And Strong Arm scooped out the soil that had been washed against the opening of a high cave upon the hill and entered it to rest after his long journey. And he dug with his hands into the soft earth, for he remembered the tubers he had buried there one day when he had been hunting with the men of the tribe, for he was hungry. And lo! many juicy tubers he found where he had buried only two or three. And Strong Arm and Quack Quack ate of the potatoes, while, for a Cave-man, Strong Arm pondered deeply on these things.
He thought much of one tuber and how it had made many tubers, and recalled the words of his father, who had spoken of the mother potato. Then he felt Quack Quack at his side and forgot the matter and fell asleep.
Necessity has been the great spur to the progress of mankind, and it is probable that over and over again, in the early stages of primitive culture, the use of fire was discovered and lost and forgotten and regained before men realized the need which fire supplied. It is almost certain that the art of pottery was discovered and lost and rediscovered times without number. It is equally certain that it took primitive man many, many long, dark years to learn to plan for the periods of want and famine.
In tropical countries, where food was to be had in abundance almost the whole year around, no necessity arose for the raising of crops. Man would never have felt the need of learning to cultivate food stuffs in this environment.
Savages had only the vaguest notions of the relation of cause and effect. It was necessary for buried tubers to sprout new potatoes year after year, for the plants to multiply before their very eyes and the necessity of planting food to have arisen before the relation of sowing and reaping could begin to mean anything to them. Only then did planting assume any tribal significance.
Doubtless it was in some semi-tropical country that the discovery of Strong Arm first began to make an impression upon the awakening minds of the early savages. Buried sweet yams and others of the potato family which had multiplied and become many yams or potatoes, must have been a wonderful windfall when discovered by the half starved tribes, in the midst of a long season of want. The cause of their growing would then be carefully observed by the clans.
Be sure that it was necessity that forced the first early savage to sow and bury against the days of coming hunger. Man did not take naturally to work. For several hundreds of thousands of years he dwelt in tropical or semi-tropical lands, where food was usually plentiful, it was only an urgent need that forced him to sow and till the soil. Before that time he had dwelt in the continual problems of the day and had been compelled to give no real thought nor plan for the morrow.
Strong Arm slept in the cave with Quack Quack after their long journey back to the home of their fathers. And he dreamed a dream wherein he saw Tall, the great man from the strange tribe, alive and walking about, just as he had done before the sickness came upon him when he had wandered out into the night and met the sabre-toothed tiger.
And in his dream Strong Arm saw Tall stand before his cave and thrust many tubers in the ground where one tuber had been. And when Strong Arm awoke he told Quack Quack and his brothers and Laughing Boy of his dream in the few words he knew and in signs and pantomime.