TRANSACTIONS. 65 



severe, and in European Russia the winters are not much 

 milder than under the corresponding latitudes of our own 

 hemisphere. The grape is indeed grown and much wine 

 produced, at Astraklian on the confines of Europe and 

 Asia in about the forty-fifth degree, but the vine is there 

 planted in deep trenches and covered in winter, a practice 

 which is followed in the Valteline also, and other districts 

 on the borders of the lower Alps. 



A very striking and important general difference be- 

 tween the agriculture of most of these countries and that 

 of the United States is, that while all our crops of any 

 commercial value with the exception of the grasses, are 

 the product of annual vegetables, a very large proportion 

 of the profits of European continental agriculture is de- 

 rived from perennial plants. Thus the vine is common to 

 some of the districts of all the countries I have mentioned ; 

 the mulberry and the olive to most of them. lu France 

 the annual yield of wine and brandy is estimated to be 

 worth more than sixty millions of dollars, and that of 

 manufactured silk something above forty millions, while 

 that of the cereal grains does not much exceed two hun- 

 dred millions. If to the products of the vine and the 

 mulberry we add those of the olive and the cork-oak; we 

 shall find that these perennials, all of which well might be, 

 but none of which yet are, cultivated in the United States 

 to such an extent as to be of any national importance, 

 yield in France returns much more than half as great as 

 those of the grain harvest of that empire, and of consid- 

 erably greater value than the entire unelaboratcd cotton 

 crop of the American Union- 

 It is obvious that this difference in the objects of rural 

 husbandry must make an essential difference in the char- 

 acter of agricultural labor and the occupations of the 

 people. Not only are the toils of those employed in cul- 

 tivating perennial plants lighter in themselves than those 

 of the husbandman whose seed time as well as his gather- 



