10 



of the Age, the moral reflections and instructions being jby 

 much the most lengthy. Of any of the practices of Horti- 

 culture he is still more meagre. Timber was felled in Au- 

 tumn. They ceased digging in the Vineyard, when from the 

 heat of the weather, about the season of the Pleiades, the 

 snails left the ground for shelter upon the Plants. The vintage 

 was in the course of November. In common with all other 

 Heathens he had a superstitious regard to lucky and unlucky 

 days ; the thirteenth day of the Moon, he considered favour- 

 able to planting, but not to sowing ; the sixteenth and ninth 

 were also propitious to planting. 



That the work as known to us is not perfect, I think is 

 further proved by no mention being made of the Olive, or 

 of manures, nor even of the burning of stubble, which is 

 perhaps the most ancient mode of ameliorating the soil. 



I have not followed historically the divisions of the Eastern 

 nations. The Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Medes, the 

 Persians, the Macedonians, the Greeks, &c. as they succes- 

 sively rose into separate powers, were only off- sets of the 

 same, or contiguous people, and practised the same Arts, 

 and were of manners and habits modified perhaps by a slight 

 difference of climate, but otherwise without change. Espe- 

 cially were there no alterations in the practices of the Arts 

 of cultivating the soil, for these of primary importance to 

 mankind were not subject to fickleness of taste, and were 

 pursued in an almost unaltered climate and soil. The scat- 

 tered fragments of information that have escaped to us con- 

 cerning such practices have been therefore arrranged in one 

 chronological series. From them we cannot but conclude 

 that even in those early ages, some of the most recondite 

 practices of the Gardener were known and followed. We 

 need not be surprised that their Gardens were not more 

 extensive, inasmuch that the number of plants known to 



