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 tillage are much the same as in overcrowded China, but his national importance and hence his ranking in society is much higher.  In Japan to-day farming absorbs 60 per cent. of the population.  The system of tillage, in many respects primitive, is yet very thorough, and by means of skilful manuring makes one plot of ground yield two or three crops per annum.[981] Every inch of arable land is cultivated in grain, vegetables and fruits.  Mountains and hills are terraced and tilled far up their slopes.  Meadows are conspicuously absent, as are also fallow fields.  Land is too valuable to lie idle.  Labor is chiefly manual and is shared by the women and children; mattock and hoe are more common than the plow.[982] Such elaborate cultivation and such pressure of population eventuate in small holdings.  In Japan one hectar (2 1-2 acres) is the average farm per family.