Proceedings Of The Aberdeen University Anatomical And Anthropological Society 1908 14 Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from Proceedings of the Aberdeen University Anatomical and Anthropological Society, 1906-08 With the hoe and the axe the native does all his agriculture. He has the virgin forest before him from which to choose, for there is no private ownership of land in native law, and the chief's country is open to the chief's people. But once a man has fixed on a piece of ground and marked it Off for his own by tying the grass into tufts or placing a stone in the fork Of a tree to mark the boundary, the ground becomes his till he vacate it or sell his rights to another. The system of agriculture is destructive in the extreme. A piece of virgin forest is felled and the timber burned on the spot. The ashes are gathered into heaps and covered with a thin layer of soil. On the fall Of the early rains the seed is planted in these heaps, and in a few days germinates. It is twice hoed before it is ready to be reaped, and when reaped the stalks are left on the ground to be burned for next year's manure. But every year a new piece of forest is felled and burned, and added to the old garden. After three or four years' cultivation the soil is exhausted and is abandoned to lie fallow for years. In this way vast tracts of land in Central Africa are deforested, and in consequence the rainfall is yearly decreasing. With this decrease the level of the great lakes and rivers is slowly falling. Within the last thirty years the level of Lake N yasa has fallen eleven feet, and there are watermarks on the rocks which show it once stood at a still higher level. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.