"The world is one vast garden, bringing forth crops of the most luxuriant and varied kind, century after century, and millennium after millennium. Yet the face of Nature is nowhere furrowed by the plough, no harrow disintegrates the clods, no lime and phosphates are strewn upon its fields, no visible tillage of the soil improves the work on the great world's farm."

H. DRUMMOND, "Tropical Africa"

BARVARD
UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

The Lakeside Press, Chicago, Ill., U. S. A.

R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company

PREFACE

This edition of the Great World's Farm has been somewhat abridged from the original English edition in order to bring it within the limits required for books of the Chautauqua Reading Circle. No essential features of the work, however, have been eliminated, and the chapter divisions remain the same as in the larger edition, with the exception of the last, "Man's Work on the Farm," which has been omitted entirely.

"Readers of mature years can hardly fail to find in this volume some facts that are new to them, some suggestions of a wider interpretation of nature or of a more accurate perception of its interrelations, or some fresh cause for intelligent wonder."