2

Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years

W. C. Lowdermilk
Public Domain
U. S. Department of Agriculture, February 1948
Soil Conservation Service, S.C.S. MP-32

Adventures in Diet
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Public Domain
Harper's Monthly Magazine
November 1935, December 1935, January 1936

Public Domain
Reprinted in 2006
Resurrection Press
Moscow, Idaho

Adventures in Diet
By
Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Conquest of the Land Through

Seven Thousand Years
By
W. C. Lowdermilk

Resurrection Press
Moscow, Idaho

Contents
ADVENTURES IN DIET
Title Page..............................................................................................9
Part One...............................................................................................11
Part Two..............................................................................................25
Part Three...........................................................................................41

CONQUEST OF THE LAND

THROUGH SEVEN THOUSAND YEARS
Title Page.............................................................................................63
Foreword.............................................................................................65
Body.....................................................................................................66

Adventures in Diet
By
Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Resurrection Press
Moscow, Idaho

10

Adventures in Diet: Part 1

By Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Harper's Monthly Magazine, November 1935.

In 1906 I went to the Arctic with the food tastes and beliefs of the
average American. By 1918, after eleven years as an Eskimo among
Eskimos, I had learned things which caused me to shed most of those
beliefs. Ten years later I began to realize that what I had learned was
going to influence materially the sciences of medicine and dietetics.
However, what finally impressed the scientists and converted many
during the last two or three years, was a series of confirmatory
experiments upon myself and a colleague performed at Bellevue
Hospital, New York City, under the supervision of a committee
representing several universities and other organizations.
Not so long ago the following dietetic beliefs were common: To be
healthy you need a varied diet, composed of elements from both the
animal and vegetable kingdoms. You got tired of and eventually felt a
revulsion against things if you had to eat them often. This latter belief
was supported by stories of people who through force of circumstances
had been compelled, for instance, to live for two weeks on sardines
and crackers and who, according to the stories, had sworn that so long
as they lived they never would touch sardines again. The Southerners
had it that nobody can eat a quail a day for thirty days.
There were subsidiary dietetic views. It was desirable to eat fruits
and vegetables, including nuts and coarse grains. The less meat you ate
the better for you. If you ate a good deal of it, you would develop
rheumatism, hardening of the arteries, and high blood pressure, with a
11

tendency to breakdown of the kidneysin short, premature old age.

An extreme variant had it that you would live more healthy, happily,
and longer if you became a vegetarian.
Specifically it was believed, when our field studies began, that
without vegetables in your diet you would develop scurvy. It was a
"known fact" that sailors, miners, and explorers frequently died of
scurvy "because they did not have vegetables and fruits." This was
long before Vitamin C was publicized.
The addition of salt to food was considered either to promote health
or to be necessary for health. This is proved by various yarns, such as
that African tribes make war on one another to get salt; that minor
campaigns of the American Civil War were focused on salt mines; and
that all herbivorous animals are ravenous for salt. I do not remember
seeing a critical appendix to any of these views, suggesting for
instance, that Negro tribes also make war about things which no one
ever said were biological essentials of life; that tobacco was a factor in
Civil War campaigns without being a dietetic essential; and that
members of the deer family in Maine which never have salt or show
desire for it, are as healthy as those in Montana which devour
quantities of it and are forever seeking more.
A belief I was destined to find crucial in my Arctic work, making
the difference between success and failure, life and death, was the
view that man cannot live on meat alone. The few doctors and
dietitians who thought you could were considered unorthodox if not
charlatans. The arguments ranged from metaphysics to chemistry: Man
was not intended to be carnivorousyou knew that from examining
his teeth, his stomach, and the account of him in the Bible. As
mentioned, he would get scurvy if he had no vegetables in meat. The
kidneys would be ruined by overwork. There would be protein
poisoning and, in general hell to pay.
With these views in my head and, deplorably, a number of others
like them, I resigned my position as assistant instructor in
anthropology at Harvard to become anthropologist of a polar
expedition. Through circumstances and accidents which are not a part
12

of the story, I found myself that autumn the guest of the Mackenzie
River Eskimos.
The Hudson's Bay Company, whose most northerly post was at Fort
McPherson two hundred miles to the south had had little influence on
the Eskimos during more than half a century; for it was only some of
them who made annual visits to the trading post; and then they
purchased no food but only tea, tobacco, ammunition and things of
that sort. But in 1889 the whaling fleet had begun to cultivate these
waters and for fifteen years there had been close association with
sometimes as many as a dozen ships and four to five hundred men
wintering at Herschel Island, just to the west of the delta. During this
time a few of the Eskimos had learned some English and perhaps one
in ten of them had grown to a certain extent fond of white man's foods.
But now the whaling fleet was gone because the bottom had
dropped out of the whalebone market, and the district faced an oldtime winter of fish and water. The game, which might have
supplemented the fish some years earlier, had been exterminated or
driven away by the intensive hunting that supplied meat to the whaling
fleet. There was a little tea, but not nearly enough to see the Eskimos
through the winter - this was the only element of the white man's
dietary of which they were really fond and the lack of which would
worry them. So I was facing a winter of fish without tea. For the least I
could do, an uninvited guest, was to pretend a dislike for it.
The issue of fish and water against fish and tea was, in any case, to
me six against a half dozen. For I had had a prejudice against fish all
my life. I had nibbled at it perhaps once or twice a year at course
dinners, always deciding that it was as bad as I thought. This was pure
psychology of course, but I did not realize it.
I was in a measure adopted into an Eskimo family the head of which
knew English. He had grown up as a cabin boy on a whaling ship and
was called Roxy, though his name was Memoranna. It was early
September, we were living in tents, the days were hot but it had begun
to freeze during the nights, which were now dark for six to eight hours.

13

The community of three or four families, fifteen or twenty

individuals, was engaged in fishing. With long poles, three or four nets
were shoved out from the beach about one hundred yards apart. When
the last net was out the first would be pulled in, with anything from
dozens to hundreds of fish, mostly ranging in weight from one to three
pounds, and including some beautiful salmon trout. From knowledge
of other white men the Eskimos consider these to be most suitable for
me and would cook them specially, roasting them against the fire.
They themselves ate boiled fish.
Trying to develop an appetite, my habit was to get up soon after
daylight, say four o'clock, shoulder my rifle, and go off after
breakfasts on a hunt south across the rolling prairie, though I scarcely
expected to find any game. About the middle of the afternoon I would
return to camp. Children at play usually saw me coming and reported
to Roxy's wife, who would then put a fresh salmon trout to roast.
When I got home I would nibble at it and write in my diary what a
terrible time I was having.
Against my expectation, and almost against my will, I was
beginning to like the baked salmon trout when one day of perhaps the
second week I arrived home without the children having seen me
coming. There was no baked fish ready but the camp was sitting round
troughs of boiled fish. I joined them and, to my surprise, liked it better
than the baked. There after the special cooking ceased, and I ate boiled
fish with the Eskimos.

II
By midwinter I had left my cabin-boy host and, for the purposes of
anthropological study, was living with a less sophisticated family at
the eastern edge of the Mackenzie delta. Our dwelling was a house of
wood and earth, heated and lighted with Eskimo-style lamps. They
burned seal or whale oil, mostly white whale from a hunt of the
previous spring when the fat had been stored in bags and preserved,
14

although the lean meat had been eaten. Our winter cooking however,
was not done over the lamps but on a sheet-iron stove which had been
obtained from whalers. There were twenty-three of us living in one
room, and there were sometimes as many as ten visitors. The floor was
then so completely covered with sleepers that the stove had to be
suspended from the ceiling. The temperature at night was round 60*F.
The ventilation was excellent through cold air coming up slowly from
below by way of a trap door that was never closed and the heated air
going out by a ventilator in the roof.
Everyone slept completely naked no pajama or night shirts. We
used cotton or woolen blankets which had been obtained from the
whalers and from the Hudson's Bay Company.
In the morning, about seven o'clock, winter-caught fish, frozen so
hard that they would break like glass, were brought in to lie on the
floor till they began to soften a little. One of the women would pinch
them every now and then until, when she found her finger indented
them slightly, she would begin preparations for breakfast. First she cut
off the head and put them aside to be boiled for the children in the
afternoon (Eskimos are fond of children, and heads are considered the
best part of the fish). Next best are the tails, which are cut off and
saved for the children also. The woman would then slit the skin along
the back and also along the belly and getting hold with her teeth,
would strip the fish somewhat as we peel a banana, only sideways
where we peel bananas, endways.
Thus prepared, the fish were put on dishes and passed around. Each
of us took one and gnawed it about as an American does corn on the
cob. An American leaves the cob; similarly we ate the flesh from the
outside of the fish, not touching the entrails. When we had eaten as
much as we chose, we put the rest on a tray for dog feed.
After breakfast all the men and about half the women would go
fishing, the rest of the women staying at home to keep house. About
eleven o'clock we came back for a second meal of frozen fish just like
the breakfast. At about four in the afternoon the working day was over
and we came home to a meal of hot boiled fish.
15

Also we came home to a dwelling so heated by the cooking that the

temperature would range from 85* to 100*F. or perhaps even higher
more like our idea of a Turkish bath than a warm room. Streams of
perspiration would run down our bodies, and the children were kept
busy going back and forth with dippers of cold water of which we
naturally drank great quantities.
Just before going to sleep we would have a cold snack of fish that
had been left over from dinner. Then we slept seven or eight hours and
the routine of the day began once more.
After some three months as a guest of the Eskimos I had acquired
most of their food tastes. I had to agree that fish is better boiled than
cooked any other way, and that the heads (which we occasionally
shared with the children) were the best part of the fish. I no longer
desired variety in the cooking, such as occasional bakingI preferred
it always boiled if it was cooked. I had become as fond of raw fish as
if I had been a Japanese. I like fermented (therefore slightly acid)
whale oil with my fish as well as ever I liked mixed vinegar and olive
oil with a salad. But I still had two reservations against Eskimo
practice; I did not eat rotten fish and I longed for salt with my meals.
There were several grades of decayed fish. The August catch had
been protected by logs from animals but not from heat and was
outright rotten. The September catch was mildly decayed. The October
and later catches had been frozen immediately and were fresh. There
was less of the August fish than of any other and, for that reason
among the rest, it was a delicacyeaten sometimes as a snack
between meals, sometimes as a kind of dessert and always frozen, raw.
In midwinter it occurred to me to philosophize that in our own and
foreign lands taste for a mild cheese is somewhat plebeian; it is at least
a semi-truth that connoisseurs like their cheeses progressively
stronger. The grading applies to meats, as in England where it is
common among nobility and gentry to like game and pheasant so high
that the average Midwestern American or even Englishman of a lower
class, would call them rotten.

16

I knew of course that, while it is good form to eat decayed milk

products and decayed game, it is very bad form to eat decayed fish. I
knew also that the view of our populace that there are likely to be
"ptomaines" in decaying fish and in the plebeian meats; but it struck
me as an improbable extension of the class-consciousness that
ptomaines would avoid the gentleman's food and attack that of a
commoner.
These thoughts led to a summarizing query; If it is almost a mark of
social distinction to be able to eat strong cheeses with a straight face
and smelly birds with relish, why is it necessarily a low taste to be
fond of decaying fish? On that basis of philosophy, though with
several qualms, I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory serves,
liked it better than my first taste of Camembert. During the next weeks
I became fond of rotten fish.
About the fourth month of my first Eskimo winter I was looking
forward to every meal (rotten or fresh), enjoying them, and feeling
comfortable when they were over. Still I kept thinking the boiled fish
would taste better if only I had salt. From the beginning of my Eskimo
residence I had suffered from this lack. On one of the first few days,
with the resourcefulness of a Boy Scout, I had decided to make myself
some salt, and had boiled sea water till there was left only a scum of
brown powder. If I had remembered as vividly my freshman chemistry
as I did the books about shipwrecked adventurers, I should have know
in advance that the sea contains a great many chemicals besides
sodium chloride, among them iodine. The brown scum tasted bitter
rather than salty. A better chemist could no doubt have refined the
product. I gave it up, partly through the persuasion of my host, the
English speaking Roxy.
The Mackenzie Eskimos, Roxy told me, believe that what is good
for grown people is good for children and enjoyed by them as soon as
they get used to it. Accordingly they teach the use of tobacco when a
child is very young. It then grows to maturity with the idea that you
can't get along without tobacco. But, said Roxy, the whalers have told
that many whites get along without it, and he had himself seen white
17

men who never use it, while the few white women, wives of captains,
none used tobacco. (This, remember, was in 1906.)
Now Roxy had heard that white people believe that salt is good for,
and even necessary for children, so they begin early to add salt to the
child's food. That child then would grow up with the same attitude
toward salt as an Eskimo has toward tobacco. However, said Roxy,
since we Eskimos were mistaken in thinking tobacco so necessary,
may it be that the white men are mistaken about salt? Pursuing the
argument, he concluded that the reason why all Eskimos dislike salted
food and all white men like it was not racial but due to custom. You
could then, break the salt habit as easily as the tobacco habit and you
would suffer no ill result beyond the mental discomfort of the first few
days or weeks.
Roxy did not know, but I did as an anthropologist, that in preColumbian times salt was unknown or the taste of it disliked and the
use of it avoided through much of North and South America. It may
possibly be true that the carnivorous Eskimos in whose language the
word salty, mamaitok, is synonymous with evil-tasting, disliked salt
more intensely than those Indians who were partly herbivorous.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the salt habit spread more slowly through
the New World from the Europeans than the tobacco habit through
Europe from the Indians. Even today there are considerable areas, for
instance in the Amazon basin, where the natives still abhor salt. Not
believing that the races differ in their basic natures, I felt inclined to
agree with Roxy that the practice of salting food is with us a social
inheritance and the belief in its merits a part of our folklore.
Through this philosophizing I was somewhat reconciled to going
without salt, but I was nevertheless, overjoyed when one day Ovayuak,
my new host in the eastern delta, came indoors to say that a dog team
was approaching which he believed to be that of Ilavinirk, a man who
had worked with whalers and who possessed a can of salt. Sure
enough, it was Ilavinirk, and he was delighted to give me the salt, a
half-pound baking-powder can about half full, which he said he had
been carrying around for two or three years, hoping sometime to meet
18

someone who would like it for a present. He seemed almost as pleased

to find that I wanted the salt as I was to get it. I sprinkled some on my
boiled fish, enjoyed it tremendously, and wrote in my diary that it was
the best meal I had had all winter. Then I put the can under my pillow,
in the Eskimo way of keeping small and treasured things. But at the
next meal I had almost finished eating before I remembered the salt.
Apparently then my longing for it had been what you might call
imaginary. I finished without salt, tried it at one or two meals during
the next few days and thereafter left it untouched. When we moved
camp the salt remained behind.
After the return of the sun I made a journey of several hundred
miles to the ship Narwhal which, contrary to our expectations of the
late summer, had really come in and wintered at Herschel Island. The
captain was George P. Leavitt, of Portland, Maine. For the few days of
my visit I enjoyed the excellent New England cooking, but when I left
Herschel Island I returned without reluctance to the Eskimo meals of
fish and cold water. It seemed to me that, mentally and physically, I
had never been in better health in my life.

III
During the first few months of my first year in the Arctic, I
acquired, though I did not at the time fully realize it, the munitions of
fact and experience which have within my own mind defeated those
views of dietetics reviewed at the beginning of this article. I could be
healthy on a diet of fish and water. The longer I followed it the better I
liked it, which meant, at least inferentially and provisionally, that you
never become tired of your food if you have only one thing to eat. I did
not get scurvy on the fish diet nor learn that any of my fish-eating
friends ever had it. Nor was the freedom from scurvy due to the fish
being eaten rawwe proved that later. (What it was due to we shall
deal with in the second article of this series.) There were certainly no

19

signs of hardening of the arteries and high blood pressure, of

breakdown of the kidneys or of rheumatism.
These months on fish were the beginning of several years during
which I lived on an exclusive meat diet. For I count in fish when I
speak of living on meat, using "meat" and "meat diet" more as a
professor of anthropology than as the editor of a housekeeping
magazine. The term in this article and in like scientific discussions
refers to a diet from which all things of the vegetable kingdom are
absent.
To the best of my estimate then, I have lived in the Arctic for more
than five years exclusively on meat and water. (This was not, of
course, one five-year stretch, but an aggregate of that much time
during ten years.) One member of my expeditions, Storker Storkersen,
lived on an exclusive meat diet for about the same length of time while
there are several who have lived on it from one to three years. These
have been of many nationalities and of three racesordinary
European whites; natives of the Cape Verde Islands, who had a large
percentage of Negro blood; and natives of the South Sea Islands.
Neither from experience with my own men nor from what I have heard
of similar cases do I find any racial difference. There are marked
individual differences.
The typical method of breaking a party into a meat diet is that three
of five of us leave in midwinter a base camp which has nearly or quite
the best type of European mixed diet that money and forethought can
provide. The novices have been told that it is possible to live on meat
alone. We warn them that it is hard to get used to for the first few
weeks, but assure them that eventually they will grow to like it and
that any difficulties in changing diets will be due to their imagination.
These assertions the men will believe to a varying degree. I have a
feeling that in the course of breaking in something like twenty
individuals; two or three young men believed me completely, and that
this belief collaborated strongly with their youth and adaptability in
making them take readily to the meat.

20

Usually I think, the men believe that what I tell of myself is true for
me personally, but that I am peculiar, a freakthat a normal person
will not react similarly, and that they are going to be normal and have
an awful time. Their past experience seems to tell them that if you eat
one thing every day you are bound to tire of it. In the back of their
minds there is also what they have read and heard about the necessity
for a varied diet. They have specific fears of developing the ailments
which they have heard of as caused by meat or prevented by
vegetables.
We secure our food in the Arctic by hunting and in midwinter there
is not enough good hunting light. Accordingly we carry with us from
the base camp provisions for several weeks, enough to take us into the
long days. During this time, as we travel away from shore, we
occasionally kill a seal or a polar bear and eat their meat along with
our groceries. Our men like these as an element of a mixed diet as well
as you do beef or mutton.
We are not on rations. We eat all we want, and we feed the dogs
what we think is good for them. When the traveling conditions are
right we usually have two big meals a day, morning and evening, but
when we are storm bound or delayed by open water we eat several
meals to pass the time away. At the end of four, six or eight weeks at
sea, we have used up all our food. We do not try to save a few
delicacies to eat with the seal and bear, for experience has proved that
such things are only tantalizing.
Suddenly, then we are on nothing but seal. For while our food at sea
averages ten percent polar bear there may be months in which we don't
see a bear. The men go at the seal loyally; they are volunteers and
whatever the suffering, they have bargained for it and intend to grin
and bear it. For a day or two they eat square meals. Then the appetite
begins to flag and they discover as they had more than half expected,
that for them personally it is going to be a hard pull or a failure. Some
own up that they can't eat, while others pretend to have good appetites,
enlisting the surreptitious help of a dog to dispose of their share. In
extreme cases, which are usually those of the middle-aged and
21

conservative they go two or three days practically or entirely without

eating. We had no weighing apparatus; but I take it that some have lost
anything from ten to twenty pounds, what with the hard work on
empty stomachs. They become gloomy and grouchy and, as I once
wrote, "They begin to say to each other, and sometimes to me, things
about their judgment in joining a polar expedition that I cannot quote."
But after a few days even the conservatives begin to nibble at the
seal meat, after a few more they are eating a good deal of it, rather
under protest and at the end of three or four weeks they are eating
square meals, though still talking about their willingness to give a soul
or right arm for this or that. Amusingly, or perhaps instructively, they
often long for ham and eggs or corned beef when, according to theory,
they ought to be longing for vegetables and fruits. Some of them do
hanker particularly for things like sauerkraut or orange juice; but more
usually it is for hot cakes and syrup or bread and butter.
There are two ways in which to look at an abrupt change of diet
how difficult it is to get used to what you have to eat and how hard it is
to be deprived of things you are used to and like. From the second
angle, I take it to be physiologically significant that we have found our
people, when deprived, to long equally for things which have been
considered necessities of health, such as salt; for things where a drug
addiction is considered to be involved, such as tobacco; and for items
of that class of so-called staple foods, such as bread.
It has happened on several trips, and with an aggregate of perhaps
twenty men, that they have had to break at one time their salt, tobacco,
and bread habits. I have frequently tried the experiment of asking
which they would prefer; salt for their meal, bread with it, or tobacco
for an after-dinner smoke. In nearly every case the men have stopped
to consider, nor do I recall that they were ever unanimous.
When we are returning to the ship after several months on meat and
water, I usually say that the steward will have orders to cook
separately for each member of the party all he wants of whatever he
wants. Especially during the last two or three days, there is a great deal
of talk among the novices in the part about what the choices are to be.
22

One man wants a big dish of mashed potatoes and gravy; another a
gallon of coffee and bread and butter; a third perhaps wants a stack of
hot cakes with syrup and butter.
On reaching the ship each does get all he wants of what he wants.
The food tastes good, although not quite so superlative as they had
imagined. They have said they are going to eat a lot and they do. Then
they get indigestion, headache, feel miserable, and within a week, in
nine cases out of ten of those who have been on meat six months or
over, they are willing to go back to meat again. If a man does not want
to take part in a second sledge journey it is usually for a reason other
than the dislike of meat.
Still, as just implied, the verdict depends on how long you have
been on the diet. If at the end of the first ten days our men could have
been miraculously rescued from the seal and brought back to their
varied foods, most of them would have sworn forever after that they
were about to die when rescued, and they would have vowed never to
taste seal again vows which would have been easy to keep for no
doubt in such cases the thought of seal, even years later, would have
been accompanied by a feeling of revulsion. If a man has been on meat
exclusively for only three or four months he may or may not be
reluctant to go back to it again. But if the period has been six months
or over, I remember no one who was unwilling to go back to meat.
Moreover, those who have gone without vegetables for an aggregate of
several years usually thereafter eat a larger percentage of meat than
your average citizen, if they can afford it.

