44 N. n. STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



and afterwards the territories of the German Powers 

 and of Switzerland, and I will endeavor to give you some 

 general notion of the husbandry of each country, with an 

 occasional illustration from other lands, and a hint or two 

 even from distant Turkey. 



After the conspicuous features I have already mentioned, 

 the traveller in France will probably first be struck with 

 the great minuteness of the division of the soil, and the 

 particolored appearance thereby given to the general sur- 

 face. On every side are strips of arable land, often not 

 more than ten or twenty 5'ards in width, and of consid- 

 erable length, breaking the monotony of the plains and 

 chequering the sunny flanks of the hills that border them. 

 These small parcels, which exhibit every variety of agri- 

 cultural product, here a miniature wheat-field or a dwarf 

 meadow, there- a bed of onions, and a plat of barley or 

 flax, or a patch of potatoes or cabbage, the farm and the 

 garden intermicgled, belong to diflercut proprietors or at 

 least occupants, living often miles from their petty fields, 

 and of course cultivating them at no trifling disadvantage. 

 The modern law of descent in France which excludes 

 primogeniture from sole inheritance of the soil and divides 

 the estate among all the heirs, combined with the tenacious 

 attachment of the French peasant to his country and his 

 paternal acres, has occasioned this exceeding minuteness 

 of partition, which has been found productive of impor- 

 tant political advantages, and at the same time of serious 

 economical evils, both of which are curiously contrasted 

 with the opposite benefits and inconveniences resulting 

 from the monopolizing of lands in England by the opera- 

 tion of the British laws of inheritance and entail. 



The farmer whose estate embraces but an aero cannot 

 keep a flock of sheep, or a yoke of oxen, or scarcely a 

 p?g; he cannot build barns or sheds for storing his crops; 

 he cannot afl'ord a comfortable dwelling, or possess a cart, 

 a wagon, plows, harrows or even a full set of the smaller 



