Those people come up, too, from the south and the south-east, and have
to go back thither for seed if their sowings fail. Of course they like
their animals tame, like the other fellows; but the grasses are their
first string, as we bow-men say.

Southward, enveloping the Alpine ridges, except where the snow peaks
perforate its carpet covering, the Woodland changes its character,
rather than gives place to anything fresh along the shores of the Lake
Region of the Old World. Here and there, in detached plateaux enfolded
among the ranges (like the Salt Lake basin and the Shoshonean plateaux
in America), there are isolated grassy plains, repeating on a smaller
scale the great grassland which skirts the Black Sea and the Caspian.
Examples are the heart of Spain and of Asia Minor, and the miniature
grasslands of the Balkan Peninsula, such as Thessaly and Eastern Thrace.

It is in the southern third, or thereabouts, of the continuous Woodland,
where the deciduous forest trees begin to give place to evergreens, as
they themselves replaced the conifers further north, that the minutely
subdivided horticulture and arboriculture begins, which characterize the
Mediterranean region. To call it agriculture would be to exaggerate its
scale. It is more like a northerly extension of tropical _Hackbau_, as
the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough
and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than
earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which
the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work
their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a
cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how
truly in this kind of farming the ox is in place of a house-slave to a
poor man. For the house-slave could handle a _zappa_, the spadelike
Levantine hoe, where an ox would fail to turn round, yet where