One ought to look, with something of filial reverence, on the
agriculture of the district into which we are penetrating; for it is
the parent of our own. From hence, or strictly speaking from the
Mediterranean shore beyond us, spread northward and westward through
France, Belgium, and Britain, all the tillage which we knew--at least
till a hundred years ago--beyond the primaeval plan of clearing, or
surface-burning, the forests, growing miserable white crops as long
as they would yield, and then letting the land relapse, for twenty
years, into miserable pasture. This process (which lingered thirty
years ago in remote parts of Devon), and nothing better, seems to
have been that change of cultivated lands which Tacitus ascribes to
the ancient Germans. Rotation of crops, in any true sense, came to
us from Provence and Languedoc; and with it, subsoiling; irrigation;
all our artificial grasses, with lucerne at the head of the list; our
peas and beans; some of our most important roots; almost all our
garden flowers, vegetables, fruits, the fig, the mulberry, the vine--
(the olive and the maize came with them from the East, but dared go
no further north)--and I know not what more; till we may say, that--
saving subsoil-draining, which their climate does not need--the
ancestors of these good folks were better farmers fifteen hundred
years ago, than too many of our countrymen are at this day.
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