these northern waters is good for food if properly prepared. Every decade we are discovering that some variety which has formerly been rejected is quite as good as any that we have hitherto prized. Thus far we have chosen only a few of the many varieties with which the sea abounds.

Pasturage. It would be impossible to estimate how much the civilized races of the north temperate zone owe to such domestic animals as the horse, the ass, the cow, the sheep, the goat, and the pig. All these animals have, at one time or another, furnished food for man. The horse, the ox, and the ass have furnished that which has played almost as important a part as food in man's conquest of nature, — namely, power. Before steam and electricity had been harnessed, or water power developed, these animals were almost the only sources of power besides human muscles. The skins. of all were and are still utilized, there being no very good substitute for leather even to this day. The cow and the goat have furnished, and still furnish, milk, one of our most important articles of diet. The wool of the sheep is even now, next to cotton, the most important material for the manufacture of clothing.

In their native state all these animals except the pig lived almost exclusively upon grass, either green or dried in the form of hay, and they still depend mainly upon it. Even the pig, with his omnivorous appetite and his accommodating stomach, will thrive on grass as his chief article of diet, though he needs some more concentrated food in addition if he is to make his best growth. Grass and grazing have therefore played a very important part in the economic life of that branch of the human race from which we are derived. Our ancestors were already herdsmen before they emerged from prehistoric darkness. All the animals now under domestication, and all the fowls except the turkey, were domesticated so long ago that we have no record as to where or when it occurred. It may give us a new respect for those prehistoric ancestors of ours

when we reflect that we have never succeeded in thoroughly domesticating any animal since we have had a history, though we may soon succeed with the zebra. There has never been a period, of which we have any record, from the earliest times to the present, when our branch of the human race did not depend for its subsistence largely upon the grazing animals. During the greater part of our historic life our domestic animals grazed on wild or native grasses. Feeding them upon cultivated grasses and grains will be discussed under Agriculture.

Grazing on our western frontier. From the earliest settlements in the territory now occupied by the United States, grazing has been an important industry. Following closely in the wake of the hunters, trappers, and fur traders, and in advance of the farmers, have gone the herdsmen. The wild grasses furnished a ready source of income to the man who possessed animals capable of turning them into salable products. The frontier settlements in colonial New England possessed large herds of cattle, and down to 1820 beef was one of the principal exports. Hogs ran wild in the woods, and, living as they did on roots and mast, they furnished an abundant supply of meat. Horses were exported in considerable numbers. After the danger from wolves was reduced, sheep were grown in large numbers. In Virginia and the Carolinas grazing developed even more rapidly. The cattlemen had their brands registered, they organized round-ups, and they carried on the business very much as it was carried on in the Far West in the seventies and eighties of the last century.

The herdsmen continued to move westward in advance of the more permanent settlements, but the farmers who plowed the land and harvested crops kept many animals to graze upon the native grasses which still flourished upon the unbroken lands. Before the building of the railroads great herds of cattle, sheep, and hogs were driven sometimes hundreds of miles to market in the cities of the Atlantic coast. A hog

which could not transport itself to market was not of much value; consequently not much attention was given to the breeding of the short-legged, barrel-shaped hog of the present day. The cattle, likewise, were built more for traveling than for meat. The oxen of that period, which were preferred to horses for heavy farm work, were well adapted to that purpose.

When the advance waves of settlement reached the great prairies of the West, the grazing industry entered a new phase. Those natural meadows of vast extent furnished a much more abundant pasturage than had the great forest which extended almost unbroken from the Atlantic coast to western Ohio in the central part of the country, and to the Mississippi River and beyond on the north and south. Goats and asses had never figured largely among the domestic animals of this country, but horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs had multiplied rapidly. On these Western prairies, the former home of countless herds of buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope, all of which were grazing animals, cattle and sheep were very economically produced, and would have been enormously profitable had not the prices of beef, mutton, and wool fallen so low as barely to cover the low cost of production. Dwellers in Eastern cities enjoyed abnormally cheap meat and continued to do so until the very end of the nineteenth century; since that time meat prices have been gradually approaching a normal level again.

The Texas cattle trail. After the close of the Civil War the grazing industry entered still another phase. Vast herds of cattle, brought by the early Spanish settlers, had long roamed the plains of Mexico and Texas. After Texas entered the United States, the grazing industry developed rapidly under the energetic management of American cattlemen. Texas cattle began to enter the markets of the North and East. The Civil War put a stop to this for a time. At the close of the war the Texas ranges were swarming with cattle. They soon began to move northward in search of more pasture as well as of better markets. This drift northward followed, in the main, the western

edge of the settlements, and the route came to be known as the Texas Cattle Trail. As settlements extended westward the trail necessarily moved westward also.

By this time the northern ranges were all west of the Mississippi River and were soon confined to the Great Plains. Farming on these plains was slow in development, because of the insufficient rainfall. Therefore the tide of westward settlement was so retarded as to permit a considerable development of what came to be called cattle ranching. The grazing

Distribution of Sheep in the United States

industry was given more time in which to develop systematically. It was less transitory than it had been on the rapidly moving frontier of earlier times. It still survives over considerable areas of the arid West, that is, west of the one hundred and second meridian, though it is gradually becoming more restricted through the gradual settlement of the better lands by farmers. Nearly half the beef cattle and more than half the sheep of the United States are grown on these ranges, though many of the animals raised there are afterwards fattened in what is known as the corn belt; that is, the country in which

Indian corn is the leading crop. This belt extends from Ohio westward beyond the Missouri River, roughly to the ninetyeighth meridian. Considerable numbers of horses are also grown on these ranges, but most of them are grown on the farms farther east. Goats also have increased on some of the southwestern ranges, though they have never played a very important rôle in our national economy.

Lumbering. Next to grass the most valuable natural product of the soil is timber. It might occupy first place if the value of

Distribution of Cattle in the United States

the native timber standing at a given time were compared with the value of the native grass standing at the same time. The proper basis of comparison, however, is the annual growth of the two products on soil equally good for either. Though this is sometimes called the age of steel, wood is still an important and almost indispensable material.

The first settlers on our Atlantic seaboard found a dense and apparently limitless forest extending from the coast westward. It was not until well into the nineteenth century that the advance guard of the army of western migration began to