23

24

Adventures in Diet: Part 2

By Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Harper's Monthly Magazine, December 1935.

Now that the experiments in diet which Karsen Anderson and I

undertook at Bellevue Hospital have been accepted by the medical
world, it is difficult to realize that there could have been such a storm
of excitement about the announcement of the plan, such a violent clash
of opinions, such near unanimity to the prediction of dire results.
The feeling that decisive controlled test were needed began to
spread after I told one of the scientific heads of the Food
Administration in 1918 that I had lived for an aggregate of more than
five years with enjoyment on just meat and water. A turning point
came in 1920 when I had an hour for explaining a meat regimen to the
physicians and staff at the Mayo Clinic. The concluding phase began
in 1928 when Mr. Anderson and myself entered Bellevue Hospital to
give science the first chance in its history to observe human subjects
while they lived through the chill of winter and the heat of summer, for
twelve months, on an exclusive meat diet. We were to do it under
conditions of ordinary city life.
At the beginning of our northern work in 1906 it was the accepted
view among doctors and dietitians that man cannot live on meat alone.
They believed specifically that a group of serious diseases were either
caused directly by meat or preventable only by vegetables. Those
views were still being held when the autumn of 1918, an old friend,
Frederic C. Walcott (later Senator from Connecticut), decided that my
25

experiences and the resulting opinions were revolutionary in certain

fields, and introduced me to Professor Raymond Pearl of John
Hopkins, who was then with the U.S. Food Administration in
Washington. Pearl considered several of the things I told him upsetting
to views then held; he questioned me before a stenographer, and sent
the mimeographed results to a number of dietitians. Their replies
varied from concurrence with him (and me) to agreement with David
Hume that you are likelier to meet a thousand liars than one miracle.
Pearl was convinced that neither fibs nor miracles were involved
and proposed that we write a book on dietetics. I agreed. But cares
intervened and things dragged.
In 1920 I had the above-mentioned chance to speak at the Mayo
Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. One of the Mayo brothers suggested that
I spend two or three weeks there to have a check-over and see whether
they could not find evidences of the supposed bad effects of meat. I
wanted to do this but commitments in New York prevented.
Then one day while talking with the gastro-enterologist Dr.
Clarence W. Lieb, I told him of my regret that I had not been able to
take advantage of the Mayo check-over. Lieb said there were good
doctors in New York, too, and volunteered to gather a committee of
specialists who would put me through and examination as rigid as
anything I could get from the Mayos.
The committee was organized, I went through the mill, and Dr. Lieb
reported the findings in the Journal of the American Medical
Association for July 3, 1926, "The Effects of an Exclusive LongContinued Meat Diet." The committee had failed to discover any trace
of even one of the supposed harmful effects.
With this publication the Lieb and Pearl events merge. For when the
Institute of American Meat Packers wrote asking permission to reprint
a large number of copies for distribution to the medical profession and
to dietitians, Lieb, Pearl and I went into a huddle. The result was a
letter to the Institute saying that we refused permission to reprint, but
suggesting that they might get something much better worth
publishing, and with right to publish it, if they gave a fund to a
26

research institution for a series of experiments designed to check,

under conditions of average city life, the problems which had arisen
out of my experiences and views. For it was contended by many that
an all-meat diet might work in a cold climate though not in a warm,
and under the strenuous conditions of the frontier though not in
common American (sedentary) business life.
We gave the meat packers warning that, if anything, the institution
chosen would lean backward to make sure that nothing in the results
could even be suspected of having been influenced by the source of the
money.
After much negotiating, the Institute agreed to furnish the money.
The organization selected was the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology.
The committee in charge was to consist of leaders in the most
important sciences that appeared related to the problem, and
represented seven institutions:
American Museum of Natural History: Dr. Clark Wissler.
Cornell University Medical College: Dr. Walter L. Niles.
Harvard University: Drs. Lawrence J. Henderson, Earnest A. Hooton,
and Percy Howe.
Institute of American Meat Packers: Dr. C. Robert Moulton.
John Hopkins University: Drs. William G. McCallum and Raymond
Pearl.
Russell Sage Institute of Pathology: Drs. Eugene F. DuBois and
Graham Lusk.
University of Chicago: Dr. Edwin O. Jordan.
Unattached: Dr. Clarence W. Lieb, private practice, and Vilhjalmur
Stefansson.
The Chairman of the committee was Dr. Pearl. The main research
work of the experiment was headed by Dr. DuBois, who is now
Physician-in-Chief of the New York Hospital and was then as he still
is, Medical Director of the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology. Among
his collaborators were Dr. Walter S. McClellan, Dr. Henry B.
27

Richardson, Mr. V. R. Rupp, Mr. G. F. Soderstrom, Dr. Henry J.

Spencer, Dr. Edward Tolstoi, Dr. John C. Torrey and Mr. Vincent
Toscani. The clinical supervision was in charge of Dr. Lieb.
After meetings of the supervising committee, the election of a
smaller executive committee and much discussion, it was decided that,
while the experiment would be directed at strictly scientific problems,
there might be side glances now and then toward common folk beliefs
and the propaganda of certain groups. For instance, our definition of a
meat diet as "a diet from which all vegetable elements are excluded"
would permit us to use milk and eggs, for they are not vegetables. But
some vegetarians are illogical enough to allow milk and eggs; we
agreed to be correspondingly illogical and exclude them. This
forestalled the possible cry that we were saved from the ill effects of a
vegetable-less diet by the eggs and the milk.
The aim of the project was not, as the press claimed at the time, to
"prove" something or other. We were not trying to prove or disprove
anything; we merely wanted to get at the facts. Every aspect of the
results would be studied, but special attention would be paid to certain
common views, such as that scurvy will result from the absence of
vegetable elements, that other deficiency diseases may be produced,
that the effect will be bad on the circulatory system and on the
kidneys, that certain harmful micro-organisms will flourish in the
intestinal tract, and that there will be insufficient calcium. The broad
question was, of the supervising doctors and by the testimony of the
subjects themselves.
The test was originally planned on me alone, but I might be struck
by lightening before conclusions were reached, or I might get run over
by a truck, and that would be construed, by mixed-dieters and
vegetarians, as showing impairment of mental alertness and bodily
vigor through the monotony and poison of meat. It was difficult to find
a colleague, for you cannot make this sort of experiment on just
anybody that appears if you consider two elementary cases.
Assume the news of a stock market crash that ruins them is
conveyed to a number of people after they have eaten a good meal.
28

Digestion may stop almost at the point of the mental shock. Obviously
the sickness which follows that meal is not caused by the food, as
such.
Or ask some impressionable friend to lunch. Serve them veal, of
good quality and well cooked. When dinner is over you inquire about
the veal; they will answer with the usual compliments. Then you say
that your case has been proved. Rover died and they have eaten him. If
your stage setting and acting have been at all adequate, a few at least
of your company will make a dive from the room. What sickens them
is not the meat of a dog but the idea that they have eaten dog.
The Russell Sage experiment then could not be made upon anybody
controlled by any strong dietetic belief, such as that meat is harmful,
that abstinence from vegetables brings trouble, that you tire of a food
if you have to eat the same thing often. But almost everyone holds
these or similar beliefs. So we were practically compelled to secure
subjects from members of one of my expeditions; they were the only
living Europeans we knew who had used meat long enough to
eliminate completely the mental hazards.
One man fortunately was available. He was Karsten Anderson, a
young Dane who had been a member of my third expedition. During
that time he had lived an aggregate of more than a year on strictly meat
and water, suffering no ill result and, in fact being on one occasion
cured by meat from scurvy which he had contracted on a mixed diet.
Moreover, he knew from experience of a dozen members of the
expedition that his healthful enjoyment of the diet was not peculiar to
himself but common to all those who had tried it, including members
of three racesordinary whites, Cape Verde Islanders with a strain of
Negro blood, and South Sea Islanders.
But there were other things which made Anderson almost incredibly
suitable for our test. For several years he had been working on his own
in Florida spending most of practically every day outdoors, lightly clad
and enjoying the benefits (such as they are) of a sub-tropical sunlight.
In that mental and physical environment he had naturally been on a
diet heavy in vegetable elements, and had suffered constantly from
29

head colds, his hair was thinning steadily; and he had developed a
condition involving intestinal toxemia such as would ordinarily cause
a doctor to look serious and pronounce: "You must go light on meat."
or "I am afraid you'll have to cut out meat entirely."
We could find no one but Anderson whose mind would leave his
body unhandicapped. So, in January 1928, the test began with the two
of us. It was under the direct charge of Dr. DuBois and his staff in the
dietetic ward of Bellevue Hospital, New York City.
A storm of protests from friends broke upon us when the press
announced that we were entering Bellevue. These were based mainly
upon the report that we were going to eat our meat raw and the belief
that we were using lean meat exclusively. The first was just a false
rumor; the trouble under the second head was linguistic.
Eating meat raw, our friends chorused, would make us social
outcasts. It is proper to serve oysters raw, and clams, in the United
States; herring raw in Norway; several kinds of fish raw in Japan; and
beef raw almost anywhere in the world if only you change the name
and call it rare. The fashion of giving raw meat to infants was
spreading, but we were babes neither in years nor in stature and could
not take advantage of that dispensation.
The answer to the raw meat scare was to explain a basic procedure
of our experimentsAnderson and I were to select our food by palate
(so long as it was meat). It proved that in most of our meals for a year
he leaned to medium cooking and I to well done.
The linguistic trouble came from a recent change of American
usage. In Elizabethan English meat was any kind of food, as in the
expression "meat and drink." In modern England this has narrowed
down to what is implied by the rhyme about Jack Sprat eating no fat
and his wife no lean, although they both ate meat. In the United States
meat, in the last few years has become a synonym for lean. The
meaning can become even narrower, as when somebody, usually a
woman, tells you that she is strictly forbidden by her physician to
touch meat, but that she is permitted all the chicken she wants, with an
occasional lamb chop. To that woman meat signifies lean beef.
30

In the linguistic sense, then we pacified our friends by reference to

Mr. and Mrs. Sprat. Our diet would be of meat in the English sense.
We were just going to live under modern conditions on the food of our
more or less remote ancestors; the food, too, of certain contemporary
"primitive hunters."

II
During our first three weeks in Bellevue Hospital we were fed
measured quantities of what might be called a standard mixed diet;
fruits, cereals, bacon and eggs, that sort of thing for breakfast; meats,
vegetables including fruits for lunch and dinner. During this time
various specialists examined us from practically every angle that
seemed pertinent.
Most tedious, and let us hope correspondingly valuable, were the
calorimeter studies. With no food since the evening before, we would
go in the late morning to the calorimeter room and sit quite for an hour
to get over the physiological effect of having perhaps walked up a
single flight of stairs. Then as effortlessly as we could, we slid into
calorimeters which were like big coffins with glass sides, and
everybody waited about an hour or so until we had got over the
disturbance of having slid in. The box was now closed up, and for
three hours we lay there as nearly motionless as we could well be
while a corps of scientists visible through the glass puttered about and
studied our chemical and other physiological processes. We were not
permitted to read and cautioned even against thinking about anything
particularly pleasant or particularly disagreeable, for thoughts and
feelings heat or cool you, speed things up or slow them down, play
hob generally with "normal" processes.
(Dr. DuBois told of a calorimeter test ruined by mental disturbance.
A nervous Romanian had developed an intense dislike for a fellowpatient named Kelly. During the second hour of an experiment that had
been going very well, Max caught a glimpse of the hated Kelly
31

through the window. This raised his metabolism ten percent during
that whole hour.)
With the air we breathed and the rest of our intakes and excretions
carefully analyzed, with our blood chemistry determined and a check
on such things as the billions of living organisms which inhabit the
human intestinal tract, we were ready for the meat.
During the three weeks of mixed diet and preliminary check-up, we
had been free to come and go. Now we were placed under lock and
key. Neither of us was permitted at any time, day or night to be out of
sight of a doctor or nurse. This was in part the ordinary rigidity of a
controlled scientific experiment, but it was in some part a bow to the
skepticism of the mixed diet advocates and to the emotional storms
which were sweeping the vegetarian realms.
Not was the skepticism and excitement all newspaper talk. One of
the leading European authorities, most orthodox and belonging to no
particular school, was touring the United States. He called on us
during the preliminary three weeks and assured the presiding
physicians most solemnly that we should be unable to go more than
four or five days on meat. He had tried it out himself on experimental
human subjects who usually broke down in about three days. These
breakdowns, I thought, were of psychological antecedents; but our
European authority instituted they were strictly psychologicalquite
independent of emotions.
The experiment started smoothly with Andersen, who was permitted
to eat in such quantity as he liked such things as he liked, provided
only that they came under our definition of meatsteaks, chops,
brains fried in bacon fat, boiled short-ribs, chicken, fish, liver and
bacon. In my case there was a hitch, in a way foreseen.
For I had published in 1913, on pages 140-142 of My Life with the
Eskimo, an account of how some natives and I became ill when we
had to go two or three weeks on lean meat, caribou so skinny that there
was no appreciable fat behind the eyes or in the marrow. So when Dr.
DuBois suggest that I start the meat period by eating as large quantities
as I possibly could of chopped fatless muscle, I predicted trouble. But
32

he countered by citing my own experience where illness had not come

until after two or three weeks, and he now proposed lean for only two
or three days. So I gave in.
The chief purpose of placing me abruptly on exclusively lean was
that there would be a sharp contrast with Andersen who was going to
be on a normal meat diet, consisting of such proportions of lean and fat
as his own taste determined.
As said, in the Arctic we had become ill during the second or third
fatless week. I now became ill on the second fatless day. The time
difference between Bellevue and the Arctic was due no doubt mainly
to the existence of a little fat, here and there in our northern caribou
we had eaten the tissue from behind the eyes, we had broken the bones
for marrow, and in doing everything we could to get fat we had
evidently secured more than we realized. At Bellevue the meat,
carefully scrutinized, had been as lean as such muscle tissue can be.
Then, in the Arctic we had eaten tendons and other indigestible matter,
we had chewed the soft ends of bones, getting a deal of bulk that way
when we were trying to secure fat. What we ate at Bellevue contained
no bulk material, so that my stomach could be compelled to hold a
much larger amount of lean.
The symptoms brought on at Bellevue by an incomplete meat diet
(lean without fat) were exactly the same as in the Arctic, except that
they came on fasterdiarrhea and a feeling of general baffling
discomfort.
Up north the Eskimos and I had been cured immediately when we
got some fat. Dr. DuBois now cured me the same way, by giving me
fat sirloin steaks, brains fried in bacon fat, and things of that sort. In
two or three days I was all right, but I had lost considerable weight.

III
For the first three weeks I was watched day and night by the
Institute staff. My exercise was supposed to be about that of an
33

average business man. I went out for walks, but always under guard. If
I telephoned, the attendant stood at the door of the booth; if I went into
a shop, he was never more than a few feet away; and he was always
vigilant. As Dr. DuBois explained, and as I well knew in advance, this
was not because the supervising staff were suspicious of me but rather
because they wanted to be able to say that they knew of their own
knowledge my complete abstinence from all solids and liquids, except
those which I received in Bellevue and which I ate and drank under the
watch of attendants.
But my affairs unfortunately demanded that I travel widely through
the United States and Canada. This was an added reason why
Andersen had been secured for the experiment. When after three
weeks, they had to put me on parole, so to speak, they retained him
under lock and key for a total of something over 90 days.
Those who believed that a meat diet would lead to death had set at
anything from four to fifteen days the point where Dr. Lieb, as clinical
supervisor, would have to call a halt in view of danger to the subjects.
Those who expected a slower breakdown had placed the appearance of
the dread symptoms long before 90 days. In any case, Anderen
reported back to the hospital constantly after he left it and I whenever I
was in town.
After my three weeks and Andersen's thirteen, and with the constant
analyses of excretions and blood when we came back to the hospital
for check-ups, the doctors felt certain they would catch us if we broke
diet. Moreover, long before the thirteen weeks ended they had satisfied
themselves that Andersen had no longing for fruits or other vegetable
materials and therefore, no motive for breach of contract.
Toward the end of the covenanted year Andersen and I returned to
Bellevue for final intensive studies of some weeks on the meat diet,
and then our first three weeks on a mixed diet. At this end of the
experiment all went smoothly with me, but not so with Andersen.
My trouble, it will be remembered, had been that at the outset they
stuffed me with lean, permitting no fat. His difficulty , or at least
annoyance, began on the second day after he completed a year on the
34

meat (January 25, 1929) when they asked him to eat all the fat he
could, to the nausea limit, permitting only a tiny bit of lean, about 45
grams per day. There they kept him on the verge of nausea for a week.
The second week they added his first taste of vegetables in a year,
thrice-cooked cabbage netting about 35 grams of carbohydrate per day.
The third week they omitted the cabbage but retained the high
proportion of fat to lean.
These three weeks, Andersen says, were the only difficult part of the
experiment. Looking back at it now, he thinks if it were possible to
separate the nausea from the other unpleasantness there would have
been a good deal left overthat he wasn't, properly speaking, well at
the end of the third week. However, that is speculation if not
imagination.
Returning to facts, we have the ominous one that pneumonia
epidemic was sweeping New York. The hospital was crowded with
patients; some of the staff got the disease, and with them Andersen. It
was Type II pneumonia in his case, and the physicians were gravely
worried, for this type was proving deadly in that epidemic, carrying off
fifty percent of its Bellevue victims. Andersen, however, reacted
quickly to treatment, ran an unusually short course, and convalesced
rapidly.

IV
The broad results of the experiment were, so far as Andersen and I
could tell, and so far as the supervising physicians could tell, that we
were in at least as good average health during the year as we had been
during the three mixed-diet weeks at the start. We thought our health
had been a little better than average. We enjoyed and prospered as well
on the meat in midsummer as in midwinter, and felt no more
discomfort from the heat than our fellow New Yorkers did.
In view of beliefs that are strangely current it is worth emphasizing
that we liked our meat as fat in July as in January. This ought not to
35

surprise Americans (though it usually does) for they know or have

heard that fat pork is a staple and relished food of the Negro in
Mississippi. Our Negro literature is rich with the praise of opossum
fat, nor did Negroes develop the taste for fats in our Southern States
for Carl Akerly relates from tropical Africa such yarns of fat gorging
as have not yet been surpassed from the Arctic. A frequent complaint
of travelers in Spain is against foods that swim in oil and there are
similar complaints when we visit Latin America. We find, when we
stop to think that many if not most tropical people love greasy food.
Then there is the parallel belief that the largest meat consumption is
in cold countries. True, the hundred-percent centers are way up north,
the Eskimos, Samoyeds, Chukchis. But the heaviest meat eaters who
speak English are the Australians, tropical and sub-tropical., while the
nearest you come to an exclusive meat among people of European
stock is in tropical Argentina where the cowboys live on beef and
mat. They like their meat fat and (so an Argentinian New Yorker tells
me) will threaten to quit work, or at least did twenty years ago, if you
attempt to feed them in any considerable part on cereal, greens, and
fruits.
It appears that, excepting as tastes are controlled by propaganda and
fashion, the longing for fat, summer or winter, depends on what else
you eat. If yours is a meat diet then you simply must have fat with
your lean; other wise you would sicken and die. But since fats, sugars,
and starches are in most practical respects dietetically equivalent, you
eat more of any one of them on a mixed diet if you decrease the
combined amount of the other two.
Sir Hubert Wilkins, when we were living in the Arctic together,
both living exclusively on meats, told me what remains my best single
instance of how fats are crowded out by commerce, fashion and
expense. The expense is frequently not the least fat, which is only
about twice as nourishing as sugar, costs, as I write at my
neighborhood grocery 50 cents per pound (bacon) or 35 cents a pound
(butter) while sugar is only 5 1/2.

