In the Louvre at Paris is one of the noblest and most famous paintings of modern art, purchased some years ago at a cost of three hundred thousand francs. It is "The Gleaners" from the brush of the French artist Jean François Millet. It pictures three peasant women who have gone out into the fields to glean at the end of the harvest. They are picking up the grain left by the reapers, seeking the little that is left on the ground. In the background are the field, the groups of reapers, the loaded wagons and the horses bringing the garnered sheaves to the rick, the farmer on horseback among his men, and the homestead among the trees. The transparent atmosphere of the summer day, the burning rays of the sun, and the short yellow stubble are all as if they were nature and not art. In the foreground are the three gleaners, "heroic types of labor fulfilling its task until 'the night cometh when no man can work.'" One of the most beautiful stories of the Bible is the tale of Ruth, the Moabitess, who went out into the fields of Palestine to glean. "And she went, and came, and gleaned in the field after the reapers; and her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging unto Boaz, who was of the kindred of Elimilech." According to the old English law, gleaners had the right to go into the fields and glean. And those needy ones who went for the leavings of the reapers could not be sued for trespass. But it is not with reaping in art, literature, or law that we are here concerned, but with the reaper as a machine, a concrete thing, a tool, an instrument of civilization. From the earliest times until nearly the middle of the last century the cutting of grain was done by means of a hand sickle or curved reaping-hook. The sickles used by the ancient Jews, Egyptians, and Chinese differed very little from those of our own ancestors. This tool was only slightly improved as the centuries went by, and to this day the sickle may be seen in use. In many parts of the British Isles the reaping-hook gave place to the scythe in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. An attempt to trace the idea of a machine for reaping would carry us far back into the early stages of agriculture; Pliny, the Roman writer, born early in the first century of the Christian era, found a crude kind of reaper in the fields of Gaul. For the great modern invention of the reaping machine, civilization is indebted to Cyrus Hall McCormick, an American.