" III Fares the Land "
The American Land : Its History and Its Uses. By William K. Van Dersal. (Oxford University Press. 21s. 6d.) IT is rare to find a new historical book that is really new, and it is rash to assert that it is really new merely because it seems new. But with all the risks of the assertion allowed for, this reviewer is driven to assert that Dr. Van Dersal has written a new, fascinating and very valuable book. It is what its title claims it to be, a history of the American land, its crops, its economic past, present and future. Bits of Dr. Van Dersal's story have been told before. Some sections recall the admirable work of Sir Cyril Fox and Dr. Darby in this country. Other sections deal with topics that Miss Semple, Dr. Raper, Professor Crane, Professor Russell Smith have pioneered in. There is an admirable description of the native resources of North America ; there is a discussion of primitive fertility and the time and methods that can restore it. There are illustrations that recall the grimmest chapters of Dr. Raper's Preface to Peasantry ; photo- graphs that recall the most dreadful illustrations used by Mr. Stuart Chase ; there is a scientific background for Tobacco Road or The Grapes of Wrath as well as for more cheerful accounts of the state of the American soil such as Miss Willa Cather has given. But the great merit of Dr. Van Dersal is to pull everything together.
He starts with the " forest primeval " that impressed and almost terrified the pioneers. We learn what trees filled the vast wilderness that stretched west to the Missouri and provided the " boundless contiguity of shade " from which, two centuries later, the descendants of the early settlers emerged reluctantly on to the lone prairie. (Readers of Longfellow who ought to have been puzzled by his references to " hemlock " will learn what it was here.) We are told the fascinating story of corn—what we call maize. (In Britain corn does not necessarily mean wheat ; it means—like ble—the locally dominant cereal.) We are given fascinating speculation on the
ancestry of the basic grain that the Indians had cultivated. We are also given an account of its sexual life that recalls a celebrate piece by Mr. Robert Benchley.
English readers may be surprised to learn how largely indigenou is the American flora, and grateful when they discover how the vine growers of Europe had to call on the new world to redress th balance of the old, not merely upset but threatened with destructi by phylloxera. It is as if salvarsan had been invented in Arneri to undo the damage done. The basic American grape, the Catawb it has been discovered, isn't European, but comes from Buncom County, hitherto only known because of the politician who talk " bunkum." The comparative scarcity of parsnips, the brigh prospects of the strawberry-breeders, who, despite seventeenth century dogmatism, propose to make a better berry ; cotton, stil royal if no longer a true monarch in the southern economy ; th history of timothy, whose eponymous hero was Timothy Hanse who brought this grass to Maryland in 172o ; the clovers, all ( which are immigrants ; the sweet potato, which is the only edible form of morning glory ; the watermelon, which most appropriate! comes from Africa ; these are part of one of the basic sources American wealth.
One of the basic sources, but perhaps nothing is basic but th soil, that fertile topsoil which can be stripped-off in a generatio or two, but takes two thousand years to replace. The decline a bold peasantry can be endured (Dr. Van Dersal has a few passin references to the possibilities of growing as much food on much less land with much less labour). But hydroponics are not yet substitute for the land that has been washed into rivers, blown int the sea, blasted by chemicals, impoverished by indiscriminate plough ing. In the short run, the white man has vastly increased the pr ductivity of American soil. But in the long, but not very long, r he may really have been mining it. But it is not Dr. Van Dersal' business to preach economic lessons. His business is to tell t story of the land. He has done it magnificently, and has -bee
helped by most intelligent illustrations. D. W. BRocitc.
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