36

Sir Hubert's father, the first white child born in South Australia, told
that when he was young the herdsman, who were the majority of the
population, lived practically exclusively on mutton (sometimes on
beef) and tea. At all times of year they killed the fattest sheep for their
own use and when in the open, which was frequently, they roasted the
fattest parts against a fire with a dripping pan underneath, later dipping
the meat into the drippings as they ate. But then gradually commerce
developed, breads and pastries began to be used, jams and jellies were
imported or manufactured, and with the advance of starches and
sugars, the use of fat decreased. Now, except that the Australians eat
rather more meat per year than people do in the British Isles, the
proportion of fat to the rest of the diet is probably about the same in
Australia as elsewhere within the Empire.
A conclusion of our experiment which the medical profession
seemingly find difficult to assimilate, but which at the same time is
one of our clearest results, is that a normal meat diet is not a high
protein diet. We averaged about a pound and a third of lean per day
and half a pound of fat (this is about like eating a two pound broiled
sirloin with the fat such a steak usually has on it). That seems like
eating mostly lean; but grow technical and you find, in energy units,
that we were really getting three-quarters of our calories from the fat.
That is what the scientists meant when they said at the end of our diet
had proved to be not so very high in protein.
That meat, as some have contended is a particularly stimulating
food I verified during our New York experiment to the extent that it
seems to me I was more optimistic and energetic than ordinarily. I
looked forward with more anticipation to the next day or the next job
and was more likely to expect pleasure or success. This may have a
bearing on the common report that the uncivilized Eskimos are the
happiest people in the world. There have been many explanations
that a hunter's life is pleasant, and that the poor wretches just don't
know how badly off they are. We now add the suggestion that the
optimism may be directly caused by what they eat.

37

Some additional fairly precise things can be said of how we fared

during the year on meat. For instance, with Dr. DuBois as a
pacemaker, we used every few weeks to run around the reservoir in
Central Park and thence to his house, going up the stairs two or three
at a time, plumping down on cots and having scientific attendants
register our breathing, pulse rate, and other crude reactions. These tests
appear to show that our stamina increased with the lengthening of the
meat period.
Andersen, who had had one head cold after another when working
nearly stripped outdoors in his Florida orange grow, suffered only two
or three attacks during the meat year in New York, and those light. He
did not regain his hair but he reported that there had been a marked
decrease in the shedding. As said, according to the reports of the
doctors, Andersen was troubled when he came from Florida with
certain toxin-producing intestinal micro-organisms in relation to which
physicians at that time ordinarily prescribed elimination of meat from
the diet. This condition did not make trouble for him while on the
meat.
A phase of our experiment has a relation to slimming, slenderizing,
reducing, the treatment of obesity. I was "about ten pounds
overweight" at the beginning of the meat diet and lost all of it. This
reminds me to say that Eskimos, when still on their native meats, are
never corpulentat least I have seen none. They may be well fleshed.
Some especially women, are notably heavier in middle age than when
young. But they are not corpulent in our sense.
When you see Eskimos in their native garments you do get the
impression of fat round faces on fat round bodies, but the roundness of
face is a racial peculiarity and the rest of the effect is produced by
loose and puffy garments. See them striped and you do not find the
abdominal protuberances and folds which are numerous at Coney
Island beaches and so persuasive in arguments against nudism.
There is no racial immunity among Eskimos to corpulence. You
prove that by how quickly they get fat and how fat they grow on
European diets.
38

Only one serious fear of the experiments was realizedour diet for
the year turned out low in calcium. This was not demonstrated by any
tests upon Andersen or me, and certainly you could not have proved it
by asking us or looking at us, for we felt better and looked healthier
than our average for the years immediately previous. The calcium
deficiency appeared solely through the food analysis of the chemists.
Part of our routine was to give the chemists for analysis pieces of
meat as nearly as possible identical with those we ate. For instance,
lamb would be split down through the middle of the spine and we had
the chops from one side cooked for us, while they got the chops from
the other side to analyze. When the diet was sirloin steaks, they
received ones matching ours. The only way in which the diet was not
identical with the food analyzed was that Andersen and I followed the
Eskimo custom of eating fish bones and chewing the rib ends; from
these sources we no doubt obtained a certain amount of calcium.
Toward the latter part of the test it became startlingly clear, on paper
that we were not getting enough calcium for health. But we were
healthy. The escape from that dilemma was assume that a calcium
deficiency which did not hurt us in our one year might destroy us in
ten or twenty.
You study bones when you look for a calcium deficiency. The thing
to do then, was to examine the skeletons of people who had died at a
reasonably high age after living from infancy upon an exclusive meat
diet. Such skeletons are those of Eskimos who are known to have died
before the European influences came in. The Institute of American
Meat Packers were induced to make a subsidiary appropriation to the
Peabody Museum of Harvard University where Dr. Earnest A. Hooton,
Professor of Physical Anthropology, under took a through going study
with regard to the calcium problem in the relation to the Museum's
collection of the skeletons of meat eaters. Dr. Hooton reported no
signs of calcium deficiency. On the contrary, there was every
indication that the meat eaters had been liberally, or at least
adequately, supplied. They had suffered no more in a lifetime from

39

calcium deficiency than we had in our short year (really short, by the
way for we enjoyed it).

40

Adventures in Diet: Part 3

By Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Harper's Monthly Magazine, January 1936.

Scurvy has been the great enemy of explorers. When Magellan sailed
around the world four hundred years ago many of his crew died from it
and most of the others were at times so weakened that they could
barely handle the ships. When Scott's party of four went to the South
Pole twenty three years ago their strength was sapped by scurvy; they
were unable to maintain their travel schedule and died. Nor has scurvy
been the nemesis of explorers only. Twenty years ago the British
Army in the Near East was seriously handicapped, and last October an
American doctor reported a hundred Ethiopian soldiers per day dying
of scurvy. The disease worked havoc during the Alaska and Yukon
gold rushes following 1896. Scores of miners died and hundred
suffered.
Medical profession and laity equally believed for more than a
hundred years that they knew exactly how to prevent and cure the
disease, yet the method always failed on severe test.
The premise from which the doctors started was that vegetables,
particularly fruits, prevent and cure scurvy. Since diet consists of
animals and plants, the statement came to take the form that scurvy is
cause by meat and cured by vegetables. Finally the doctors
standardized on lime juice as the best of preventatives and cures. They
name it a sure cure, a specific. Lawmakers followed the doctors. It is

41

on the statute books of many countries that on long voyages the crews
are to be supplied with lime juice and induced or compelled to take it.
Obtained from officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and
from sourdoughs, I have in my diaries and notes many a case of
suffering and death caused by scurvy in the Alaska and Yukon gold
rushes. The miner generally began to sicken toward the end of winter.
He had been living on beans and bacon, on biscuits, rice, oatmeal,
sugar, dried fruits and dried vegetables. When he recognized his
trouble as scurvy he made such efforts as were possible to get the
things which he believed would cure him. Apparently the miners had
the strongest faith in raw potatoes. These had to be brought from afar,
and there are heroic tales of men who struggled through the wilderness
to succor a comrade with a few pounds of them. There were similar
beliefs in the virtues of onions and some other vegetables. Curiously,
there was either no belief in those vegetables which were obtainable,
or else there was a belief that they should be treated in a way which.
we now understand, destroys their value. For instance a man might
have been cured or at least helped with a salad of leaves or even bark
of trees. What the miners did with the pine needles and willow drink
the tea. If they had fresh meat they boiled it to shreds and drank the
broth. Death frequently occurred in two to four months from
recognized onset of the disease.
Ignoring the decimation of armies, and the burden of this disease in
many walks of civil life through past ages, we turn to the explorers, the
class most widely publicized as suffering from and dying of scurvy.
It is unusual to rank James Cook of a hundred and fifty years ago
with the foremost explorers of all time. Part of his fame may be
attributed to his having discovered how to prevent and cure scurvy.
Medical books name him as pioneer in the field, saying that we owe to
him the conquest of a dread disease. For he demonstrated that with
vegetables (again particularly fruits) scurvy could be prevented on the
longest voyages. By statement or inference these books assert that
from this developed the knowledge according to which we extract and

42

bottle the juice of the lime, stock ships with it, prevent and cure
scurvy.
As show above intimated, however, the good physicians, with their
faith in lime juice as a specific, overlooked its constant failure upon
severe test.
How stoutly the faith was kept is shown by the British polar
expedition of Sir George Nares. When he returned to England in 1876
after a year and a half, he reported much illness from scurvy, some
deaths, and a partial failure of his program as a result. In his view fresh
meat could have saved his men. But the doctors, as we shall see when
we consider how they later advised Scott, soon forgot whatever
impression was made by Nares. They seem to have scared themselves
with the old doctrines by a series of assumptions: that the lime juice on
the Nares expedition might have been deficient in acid content; that
some of the victims did not takes as much of it as needed; and that
perhaps it was too much to expect of even the marvelous juice to cope
with all the things which tended to bring on scurvyabsence of
sunlight, bad ventilation, lack of amusement and exercise, insufficient
cleanliness.
Particularly because Nares medical court of inquiry had closed on a
note of cleanliness and "modern sanitation," you would think the
medical world might have felt a severe jolt when they read how
Nansen and Johansen had wintered in the Franz Josef Islands, (now
Nansen Land) in 1895-96. They had lived in a hut of stones and walrus
leather. The ventilation was bad, to conserve fuel; the fire smoked, so
that the air was additionally bad; there was not a ray of daylight for
months; during this time they practically hibernated, seldom going
outdoors at all and taking as little exercise as appears humanly
possible. Yet their health was perfect all winter and they came out of
their hibernation in as good physical condition as any men ever did out
of any kind of Arctic wintering. Their food had been lean and the fat
of walrus.
Tens, if not hundreds of thousand of scientists in medicine and the
related branches must have seen this account, for Nansen's books were
43

bestsellers in practically every language and newspapers were full of

the story. Yet the effect was negligible. The doctors and dietitians still
continued to pontificate on meat producing scurvy and on the
contributory bad effects of what they called insufficience of
ventilation, cleanliness, sunlight and exercise. They still prescribed
lime juice and put their whole dependence on it and other vegetable
products.
Excuses for lime juice have persisted to our day. It was for instance,
demonstrated with triumph recently that the meaning of "lime" had
changed during the last hundred years, explaining the claim that it
worked better in the eighteenth than in the nineteenth centurythen
the juice was made from lemons called limes; now it is made from
limes called limes.
The antiscorbutic value of lemons may be far greater than that of
limes per ounce, but that does not go to the root of the matter. For
proof of this consider how Nansen's experience was re-enforced and
interpreted by four expeditions during two decades, two of them
commanded by Robert Falcon Scott, one by Ernest Henry Shackleton,
one by me.

II
Scott, in 1900, sought the most orthodox scientific counsel when
outfitting his first expedition. He followed advice by carrying lime
juice and by picking up quantities of fruits and vegetable things as he
passed New Zealand on his way to the Antarctic. He saw to it that the
diet was "wholesome," that the men took exercise, that they bathed
and had plenty of fresh air. Yet scurvy broke out and the subsequently
famous Shackleton was crippled by it on a journey. They were pulling
their own sledges at the time so they must of had enough exercise.
There was plenty of light with the sun beating on them, and there was
plenty of fresh air. To believers in the catch words and slogans of their

44

day, to believers in the virtues of lime juice, the onset of the scurvy
was a baffling mystery.
That is was Shackleton's scurvy which most interfered with the
success of the first Scott expedition was particularly unfortunate, if
you think of the jealousies it aroused, the enmities it caused. Scurvy,
as disease go, is really one of the cleanest and least obnoxious; but in
English the name of it is a term of opprobrium"a scurvy fellow," "a
scurvy trick." Shackleton may have smarted as much under that wordassociation as he did under the charge that his weakness had been
Scott's main handicap. The passion to clear his name, in every sense,
drove him to the organization of an expedition, which many in Britain
considered unethicala subordinate, with indecent haste and
insistence, crowding forward to eclipse his commander.
The crucial element in the first Shackleton expedition, to the
students of scurvy, is the fact that Shackelton was an Elizabethan
throwback in the time of Edward VII. He was a Hawkins or a Drake, a
buccaneer in spirit and method. He talked louder and more than is
good form in modern England. He approached near to brag and
swagger. He caused frictions, aroused and fanned jealousies, and won
the breathless admiration of youngsters who would have followed
Dampier and Frobisher with equal enthusiasm in their piracies and in
their explorations.
The organization, and the rest of the first Shackleton expedition,
went with a hurrah. They were as careless as Scott had been careful;
they did not have Scott's type of backing, scientific or financial. They
arrived helter skelter on the shores of the Antarctic Continent, pitched
camp, and discovered that they did not have enough food for the
winter, nor had they taken such painstaking care as Scott to provide
themselves with fruits or other antiscorbutics in New Zealand.
Compared with Scott's, their routine was slipshod as to cleanliness,
exercise, and several of the ordinary hygienic prescriptions.
What signifies is that Scott's men, with unlimited quantities of jams
and marmalades, cereals and fruits, grains, curries, and potted meats,
had been little inclined to add seals and penguins to their dietary. With
45

Shackleton it was neither wisdom or acceptance of good advise but

dire necessity which drove to such use of penguin and seal that Dr.
Alister Forbes Mackay, physician from Edinburgh, who was a member
of that Shackleton expedition and later physician of my ship the
Karluk, told me he estimated half the food during their stay in the
Antarctic was fresh meat.
In spite of the lack of care, (indeed, as we now see it, because of
their lack), Shackleton had better average health than Scott. There was
never a sign of scurvy; every man retained his full strength; and they
accomplished that spring what most authorities still consider the
greatest physical achievement ever made in the southern polar regions.
With men dragging the sledge a considerable part of the way, they got
to latitude 88 23 S., practically within sight of the Pole.
Scott began his second venture as he had begun the first, by asking
the medical profession of Britain for protection from scurvy and by
receiving from them once more the good old advice about lime juice,
fruits, and the rest. In winter quarters he again placed reliance on that
advice and on constant medical supervision, on a planned and
carefully varied diet, on numerous scientific tests to determine the
condition of the men, on exercise, fresh air, sanitation in all its
standard forms. The men lived on the foods of the United Kingdom,
supplemented by the fruit and garden produce of New Zealand.
Because they had so much which they were used to, they ate little of
what they had never learned to like, the penguins and seals.
Once more they started their sledge travel after a winter of
sanitation. The results had previously be disappointing; now they were
tragic. While scurvy did not prevent them from reaching the South
Pole, it began to weaken them on the return and progressed so rapidly
that the growing weakness prevented them, if only by ten miles, from
being able to get back to the final provision depot.
Those who have ignored the scurvy have sometimes claimed that if
Scott had reached the depot he would have been able to reach the base
camp eventually. This becomes more than doubtful when you realize
that the progressive decrease of vigor, both mental and bodily, was not
46

going to be helped by even the largest meals, if those meals were of

food lacking antiscorbutic value.
The story of Scott and his companions, especially through the last
few weeks, is among the boldest in any language; through it they
became national heroes and world heroes. But in the speech of their
countrymen (though not in many another European tongue), scurvy
sounds unclean. It appeared necessary to Scott's surviving comrades,
and to those in Britain who knew the truth, to take care that the
tabooed word should not sully a glorious deed.
To suppress the association of a disease with the beauty and heroism
of Scott's death may have been worth while at the time; but it can
scarcely be deplored by anyoneand must be praised by scientists
that Commander Edward G. R. Evans, now Admiral, Scott's secondin-command, after a time gave out the scurvy information, including
the statement that he himself had been ill.
It is irrational, at least now that emotions have calmed, to blame
Scott. No one was to blame, for they all acted according to the light of
their day. If anybody was to blame it was primarily those who gave
medical advice to the expedition before it sailed; secondarily, it was
the chief medical officer, rather than the commanding officer, of the
expedition.
It seems strange, now, that a comparison of the Scott and
Shackleton experiences did not fully enlighten the doctors on the true
inwardness of scurvy; but of course part of the explanation is that the
Scott medical information was suppressed. Therefore, it remained for
my own expedition to demonstrate, so far as polar expeditions are
concerned, and for the Russell Sage experiments to call to the attention
of the medical profession, the most practical and only simple way of
curing scurvy. For no matter how good the juice of limes (or lemons),
it is difficult to carry, it deteriorates, and you may lose it, as by a
shipwreck. The thing to do is to find you antiscorbutics where you are,
pick them up as you go.
On my third expedition it happened as circumstantially related in a
book called "The Friendly Arctic", that three men came down with
47

scurvy though disobeying the instructions of the commander and

living without his knowledge for two or three months chiefly on
European foods when they were supposed to be living chiefly on meat.
It seems to take from one to three months for even a bad diet to
produce recognizable scurvy, but there after developments are rapid
through the next few weeks. In the case of my men it was about three
weeks ( as they later thought) after they noticed the trouble and about
ten days after they complained of it to me, when one of them was so
weak we had to carry him on a sledge, while the other was barely able
to stagger along, holding on behind. By then every joint pained, their
gums were as soft as "American" cheese, their teeth so loose that they
came out with almost the gentlest of pulls.
We were 60 or 80 miles from land on drifting sea ice when the
trouble stared, and we hastened ashore to get a stable camp for the
invalids. It would have been no fun, with sick men on your hands, if
the site of your camp started disintegrating under pressure and
tumbling about.
We reached an island (about 900 miles north of the Arctic Circle)
the coast of which was known although the interior had never been
explored. We traveled a few miles inland, established a camp, hunted
caribou (there were two of us well, out of four) and began the all-meat
cure. Fuel was pretty scarce, so we cooked only one meal a day;
besides, I thought raw food might work better. We cooked the
breakfast in a lot of water. The patients finished the boiled meat while
it was hot and kept the broth to drink during the rest of the day. For
their other meals they ate slightly frozen raw meat, with normal
digestion and good appetite. We divided up the caribou Eskimo style,
so the dogs got organs and entrails, hams, shoulders, and tenderloin,
while the invalids, and we hunters got heads, briskets, ribs, pelvis and
the marrow from the bones.
On this diet all pain disappeared from every joint within four days
and the gloom was replaced by optimism. Inside a week both men said
that they had no realization of being ill as long as they lay still in bed.
In two weeks they were able to begin traveling, at first riding on the
48

sledges and walking alternately. At the end of a month they felt as if

they had never been ill. No signs of the scurvy remained except that
the gums, which had receded from the teeth, only partly regained their
position.
By comparing notes later with Dr. Alfred Hess, the leading New
York authority on scurvy, I found that when I was getting these results
with a diet from which all vegetable elements were absent, he was
getting the same results in the same length of time through a diet
where the main reliance was upon grated raw vegetables and fruits and
upon fresh fruit juices.
There is no doubt, as the quantitative studies have shown, that the
percentage of Vitamin C, the scurvy preventing factor, is higher in
certain vegetable elements than in any meats. But it is equally true that
the human body needs only such a tiny bit of Vitamin C that if you
have some fresh meat in your diet every day, and don't over cook it,
there will be enough C from that source alone to prevent scurvy. If you
live exclusively on meat you get from it enough vitamins not only to
prevent scurvy but as said in a previous article, to prevent all other
deficiency diseases.
Closing the subject of vitamins in relation to long expeditions, we
had better emphasize that there has recently been such progress in the
extraction, concentration and storage of Vitamin C that it is now
possible to carry with you enough to last several years and of such
quality that it will not deteriorate to the point of uselessness. But why
carry coals to Newcastle? if you are in the tropics, pick a fruit, or eat a
green; if you are at sea, throw a line outboard and catch a fish; if you
are in the Antarctic, use seals and penguins; if in the Arctic, hunt polar
bears, and seals, caribou and the rest of the numerous game. True
enough, if you make a journey inland into the Antarctic Continent or
toward the center of Greenland, where there is no game because the
land is permanently snow-covered, you have to carry food with you. In
that case you might as well take lemon juice. It is one of the most
portable sources and they know now how to make and pack it so that
its qualities as well as quantities will last you.
49

III
A bulletin conspicuous in the subways co-operated some time ago
with the New York Commissioner of Health by displaying this notice:
FOR SOUND TEETH
BALANCED DIET with
VEGETABLES : FRUIT : MILK
BRUSH TEETH
VISIT DENTIST REGULARLY
Shirley W. Wynne, M.D.
Commissioner of Health

