EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLES. 79 
All the operations of rural husbandry are destructive to 
spolitaneous vegetation by the voluntary substitution of domes- 
tic for wild plants, and, as we have seen, the armies of the 
colonist are attended by troops of irregular and unrecognized 
camp-followers, which soon establish and propagate themselves 
over the new conquests. These unbidden and hungry guests— 
the gipsies of the vegetable world—often have great aptitude 
for accommodation and acclimation, and sometimes even crowd 
out the native growth to make room for themselves. The 
botanist Latham informs us that indigenous flowering plants, 
animal, not vegetable, and he ascribes their multiplication to excessive manur- 
ing and stimulation of the growth of the plants on which they live. They are 
now generally, if not universally, regarded as vegetable, and. if they are so, 
Babinet’s theory would be even more plausible than on his own supposition.— 
Etudes et Lectures, ti., p. 269. 
Ti is a fact of some interest in agricultural economy, that the oidium, which 
is so destructive to the grape, has produced no pecuniary loss to the proprie- 
tors of the vineyards in France. ‘‘ The price of wine,” says Lavergne, ‘‘ has 
quintupled, and as the product of the vintage has not diminished in the same 
proportion, the crisis has been, on the whole, rather advantageous than detri- 
mental to the country. ”__ Economie Rurale de la France, pp. 263, 264. 
France produces a large surplus of wines for exportation, and the sales to 
foreign consumers are the principal source of profit to French vinegrowers. 
In Northern Italy, on the contrary, which exports little wine, there has been 
no such increase in the price of wine as to compensate the great diminution in 
the yield of the vines, and the loss of this harvest is severely felt. In Sicily, 
however, which exports much wine, prices have risen as rapidly as in France. 
Waltershausen informs us that in the years 185842, the red wine of Mount 
Etna sold at the rate of one kreuzer and a half, or one cent the bottle, and 
sometimes even at but two thirds that price, but that at present it commands 
five or six times as much. 
The grape disease has operated severely on small cultivators whose vine- 
yards only furnished a supply for domestic use, but Sicily has received a com- 
pensation in the immense increase which it has occasioned in both the product 
and the profits of the sulphur mines. Flour of sulphur is applied to the vine 
as a remedy against the disease, and the operation is repeated from two to three 
or four—and sometimes even eight or ten—times in a season. Hence there is 
a great demand for sulphur in all the vine-growing countries of Europe, and 
Waltershausen estimates the annual consumption of that mineral for this sin- 
gle purpose at 850,000 centner, or more than forty thousand tons. The price 
of sulphur has risen in about the same proportion as that of wine. —WALTERS- 
HAUSEN, Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau, pp. 19, 20. 
