How would these crops grow in the new soil and unfamiliar climate? was the question the anxious settlers asked themselves. Would they ripen before the fall freezes? What new insects and blights awaited these plants upon which so much depended? Governor William Bradford tells us the story. The English grain, when planted that first anxious year, "came not to good, eather by ye badness of ye seed, or lateness of ye season, or both or some other defecte." Although the Mayflower passengers preferred the grains to which they were accustomed, they were forced by dire necessity to use an unfamiliar food - a strange-looking cereal that grew on a tall stalk and carried its seed on the side of the plant instead of at the top, as all grains were carried in Europe. Indian corn kept the members of the colony alive until they learned how to grow their Old World crops under the conditions of a new country.

Planted in the fall, English wheat and barley, adapted to a mild climate, could not withstand the cold of New England winters. When planted in the spring, it blasted and mildewed and would not ripen. Fortunately for the early settlers, grass grew almost as luxuriantly, if not so green, in the New World as in the Old; and the cattle and sheep brought over in the ships that soon followed the Mayflower thrived and multiplied. Their chickens and ducks found the meadows of Massachusetts as good a place to pick up a living as the fields of Devonshire. In the woods there was a larger fowl that the Indians prized. Carried back to Europe it was called the Cock of India at first, and later the turkey. So, to-day, North America's only contribution to the list of domesticated animals is named after a country in Asia Minor. But no more is the lordly turkey allowed to roam the fields and roost in tallest trees or windmills. He isn't even permitted to have his feet on the ground. Traveling about the country one sees these big birds in wire-bottomed pens. Bacteriologists have learned that the earthworms and other natural food of the turkey carry a deadly parasite that in the past has wiped out whole flocks. Such a simple procedure as keeping the birds off the ground has made turkey raising profitable in the part of the country where they once proudly strutted in the wild.

In the same country in which the Indians numbered less than ten million inhabitants, and then practiced a severe limitation of offspring, the white inhabitants now total a hundred and twenty million and are increasing at a rate that will double the present population in a half century. Where the Indians often went hungry, we now study books on how to reduce. Farm surpluses cause the government as much anxiety as the famines did in Egypt. In part this is due to better machinery for cultivation and transportation. Where the squaw with a clamshell hoe had to work hard to grow enough corn and beans to feed her own family, a man with a steel plow and cultivator can grow enough for two families. To-day, with power machinery, one farm family can produce enough to provide four or more families with an abundance of everything.

This development could never have taken place if the crops were not adapted to the varied soil and seasonal conditions in those regions where they are best grown. Some crops are better adapted to machine cultivation and others are preeminently fitted for hand cultivation. Although machinery has now been skillfully devised to plant, cultivate, and harvest the corn crop, all of these operations for thousands of years were done by hand. Wheat, on the other hand, has always necessitated machinery in some form. The seeds are too small to sow singly by hand and must be broadcast. This demands some form of raking the soil to cover the seeds. The plants need no cultivation or weeding, and when the crop is ready to gather, it has to be cut with some kind of knife, flailed with some kind of beater, and cleaned with some kind of blower. Through the ages man's inventive genius has been directed toward better means of performing these operations.

We think of the early explorers busily searching the earth's surface for gold and silver to make ornaments, and for copper and iron to make swords and armor. But one of the main uses for metal has always been to make food easier to produce. The hoe and sickle were first made of stone, then of bronze, and finally of iron and steel. With a little alteration in shape, the hoe became a spade and then a plow; the sickle became a scythe and then a cradle and finally a reaper. Where formerly it took one man a good part of the season to prepare the ground, plant the seed, and harvest and thresh an acre of wheat, the same thing can now be done in less than three hours of actual working time - plowing and planting in one operation, harvesting and threshing in another.

But what value would all this machinery have if the plants did not grow properly and ripen a useable crop? The New England settlers, as we have noted, could not use their English wheats, because they blasted and winterkilled; they were forced to use the hand-tilled grain of the Indians. Only when they brought wheat from the colder parts of Europe and Asia were they able to grow satisfactory crops. The apples and grapes from the Old World often failed in the New, and not until countless numbers of seedlings had been grown were fruits developed that could live through the coldest winters and bear edible fruit in the driest summers.