During the same time the ether was full and the magazine pages
were crowded with advertising which told you that mouth chemistry is
altered by a paste, a powder, or a gargle so as to prevent decay, that a
clean tooth never decays, that a special kind of toothbrush reaches all
the crevices, that a particular brand of fruit, milk or bread is rich in
elements for tooth health. There were toothbrush drills in the schools.
Mothers throughout the land were scolding, coaxing, and bribing to get
children to use the preparations, eat the foods, and follow the rules that
insured perfect oral hygiene.
Meantime there appeared a statement from Dr. Adelbert Fernald,
Curator of the Museum of Dental School, Harvard University, that he
had been collecting mouth casts of living Americans, from the most
northerly Eskimos south to the Yucatan. The best teeth and the
healthiest mouths were found among people who never drank milk
since they had ceased to be suckling babes and who never in their lives
tasted any of the other things recommended for sound teeth by the
New York Commissioner of Health. These people, Eskimos, never use
tooth paste, tooth powder, tooth brushes, mouth wash, or gargle. They
never take any pains to cleanse their teeth or mouths. They do not visit
50

their dentist twice a year or even once in a lifetime. Their food is

exclusively meat. Meat, be it noted, was not mentioned in the
advertisement issued by Dr. Wayne.
Teeth superior on the average to those of the presidents of our
largest tooth-paste companies are found in the world to-day, and have
existed during past ages, among people who violate every precept of
current dentifrice advertising. Not all of them have lived exclusively
on meat; but so far as an extensive correspondence with authorities has
yet been able to show me, a complete absence of tooth decay from
entire communities has never existed in the past, and does not exist
now, except among people in whose diet meat is either exclusive or
heavily predominant.
Our Bellevue experiments threw a light on tooth decay, but the key
to the situation lies more in the broad science of anthropology. I now
give, by sample and by summary, things personally known to me from
anthropological field work.
My first anthropological commission was from the Peabody
Museum of Harvard University when they sent John W. Hasting and
me to Iceland in 1905. We found in one place a medieval graveyard
that was being cut away by the sea. Skulls were rolling about in the
water at high tide, at low tide we gathered them and picked up
scattered teeth here and there. As wind and water shifted the sands we
found more and more teeth until there was a handful. Later we got
permission to excavate the cemetery, and eventually we brought with
us to Harvard a miscellaneous lot of bone which included 80 skull, and
as said, a great many loose teeth.
The collection has been studied by dentists and physical
anthropologists without the discovery of a single cavity in even one
tooth.
The skulls in the Hastings-Stefansson collection represent persons
of ordinary Icelandic blood. There were no aborigines in that island
when the Irish discovered it some time before 700 A. D. When the
Norsemen got there in 860 they found no people except the Irish. It is
now variously estimated that in origin the Icelanders are from 10
51

percent to 30 percent Irish, 40 percent to 50 percent Norwegian, the

remainder, perhaps 10 percent, from Scotland, England, Sweden, and
Denmark.
None of the people whose blood went into the Icelandic stock are
racially immune to tooth decay, nor are the modern Icelanders. Then
why were the Icelanders of the Middle Ages immune?
An analysis of the various factors make it pretty clear that their food
protected the teeth of the medieval Icelanders. The chief elements
were fish, mutton, milk and milk products. There was a certain amount
of beef and there may have been a little horse flesh, particularly in the
earliest period of the graveyard. Cereals were little important and
might be used for beer rather than porridge. Bread was negligible and
so were all other elements from the vegetable kingdom, native or
imported.
My mother, who as born on the north coast of Iceland, remembered
from the middle of the nineteenth century a period when bread still
was as rare as caviar is in New York to-dayshe tasted bread only
three or four times a year and then only small pieces when she went
with her mother visiting. So far as bread existed at her own house, it
was used as a treat for visiting children. The diet was still substantially
that of the Middle Ages, though the use of porridge was increasing.
She did not remember hearing of toothache in her early youth but did
remember accounts of it as a painful rarity about the time when she
left for America in 1876. Soon after arrival in the United States
(Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota,) and in Canada (Nova Scotia,
Manitoba) the Icelandic colonists became thoroughly familiar with the
ravages of caries. They probably had teeth as bad as those of the
average American long before 1900.
There is then at least one case of a north-European people whose
immunity from caries (to judge from the Hastings-Stefansson
collection and common report) approached 100 percent for a thousand
years, down to approximately the time of the American Civil War. The
diet was mainly from the animal kingdom. Now that it has become,
both in America and Iceland approximately the same as the average
52

for the United States or Europe, Icelandic teeth show a high percentage
of decay.
I began to learn about another formerly toothacheless people when I
joined the Mackenzie River Eskimos in 1906. Some of them had been
eating European foods in considerable amount since 1889, and
toothache and tooth decay were appearing, but only in the mouths of
those who affected the new foods secured from the Yankee whalers.
The Mackenzie people agreed that toothache and cavities had been
unknown in the childhood of those then approaching middle age while
there were many of all ages still untouched, the ones who kept mainly
or wholly to the Eskimo diet. Here and in many other places, this is
somewhere between 98 and 100 percent from animal sources. There
are districts, like parts of Labrador and of western and southwestern
Alaska, where even before the coming of Europeans there was
considerable use of native vegetable elements nowhere furnished as
much as 5 percent of the average yearly caloric intake of the primitive
Eskimos, even in south-western Alaska.
Dr. Alex Hirdlicka, Curator of Anthropology in the National
Museum, Washington, writes me that he knows of no case of tooth
decay among Eskimos of the present or past who were uninfluenced
by European habits. Dr. S. G. Ritchie, of Dalhousie University, wrote
after studying the skeletal collection gathered by Mr. Diamond Jenness
on my third expedition: " In all the teeth examined there is not the
slightest trace of caries."
I brought about 100 skulls of Eskimos, who had died before
Europeans came in, to the American Museum of Natural History, New
York. These have been examined by many students, but no sign of
tooth decay has yet been discovered.
Dr. M. A. Pleasure examined at the American Museum of Natural
History 283 skulls said to be Eskimo of pre-European date. He found a
small cavity in one tooth; but when the records where check it turned
out that the collector, Rev. J. W. Chapman of the Episcopal Board of
Missions, who now lives in New York City, had sent that skull to the
Museum as one of an Athabasca Indian, not of an Eskimo.
53

The slate is, therefore, clean to date. Not a sign of tooth decay has
yet been discovered among that one of all peoples which most
completely avoids the foods, the precepts, and the practices favored for
dental health by the New York Commissioner of Health, the average
dentist, the toothbrush drillmasters of the schools, and the dentifrice
publicists.

IV
When addressing conventions and societies of medical men, I
usually state the oral hygiene case somewhat as above but in more
detail. If there is rebuttal from the floor, it invariably takes the form of
contending that the tooth health of primitive people is due to their
chewing a lot and eating coarse food. The advantage of that argument
to the dentist, whose best efforts have failed to save your teeth is
obvious. It gives him an excuse. He can from the doctrine make a case
that not all your care, even when support by his skill and science, can
preserve teeth in a generation of soft foods, that give no exercise to the
teeth and no friction to the gums.
But it is deplorably hard to square anthropology with this
comfortable excuse of the dentist. Among the best teeth of a mixeddiet world are those of a few South Sea Islanders who as yet largely
keep to their native diets. Similar or better tooth condition is described,
for instance, from the Hawaiian Islands by the earliest visitors. But can
you think of a case less fortunate for the chewing-and-coarse-food
advocates? The animal food of these people was chiefly fish, and fish
is soft to the teeth, whether boiled or raw. Among the chief vegetable
elements was poi, a kind of soup or paste. Then they used sweet
potatoes.
It would be difficult to find a New Yorker or Parisian who does not
chew more, and use coarser food, than the South Sea Islanders did on
the native diets which gave them in at least some cases 97 percent
freedom from caries, a record no block on Park Avenue can approach.
54

Nor do Eskimos chew much, as compared with us. So far as their

meat is raw it can be chewed like a raw oysterslips down similarly.
When perfectly fresh meat is cooked, two main causes determine
toughness: the age of the beast and the manner of cooking. The chief
food animal of inland Eskimos is the caribou. A young caribou is as
fleet as a heifer; an old one is as slow as a cow. Therefore the wolves
get the clumsy old which drop behind when the band flees, and the
Eskimos seldom have a chance to secure an animal that is more than
three or four. Such young caribou are not tough, no matter how
cooked.
I do not know a corresponding logical demonstration for seals, but I
can testify from helping to eat thousands that their meat is never
toughat least not in comparison with the beefsteaks you sometimes
get in New York chophouses.
Then there are Eskimos who live practically exclusively on fish. As
said, you can't chew them when they are raw; there is not much
chewing when they are eaten boiled. the only condition under which
fish become tough, or rather hard, is when they are dried. Some
Eskimos use dried fish; others do not.
There is for separated districts a wide difference in the amount of
Eskimo chewing, but no one has reported that health of the teeth is
better among heavy chewers. How could it be when as yet no caries
has been found either among the lightest or heaviest masticators?
It is used as a second line of defense by the mastication advocates
that even if Eskimos perhaps don't chew their food so very much they
do chew skins a great deal. Their chewing of leather is far less than
you might believe from what has been said by a particular kind of
writer and pictured in certain movies. In any case, skin chewing is
mainly by the women, and it is not easy to bring under the conditions
of modern scientific thought the idea that the wife's chewing preserves
her husband's teeth.
Once at a talk to a medical group I encountered a further argument.
Is it not true that Eskimo men use the teeth a great deal in their crafts?
Do they not bite wood, ivory, or metal to hold, pull out, twist, and so
55

one? The best I could think of was to agree that Eskimos pull nails
with their teeth because they have good teeth than that they have good
teeth because they pull nails.
There are several reasons why the teeth of many Eskimos wear
down rapidly. They usually meet edge to edge, where ours frequently
overlap, and that tends to cause wear. Some Eskimos wind-dry fish or
meat, sand gets in, and to an extent makes them like sandpaper. Both
sexes, but especially men, use their teeth for biting on hard materials.
Both sexes, but especially the women, use their teeth for softening
skins. A wearing toward the pulp may, therefore, take place in early
middle-life. What then happens is stated by Dr. Richie (whom we have
already quoted) with relation to the Coronation Gulf Eskimos:
"Coincident with this extreme wear of the teeth the dental pulps
have taken on their original function with conspicuous success.
Sufficient new dentine of fine quality has been formed to obliterate the
pulp chambers and in some cases even the root canals of the teeth.
This new growth of tissue is found in every case where access to the
pulp chambers has been threatened. There has therefore been no
destruction of the pulps through infection and consequently alveolar
abscesses are apparently unknown."
Total absence of caries from those who live wholly on meat is then
definite. Cessation of decay when you transfer from a mixed to a meat
diet happens usually, perhaps always. The rest of the picture is not so
clear.
Caries has been found in the teeth of mummies in Egypt, Peru, and
in our own Southwest. These ancient people were mixed-diet eaters,
depending in considerable part on cereals. Their teeth were better than
ours, though not so good as the Eskimos. If you want a dental law, you
can approximate it by saying that the most primitive people usually
have the best teeth. You can add that in some cases a highly vegetarian
people while not attaining the 100 percent perfection of meat eaters, do
nevertheless, have very good teeth as compared with ours.
It is contended by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association Health
Research Project that the shift from good to execrable teeth among the
56

mixed diet Polynesians there has been due to years of cereals. I have
seen no comment of theirs upon the (I should think) great increase of
sugar consumption that has been synchronic with the deterioration of
Hawaiian teeth.
On the view that diet is the greatest factor in saving teeth, the
anthropologists have been getting support from experiments conducted
by institutions and by scattered students. Some dentists are here
contributing nobly to a research, and to a campaign of education, that
seems bound to deplete their income. My probing has not revealed
thus far corresponding unselfishness among the dentifrice
manufacturers.
A serious mouth disease, next after caries, is pyorrhea. He who runs
cannot read the marks so readily on human skeletons; but it seems at
least probable that the medieval Icelanders, the Eskimos, and others
who have left teeth free from cavities, were also free from, or at least
not severely afflicted by, pyorrhea. Similarly, the modern investigators
have found Eskimos who are still living on their native foods to have
an unusually good average condition of general oral health, therewith
absence of pyorrhea.
One of the things we noticed in the general well-being of our New
York year on meat and similar years in the Arctic was the absence of
headaches. I used to have them frequently before going north and have
them occasionally whenever I am on a mixed diet. The whys and
wherefores are not clear and what we say on this point is more
tentative than any other part of this statement.
It was noticed in the X-ray pictures during our New York meat year
that we had far less gas in the intestinal tract when on meat than when
on a mixed dietpractically no gas. The work of Dr. John C. Torrey
showed that neither did digestion and elimination produce those
offensive smells which are found in vegetarianism and on a mixed diet
But whether the freedom from a certain kind of intestinal food
decomposition was what led to the freedom from headache is no more
than a working hypothesis.

57

The prevention of headache by abstaining from vegetables has been

recorded in books. An outstanding case is that of Francis Parkman, the
historian, who suffered with headaches all his life except, as he states,
during one period when he was living with an Indian tribe chiefly or
exclusively on meat. This testimony, though by an eminent man
widely read, and though a fair sample of the testimony of meat eaters,
commanded little attention for the physicians. It should be said in their
defense, however, that Parkman himself does not proclaim the
experience as a triumphant discovery. He rather puts it the other way
about, that in spite of being compelled to live on meat, he was free
from the headaches that plagued him the rest of his days.
Professor Raymond Pearl, nearly twenty years ago, while he was at
the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station, proved that chickens know
more than professors about what is good for chickens to eat. Now
several experiments appear in a good way to establish that children, if
given complete freedom to choose among foods undisguised by sauces
and artificial flavors will select better for their own health and strength
than the mother or child specialist. One of the things frequently
noticed about these children is that they eat large quantities of a single
item which they happen to like. Our living for years on a single item
which we liked was from the point of view no more than carrying
forward a childhood tendency.

V
More than twenty-five years have passed since the completion of
my first twelve months on meat and more than six years since the
completion in New York of my sixth full meat year. All the rest of my
life I have been a heavy meat eater, and I am now fifty-six. That
should be long enough to bring out the effects. Dr. Clarence W. Lieb
will report in the American Journal of Gastroenterology that I still run
well above my age average on those points where meat has been

58

supposed to cause deterioration. The same is the verdict of my own

feelings. Rheumatism, for instance, has yet to give me its first twinge.
The broadest conclusion to be drawn from our comfort, enjoyment,
and long-range well-being on meat is that the human body is a sounder
and more competent job than we give it credit for. Apparently you can
eat healthy on meat without vegetables, on vegetables without meat, or
on a mixed diet.
Two stories summarize one of the most interesting sides of the case,
the dental. In 1903 I heard the Dean of the dental school of the
University of Pennsylvania say in a lecture that he thought dentists to
that year had done more harm than good, but would thereafter be
doing more good than harm. In 1928 when I told this to Dr. Percy
Howe, Director of the Forsyth Dental Infirmary for Children, he said
he thought the good Dean had been premature by at least twenty years.
As I understand Dr. Howe, much good was done in particular cases by
dentists long ago, but it is only within the past ten years or so that the
average for good has overbalanced the harm by any very heavy
proportion.
While meat eaters seem to average well in heath, we must in our
conclusion draw a caution from the most complete modern example of
them the Eskimos of Coronation Gulf, when he was anthropologist on
my third expedition, that the two chief causes of death were accidents
and old age. This puts in a different form my saying that these
survivors of the stone age were the healthiest people I have ever lived
among. I would say the community, from infancy to old age, may have
had on the average the health of an equal number of men about twenty,
say college students.
The danger is that you may reason from this good health to a great
longevity. But meat eaters do not appear to live long. So far as we can
tell, the Eskimos, before the white men upset their physiological as
well as their economic balance, lived on the average at least ten years
less than we. Now their lives average still shorter; but that is partly
from communicated diseases.

59

It has been said in a previous article that I found the exclusive meat
diet in New York to be stimulatingI felt energetic and optimistic
both winter and summer. Perhaps it may be considered that meat is,
overall, a stimulating diet, in the sense that metabolic processes are
speeded up. You are then living at a faster rate, which means you
would grow up rapidly and get old soon. This is perhaps confirmed by
that early maturing of Eskimo women which I have heretofore
supposed to be mainly due to their almost complete protection from
chill they live in warm dwellings and dress warmly so that the body
is seldom under stress to maintain by physiological processes a
temperature balance. It may be that meat as a speeder-up of
metabolism explains in part both that Eskimo women are sometimes
grandmothers before the age of twenty-three, and that they usually
seem as old at sixty as our women do at eighty.
So you could live on meat if you wanted to; but there is no driving
reason why you should. Moreover vegetables are fundamentally
economical. You can get several times more food value from an acre
of corn than from the pigs that ate the corn.
The thing to do then, probably, is to go on as you have been doing,
but adding to your mental equipment, if it be a novelty, the idea that
several at least of the disadvantages of a meat diet are compensated for
by advantages.

60

61

62

Conquest of the Land Through

Seven Thousand Years
By
W. C. Lowdermilk

Resurrection Press
Moscow, Idaho

63

64

FOREWORD
In 1938 and 1939, Dr. W. C. Lowdermilk, who was an assistant chief
of the U. S. Soil Conservation Service at that time, made an 18-month
tour of western Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East to study soil
erosion and land use in those areas. This tour was sponsored by the
soil Conservation Service at the request of a congressional committee.
The main objective of the tour was to gain information from those
areas -- where some lands had been in cultivation for hundreds and
thousands of years -- that might be of value in helping to solve the soil
erosion and land use problems of the United States.
During the 1938-39 tour, Dr. Lowdermilk visited England, Holland, France, Italy, Algeria, Tunisia, Tripoli, Egypt, Palestine, TransJordan, Lebanon, Cyprus, Syria, and Iraq. Prior to that time, he had
spent several years in China where he had studied soil erosion and land
use problems.
After his return to this country, Dr. Lowdermilk gave numerous
lectures, illustrated with lantern slides, about his findings on land use
in the old world. Conquest of the Land Through Seven Thousand Years
is the essence of those talks. It was first published in l942, in
mimeograph form, as a lecture. It has been used extensively in
conjunction with lantern slides by many school teachers and other
lecturers. It proved to be so popular that it now has been slightly
revised and illustrated, and is published in its present form with the
hope that its usefulness will be greatly extended.
Most of the illustrations used in this publication were made from
photographs taken by Dr. Lowdermilk during his travels.

