64 N. H. STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



and they are still brewed by the tribes of the Caucasus 

 now inhabiting the localities from which the Goths are 

 believed ♦to have emigrated. Tacitus, in his remarkable 

 little treatise on the manners and customs of the Germans, 

 written about a century after the commencement of our 

 era, says '•' their drink is a liquor extracted from barley or 

 other grain and corrupted into a certain resemblance to 

 wine." The consumption of this stupefying drink is quite 

 incredible, and it influences in various ways the industry 

 of the whole Germanic race, to an extent hardly inferior 

 to the results of the cultivation of the cereal grains in our 

 own great West. It is a significant fact that one third of 

 the revenue of Bavaria is derived from a tax on beer. 



As the character and objects of agricultural labor arc 

 always much affected by meteorological influences, a word 

 on the relative climates of the Old World and the New 

 will not be out of place here. The most general state- 

 ment of the law of climate, next after the influence of 

 latitude and elevation, is that the western coast of all 

 continents enjoys a milder winter and a less scorching 

 summer than the eastern. Thus the climate of the Atlantic 

 States finds its parallel in the corresponding latitudes of 

 China and Japan, while Oregon and the interior of Cali- 

 fornia very nearly resemble, in this particular, the maritime 

 and inland countries of western Europe. Between eastern; 

 America and the west coast of the European continent 

 the difl"crence is very great. The grape grows in Germany 

 in the same latitude as the almost eternally frozen shores 

 of James's Bay in the New World and Kauitchatka ia 

 the Old ; and the most highly prized wines of Europe, the 

 Hochheimcr or lloch, are produced as far north as the 

 fiftieth degree. Rice is grown with advantage near the 

 coast of the Adriatic in latitude forty-five ; and the farmer 

 of Lombardy is jjloughing his fields when, under the same 

 parallel, the earth is frozen three feet deep on our north- 

 ern frontier. Farther cast the climate becomes again 



