Intensive tillage.]

The dense population of the Mediterranean islands is the concomitant of
an advanced agriculture. The connection between elaborate tillage and
scant insular area is indicated in the earliest history of classic
Aegina. The inhabitants of this island were called Myrmidons, Strabo
tells us, because by digging like ants they covered the rocks with earth
to cultivate all the ground; and in order to economize the soil for this
purpose, lived in excavations under ground and abstained from the use
of bricks.[975] To-day, terraced slopes, irrigation, hand-made soils,
hoe and spade tillage, rotation of crops, and a rich variety of field
and garden products characterize the economic history of most
Mediterranean islands, whether Elba, the Lipari, Ponza, Procida, Capri,
Ischia, Pantellaria, Lampedusa,[976] or the Aegean groups. The sterile
rock of Malta has been converted for two-thirds of its area into fertile
gardens, fields and orchards. The upper stratum of rock has been
pulverized and enriched by manure; the surface has been terraced and
walled to protect it against high winds. In consequence, the Maltese
gardens are famous throughout the Mediterranean.[977] In the Cyclades
every patch of tillable ground is cultivated by the industrious
inhabitants. Terraced slopes are green with orchards of various southern
fruits, and between the trees are planted melons and vegetables. Fallow
land and uncultivated hillsides, as well as the limestone islands fit
only for pastures, are used for flocks of sheep and goats.[978]

[Sidenote: Japanese agriculture.]

It is in Japan that agriculture has attained a national and aesthetic
importance reached nowhere else. Of the 150,000 square miles
constituting Japan proper, two-thirds are mountains; large tracts of
lowlands are useless rock wastes, owing to the detritus carried down by
inundating mountain torrents.[979] Hence to-day arable land forms only
15.7 per cent. of the whole area. During the two hundred and fifty years
of exclusion when emigration and foreign trade were forbidden, a large
and growing population had to be supplied from a small insular area,
further restricted by reason of the configuration of the surface. Here
the geographical effects of a small, naturally defined area worked out
to their logical conclusion, Consequently agriculture progressed rapidly
and gave the farmer a rank in the social scale such as he attained
nowhere else.[980] His methods of til