65

Introduction
Some time ago I heard of an old man dawn on a hill farm in the
South, who sat on his front porch as a newcomer to the neighborhood
passed bye. The newcomer to make talk said, "Mister, how does the
land lie around here?" The old man replied, "Well -- I don't know
about the land a-lying; its these real estate people that do the lying." In
a very real sense the land does not lie; it bears a record of what men
write on it. In a larger sense a nation writes its record on the land, and
a civilization writes its record on the land -- a record that is easy to
read by those who understand the simple language of the land. Let us
read together some of the records that have been written on the land in
the westward course of civilization from the Holy Lands of the Near
East to the Pacific Coast of our country through a period of some 7000
years.
Records of mankind's struggles through the ages to find a lasting
adjustment to the land are found written across the landscapes as
"westward the course of empire took its way." Failures are more
numerous than successes, as told by ruins and wrecks of works along
this amazing trail. From these failures and successes we may learn
much of profit and benefit to this young nation of the United States as
it occupies a new and bountiful continent and begins to set up house
for a thousand or ten thousand years -- yea, for a boundless future.
Freedom Bought and Sold for Food
Pearl Harbor, like an earthquake, shocked the American people to
a realization that we are living in a dangerous world -- dangerous for
our way of life, for our survival as a people, and perilous for the hope
of the ages in a government of the people, by the people and for the
people. Why should the world be dangerous for such a philanthropic
country as ours?
The world is made dangerous by the desperation of peoples
suffering from privations and fear of privations, brought on by restrictions of the exchange of the good and necessary things of Mother
Earth. Industrialization has wrought in the past century far reaching
66

changes in civilization, such as will go on and on into our unknown

future. Raw materials for modern industrialization are localized here
and there over the globe; they are not equally available to national
groups of peoples who have learned to make and use machines. Wants
and needs of food and raw materials have been growing up unevenly
and bringing on stresses and strains in international relations that are
seized upon by ambitious peoples and leaders to control by force the
sources of such food and raw materials. Wars of aggression, long and
well planned, take place to obtain such materials.
Such conflicts are not settled for good by war; the problems are
pushed aside for a time only to come back in more terrifying
proportion at some later time. Lasting solutions will come in another
way. We can depend on the reluctance of peoples to launch themselves
into war, for they go to war because they fear something worse than
war, either real or propagandized. A just relation of peoples to the
earth rests not on exploitation, but rather on conservation -- not on the
dissipation of resources, but rather on restoration of the productive
powers of the land and on access to food and raw materials. If civilization is to avoid a long decline such as has blighted North Africa and
the Near East for 13 centuries and for centuries yet to come, society
must be born again out of an economy of exploitation into an economy
of conservation.
We are now getting down to fundamentals in this relationship of a
people to the land. My experience with famines in China taught me
that in the last reckoning all things are purchased with food. This is a
hard saying; but the recent worldwide war shows up the terrific reach
of this fateful and awful truth. Aggressor nations used the rationing of
food to subjugate rebellious peoples of occupied countries. For even
you and I will sell our liberty and more for food, when driven to this
tragic choice. There is no substitute for food.
Seeing what we will give up for food, let us look at what food will
buy -- for money is merely a symbol, a convenience in the exchange of
the goods and services that we need and want. Food buys our division
of labor that begets our civilization. Not until tillers of soil grew more
67

food than they themselves required were their fellows released to do

other tasks than the growing of food -- that is, to take part in a division
of labor that became more complex with the advance of civilization.
For the lumberjack does not go into the forest to cut and log out timber
until food is made available, nor do miners dig the ore out of the
bowels of mountains, nor mechanics fashion metals into tools and
machines, nor soldiers fight battles until food is made abundant and
adequate.
True, we have need of clothing, of shelter, of other goods and
services made possible by a complex division of labor founded on this
food production when suitable raw materials are at hand. And of these
the genius of the American people has given us more than any other
nation ever possessed. They comprise our American standard of living.
But these other good things matter little to hungry people as I have
seen in the terrible scourges of famine.
Food production is thus the final and fundamental measure of
adjustment of a people to its land resources. Food production is the
measure of the carrying capacity of the land for a human population,
but the multiplicity in divisions of labor determines our standards of
living. Trade and transportation permit concentration of peoples in
cities and certain countries beyond the food producing capacity of the
underlying land, but this in no way invalidates this basic relation of a
people to the earth.
Food comes from the holy earth. The land with its waters gives us
nourishment. The earth rewards richly the knowing and diligent but
punishes inexorably the ignorant and slothful. This partnership of land
and farmer is the rock foundation of our complex social structure.
In 1938, in the interests of a permanent agriculture and of the
conservation of our land resources, the Department of Agriculture
asked me to make a survey of land use in olden countries, for the
benefit of our farmers and stockmen and other agriculturists in this
country. This survey took us through England, Holland, France, Italy,
North Africa, and the Near East, and after 18 months was interrupted
by the outbreak of war when Germany invaded Poland in September
68

of 1939. We were prevented from continuing the survey through

Turkey, the Balkan States, Southern Germany, and Switzerland as was
originally planned. But in a year and a half in the olden lands we
discovered many things of wide interest to the people of America.
Graveyard of Empires
We shall begin our reading of the record as it is written on the
land in the Near East, where civilization arose out of the mysteries of
the Stone Age and gave rise to cultures that moved eastward to China
and westward through Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean to the
Americas. We are daily and hourly reminded of our debt to the
Sumerian peoples of Mesopotamia, whenever we use the wheel that
they invented more than 6000 years ago; we do homage to their
mathematics each time we look at the clock or our watches to tell time
divided into units of sixty. Moreover, our calendar in use today is a
revision of the method of the ancient Egyptians in dividing the year.
We inherit the experience and knowledge of the past more than we
know.
Agriculture had its beginnings at least 7000 years ago and
developed in two great centers -- in the fertile alluvial plains of
Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley. We shall leave the interesting
question of the precise area in which agriculture originated to the
archaeologists. It is enough for us to know that it was in these alluvial
plains in an arid climate that tillers of soil began to grow food crops by
irrigation in quantities greater than their own needs and released their
fellows for a division of labor that gave rise to what we call
civilization. We shall follow the vicissitudes of peoples recorded on
the land, as nations rose and fell in these fateful lands.
A survey of such an extensive area in the short time of two years
called for simple but fundamental methods of field study. With the aid
of agricultural officials of other countries, we hunted out fields that
had been cultivated for a thousand years, or the basis of a permanent
agriculture. Likewise, we sought to find the reasons why lands
formerly. cultivated had been wasted or destroyed, as a warning to our
69

farmers and our city folks of a possible similar catastrophe in this new
land of America. A simplified method of field study enabled us to examine large areas rapidly.
In the Zagros Mountains that separate Persia from Mesopotamia,
shepherds with their flocks have lived from time immemorial, when
"the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." From time to time
they have swept down into the plain to bring devastation and destruction upon farming and city peoples of the plains. Such was the
beginning of the Cain and Abel struggle between the shepherd and the
farmer, of which we will have more to say.
At Kish, we looked upon the first capital after the Great Flood that
swept over Mesopotamia in pre-historic times and left its record in a
thick deposit of brown alluvium. The layer of alluvium marked a break
in the sequence of a former and a succeeding culture as recorded in
artifacts. Above the alluvium deposits is the site of Kish, the first
capital in Mesopotamia after the traditional flood as described in the
Bible.
At the ruins of mighty Babylon we pondered the ruins of
Nebuchadnezzar's stables adorned by animal figures in bas-relief; we
stood subdued as at a funeral as we recalled how this great ruler of
Babylon had boasted:
That which no king before had done, I did....A wall like a mountain
that cannot be moved, I builded....great canals I dug and lined them
with burnt brick laid in bitumen and brought abundant waters to all
the people....I paved the streets of Babylon with stone from the
mountains....magnificent palaces and temples I have built....Huge
cedars from Mount Lebanon I cut down....with radiant gold I
overlaid them and with jewels I adorned them.
Then came to mind the warnings of the Hebrew prophets that
were thundered against the wicked city, for they warned that Babylon
would become "A desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a land
wherein no man dwelleth....And wolves shall cry in their castles, and
70

jackals in the pleasant places." Believe it or not, the only living thing
that we saw in this desolation that once was Babylon, was a lean gray
wolf, shaking his head as if he might have had a tick in his ear, as he
loped to his lair in the ruins of one of the seven wonders of the ancient
world -- the Hanging Gardens of Babylon where air conditioning was
in use 2600 years ago.
Mesopotamia, the traditional site of the Garden of Eden, out of
which come the stories of the Flood, of Noah and the Ark, of the
"Tower of Babel" and the confusion of tongues, of the fiery furnace
which we found still burning today, is jotted full of records of a
glorious past, of dense populations and of great cities that are now
ruins and desolation. For at least eleven empires have risen and fallen
in this tragic land in 7000 years. It is a story of a precarious agriculture
by people who lived and grew up under the threat of raids and invasions from the denizens of grasslands and the desert, and of the failure
of their irrigation canals because of silt -- silt!
In recent years a great pool of oil was discovered beneath the
traditional Garden of Eden. It was escaping gas from this pool that
caught fire and became known as the fiery furnace into which,
presumably, the three friends of Daniel, Shadrach, Meschech and
Abednego, were thrown by an angry King. Income from this rich find
of petroleum may well be used to restore this ancient land to more than
its former productivity by installations of modern civilization. Scarcely
a beginning in this possible reclamation has been made.

71

Fig. 1. The remains of the prehistoric city of Kish lay buried under the sands of
Mesopotamia for thousands of years. During recent years, archaeologists have
excavated the ruins shown above. These ruins now lie in a desert -- a man-made
desert.

Fig. 2. This picture shows part of the excavated ruins of ancient Babylon; which was
the capital of most of the civilized world only 4,000 years ago. When Babylon died,
it remained dead and was buried under the sands of Mesopotamia; not because it was
sacked and razed; but because the irrigation ditches which watered the lands that
supported the city were permitted to fill with silt.
72

In Mesopotamia, agriculture was practiced in a very dry climate

on canal irrigation with muddy water. Waters of the Twin Rivers are
now heavily charged with the products of erosion out of far mountain
gorges and overgrazed hill lands, of the Tigris and Euphrates drainage.
This muddy water was the undoing of empire after empire by reason of
silt. As muddy river waters slowed down, they choked up the canals
with silt. It was necessary to keep this silt out of the canals year after
year to supply life-giving waters to farm lands and to cities of the
plain. As populations grew, canals were dug further and further from
the rivers, until a great system of canals called for a great force of hand
labor to keep them clean of silt. This was a very serious problem, for
the rulers of Babylon brought in war captives for this task. Now we
understand why the captive Israelites "sat down by the waters of
Babylon and wept," for they also were doubtless required to dig silt
out of canals of Mesopotamia.
As these great public works of cleaning silt out of canals were
interrupted from time to time by internal revolutions and by foreign
invaders, the peoples of Mesopotamia were brought face to face with
disaster in canals choked with silt. Stoppage of canals by silt depopulated villages and cities more effectively than the slaughter of people
by an invading army.
On the basis of an estimate that it was possible in times past to
irrigate 21,000 square miles of the 35,000 square miles of the alluvium
of Mesopotamia, the population of Mesopotamia at its zenith was
probably between 17 and 25 million. The present population of all Iraq
is estimated to be about 4,000,000 including nomadic peoples. Of this
total not more than 3,500,000 live on the alluvial plain.
Decline in population, in Mesopotamia is not due to loss of soil by
erosion; for the fertile lands are still in place and life-giving waters still
flow in the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, ready to be spread upon the
lands today as in times past. Mesopotamia is capable of supporting as
great a population as it ever did and greater when modern engineering
makes use of reinforced concrete construction for irrigation works and
73

powered machinery to keep canal systems open. A greater area of

Mesopotamia thus might be farmed than ever before in the long
history of this tragic land. But erosion in the hinterlands aggravated the
silt problem in waters of the Twin Rivers, as they were drawn off into
the ancient canal systems, and invasions of nomads out of the grasslands and the desert brought about the breakdown of irrigation that
spelled disaster after disaster.
We shall leave Mesopotamia now where at least 11 empires rose
and fell in the past 7000 years and where the 12th nation of Iraq is now
just beginning a new life. We shall travel westward across the Syrian
desert, along the probable route of the patriarch Abraham with his
family, as he journeyed from Ur of the Chaldeas to the Promised Land
of Canaan. We had selected for our survey of Mesopotamia, a period
that would fall after the usual spring rains and before the sandstorms of
late spring. But we were overtaken by a belated rain and became stuck
in the mud. We owe our rescue to the kindness and efficiency of employees of the Iraq Petroleum Pipe Line Company which was engaged
in pumping oil out of the great pool under the Garden of Eden to the
Mediterranean Coast, in two pipe lines each more than 600 miles long.
In Egypt's Land
Let's now turn to the other great center of population growth and
development of civilization in the Valley of the Nile, where the
mysterious Sphinx ponders problems of the ages as he looks out over
the narrow green valley of the Nile lying across a brown and sunscorched desert.
In Egypt as well as in Mesopotamia tillers of soil early learned to
sow food plants of wheat and barley and to grow surplus food that
released their fellows for divisions of labor that gave rise to the
remarkable civilization that arose in the Valley of the Nile. Our debt to
the ancient Egyptians is great.
Here farming grew up with flood irrigation of muddy water where
problems of farming were quite different from those of Mesopotamia.
Annual flooding with silt-laden waters spread thin layers of silt over
74

the land, raising it higher and higher. In these flat lands of slowly
accumulating soil, farmers never met with problems of soil erosion. To
be sure, there have been problems, especially since year-long irrigation
has been made possible by the Assuan Dam, of salt accumulation and
of rising water tables for which drainage is the solution. But the body
of the soil has remained suitable for cropping for 6000 years and more.
It was perhaps in the Nile Valley that a genius of a farmer about 6000
years ago hitched an ox to a hoe and invented the plow, thus originating power-farming to disturb the social structure of those times much
as the tractor disturbed the social structure of our country in recent
years. By this means farmers became more efficient in growing food; a
single farmer released several of his fellows from the vital task of
growing food for other tasks. Very likely the Pharaohs had difficulty in
keeping this surplus population sufficiently occupied; for we suspect
that the Pyramids were the first great W.P.A. projects.
On the Trail of the Israelites
We shall follow the route of Moses out of the fertile irrigated
lands of Egypt into a mountainous land where forests and fields were
watered with the rain of heaven. Fields cleared on mountain slopes
presented a new problem in farming -- the problem of soil erosion,
which as we shall see, became the greatest hazard to permanent
agriculture and an insidious enemy of civilization.
We crossed the modern Suez Canal with its weird color of blue,
now a very important "big ditch," into Sinai where the Israelites with
their herds wandered for 40 years. They or some one must have overgrazed the Peninsula of Sinai, for it is now a picture of desolation. We
saw in this landscape how the original brown soil mantle was eroded
into enormous gullies as shown by great yellowish gashes cut into the
brown soil covering. I had not expected to find evidences of so much
accelerated erosion in the arid land of Sinai.
On the way to Aqaba we crossed a remarkable landscape, a
plateau that had been eroded through the ages almost to a plain, called
a peneplain in physiographic language. This broad flat surface glisten75

ed in the sunlight with the colors of the rainbow because of desert

varnish on the small stones that had been fitted together through the
ages to form a classic example of desert pavement. This peneplain
surface dates back to Miocene times, in the geological scale. In the
plain now is no evidence of accelerated cutting by torrential streams,
no evidence that climate has changed for drier or wetter conditions
since Miocene times. Here is a cumulative record going far back of the
Ice Age, proclaiming that in this region climate has been remarkably
stable.
From this plateau we dropped down 2500 feet into the Araba or
gorge of the great rift valley that includes the Gulf of Aqaba, the
Araba, the Dead Sea, and the Valley of the Jordan. At the head of the
Gulf of Aqaba of the Red Sea we found Dr. Nelson Glueck excavating
Ezion Geber which he calls the ancient Pittsburgh of the Red Sea, or
Solomon's Seaport, where copper was smelted 2800 years ago to
furnish instruments for Solomon and his people. The mud brick used
for building these ancient houses looked just like our adobe brick of
New Mexico and Arizona.
As we climbed out of the rift valley over the east wall to the
plateau of Trans-Jordan that slopes toward the Arabian Desert, we
came near Amman upon the same type of peneplain that we crossed
west of the Araba. This peneplain was covered by a coarser pavement
in which were fragments of basalt, but topographically these two
plains are parts of the same peneplain that once spread unbroken
across this region. But toward the end of Pliocene times -- that is, just
before the beginning of the Ice Age -- a series of parallel faults let
down into it the great rift valley to form one of the most spectacular
examples of disturbances in the earths crust that is known to
geologists.
From Ma'an we proceeded past an old Roman dam, silted up and
later washed out and left isolated as a meaningless wall, and on to Elji
where we took horses to visit the fantastic ruins of ancient Petra
(called Sela in the Old Testament). This much-discussed city was the
capital of the Nabatean civilization and flourished at the same time as
76

the Golden Age of China -- 200 B.C. to 200 A.D. Rose-red ruins of a
great city are hidden away in a desert gorge on the margin of the
Arabian desert.
Petra is now the desolate ruin of a great center of power and
culture and has been used by some students as evidence that climate
has become drier in the past 2000 years, making it impossible for this
land to support as great a population as it did in the past. In
contradiction to this conclusion, we found slopes of surrounding valley
covered with terrace walls that had fallen into ruin and allowed the
soils to be washed off to bare rock over large areas. These evidences
showed that formerly food was grown locally and that soil erosion had
damaged the land beyond use for crops. Invasion of nomads out of the
desert had probably resulted in a breakdown in these measures for the
conservation of soil and water, and erosion had washed away the soils
from the slopes and under-mined the carrying capacity of this land for
a human population. Before ascribing decadence of the region to
change of climate, we must know how much the breakdown of intensive agriculture contributed to the fall and disappearance of this
Nabatean civilization.
The great buildings used for public purposes are amazing;
temples, administrative buildings, and tombs are all carved out of the
red Nubian sandstone cliffs. A fascinating story still lies hidden in the
unexcavated ruins of this ancient capital. The influence of Greek and
Roman civilization was found in a great theater with a capacity to seat
some 2500 persons, carved entirely out of massive sandstone rock,
which only echoes the scream of eagles, or the chatter of tourists.
And as we proceeded northward in the Biblical land of Moab, we
came to the site of Mt. Nebo and were reminded of how Moses, after
having led the Israelites through 40 years of wandering in the
wilderness, stood on this mountain and looked across the Jordan
Valley to the Promised Land. He described it to his followers in words
like these:

77

For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of
brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys
and hills; a land of wheat and barley and vines and fig trees and
pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey; a land wherein thou
shalt eat bread without scarceness; thou shalt not lack anything in
it; a land whose stones are iron and out of whose hills thou mayest
dig brass.
The Land of Milk and Honey
We crossed the Jordan Valley as did Joshua and found the Jordan
River a muddy and disappointing stream. We stopped at the ruins of
Jericho and dug out kernels of charred grain which the archaeologists
tell us undoubtedly belonged to an ancient household of this ill-fated
city. We looked at the Promised Land as it is today, 3000 years after
Moses described it to the Israelites as a land flowing with milk and
honey.
The British Mandate Government for Palestine was very
accommodating and furnished an armored car to protect us in our
travels against attacks of terrorists, who were very active at that time.
The Government also furnished us an airplane with special permission
to take pictures from the air. The Jewish Agency gave us all facilities
to study the agricultural colonies. Because of this excellent
cooperation, we had an excellent view of Palestine as it is today.
We found that the soils of red earth had been washed off the
slopes to bed rock over more than half the upland area -- washed off
the slopes and lodged in the valleys where they are still being
cultivated and still being eroded by great gullies that cut through the
alluvium with every heavy rain. Evidence of rocks washed off the hills
were found in piles of stone where tillers of soil had heaped them
together to make cultivation about them the easier. From the air we
read with startling vividness the graphic story as written in the land,
where soils have been washed off to bed rock in the vicinity of Hebron
and only dregs of the land are left behind in narrow valley floors, there
still cultivated to meager crops.
78

Fig. 3. This is a present day view of the Promised Land to which Moses led the
children of Israel. A few patches, like those shown in the foreground, still have
enough soil to raise a meager crop of grain. But, as observed from the rock
outcroppings, most of the land on the sloping hillsides has lost practically all soil
through man-induced erosion. The crude rock terrace, shown in the middle
foreground, helps to hold some of the remaining soil in place.

Fig. 4. This picture, taken near Jerusalem, Palestine, shows a contrast in slopes. The
slopes in the foreground and the left middle distance are almost completely bare of
soil; while the slopes to the right where crude terraces are seen still retain enough
soil to produce a thin crop of grain.
79

In the denuded highlands of Judea are ruins of abandoned village

sites. Capt. P.L.O. Guy, Director of the British School of Archaeology,
has studied in detail those in the drainage of Wadi Musrara. These
sites were occupied 1500 years ago; since that time they have been
depopulated and abandoned in greater numbers on the upper slopes.
Capt. Guy divided the drainage of Musrara into three altitudinal zones:
The plain, 0-325 feet; foothills, 325-975 feet; and mountains, 975 feet
and over. In the plain 34 sites were occupied and 4 abandoned; in the
foothills, 31 occupied and 65 abandoned; and in the mountains, 37
occupied and 124 abandoned. Villages have thus been abandoned in
the 3 zones by percentages in the above order of 11, 67 and 77, which
agrees well with the removal of soil. It is little wonder that villages
were abandoned in a landscape such as this in the upper zone near
Jerusalem, where the soil, source of food supply, has been wasted
away by erosion and only remnants of the land left in drainage
channels, held there by cross walls of stone.
Where soils are held in place by stone terrace walls that have been
maintained down to the present, we found the soils still cultivated after
several thousand years and still producing -- not heavily, to be sure,
because of poor soil management. Most important, the soils are still in
place and will grow bigger crops with improved soil treatment. We
also looked upon the glaring hills of Judea not far from Jerusalem,
dotted with only a few of its former villages, whose terraces have been
kept in repair for more than 2000 years.
What is the cause of the decadence of this country that was once
flowing with milk and honey? As we ponder the tragic history of the
Holy Lands, we are reminded of the struggle of Cain and Abel, how it
has been made realistic through the ages by the conflict that persists
even unto today, between the tent dweller and the house dweller,
between the shepherd and the farmer. The desert seems to have
produced more people than it could feed; from time to time the desert
people swept down into the fertile alluvial valleys where, by irrigation,
tillers of soil grew abundant foods to support teeming villages and
80

thriving cities. They swept down as a wolf on the fold to raid the
farmers and their supplies of food. Raiders sacked and robbed and
passed on, often leaving destruction and carnage in their path, or they
replaced former populations and themselves became farmers only to
be swept out by a later wave of hungry denizens of the desert.
Conflicts between the grazing culture and farming culture of the
Holy Lands have been primarily responsible for the tragic history of
this region. Not until these two cultures supplement each other in
cooperation can we hope for peace in this ancient land. We saw the
tents of descendants of nomads out of Arabia who in the 7th century
swept in out of the desert to conquer and over-run the farming lands of
Palatine and again in the 12th century when they drove out the
Crusaders. They and their herds of long-eared goats, often called
cloven-hoofed locusts, let terrace walls fall in ruin and unleashed the
forces of erosion which for nearly 13 centuries have been washing the
soils off the slopes into the valleys to make marshes or out to sea.
In recent times a great movement has been under way for the
redemption of the Promised Land by Jewish settlers, who have
wrought wonders in draining swamps, ridding them of malaria and
planting them to thriving orchards and fields, in repairing terraces, in
reforesting the desolate and rocky slopes, and in the improvement of
livestock and poultry. The work of the Jewish colonies is the most
remarkable reclamation of old lands that I have seen in three
continents.
Throughout our survey of the work of the agricultural colonies, I
was asked to advise on measures to conserve soil and water. I urged
that trees of orchards be planted on the contour and the land benchterraced by contour plowing. So insistent was I on this point that
finally we were told of one orchard that was planted in this manner.
We went to see it. The trees were planted on the contour, the land was
bench-terraced and slopes above the orchard were furrowed on the
contour and planted to hardy trees. By these measures all the rain that
fell the season before, one of the wettest in many years, was absorbed
by the soil. No runoff occurred after this work was done, to cut gullies
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down slope and to damage the orchards below. When I asked where
the man responsible for this had learned these measures, he told me
that he had learned them at the Institute of Water Economy in Tiflis,
Georgia, in Trans-Caucasia.
Across Syria
We crossed the Jordan again into a region famous in Biblical
times for its oaks, wheat fields and well-nourished herds, where we
found the ruins of Jorash, one of the ten cities of the Decapolis, and
Jerash the second. Archaeologists tell us that Jerash was once the
center of some 250,000 people. But today only a village of 3000 marks
this great center of culture, and the country about is sparsely populated
with semi-nomads. The ruins of this once powerful city of Greek and
Roman culture are buried to a depth of 13 feet with erosional debris
washed from eroding slopes. Excavation by archaeologists has
disclosed the beauty and grandeur of the main street of Jerash that was
lined with stately columns with beautifully carved capitals for which
the city was famous throughout the Near East.
We searched out the sources of water that nourished Jerash and
found a series of springs protected by masonry built in the GraecoRoman times. We examined these carefully with the archaeologists to
discover whether the present water level had changed with respect to
the original structures and whether the openings through which the
springs gushed was the same as that of ancient times. We found no
suggestion that the water level was any lower than it was when the
structures were built or that the openings were different. It seems that
the water supply had not failed, but when we examined the slopes
surrounding Jerash we found the soils washed off to bed rock in spite
of rock walled terraces. The soils had been washed off the slopes and
lodged in the valleys, there to be cultivated by the semi-nomads who
lived in black goat-hair tents, whereas in Roman times this area
supplied grain to Rome and supported thriving communities and rich
villas, ruins of which we found in the vicinity.

