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| Name |
Marion I. Newbigin |
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| Address |
Macmillan and Co. Ltd., London 1910 |
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| Country |
United Kingdom |
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| Category |
Book Review |
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| Title |
Tillers of The Ground |
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| Details |
Today, science is just at the click of mouse, but at the beginning of the last century, it was still being researched and written about. Published in 1910, this book is scientific literature in its nascent stage. The author recreates the history of agriculture around the necessities, fulfillment, changes and advancements. The book has been written with the belief that inspiration and not information should hold key to the narrative in the books being written about science.
The ingenuity of the natives in making use of the last drop available for the irrigation finds mention in a vivid picture of a family mansion, that apart from the furniture has water jars, “One of the jars leaks a little, so the prudent Indian has planted three spears of Indian corn under the drip – this is “irrigation” on the small scale.” The skilled British farmer had very little land for tilling so he moved to United States, Canada, New Zealand, and India and spread agricultural practices almost all over the globe, beating the natives (It is a different matter that while productivity did increase in many cases, sustainability declined. Further, this is no apology for colonial expansion. Ed).
Agriculture today owes everything to the workers as well as numerous scientists, botanists, travellers who toiled for years to get the desired results. There is an interesting anecdote of Tajima Mori, a Japanese for whom it took nine years to get the citrus plants from nearby China, some 2000 years ago. Again it took 19 years for farmers to experiment with the cultivation of Smyrna fig in American desert successfully. This could happen only because the farmers did not remain content with the ignorance and agreed to spend lives in toilsome instead of the direct productive work. Yet the task is not finished, and (in the words of the author) “… it is ours to aid it either by our work or by our sympathy with the workers. Only thus we can carry on the work which the men of the Stone Age began.”
After spreading the Agriculture, the toilers started plant breeding, hybrids, grafting. The author also conjures the picture of baffled farmers wondering what connection barberries and mildew had in the wheat field. Fighting, defeating, recovering from the diseases, became an additional step in the development of agriculture. From the hard toiler, man has become the controller of agriculture. There is an example of gardeners in Paris, who regulate the yield of the flowers and the fruits according to festivities that might change dates every year.
Treatment
The style is narrative and lucid. Each chapter arrests the attention and leaves yearning for more. Explanations with the help of the examples add to the zing. All through the tone is inspiring. History of agriculture is dotted with the people who worked hard for years, failed, yet restarted. “We have failed; we must begin again.” Burbank spent twenty six years on his experiments with lilies (lilium sp.) to improve them by crossing. After crossing the lilies, he would wait for a long time till they flowered, as lilies grown from the seed do not flower for some years. With time and patience any type of plant can be made (or modified), as was proved by the great Dutch botanist de Vries. On an excursion in Holland he spotted a ‘four- leaved’ clover plant. He brought the plant and cultivated it for “three long years” to get higher yield of four leaved plants. Collecting the seeds of these, he then planted more of them and continued the experiment for nine generations. He succeeded in procuring clover plants with four, five, six, and seven-partite leaves.
When a farmer laments over his blackened potatoes the man of Science steps in to say, “Courage!..... We can perhaps prevent the same thing happening again.”
It would be wise for our generation to venerate and preserve the age old efforts of tilling the land and add on to the goodness of the Earth.
And that is also the message of Honey Bee Network. |
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| Volume No. |
Honey Bee 19(3): 19, 2008 |
