THE FIRST efforts at directing the forces of nature and employing them in the service of man were made by the farmer. The task of growing food was quite the most important of primitive occupations, and although the virgin soil was rich and the yield abundant there were regions where crops could not be raised except at the expense of constant toil. Infrequent rains made it necessary to carry water by hand from wells and rivers and pour it over thirsty lands. As the grain fields grew more extensive, irrigating ditches were used which saved the toil of carrying the water, although it still had to be raised by hand. Then machines were invented by which water could be raised by animal power and, finally, as we have already seen, automatic water-lifting machines were constructed by which the river itself was constrained to lift a part of itself and pour this part into the irrigation ditches. While it is true that the earliest machines were built to lighten the work of the farmer, the attention of inventors was soon attracted to other fields of endeavor and the farmer was left to toil slavishly from daybreak to sundown with no further mechanical aid. The tools he used were improved in form and quality. Oxen were used to draw the plow. The wooden plow made out of a forked stick gave way to a bronze plow and, finally, to one of iron. The curved knife or sickle went through a similar process of evolution from flint to iron. It was the only implement used for cutting the standing grain, and not until comparatively recent times did it give way to the scythe. Practically all the work of tilling, seeding, cultivating, harvesting and threshing was done by hand in practically the same way and with practically the same tools from the time of the Pharaohs down to the end of the eighteenth century. THE FIRST HARVESTING MACHINE To be sure, there is a record of a harvesting machine built in Gaul, while that province was under Roman dominion. Pliny described this machine in 70 A. D. It consisted of an ox cart which was _pushed_ through a field of grain, instead of being _pulled_ by the ox. This cart carried a rack or comb which caught the heads of the standing grain, tearing them off and delivering them into the body of the cart. Unfortunately this primitive, but useful, harvester was not extensively employed and in time it was lost to agriculture. Farmers reverted to the time-honored method of reaping by hand and the ox-pushed machine was forgotten. From time to time in recent years this machine has been reinvented and a machine similar in principle is used to-day to gather clover seed.