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Further to the north near Hama, we came to an area of gently

sloping lands in Syria where wheat is still grown after thousands of
years of cultivation. Mr. Hibrani, an Arab gentleman farmer who seeks
to put modern farm machinery to use on his large holdings with poor
success, told me this story: Some time ago an Arab land owner sent his
son to a modern university to learn the law. After graduation the son
did not find the law to his liking and returned to his father who made
him overseer of the threshing floor. The son was watching the two
piles of threshed grain grow equally, one for the landlord, the other for
the tenant. Then he asked the tenant, "What becomes of the straw?"
The tenant replied, "The tenant gets all the straw." The lawyer son then
commanded the tenant, "Next year you are to plant only wheat, but
plant no straw." Tillers of soil have been exploited since slavery was
invented in Egypt, and they in turn have exploited the earth.
In the alluvial plains along the Orontes River agriculture supports
a number of cities, but much reduced in population from those of
ancient times. Water wheels introduced from Persia during or
following the conquests of Alexander the Great (300 B.C.) were
numerous along the Orentes -- hundreds, we were told, in Roman
times, but today only 44 remain. They are picturesque old structures
both in their appearance and in the groans of the turning wheel as they
slowly lift water from the river to the aqueduct to water the city of
Hama. These wheels are more than 2000 years old, but no part of the
wheel is that old, because the parts have been replaced piecemeal
many times through the centuries.
The Hundred Dead Cities
Still further to the north in Syria, we came upon a region where
erosion had done its worst in an area of more than a million acres of
rolling limestone country between Hama, Aleppo, and Antioch. French
archaeologists, Father Mattern and others, found in this manmade
desert more than 100 dead cities, and called it "cent villes mortes," or a
"Hundred Dead Cities." Butler of Princeton rediscovered this region a
generation ago and aroused interest in the area. These were not cities
83

as we know them, but villages and market towns. Here by field

examination at Bare and Hirbet Haas we found that soils had been
washed off to limestone bed rock to a depth of from 3 to 6 feet. The
ruins of these towns were not buried as other ruins such as we saw
elsewhere, but were left as stark skeletons in beautifully cut stone,
standing high on bare rock. Measurements from doorsills to the
foundation rock indicated that soils to a depth of 3 to 6 feet had been
washed off and swept away in winter floods, leaving a region of ghost
cities. Here erosion had done its worst. If the soils had remained, even
though the cities were destroyed and the populations dispersed, the
area might be repeopled again and cities rebuilt. But now that soils are
gone, all is gone.
We are told that in 610-612 A.D. a Persian army invaded this
thriving region and less than a generation later, in 633-638, the
nomads out of the Arabian desert completed the destruction of the
villages and dispersal of the population so that all the measures for
conserving soil and water that bad been built up through centuries
were allowed to fall into disuse and ruin; then erosion was unleashed
to do its deadly work in making this area a manmade desert.
From the air we got a vivid idea of what had happened to the
villages of this area where a civilization of an unusually high type had
grown up and developed a distinctive architecture. It was a Christian
civilization with great churches, ruins of which are still seen in Bare.
We saw Christian symbols carved into stone doorposts indicating that
the householders were not ashamed to confess their faith, and we saw
the ruins of many Christian churches.
Looking for the Forests of Lebanon
About 5000 years ago, we are told by archaeologists, a Semitic
tribe swept in out of the desert and occupied the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean and established the harbor towns of Tyre and Sidon. On
the site of another such harbor town is Beirut, which today is the
capital of the republic of Lebanon. You can see it from a high point on
the Lebanon Mountains overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
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These early Semites were Phoenicians, who found their land a

mountainous country with a very narrow coastal plain and little flat
land on which to carry out the traditional irrigated agriculture as it had
grown up in Mesopotamia and Egypt. We may believe that as the
Phoenician people increased, they were confronted with three choices:
(1) of migration and colonization, which we know they did; (2) of
manufacturing and commerce, which we know they did; and (3) of
cultivation of slopes, about which we have hitherto heard very little.
Here was a land covered with forests and watered by the rains of
heaven, a land that held entirely new problems for tillers of soil who
were accustomed to the flat alluvial valleys of Mesopotamia and the
Nile. As forests were cleared either for use or for commerce, slopes
were cultivated. Soils of the slopes eroded then under heavy winter
rains as they would now. Here under rain-farming, tillers of soil for the
first time encountered severe soil erosion and the problem of
establishing a permanent agriculture on sloping lands.
We find as we read the record written on the land in this
fascinating region, tragedy after tragedy deeply engraved on the
sloping land where efforts to hold back the life-giving soil were
developed to high stages of refinement and were later allowed to fall
into ruin. We saw many slopes that were once covered with forests
where the trees had been cut and the land cleared and cultivated. Soil
began forthwith to erode under seasonal winter rains; efforts were
made to control erosion by constructing walls across the slopes, of
which we see ruins here and there today. For one reason or another,
these measures failed, and the soil mantle shifted down slope under the
action of progressive erosion. As the fine-textured soil was washed
away leaving loose rocks at the surface, tillers of the soil piled them
together to make cultivation about them the easier. In these cases the
battle with soil erosion was definitely a losing one.

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Fig. 5. This hillside in Trans-Jordan was once covered with a layer of productive
soil. Sheet erosion probably removed most of the topsoil during the first century of
use. Gullies then began to form. As the gullies grew thicker and deeper, practically
all topsoil and subsoil were removed from the entire slope. Man has put this land
back almost to the state it was in when nature first started to build soil on it.

Fig. 6. Ancient rock-walled bench terraces protect this Lebanon hillside after
thousands of years of use. It is estimated that the terracing of some Lebanon hillsides
cost at least $2,000 per acre, if we should figure the cost of labor at 40 cents per
hour. Such expensive methods of protecting the land are practical only where people
have no other land on which to produce their food.
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Elsewhere we found how the battle with soil erosion had been
won by the construction and maintenance of a remarkable series of
rock-walled terraces from the bases to the crests of slopes, like
fantastic stair-cases. At Beit Eddine in the mountains of Lebanon east
of Beirut, we round the slopes terraced even up to grades of 76 per
cent. At wages of 40 cents per hour it would cost $2000 to $5000 an
acre to build such structures on 50 to 75 per cent slopes. These vast
works, an arresting monument to the labor of tillers of soil throughout
thousands of years, show the length to which a people will go to save
their soils when necessity for food requires it.
Some say we cannot afford to build terraces at such fabulous
costs; but these people did so, and we would do as much if it were
necessary to survive. We spent more than 300 billion dollars to defend
our land against foreign foes during World War II; we would do as
much to save our land from erosion if it were necessary. Our war effort
averaged more than $150 for every acre of land in continental United
States and more than $700 for every acre of cultivated land. Who says
we cannot afford it? But, fortunately, by the science of conservation
we can save our soils for sustained use at a mere fraction of the cost or
defending our land from invasion by the Army or planes of an enemy
country.
The mountains of ancient Phoenicia were once covered by the
famous forests of cedars of Lebanon. An inscription on the temple of
Karnak as translated by Breasted, announces the arrival in Egypt
before 2900 B.C. of 40 ships laden with timber of cedar out of
Lebanon. You also recall that it was King Solomon, nearly 3000 years
ago, who made an agreement with Hiram, King of Tyre, to furnish him
cypress and cedars out of these forests for the construction of the
temple at Jerusalem. Solomon supplied 80,000 lumberjacks to work in
the forest and 70,000 to skid the logs to the sea. It must have been a
heavy forest for such a woods force. What has become of this famous
forest that once covered nearly 2000 square miles?

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This forest was protected in Roman times to grow timber for the
Roman fleet as told by inscribed monuments. In the mountains or
Lebanon, many monuments were round marked with the letters,
"H.D.S." Their meaning was not understood until a stone was found
and carried to the museum or the American University at Beirut. The
inscription is interpreted to read: "Emperor Hadrian Augustus, Forest
Boundary" (Emp. Hdn. Aug. Definitie Silvarum), indicating that in the
time or Emperor Hadrian the boundaries of these forests were marked
for protection.
But today only 4 small groves of this famous Lebanon cedar forest
are left, the most important or which is the Tripoli grove of trees in the
cup of a valley. An examination of the grove revealed some 400 trees
of which 43 are old veterans or wolf trees. As we read the story written
in tree rings, it appears that about 300 years ago the grove had nearly
disappeared with no less than 43 scattered veterans standing. These
trees with wide-spreading branches had grown up in an open stand.
About that time a little church was built in their midst that made the
grove sacred; a stone wall was built about the grove to keep out the
goats that grazed over the mountains. Seeds from the veterans fell to
the ground, germinated and grew up into a fine close-growing stand of
tall straight trees that show how the cedars or Lebanon will make good
construction timber when grown in forest conditions.
Such natural restocking also shows that this famous forest has not
disappeared because or adverse change of climate, but that under the
present climate it would extend itself if it were safeguarded against the
rapacious goats that graze down every accessible living plant upon
these mountains.
As we read in the Hold Lands records of decline and ruin and
oblivion of great empires of the past, we were moved by the ineffable
sadness and tragedy of mans failures to find a lasting adjustment to his
land resources. Time after time as I pondered tragic ruins or great
centers or power and culture and the even more tragic ruins of the
lands that supported these teeming centers of population, the question
would come to mind: Must our fair country of America rise to great
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power and strength only to decline and fall, because we fail to find a
solution to this age-old problem of a permanent source of abundant
and adequate food? Have we the intelligence -- have we the will to
establish here a lasting nation where the dream of liberty for all is
planted? Here is a challenge to the perennial youth of our land!
China's Sorrow
Before proceeding to Cyprus and North Africa, let's take a look at
China, whose civilization probably arose somewhat later than that
which developed in the Near East and was partly influenced by it.
Mixed agriculture, irrigation, the ox-drawn plow, and terracing of
slopes are notable similarities in the two regions.
It was in China, while I was engaged in an international project
for famine prevention in 1922-27, that the full and fateful significance
of soil erosion was first burned into my consciousness.
During an agricultural exploration into regions of North China
seriously affected by the famine of 1920-21, I examined the site where
the Yellow River in 1852 broke from its enormous system of inner and
outer dikes. As we traveled across the flat plains of Henan we saw a
great flat-topped hill looming up before us. We traveled on over the
elevated plain for seven miles to another great dike that stretched
across the landscape from horizon to horizon. We mounted this dike
and, behold! there lay before us the Yellow River, the Hwang Ho, a
great width of brown water flowing quietly that spring morning into a
tawny haze in the east.
A brisk chilly wind tugged at our clothing, as we contemplated
this scene of tremendous implications. Here lay the river known as
China's Sorrow for thousands of years, apparently harmless, in a
channel fully 40 to 50 feet above the plain of the great delta. This
gigantic river had been lifted up off the plain over its entire 400-mile
course across its delta and had been held in this channel by the hand
labor of men, without machines or engines, without steel cables or
construction timber and without stone. The longer I pondered this aweinspiring scene, the more was I amazed at the magnitude of the
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accomplishment of millions of Chinese farmers literally with their bare

hands and carrying-baskets, who through thousands of years had built
here a stupendous monument to human cooperation and the will to
survive. I became oblivious of the chill of the wind that kept tugging at
my clothes, lost in wonder and admiration of the nameless and unsung
heroes who had fought the battle of floods with this tremendous
dragon of a river since the days of Ta-Yu, nearly 4000 years ago, and
had lost and won time and again.
But why should this battle with the river have to be endless? Any
relaxation of vigilance let the river break over its dikes, calling for
herculean and cooperative work or hundreds of thousands of farmers
to put the river back again in its channel. Then suddenly it dawned
upon me that the river water was brown with silt, heavily laden with
soil that was washed but of the highlands of the vast drainage system
of the Yellow River. As the flood waters of China's Sorrow reached
the gentler slope of the delta (one foot to the mile) the current slowed
down and began to drop the load of silt. Deposits of silt in turn
lessened the capacity of the channel to carry flood waters and called on
the farmers threatened with angry floods to build up the inner and
outer dikes yet higher and higher, year after year.
There was no end to this demand of the river if it were to be
confined between its dikes. Final control of the river so heavily laden
with silt was hopeless; yet hopeful millions of farmers toiled on.
In 1852, the yellow-brown waters of the Hwang Ho broke out of
its elevated channel to seek another way to the sea. It had emptied into
the Yellow Sea, where it usurped the old outlet of the Shai River. This
time the river broke over its dikes near Kaifeng, Honan, and wandered
to the northeast over farm lands, destroying villages, smothering the
life out of millions of humans and discharged into the Gulf of Chihli,
400 miles north of its former outlet. China's Sorrow in its rage had
refused to be lifted any higher off its plain. Hundreds of thousands of
farmers had been defeated. Silt -- its unending accumulation in the
channel of the Yellow River -- had defeated them, valiant as they
were.
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Silt -- silt -- silt! As we were aroused by the tugging of the cold

wind, we turned away determined to learn where this silt came from,
even up to the head waters.
In a series of carefully planned agricultural explorations we
discovered the source of the silt that brought ruin to millions of
farmers in the plains. In the Province of Shansi we found how the line
of cultivation was pushed up slopes, following the clearing away of
forests. Soils formerly protected by a forest mantle were thus exposed
to the dash of summer rains, and soil erosion began a headlong process
of land destruction and filling of streams with soil waste and detritus.

Fig. 7. A severely gullied area in the loess hills of North China These hills were once
covered with trees and grass; but cultivation started the ruinous process of erosion
There are thousands of acres like this in China today. It produces nothing except
yellow mud to clog the Yellow River with silt.

Without a basis of comparison, we might easily have misread the

record as written there on the land. But temple forests, preserved and
protected by the Buddhist priests, gave me and my Chinese associates
a remarkable chance to measure and compare the rates of erosion
within these forests and on similar slopes and soils that had been
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cleared and cultivated. The story of these fascinating studies is too

long to include in this paper; it is reported in the Proceedings of the
Pan-Pacific Science Congress, Tokyo, 1926.

Fig. 8. These bench terraces in ShanSi province, China, again illustrate the extent to
which people will go to save their soil when they do not have enough good land to
produce their food.

In brief, my Chinese scientific associates (T.I. Li, C.T. Ren, C.O.

Lee and others) and myself carried out a series of soil erosion
experiments during rainy seasons of 3 years in which we measured the
rate of runoff and erosion by means of runoff plots within temple
forests and out on farm fields under cultivation or abandoned because
of erosion. It was on such slopes as these that we got for the first time
in soil erosion studies, experimental data on such comparisons. Here
too, we found how the Yellow River had become China's Sorrow, for
we found that runoff and erosion from cultivated land were many
times as great as from temple forests, whereas they caused heavy
losses of soil from cultivated land.
It was clear that if the farmers of the delta plain were ever to be
safeguarded from the mounting perils of the silt-laden Yellow River,
the source of the silt must be stopped by measures of erosion control.
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Further west in the midst of the famous and vast loessial deposits of
North China, we found in another exploration in the Province of
Shensi, how an irrigation system that was first established in 246 B.C.
had been put out of use by silt. Here again silt was the villain in the
tragedy of the land. Silt was undoing the anxious and unending labor
of the Chinese to establish a lasting adjustment to their land. We
sought out the origin of the silt that had brought an end to an irrigation
project which had fed the sons of Han during the Golden Age of
China. The origin was found in areas where soil erosion had eaten out
of the land gargantuan gullies 600 feet deep, that were advancing
headward into the great mantle of fertile loessial soil. One may see
remnants of terraces that were in use before the landscape was riddled
by huge gullies. It was while contemplating such scenes that I resolved
to challenge the conclusions of the great German geologist, Baron von
Richthofen, and of Ellsworth Huntington, that the decadence of North
China was due to desiccation or pulsations of the climate.
Temple forests gave the clue; they demonstrated beyond a doubt
that the present climate would support a generous growth of vegetation
capable of preventing erosion on such a scale. Human occupation of
the land had set in motion processes of soil wastage that were in
themselves sufficient to account for the decadence and decline of this
part of China, without adverse change of climate. In other words, soil
erosion unless controlled, will undermine a civilization. I could see
that it had already done so, and, unless ways to control it were found,
it would bring desolation to others including my own country.
It was in the presence of such tragic scenes on a gigantic scale that
I resolved to run down the nature of soil erosion, which had proved to
be the insidious enemy of civilization and to devote my lifetime to
study of ways to conserve the lands on which mankind depends. Out
of this experience grew a series of scientific studies in China during
the years 1923-27, as reported elsewhere, which were transferred to
the United States in 1927 and have been incorporated in erosion and
stream-flow investigations of the U. S. Forest Service and later in our
movement for land conservation in the United States, under the
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leadership of Dr. H. H. Bennett, Chief of the Soil Conservation

Service.
Soil Waste in Ancient Cyprus
Let's now go back and follow the westward course of civilization
from the Holy Lands through North Africa and on into Europe. We
shall first stop in Cyprus where we found the land-use problems of the
Mediterranean epitomized in a comparatively small area. If one wishes
to study land use in the Mediterranean region he will find in Cyprus a
summary of all major problems brought together within a small area
an introduction to, or a summary of, problems of land use of the lands
surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
In the plain of Mesaoria is written a telling record in and about a
Byzantine church. The church on the outskirts of the village of Asha in
eastern Cyprus is surrounded by a graveyard and its wall. The alluvial
plain now stands 8 feet above the level of the churchyard as we
measured it. On entering the church we stepped down 3 feet from the
yard level to the floor of the church; but inside the church we noted
that low pointed arches were blocked off, and new arches cut for doors
and windows. The aged vestryman told us that about 30 years ago a
flood from the plain had filled the church with water and left 2 feet of
silt on the floor. Rather than clean it out, a new stone floor had been
laid over the silt deposit. Thus, 8 plus 3 plus 2 equals 13 feet, the
height of the present alluvial plain above the church floor. From these
measurements we concluded that the plain had filled in not loss than
13 feet, very probably more, with erosional debris washed off the
drainage slopes. This church proclaims silently and eloquently the
progressive wastage of soils of the surrounding hill lands that have
been cultivated up steep gradients.
Across North Africa
We shall now continue westward along the northern coast of
Africa into Tunisia, and Algeria. Here we read the record of the
granary of Rome in North Africa during the Empire, by surveying a
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cross section across North Africa from the Mediterranean to the Sahara
Desert, from 40 inches of rainfall to 4 inches, from Carthage on the
coast to Biskra at the edge of mysterious Sahara.
In Tunisia we found that it rains in the desert of North Africa in
winter time now as it did in the time of Caesar, who in 44 B.C.
complained of how a great rainstorm with wind had blown over the
tents of his army encampment and flooded the camp. It rains hard
enough to produce flash floods in the wadies. At one place muddy
water swept across the highway in such volume that we decided to
wait until the next day until the flash flow had gone down before
proceeding.
As we make a rapid survey of land use across Tunisia and Algeria
from the Mediterranean coast to the edge of the Sahara, through the
center of what was the granary of Rome, we shall begin at Carthage
the principal city of North Africa in Phoenician times.
We stood on the site of ancient Carthage, one of the colonies of
Phoenicia that grew to be great and powerful -- the city that produced
Hannibal and became a dangerous rival of Rome. In 146 B.C. at the
end of the Third Punic War, Scipio destroyed Carthage, but out of the
doomed city he saved 28 volumes of a work on agriculture written by
a Carthaginian by the name of Mago, who was recognized by the
Greeks and Romans as the foremost authority on agriculture in the
Mediterranean. These works of Mago were translations in the existing
works of such Roman writers on agricultural subjects as Columella,
Varro, and Cato. This incident tells us that the traditions of conserving
soils and waters that we believe were first discovered on the slopes of
ancient Phoenicia had been brought by their colonists to North Africa;
we suspected these measures furnished the basis of the great
agricultural production that was so important to the Romans during the
Empire.
Over a large portion of the ancient granary of Rome we found the
soil washed off to bed rock and the hills seriously gullied from
overgrazing. The valley floors are usually still cultivated but are still
eroding in great gullies fed by accelerated storm runoff from barren
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slopes. This was in an area that once supported many great cities in
Roman times.
We found at Djemila the ghosts of Cuicul, a city that was once
great and populous and rich but later was covered completely, except
for about 3 feet of a single column, by erosion debris washed off
slopes of surrounding hills. For 20 years French archaeologists had
been excavating this remarkable Roman city and unearthed great
temples, two great forums, splendid Christian churches, and great
warehouses for wheat and olive oil. All this had been buried by
erosional debris washed from the eroding slopes above it. The
surrounding slopes once covered with olive groves are now cut up
with active gullies.
The modern village that falls heir to this once beautiful Roman
city houses only a few inhabitants. The flat lands are still farmed to
grain but the slopes once planted to olives are bare and eroding and
wasting away. What is the reason for this astounding decline and ruin?
Timgad, Lost Capital of a Lost Agriculture
Further to the south we stopped to study the ruins of another great
Roman city of North Africa, Thamugadi, now called Timgad. This city
was founded by Trajan in the first century A.D., laid out in
symmetrical pattern and adorned with magnificent buildings, with a
forum embellished by statuary and carved porticoes, a public library, a
theater to seat some 2500 persons, 17 great Roman baths, and, if you
please, with marble flush toilets for the public. After the invasion of
the nomads in the seventh century had completed the destruction of the
city and dispersal of its population, this great center of Roman culture
and power was lost to knowledge for 1200 years. It was buried by the
dust of wind erosion from surrounding farm lands until only a portion
of Hadrian's arch and 3 columns remained like tombstones above the
undulating mounds to indicate that once a great city was there.

