a choice of situations the forest land is invariably preferred. In North America, where there are wide areas, of open land, the agricultural operations of the semi-hunting tribes, unacquainted with the use of metal, have been thus described: “The Indians belt (coupent) the trees about 2ft. or 3ft. from the ground; then they trim off all the branches and burn them at the foot of the tree, in order to kill it, and afterwards take away the roots. This being done, the women carefully clean up the ground between the trees, and at every step they dig a round hole, in which they sow nine or ten grains of maize, which they have first carefully selected and soaked for some days in water.”* “The Mounds of the Mississippi.” Lucien Carr. The Dyho† “Highlands of Central India.” Capt. J. Forsyth. cultivations general throughout the mountainous parts of Hindostan are dependent on the forest land; and in Polynesia the land at first rescued from the forest is, after being in cultivation a few years, allowed to grow up in trees, when it is again cleared and brought under crop. ‡ “Jottings in the Pacific.” Rev. W. Wyatt Gill. To any one who has resided some time in newly-settled country and devoted his attention to agriculture the reason for this seeming waste of labour is obvious. Naturally open grass or fern land is generally unproductive until after it has been broken up and exposed to the sun and air for some time. Forest land, on the contrary, is most fertile immediately after the timber has been burned off, and is also for a time free from weeds. Forest fires and the dense luxuriant growth of shrubs that appear after the destruction of the large timber may have suggested this primitive mode of husbandry. As many of these shrubs—for instance, the raspberries that come up on clearings in North America, the poroporo (Solanum aviculare) and the Cape gooseberry (Physalis peruviana) that follow the destruction of the New Zealand bush—produce edible fruit, even the idea of agriculture may have been thus originated. The most important effect of agriculture as regards modern civilization has been the enormous increase of population it gave rise to. It has been estimated that, of pastoral nomads like the Kirghiz of Central Asia, France would support about fifty thousand, and the whole pastoral zone of northern Europe not more than a million, or about half the population of the Lower Nile Valley at the time Memphis was founded and the pyramids built. In the earliest historical period the great mass of the Old-World population was contained within a narrow zone, extending from China on the east along the southern portion of