mals capable of giving milk and wool and bearing burdens. It must have made the primitive mouth water to see them running away in the distance. So should the economic botanist and the other scientific agriculturists feel at the sight of such trees as the mesquite, the honey-locust, and the screw-bean. These are three legumes that grow wild over vast areas from Kansas and Texas to the Pacific. They yield millions of pounds of rich beans, they have been eaten for ages by wild animals, and they have saved many a pioneer team from starvation from the days of the fortyniners to the present. Now we need to harness them, just as we would harness a mountain stream to turn a mill or irrigate a garden-plot. The almond is a desert edition of the peach with no pulp, little stone, and large nutritious kernel. This staple food grows on dry hills from Spain to Turkestan and Nevada, and there are many wild varieties thriving under frightfully arid conditions in central Asia and in Nevada. I can think of few easier ways of fattening a crop of porkers than turning them out to harvest an almond crop or an acorn crop. The acorn made the pig what he is, and there are oaks that perform prodigies in the yielding of acorns and in the endurance of dry climates.

While the first great need of arid America is to domesticate new tree-crops, we should remember that that is nothing more than the Romans did. The second need follows close upon the first, the breeding of better types-types that yield more fruit, better fruit, and yield it earlier. We are only beginning dimly to appreciate our new-found ability to apply the principles. of heredity to our plant needs. The plantbreeder is now in a position to harness to our needs new forces of nature, just as the engineer harnesses fire and falling water. Once we turn an adequate body of trained men upon this problem we will be on the way to make tens and hundreds of thousands of square miles of poor Western range blossom with fruitful trees, as did once the plains around the Roman ruins of El Djem and Sufetula. Rome did it with one tree; America can have many.

[blocks in formation]

The Judgment of the Thorntons

By MARY HEATON VORSE

Author of "The Heart's Country," etc.

Illustrations by W. S. Conrow

HOSE who knew him best said that

dent which made a man as promising as Andrew Sears go to seed. Analogies like this between things that grow and the human spirit are bound to be teasing in their inexactness. The phrase "gone to seed" was most incomplete. The process of going to seed is a more generous affair than that which happened to Andrew Sears; it bespeaks a certain loose generosity, a wanton profusion of bloom some time or other, an early wasting of oneself in a splendid effort. What happened to him was more like the withering of a flower on the stalk, the contours of which maintain a semblance of themselves as they were when full of sap, and have a certain shadowy beauty in their withered. state. At a distance they even look like real flowers.

And so it happened that the work which he did from that time on was appreciation and criticism of other people's work, and scholarly enough; but insight for great criticism exists only when the great man's spirit is mirrored in the spirit of another man who is nearly his peer, and the mirror of Andrew Sears' spirit reflected only broken corners of larger minds.

When he chose to reflect a man small enough for him to see him in his entirety, a flaw in the glass, which was his own hidden bitterness, gave back a contorted, ironic outline, as though, knowing too well the limitations of his own soul, he could see with fantastic accuracy the limitations of souls like his own. The most eloquent things that he wrote at this time were on shallowness and aridity, as though

by force of contemplating these qualities,

them, watching them thwart and dwarf the generosities of men's spirits, he got to their very core, to their inner meaning, as a devotee sees the mystic heart of the thing on which his loving contemplation turns.

In writing such things he achieved a shadow of the early promise of his own genius, for of necessity we must always and forever express in terms of art the things we know the best and have felt most deeply. That which turned life into such a chill purgatory for him was the brief contemplation of himself as he really was. For a moment he had seen himself stripped down until the very inner essence of him stood out nakeď and shivering. Men put into their work, and he knew it, the essence of their own souls, the visions of themselves as they might be. The thing he had seen was not worth while putting anywhere,-so it appeared to his critical judgment,-and yet his fingers ached for the pen, and yet he must support himself, and yet he must continue to live in the world.

This all sounds as though his failure to fulfil himself was the result of a morbid brooding; but nothing was further from that. What happened to him was that curious psychological change which comes to the champion when he receives his knock-out blow, and he knows that he can never recover himself. It is n't himself that has been knocked out; it is his faith in himself that has been shaken, and somewhere in the fastnesses of his own nature he believes he can never win again.

« PreviousContinue »