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Fig. 9. (L-132) In the middle distance may be seen the ruins of the ancient Roman
city of Cuicul. It was a rich and prosperous city in North Africa when that region was
known as the "granary the Roman Empire." Note that the ruin of the land, as seen in
the distance and foreground, is almost as complete as the ruin of the city.

Fig 10. This small flock of scrawny sheep graze on the scant vegetation that may be
found near the ruins of Cuicul. This is about the only productive use the land now
has; the gullied hillsides in the distance do not even support enough vegetation for
that.

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Fig. 11. The ruins of Timgad -- another ancient Roman city of North Africa. The few
squalid huts, seen in the middle distance, now house about 300 inhabitants; which is
all that the eroded land will support at present -- another example of a city that
remains dead because the land that supported it is dead.

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Fig. 12 (previous page) L-l41. This large grove of olive trees are thriving on the
plains near Sfax, Tunisia. The scattered groves of this kind that may be found in
North Africa today show that the climate is still suitable for agriculture where
productive soil is still on the land.

Since discovery of the site, the French Government has been

excavating this great center for 30 years and has disclosed remarkable
examples of building, of art, and of ways of living during Roman times
in North Africa, all supported by the agriculture of the "Granary of
Rome." The mosaics that lined the public baths were beautiful in
design. Within the city we found ruins of a great bakery with its many
grist mills turned by slaves to grind the wheat that grew on the plains.
But today this great center of power and culture of the Roman empire
is desolation; it is represented by a modern village of only a few
hundred inhabitants who live in squalid structures, the walls of which
are for the most part built of stone quarried from the ruins of the
ancient city.
We saw also where water erosion cut a gully down into the land
and exposed an ancient aqueduct that supplied water to the city of
Timgad from a great spring some 3 miles away. Within and
surrounding Timgad, we studied remarkable ruins of great olive
presses where today there is not a single olive tree within the circle of
the horizon.
On the plain of Tunisia we came upon in El Jem, the ruins of a
great coliseum, second only in size to that of Rome, for the amusement
of a city in a populous region. It was built to seat some 65,000 people,
whereas it would be difficult to find 5000 persons today within this
district. The ancient city now lies buried around the coliseum and a
sordid modern village is built on the buried city.
What was the cause of the decadence of North Africa and the
decline of its population? Some students have suggested that the
climate changed and became drier, forcing people to abandon their
remarkable cities and works. But Gsell, the renowned geologist who
studied this problem for 40 years, challenged the conclusion that the
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climate has changed in any important way since Roman times. So

Director Hodet, of the Archaeological Excavations at Timgad, decided
as an experiment to plant olive trees on an unexcavated portion of the
city where there would be no possibility of sub-irrigation. He planted
young olive trees in the manner prescribed in Roman literature,
watering them in the following two long dry summer seasons. These
olive trees are thriving, indicating that where soils are still in place,
olive trees will grow today probably very much as they did in Roman
times.
On the plains about Sfax, ruins of olive presses were found by
early travelers, but no olive trees. An experiment was decided upon 40
years ago to plant olive trees there, and they grew. Now more than
150,000 acres are planted to olive trees, and their products support
thriving industries in the modern city of Sfax. These plantings indicate
that the climate of today, as far as production of olives is concerned, is
not unlike that of Roman times; in other words, that the climate has not
become drier in a significant degree since Roman times.
Other students of this baffling problem have suggested that
pulsations of climate with intervening dry periods have taken place,
sufficient to blot out the civilization of North Africa. Such
undoubtedly might have been the case, but at Sousse we found telling
evidence on this point in an olive grove that has survived since Roman
times. These olive trees are at least 1500 years old, we were informed.
I was interested in the way these trees were planted -- in basins
bordered by banks of earth with ways of leading in unabsorbed storm
runoff from higher ground. We passed along this area at a time of
heavy rains which showed just how this method had worked since the
trees were first planted. If there have been pulsations of climate since
Roman times this grove should show that the drier periods were not
sufficiently severe to kill the olive trees. We conclude that it does not
seem probable that either a progressive change of climate or pulsations
of climate account for the decadence of North Africa. We must seek
other causes for this colossal tragedy.

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On hillsides between Constantine and Timgad, we found written

on the land a record that indicates what has happened to soils of the
granary of ancient Rome. We found some hills which, according to the
botanists, were covered with savanna vegetation of scattered trees and
grass. Vegetation had conserved a layer of soil on these hills for
unknown ages. With the coming of a grazing culture brought in by
invading nomads of Arabia, erosion was unleashed by overgrazing of
the hills. We can see written here on the landscape how the soil mantle
was washed off the upper slopes to bed rock. Accelerated runoff from
the bared rock cut gullies into the upper edge of the soil mantle,
working it down hill as if a great rug were being pulled off the hills,
and depositing material at lower levels. The accumulation of torrential
flows during winter storms is cutting great gullies through the alluvial
plains just as it does in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah of our own
country. The effect of this is to lower the water table, bringing about
the effects of desiccation without reduction in rainfall. In this manner
has the country been seriously damaged and its capacity to support a
population much reduced. Unleashed and uncontrolled soil erosion is
sufficient to undermine a civilization, as we found in North China and
as seems to be true in North Africa as well.
The Dry Lands of North Africa
We traveled across North Africa southward toward the Sahara
Desert into zones of less and less rainfall. Beyond the cultivated area
in Roman times was a zone devoted to stock raising on a large scale.
Thousands of cisterns were built in Roman or pre-Roman times to
catch storm runoff from the land to store it for outlying villages and
for watering herds of livestock during the dry summer seasons. Many
of these cisterns were being cleaned out and repaired by the French
Government before World War II, to use for the same purpose as they
were used for in ancient times. And the French Government was going
the Romans one better because of the advantage in steel reinforced
concrete construction. We looked upon one of the modern cisterns four
times as large as any Roman cistern, with a capacity of 100,000 cubic
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feet. This cistern was filled in two years and now waters the herds of
semi-nomads who inhabit this portion of North Africa.
Still farther toward the desert about 70 miles south of Tebessa we
found a remarkable example of ancient measures for the conservation
of water At some time in the Roman or possibly pre-Roman period,
peoples of this region built check dams to divert storm water around
the slope -- in canals that the French are now cleaning out again -- to
spread upon a remarkable series of bench terraces. This area of
unusual interest raises a number of puzzling questions which we are
not yet able to answer. If these terraces were cultivated to crops in
times past they are the best evidence we have that climate has become
drier since they were first built. But if they were built for spreading
water to increase forage production for grazing herds then, as the
French are using them today, they are not evidence for an adverse
change of climate. This evidence alone could leave us in doubt, but
other evidence would indicate that water spreading was most used here
for crops.
This region of North Africa is similar to the Navajo country in the
United States where in recent years our Soil Conservation Service has
developed measures for spreading storm water on alluvial valley floors
to increase forage growth for herds of Navajo sheep. It would be
interesting to know the date and the reason for building these terraces.
They may indicate that with Roman occupation of North Africa the
native tribes were driven beyond the border of the Roman Empire and
were forced to devise these refined measures for conservation and use
of water in a dry area; or they may indicate that North Africa was, so
densely populated that it was necessary to use these refinements in the
conservation of water to support the population on the margins of a
crowded region. Whatever may be the answers to these questions, the
French Government during our visit in North Africa in 1939, was in
the course of restoring these ancient practices of diverting storm water
with check dams around slopes in canals to spread it upon the gentle
slopes that had been flattened by a remarkable series of bench terraces.

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We passed through the Saharan Atlas, mountain range by a narrow

valley and into the mysterious Sahara Desert that spreads out toward
the horizon as a faint blue sea. Salmon-colored sands form restless
dunes that wander hither and yon in a lifeless landscape. At the north
wall of the Sahara Desert, near the foot of the mountain wall we came
upon the oasis of Biskra. We found the oasis a refreshing contrast to
the glare of the desert. This oasis is nourished by sweet water from
great springs issuing at the foot of limestone mountains.
The importance of an oasis in North Africa is measured not by the
number of its inhabitants, but rather by the number of its date-palm
trees. The oasis of Biskra has 250,000 date palms that furnish crops of
delicious dates, as we know from personal experience, that are the
chief articles of trade in the markets and the chief article of diet of the
people.
We have now completed a transect across North Africa from 40
inches of rainfall on the coast to 4 inches at Biskra -- across the
granary of Rome -- and have seen how great cities were built and grew
up in this fertile region supported chiefly by crops of grain and olive
oil. We have told how these great cities were abandoned and the
former dense population dispersed; how the cities were buried in the
overwash of erosional debris from eroding hills and by the dust of
wind erosion from surrounding farm lands, and lost to knowledge for a
period of 1200 years. We have noted the evidences that this decline
and decadence of North Africa was neither due to a progressive
adverse change of climate nor to pulsations of climate, but was due to
the breakdown of an agriculture of remarkable refinements which
arose out of colonization by the Phoenicians who, we believe, brought
from ancient Phoenicia the solutions to problems of conserving soils
and waters encountered in their mountainous homeland.
Soil erosion by water and by wind has so damaged this once fair
province of the Roman Empire that its capacity to support people has
been much reduced. The soils have been washed off the hills and
deposited in the valleys, where they may still be cultivated but are still

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eroding, as we saw by great gullies that cut through alluvial valley

fills.
While the land has been seriously damaged, as you can see written
on landscape after landscape, the country is still capable of far greater
than its present production. In Roman times a high stage of
conservation of soils and waters was reached with an intensive culture
of orchards and vineyards on the slopes, and intensive grain-growing
in the valleys. All this depended on efficient conservation and use of
the rainfall. We find numerous references to such practices in the
literature of the time. But as nomads swept in out of the desert, their
extensive and exploitive grazing culture replaced these highly refined
measures of land use and let them fall into disuse and ruin. Erosion
was unleashed on its destructive course, and the capacity of the land to
support people was seriously reduced.
The veteran student of North Africa, Prof. Gautier, answered my
query as to whether climate of North Africa had changed since Roman
times, in the following way: "We have no evidence to indicate that the
climate has changed in an important degree since Roman times; but,"
he said, "the people have changed." We conclude that the decline of
North Africa is due to a change in a people and more especially to a
change in culture and methods of use of land that replaced a highly
developed and intensive agriculture and that allowed erosion to waste
away the land and to change the regime of waters.
A Word About Land Use in Italy
We shall now cross the Mediterranean sea to Italy. The westward
course of civilization has left its marks in Italy. We found at Paestum,
south of Naples, one of the best preserved of Greek temples located on
the coastal plain near the sea. Here there was no overwash of erosional
material or accumulation of dust from wind erosion, and no gully
erosion in the plain. We walked on the same level as the Greeks who
built the temple 2600 years ago.
But population pressure in Italy under its smiling climate and blue
skies has pushed, the cultivation line up the slopes to dizzy gradients
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and caused the building of villages on picturesque ridge points. In Italy

there are 826, persons per square mile of cultivated land, while in the
United States, there are only 208. This method of comparison of
population density gives us the advantage because of our vast grazing
lands that support great herds of livestock. But if we had the same
density of population per, square mile of cultivated land in the United
States as has Italy, we should have 520 million people instead of our
130 million. This give us some idea of the relative densities and
pressures of population upon the land and accounts for the intensive
use not only of the plains, but of the slopes up to steep gradients in
Italy.
We haven't space to tell the details of how the Pontine Marshes,
that for 2000 years defied the efforts at reclamation of former rulers of
Italy, were successfully reclaimed recently. This former pestilential
area has been drained and rid of malaria and it is now divided into
farms equipped with reinforced concrete houses of attractive design,
families are established free from perils of malaria and safe in the
security of their land.
Torrent Control in the French Alps
As we proceeded into southeastern France, we found the same
condition of intensive use of the land on valley floors and on the
slopes, which are terraced up to steep gradients. We saw how, in the
French Alps, population pressure on land of the plains has pushed the
cultivation line, up the slopes into mountains and where grassy
meadows were overgrazed.
This excessive use of the mountainous areas in the French Alps
unleashed torrential floods that for more than a century ravaged
productive alpine valleys. Erosional debris was swept down by
recurring torrential floods to bury fields, orchards and villages, to cut
lines of communication and to kill inhabitants of the valleys. So
serious became this menace to the welfare of the region that the French
Government, after much study and legislation, undertook in 1882 a
constructive program of torrent control. Since that time, funds of
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hundreds of millions of francs have been spent for works of torrent

control that are remarkably successful. The French forest engineers
have worked out many of the problems that confront us in this new
land in the control of torrential floods in mountainous areas. By an
intensive study of these problems and solutions in we may gain much
time and save much money in this country in our flood control
program.
We found where the debris washed out of the mountains had filled
up streams in the valleys, causing water tables to rise to damage crops
on bordering alluvial lands which are the most fertile and productive in
the mountainous region. The lesson here is to keep the soil on the
slopes where it belongs, rather than letting erosion impoverish the
mountains and damage the valleys.
Intensive Land Use in France
We found slopes in southern France cultivated on gradients up to
100 per cent, where terrace walls were as high as the benches were
wide. Some of these terraced fields had been under cultivation for
more than a thousand years -- and likely much longer, for the
Phoenicians are believed to be responsible for terracing in this part of
France.
When the soils of these age-old terraces become "fatigued" or
tired, as the French say, they are turned over to a depth of more than 3
feet once in 15 to 30 years as the need may be. Thereafter a cover crop
is planted on the newly exposed soil material for two or more years,
followed by plantings of orchard trees or vines or vegetables.
In eastern France we found adjustments of, farming to slopes in
various stages. In places, terraces are built with rock walls on the
contour to reduce slope gradients; elsewhere rock walls are built on the
contour to form level benches. But at other places, in the absence of
rock walls, we found a remarkable method used for adjusting
cultivation to slopes: farmers dug up the bottom furrow of their fields
that were laid out in contour strip crops and loaded the soil into carts,
hauling it to the upper edges of the fields and dumping it along the
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upper contour furrows to compensate for down slope movement of soil

under the action of plowing and the wash of rain. This was done each
year. Where the slope was too steep to haul the soil up hill, we saw the
farmers loading the soil of the bottom furrow in baskets and carrying it
on their backs to the upper edges of the fields for the same purpose. In
this manner do these farmers of France take care of their soil from
generation to generation.
In southeastern France in the region of Les Landes we studied,
probably the greatest achievement of mankind in the reclamation of
sand dunes. It is recorded that the Vandals in 407 A.D. swept through
France and destroyed the settlements of the people who in times past
had tapped pine trees of the Les Landes region and supplied resin to
Rome. Vandal hordes razed the villages, dispersed the population, and
set fire to the forests, destroying the cover of a vast sandy area.
Prevailing winds from the west began the movement of sand, and in
time moving and menacing sand dunes covered an area of more than
400,000 acres that in turn created 2,250,000 acres of marsh land. Sand
dunes in their diabolic eastward march covered farms and villages and
dammed streams causing marshes to form behind them. The scourge
of malaria followed and practically depopulated the once well peopled
and productive region. These conditions caused not only disease and
death, but impoverishment of the people as well. In 1778 Villers was
appointed by the French Government to create a military port at
Arcachon. He reported that it was first necessary to conquer the
movement of the sand dunes and presented the principle of dune
fixation. In 1786, Napoleon appointed his famous engineer,
Bremontier to control these dunes. Space will not permit telling the
fascinating details of this remarkable story -- of how the dunes were
conquered by the establishment of a littoral dune and reforestation of
moving sand behind, an how marshy lands were drained by
Chambrelent after a long period of experimentation and persuasion of
public officials. Now this entire region is one vast forest supporting
thriving timber and resin industries and numerous health resorts.

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Fig. 13. A terraced citrus orchard in southern France. This land has been in
cultivation for at least a thousand years and probably much longer than that; for it is
believed that the terraces were first built by the Phoenicians more than 2,500 years
ago.

Fig. 14. (L-83) Large sand dunes in southwestern France that are moving at the rate
of about 60 feet each year. These dunes are literally engulfing the forest that may be
seen at the base of the dunes.

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Fig. 15. Contour strip cropping in southwestern Germany. Some farmers of Europe
have been using this method to help control erosion. for hundreds of years.

