EEPORT OF THE CHEMIST. 147 



has auy uatioTj or city fallen into ruins while ber fields maintained their 

 fertility. Even before the Punic wars Eome had drawn from the rich 

 fields and faultless climate of Italy the material to ieed ;md clothe the 

 thousands within her walls for nearly five hundred years, without any 

 compensating- return. At length a scarcity of food drove the nation to 

 war, in order to procure corn to distribute amoug' the people, and thus 

 temi>orarily avert the famine that yearly threatened them. But these 

 supplies, the trophies of v/ars but little better than robberies, were 

 swallowed up by the insatiable sewers of Eome, and the fields of Italy 

 remained impoverished, though Sicily, Sardinia, Sr)ain, and the African 

 provinces poured their wealth of food into her capital. The treasure, 

 once there, was lost forever in the polluted waters of the Tiber. 



The exhaustion of her soil and the consequent uncertainty of the food- 

 supply was the principal cause of the downfall of the republic, and final 

 overthrow of the empire which succeeded it. Scipio, two hundred years 

 before Christ, fed multitudes daily from the public stores, and the con- 

 quered provinces were taxed one-tenth of their harvests, to su^jply the 

 means for this distribution of food; and even with this provision re- 

 X)eated famines occurred. Augustus Gfesar is said to have fed 300,000 

 of the population of Eome at the public expense during the greater 

 part of his reign. When the census of Julius Csiesar showed a decrease 

 of population in the city, that shrewd statesman did not hesitate to re- 

 fer it to the scarcity and uncertainty of the food-supply. But his laws, 

 in the emergency, were as ineffectual as the agrarian ]n-oject of Caius 

 Gracchus luid. been to restore to fertility the wasted fields of Italy. In 

 this state of pauperism, who Mill be surprised that the Eoman citizen 

 lost his traditional independence, and descended to a condition the most 

 servile and abject "? an effect to be traced directly to the uncompensated 

 drain of the cities on the fertility of the fields. 



The lesson of Spain is no less instructive than that of Eome. Strabo 

 speaks ot the plains of Andalusia producing a hundredfold. At the 

 beginning of the tenth century Moorish Spain supported from her own 

 soil a population of 30,000,000. At the time of the Eoman conquest 

 the city of Tarragona is represented as having a population of 1,000,000, 

 and when in possession of the Moors it numbered 350,000, but at the 

 l^resent it has scarcely 15,000 inhabitants. When we learn that Catalonia, 

 once the granary of Southern Europe, now only yields a scanty harvest 

 once in two years, and that Andalusia, at one time so fertile, noAv gives a 

 harvest but once in three years, ato may learn this salutary lesson — no 

 nation can long survive the exliaiistion of its soil. 



On the other hand, the cities of Egypt, though not less wasteful than 

 the contemporary cities of Asia and Europe, yet surrounded by fields 

 whose perpetual fertility is insured by the annual inundation of the 

 Nile, have always maintained a respectable population, at least in num- 

 bers. Cairo at the present time has not less than 300,000 inhabitants, 

 and other cities are quite populous. China and Japan can justly claim 

 an antiquity which carries their history up to the very infancy of the 

 race. Now, in what particular does China or Japan differ from the old 

 nations of Western Asia, or Southern Europe, w^hich live now only in the 

 cruuil)ling ruins of their once magnificent cities "J Chiefly in this : China 

 and Japan by a rigid system of compensatioii, which requires that the 

 fields shall receive from the cities as much as they give, have maintained 

 their capacity for production, and consequently have been able to feed 

 the swarming millions of their population, and thus to prolong their 

 national existence indefinitely. Had China or Japan sent abroad her 

 food to bo consumed in foreign lands, or buried the nitrogen, phosphoric 



