The wealth they thus amassed was scanty and transitory; but when their successors, the neolithic peoples, appeared with domesticated animals, an agriculture, a beginning of sedentary life and city building, and, ere long, devised the excavation of ores wherewith to fashion weapons of bronze, the land areas suitable for these occupations soon became the centres of ethnic life and property. I need not pursue the story of the growth of these prime industries: the cultivation of the soil, the domestication of animals, the exploitation of mines, the transformation from a wandering to a sedentary life, from vagabondage to the hallowed associations of a home, and the effects which these changes wrought on the sentiments and intellects of tribes. What I wish particularly to point out is that what man asks from the soil is primarily nutrition,—only nutrition, a living. It is the “food-quest” which has been so vividly portrayed in American primitive life by Mindeleff and so fully set forth by Mason: the tribe enslaved by the soil; its laws, religion, customs, hopes, and fears wrapped up and submerged in the desperate strife for food. Only where there is a surplus, where wealth rises above want, is it possible for the group to free itself from this bondage to the clod,—to become more than an “adscript of the glebe.” The relations between man and the fauna and flora of the region he inhabits are constant and intimate. The progress of civilisation has been traced by Pickering and others in the distribution of plants cultivated by man for his food, use, or pleasure. They have been rightly named by Gerland “the levers of his elevation.” Especially the cereals supplied him a regular, appropriate, and sufficient nutrition. Their product was not perishable, like fruit, but could be stored against the season of cold and want. Their cultivation led to a sedentary life, to the clearing and tillage of the soil, to its irrigation, and to the study of the seasons and their changes. The grain, once harvested, still required preparation to become an acceptable article of food. It must be soaked or crushed and in some way cooked. These processes stimulated inventive ingenuity, encouraged regular labour, and required specialisation of employment. In the hunting and fishing stage of culture the fauna supplies the chief articles of food. To obtain it was man’s earliest school of thought. He had to surpass the deer in swiftness and the lion in strength, or devise means to circumvent them. We find the early cave-men had accomplished as much. They prepared pitfalls for the mammoth, traps for the sabre-toothed tiger, foils for the fleet reindeer, and did not hesitate to encounter even the formidable rhinoceros. Nets, hooks, and fishing-gear were thought out with which to lure and ensnare the denizens of the streams.