Fig. 16. (L-4) A view of productive farmland in Holland that was literally reclaimed
from the sea. This land was on the floor of the sea only 7 years before this picture
was made The Dutch diked off the sea and leached out the excess salt and minerals
at a cost of about $200 per acre

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Fortunately, for comparison, one dune on private land was for

some reason left uncontrolled near Arcachone This dune is 2 miles
long, one-half mile wide and 300 feet high. It is now moving landward
covering the forest at the rate of about 65 feet a year. As I stood on this
dune, stung by the grains of sand in the teeth of strong winds off the
sea, and looked to the north, to the east, and to the south, on an
undulating sea of evergreen forest to the horizon, I began to appreciate
the magnitude of the achievement of converting a vast menace of
disease and death such as the giant sand dune underfoot and marsh
lands behind into a saving resource of growing, profitable forests and
health resorts. This is another example of adjustments of a people to
land resources through land conservation.
How the Dutch Farm the Ocean Floor
We followed the westward course of civilization into Holland
where we found another of mankind's greatest achievements -- the
reclamation of the ocean floor for farming.
Holland is a land of about eight and a quarter million acres,
divided into two almost equal parts -- above and below high tide level,
and inhabited by eight million industrious people. Its land includes the,
great delta of the North Sea built up with the products of erosion
sculptured out of the lands of Germany and Switzerland and
northeastern France; brought down on the Rhine, and Meuse Rivers.
Now 45 per cent of the area lies below high tide level and one fourth
lies below mean sea level. The Dutch from time immemorial have
been carrying on an unending battle with the sea. They have become
expert in filching land from the grasp of the angry waters of the North
Sea.
The density of population of Holland per square mile of cultivated
area is such that on the same basis the population of the United States
would be one and a quarter billion people. This comparison, however,
is unfair in some particulars for much of Holland is kept in permanent
grass to support a thriving dairy industry. At any rate, the density of
population of Holland has called for an increase of their land area.
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Rather than to seek additional land by conquest of their neighbors they

have turned to the conquest of the sea. The Zuider Zee Project, two
centuries in the planning, is their masterpiece in their two-thousand
year battle with the North Sea. When completed, this project will add
500,000 acres of new land to Hollands territory and will convert the
old salt Zuider Zee into a sweet water lake renamed the Yssel Meer.
The Dutch have built great dikes to dam off the sea and have pumped
the water out of the, basins with great pumping plants. They have
diked off the sea and de-watered, the land, leached it of its salt, and
converted it into productive farm land. We stood on fertile farmland
that was the floor of the sea only 7 years earlier, that now is divided
into farms equipped with fine houses and great barns. At a cost of
about $200 an acre, this land was reclaimed from the sea and divided
into farms equipped with modern villages to supply all services for
rural communities. The Dutch by this means have created a new
agricultural paradise into which only select farmers may enter.
Laughingly, I told the manager of the Wieringermeer Polder that.
he was the St. Peter of this new, agricultural heaven on earth. Out of
30 applications for each farm he selects one on the basis of his
character, the past record of his family and his freedom from debt. The
successful applicant is put on probation for a period of 6 years and if
he farms the land in accordance with the best interests of the land and
of the country, he will be permitted to continue for another period. If
he fails to do so, he must get off and give another farmer applicant a
chance.
This thoroughly planned and perfectly executed project is without
question the greatest achievement of mankind thus far in the
reclamation of land for farm use. We do not know exactly how much
this magnificent project was damaged by the invasion of Holland and
partial flooding of the land during the recent war.
A Glance at England
As we follow the westward course of civilization into the mild
climate of England, we find. that tillers of soil here have had little
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difficulty with soil erosion, for rains come as mists and slopes are
gentle and fields are usually farmed to closegrowing crops of small
grains. England is well suited to grassland farming and to the growing
of small grains. Clean-tilled crops have never been in general use. So
we found fields in England that have been cultivated for 1000 years or
more where the yields of wheat, have been raised to averages between
40 to 60 bushels per acre. The maximum yield thus far is 96 bushels to
the acre. The principal problems before the farmers of England are
rotations, seed selection and farm implements.
The recent war made new demands on the lands of England. Prior
to blockading action by the enemy, the British Isles depended on
imports for two-thirds of their total food supply. One-third of their
population was fed from their own lands, requiring about 12 million
acres of cultivated land for this purpose. In war time, fully 50 per cent
more land was plowed to grow food crops; and most of it is still in
cultivation. Pasture land and grassland on slopes are being cultivated.
Soil erosion, may become a problem more serious than ever before in
British agriculture, because of the extraordinary demands for the
growing of food.
The New World
And now we cross the Atlantic, following the, course of
civilization to the new land which by one of the most remarkable facts
of history was kept for the most part isolated from the peoples of the
Old World until civilization had advanced through a period of fully
6000 years.
The peoples found here, presumably descendants of tribes coming
from Asia in the distant past, had been handicapped in the
development of agriculture by, lack of large animals. suitable for
domestication and by ignorance of the wheel or the use of iron. They
had, however, learned to conserve water and soils in a notable way,
especially in the terrace agriculture of Peru and Central America and
in the Hopi country of Southwestern United States. Some have held
that this knowledge was brought across the South Pacific by way of
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islands, on many of which such practices are still found. In any case,
lacking iron or even bronze tools, these peoples for the most part still
depended largely on hunting, fishing and gathering along with shifting.
cultivation for their livelihood, and the soil resources seem to have
been for the most part almost unimpaired.
To the peoples of the Old World, the Americas were a land of
promise, a release from the oppressions, economic and political,
brought on by congested populations and failures of peoples to find
righteous adjustments to their long used land resources.
North America, as the first colonists entered it, was a vast area of
good land, more bountiful in raw materials for a complex civilization
than ever was vouchsafed any people. "The spacious Mississippi
Valley is the most expansive habitation of mankind in the world," says
the historian, Henry Truslow Adams. Its soils were fat with
accumulated fertility, of the ages; its mountains were full of mineral;
its forests of timber; its clear rivers were teeming with fish., All these
were abundant -- soil productivity, raw materials, and power for a
remarkable civilization. How new is this land in comparison with the
Holy Lands?
The hardy pioneers, who first settled the eastern seaboard and then
the west, found a land beautiful for its rocks and rills, for its forests
and valleys and for its majestic purple mountains; beautiful for its
wide open plains and spacious skies; for the majesty of its scenery in
lakes and snow-capped mountains. Our forefathers found a land
wonderful for indescribable grandeur of scenery; wonderful for its
great expanse as they continued the westward course of civilization to
the shores of the Pacific.
Here was the last frontier of this westward march; for there are no
more new continents to discover, to explore and to exploit. If we are to
discover a way of establishing an enduring civilization we must do it
here, for this is our last stand! We have not yet fully discovered this
way; we are searching for the way and the light. Here is a challenge of
the ages to old and young alike; a chance to solve this age-old problem

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of establishing an enduring civilization -- of finding a righteous

adjustment of a people to its land resources.
Our land is like a great farm, plentiful for fields suited to the
growing of cotton, corn, and other crops, plentiful in land for pastures,
woods, and general farming. In the West, our country is plentiful for
vast grazing lands well suited to the raising of herds of sheep and
cattle, and plentiful for fertile alluvial valleys of the arid regions overawed by high mountains that condense the waters out of moistureladen
winds, to irrigate garden lands of high yields. Such is the American
farm, plentiful for feeding at least 350 million people when the land is
intensively cultivated under full conservation and fully occupied with
a complex, division of labor that will give us a higher general standard
of living than we enjoy today.
The Record of Our Lands
But now let US read the record that we have written on our own
land in, a very short period of 300 years.
In the past 150 years, our occupation of this fabulous land has
coincided with the coming of the age of science and power-driven
machines. By our understanding of a power over materials and forces
of nature, we have been able to rip up the earth more rapidly than ever
before in the history of the human race.
Along the Atlantic Coast in the Piedmont we find charming
landscapes of fields with red soils and glowing grain fields, but lo! in
their midst we find an insidious enemy devouring the land -- stealing it
away, ere we are aware, by sheet erosion, rain by rain -- washing it
down into the streams and out to the sea. Sheet erosion, marked by
shallow but numberless rills in our fields, is blotted out by each
plowing, so that we soon forget what is happening to the good earth
until we measure these soil and water losses. More than 300 million
acres out of our 400 odd millions of acres of farm fields are now
eroding faster than soil is being formed. That means destruction of the
land if erosion is not controlled.

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We are not guessing, for erosion experiment stations located

throughout the country in problem areas of soil wastage, have given us
accurate results. Let us compare rates of erosion under different
conditions of land coverage and use. Measurements through five years
at the Statesville, North Carolina Erosion Experiment Station show
that, on an 8 per cent slope, land in fallow without cropping lost each
year an average of 29 per cent of rainfall in immediate runoff and 64
tons of soil per acre in wash-off of soil. This means that in 18 years, 7
inches of soil (the average depth of top soil) would be washed away to
subsoil. Under continuous cropping to cotton, as was once the general
practice in this region, the land lost each year an average of 10 per cent
of rainfall and 22 tons of soil per year, which means that it would take
44 years to erode away 7 inches of soil. Rotations reduced but did not
stop erosion, for the land lost 9 per cent of the rain and enough soil
that it would take 109 years to erode away 7 inches of soil. That is a
very short time in the life of our nation. But where the land was kept in
grass, it lost less than one per cent of beneficent rain and a mere
fraction of a ton of soil per year so that it would take 96,000 years to
wash away 7 inches of soil; this rate is certainly no faster than soil is
formed.
Under the natural cover of woods, burned over annually, as has
unfortunately been the custom in southern woods, the land lost 3 1/2
per cent of rain and six-tenths of a ton of soil per year, so that it would
take 1800 years to erode away 7 inches of soil. But where fire was
kept out of the, woods, and forest litter accumulated on the forest
floor, the land lost less than one-third of one per cent of the rainfall
and an infinitesimal amount of soil, so that, according to the
calculations, it would require more than 500,000 years to wash away 7
inches of soil. Such an infinitesimal rate of erosion is indeed far below
the rate of soil formation.
Here in, a nutshell, so to speak, we have the underlying hazard of
civilization. By clearing and cultivating sloping lands -- for most of
our lands are more or less sloping -- we expose soils to accelerated
erosion by water or by wind and sometimes by both water and wind. In
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doing this we enter upon a regime of self-destructive agriculture. The

direful results of this suicidal agriculture have in the past been escaped
by migration to new lands or, where this was not feasible, by the most
extraordinary works of terracing slopes with rock walls as was done in
ancient Phoenicia, Peru, and China. Escape to new lands is no longer a
way out. We are brought face to face today with the necessity of
finding out how to establish permanent agriculture on our farms under
cultivation before they are damaged beyond reclamation, and before
the food supply of a growing population becomes deficient.
Within a new and underpopulated land such as is ours that is
farmed extensively rather than intensively, there is considerable slack
before privations on a national scale will overtake us. But privations of
individual farm families, resulting from wastage of soil by erosion, are
indicators of what will come to the nation as our population increases.
Farm production goes down from depletion of soil resources, unless
measures of soil conservation are put into effect throughout the length
and breadth of the land.
We must be in possession of a certain amount of abundance to be
provident, for a starving farmer will eat his seed grain; you will do it
and I will do it, even though we know it to be fatal to next years crop.
Now is the time, while we still have much good land still capable of
restoration to full or greater productivity, to carry through a full
program of soil and water conservation. Such is necessary for building
here a civilization that will not fall as have others whose ruins we have
studied in this paper.
A solution to the problem of the farming of lands with more or
less slope must be found if we are to establish an enduring agriculture
in the United States. We have only about 100 million acres of flat
alluvial lands where the erosion hazard is negligible out of 450 million
acres of land that will ever be suitable for crops. Most of our
production comes from sloping lands where the hazard of soil erosion
is ever present, calling urgently for the discovery, adaptation, and
application of measures for conserving our soils.

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In the results of the Statesville Erosion Experiment Station we

saw how a forest with its ground litter was effective in keeping down
the rate of soil erosion well within rates of soil formation. Out of
untold ages of unending reactions between forces of erosion that wear
down the land and forces of plant growth that build up the land
through vegetation, the layer of forest litter has proved to be the most
effective natural agent in reducing surface wash of soil to a minimum.
Here is clearly our objective for permanent agriculture, namely, to
safeguard the physical body of the soil resource and keep down
erosion wastage under cultivation as nearly as possible to this geologic
norm of erosion under natural vegetation.
A few years ago I came upon a hill farmer in an obscure part of
the mountains of Georgia, who was trying to apply on his corn field
the function of forest litter as he saw it under the nearby forest on the
same slope and same type of soil. It was for me a great experience to
sit down with J. Mack Gowder of Hall County, Georgia, in his forest
beside the fields he had cultivated for 20 years in a way that has caught
the imagination of thoughtful agriculturists of the nation. We talked
about the simple device of forest ground litter and how effective it is in
preventing soil erosion even on steep slopes, and how he thought that
if litter at the ground surface would work in the forest it ought also to
work on his cultivated fields just along the same slope.
Mr. Gowder told me how, as a young man when he bought this
steep wooded land more than 20 years ago, he hoped to avoid the soil
erosion that was ruining the farms on smoother and better land of the
country. He planned to do this by stirring his land with deep plowing
but without turning the soil, so as to leave his crop litter at the surface - to do the same kind of work that the forest litter had done from time
out of mind. Gowder chose a bull tongue plow, only 4 inches wide to
do the trick. He told me that his neighbors laughed at him for such
foolish ways of plowing. As a concession to customs of the region he
put in channel terraces with a slight grade, as a precaution against
storm runoff from unusual rains. But thus far they have not been
needed. Now Gowder is cultivating topsoil on slopes up to 17 per cent
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whereas his ridiculing neighbors have only subsoil to farm, for they
have lost all their topsoil by erosion.
Leaving crop litter which is sometimes called "stubble mulch" and
"crop residue" at the ground surface in farming operations, is one of
the most significant and important contributions to American
agriculture and deserves to be spread wide through the country.
Certain adaptations of the method need to be made to meet the
problems of different farming regions, but the new principle is the
contribution of importance. There is not time to go into variations of
the Gowder crop litter method of farming, except to herald it as a
discovery as important to agriculture of the New World and these
times as the invention of the plow was to the Old World.
Danger Signs in America
Sheet erosion develops into gullies if allowed to continue
unchecked for a few years. Such gullies become numberless gutters to
lead off storm waters and flash floods that gouge out miniature gorges
and ruin the land for further cultivation. Material washed out of such
gullies is swept down into river valleys to shoal streams, to fill
reservoirs, and to destroy water storage for hydro-electric power and
for irrigation.
One of the most important findings of this survey of the use of
land in 7000 years is that tillers of soil have encountered their greatest
problem throughout the ages in trying to establish a permanent
agriculture on sloping lands. We have read the record as written on the
land, of failures from place to place but of few instances of success.
This same problem is with us in our new land of America, where
millions of acres have been destroyed for further cultivation and
abandoned.

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Fig 17. This formerly fine American farm home has been abandoned for much the
same reason that many cities of the old world were abandoned -- the eroded land
around it will no longer support a prosperous farm family.

Fig. 18. This prosperous American farm is being farmed the conservation way. The
terraces, strip crops, contour rows, and other soil and water conservation measures
protect the land against erosion and help to build up soil fertility.

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How then shall we continue to support fair cities and beautiful

homes by agriculture on sloping lands of this country? Shall we resort
to methods of ancient Phoenicia where slopes are terraced by building
rock walls as a staircase to make lands level at an expense of $2000 to
$5000 an acre? We say this is too costly even if we had the stone in
place to build such terrace walls, but across our great land there is not
enough stone within reach of eroding fields to terrace our land in this
manner even if it were justifiable in cost. We must find some other
solution to the age-old problem of slope cultivation.
The Way to an Enduring Agriculture
We have a solution to this problem derived from the past
experiences of farmers and from the results of experiments in our soil
erosion experiment stations. This solution is contour farming
supported by all other conservation measures. Our answer is contour
farming, supported by necessary measures first to increase the intake
capacity of the soil for rain waters by practices of retaining crop litter
at the surface, soil improvement, crop rotations, and strip cropping on
the contour; and second to lead away unabsorbed storm waters
harmlessly in channels of broad base terraces into outlet channels and
thence into natural drainage channels. By these coordinated measures
applied and adapted to the land on a physiographic basis we have
developed a new type of farming on the level rather than farming up
and down the hill. This is our solution to reduce the rate of erosion to
safeguard our soils on slopes where soil erosion by water is the hazard.
We have applied this method, during recent years, over millions of
acres as you may see from an airplane when you fly over portions of
the country.
In Texas near Temple, in the drainage of North Elm Creek, 174
farmers of bordering farms joined themselves into a soil conservation
association on a drainage basis covering a block of 34,000 acres.
Control of erosion and of storm runoff was planned and carried out on
a drainage basis, ignoring property and county lines in the same way
as runoff water ignores such arbitrary lines. Terrace outlet channels
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were laid out to carry water harmlessly through one farm and another
to natural drainage channels. One terrace outlet system may serve in
this way as many as 5 farms. By this approach to conservation it is
possible to treat the land in accord with its adaptabilities and to control
storm waters according to hydraulic principles. This is indeed
physiographic engineering that builds a lasting basis for a thriving
civilization.
This does not mean that we have yet found the final answer to full
control of soil erosion that will assure permanent agriculture, but we
are on the way to that solution. Our present practices may not yet stop
erosion, but will reduce it more and more as application of measures is
more and more complete. These measures and others will need further
improvement and adaptation to the problems as use of land becomes
more and more intensive. Such is the way out to this ageold problem
of establishing an enduring agriculture on sloping lands.
It is true that our level lands of the alluvial valleys have their
problems of drainage both in the irrigated and rain supplied area. But
these problems do not include the wastage of the physical body of the
soil resource. The soil remains in these flat lands, leaving us the
freedom of choice of drainage when the lands are economically ripe
for us. Our chief problem among many in the land conservation
movement in the United States is to conserve lands under cultivation
and grazing on slopes.
Wind erosion is a spectacular problem restricted to a smaller area
of the country where it is, however, serious and destructive. Wind
erosion attacks level as well as sloping lands cultivated in semi-humid
and semi-arid parts of the country. Wind erosion sorts the soil more
thoroughly than water erosion, lifting fine and fertile particles of soil
aloft to be flown to "parts unknown" and leaving behind coarser and
heavier particles that become sandy hummocks, then sand dunes that
begin an inexorable march of destruction. Such was the case in the socalled "dust bowl" of the Great Plains.
Control of wind erosion is based first upon a suiting of the land to,
its capabilities, by conserving all or most all of the rain that falls on it,
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which calls for contour farming except on flat lands. Appropriate

measures include strip shelter belts of crops, tillage practices that leave
crop litter or residue at the surface, and rotations suited to moisture
supplies in the soil profile. These with progressive improvement of
soil management practices will control wind erosion. It has proved a
simpler task, however, to control wind erosion than the less
spectacular but more insidious water erosion.
Lessons from the Old World
In this discussion on lessons from the Old and New Worlds in
conserving the vital heritage of our people, I have laid special
emphasis on saving the physical body of soil resources rather than
their fertility, for the following reason. Soil conservation must be a
cooperative objective and undertaking. Maintenance of fertility is a
part of this cooperative enterprise that falls properly to the farmer
himself. Conserving the physical integrity of the soil resource falls to
the nation as well as the farmer and landowner, in order to save the
people's heritage and safeguard the national welfare. If the physical
body of the soil resource is saved, we as a people are safeguarded in
liberty of action, in applying more or less fertilizer, and of planting this
or that crop in accord with market demands and national needs. If the
soil is destroyed, then our liberty of choice and action are gone,
condemning this and future generations to needless privations and
dangers. So big is this job of saving our good lands from further
damage and of reclaiming to some useful purpose vast areas of
seriously damaged and ruined lands, that full cooperation of the
individual interest of farmers with technical leadership and assistance
of the Government is not only desirable, but necessary, if we are to
succeed.
Another conclusion from our survey of the use of land through
7000 years where economic conditions have changed for better or for
worse more rapidly than climate, is that land after all is not an
economic commodity It is an integral part of the nation even as its
people are and requires protection by the individual owner and by the
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nation as well. Nowhere have we found more telling evidence of this

truth than in California where gold in '49 lured a host of people to the
State, but soils of its valleys have maintained its settlement. It was said
in times of old: "Thars gold in them thar hills," but there was more
than gold in the valleys. In the vicinity of Sacramento a few years ago
when I examined this area, valley lands had a value of $69 an acre for
growing winter wheat with natural rainfall. But these lands overlaid
gravels, and in these gravels was gold; so a dredging company bought
up the land, paying $200 an acre for it. The company brought in
mighty dredges to turn the land upside down to get out the gold and
left these farming lands in windrows of quartzitic boulders that will
not weather in a million years. What sort of economics is this: what
shall it profit a nation if it gain a whole world of gold and lose its soil?
The Eleventh Commandment
When in Palestine in 1939, as I pondered the problems of the use
of the land through the ages, I wondered if Moses, when he was
inspired to deliver the Ten Commandments to the Israelites in the
Desert to establish mans relationship to his Creator, and to his fellow
men -- if Moses had foreseen what was to become of the Promised
Land after 3000 years and what was to become of hundreds of millions
of acres of once good lands such as I have seen in China, Korea, North
Africa, the Near East and in our own fair land of America -- if Moses
had foreseen what suicidal agriculture would do to the land of the Holy
Earth, he might not have been inspired to deliver another
Commandment to establish mans relation to the earth and to complete
mans trinity of responsibilities to his Creator, to his fellow men and to
the Holy Earth. When invited to broadcast a talk on soil conservation
in Jerusalem in June, 1939, I gave for the first time what has been
called the Eleventh Commandment, as follows:

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THOU SHALT INHERIT THE HOLY EARTH AS A FAITHFUL

STEWARD, CONSERVING ITS RESOURCES AND PRODUCTIVITY FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION. THOU
SHALT SAFEGUARD THY FIELDS FROM SOIL EROSION, THY
LIVING WATERS FROM DRYING UP, THY FORESTS FROM
DESOLATION, AND PROTECT THY HILLS FROM OVERGRAZING BY THY HERDS, THAT THY DESCENDANTS MAY
HAVE ABUNDANCE FOREVER. IF ANY SHALL FAIL IN THIS
STEWARDSHIP OF THE LAND THY FRUITFUL FIELDS SHALL
BECOME STERILE STONY GROUND AND WASTING GULLIES,
AND THY DESCENDANTS SHALL DECREASE AND LIVE IN
POVERTY OR PERISH FROM OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH.

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