Production of Structural Materials.
About twenty pamphlets on other minerals.
[CHAPTER IX]
ANIMAL FOODS
GRAZING
Food is of two classes: vegetable, which comes directly from the earth, and animal, which has fed on vegetable life. This is, of course, a more concentrated form of food, and much less of it is needed to sustain life.
For the plentiful supply of vegetable food we must depend upon the fertility of the soil, as we have seen. Our animal food can not be classed among our natural resources, but as a product of them, and requires the same care and wise use.
In the early history of our country natural animal food was abundant. Fishes swarmed in the sea, lakes, and streams. Wild turkeys and other game birds, deer, and bison formed a large part of the food of our forefathers. But these have been gradually disappearing. We have caught and destroyed so many fish that we have only a fraction of our former number. The game birds have disappeared either because they have been killed in great numbers or because their nesting-places have been destroyed. Of the big game nothing is now left except in a few remote regions, and it is growing less plentiful each year.
Although large quantities of fish and game are marketed every year at certain seasons, they form a small fraction of the animal food required in the country, and we must now depend for most of our animal food, not on that which was at first given us for a natural resource but on that raised by man.