ANCIENT AGRICULTURAL LITERATURE. 197 



with the bodies of beasts. From such history, and from 

 the statements and silence of Caesar and Livy, we appeal 

 to numerous, but incidental and entirely unsuspicious cir- 

 cumstances, which meet us in the agricultural writers. They 

 appear to us to warrant the inference, that a settled con- 

 dition of society, and considerable progress in the useful 

 arts, existed in Gaul and Britain before those countries 

 were known to the Komans. Indeed, we doubt whether 

 civilization was not rather repressed than advanced by their 

 classic invaders. Nor is this opinion inconsistent with the 

 fact that they were conquered. That they fell before ar- 

 mies to whose equipment and training the accumulated 

 science of centuries had been applied, is analogous to the 

 case of the village hero, who, though he has by activity 

 and pluck thrashed all his rural competitors, finds himself 

 powerless in the hands of a professional prize-fighter. 



The Romans found Gaul a country of large farms (lati- 

 fundia), in which various agricultural appliances quite 

 unknown to themselves were habitually practised. The 

 Romans were ignorant of the general use of lime in agri- 

 culture they learned it in Gaul. They found chalk bene- 

 ficially applied to corn-growing, both in Gaul and in Britain. 

 In both countrief'various marls were applied to various de- 

 scriptions of soil with scientific discrimination. In Britain, 

 a particular description of marl, which was used as a top- 

 dressing to land, was got by pits 10 yards deep. This cir- 

 cumstance is very significant. Every one conversant with 

 underground work will be aware that it implies some power 

 of freeing the works from water, and some scientific mode 

 of ventilating them. The heavy expense of such an im- 

 provement is justified by the statement that the benefit 

 endured for eighty years, and was only repeated after the 

 expiration of that period. That circumstance, again, im- 

 plies a settled state of society and great security of pro- 

 perty. A Roman writer is not likely to have invented these 

 matters, and we attach much more weight to inferences 

 justly deducible from them, than we do to Csesar's vague 



