62 



FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



lb. of beet, they occur in numbers in the French com- 

 petitions, and the success depends entirely upon good 

 culture and appropriate manuring. It thus appears that 

 while under ordinary high farming we need from 

 2,000,000 acres to keep 1,000,000 horned cattle, double 

 that amount could be kept on one-half of that area ; and 

 if the density of population required it, the amount of 

 cattle could be doubled again, and the area required 

 to keep it might still be one-half, or even one-third of 

 what it is now.* 



The above examples are striking enough, and yet 

 those afforded by the market-gardening culture are still 

 more striking. I mean the culture carried on in the 

 neighbourhood of big cities, and more especially the 

 culture maraichlre round Paris. In that culture each 

 plant is treated according to its age. The seeds ger- 

 minate and the seedlings develop their first four leaflets 

 in especially favourable conditions of soil and tempera- 

 ture ; then the best seedlings are picked out and trans- 

 planted into a bed of fine loam, under a frame or in the 

 open air, where they freely develop their rootlets and, 

 gathered on a limited space, receive more than usual 

 care ; and only after that preliminary training are they 

 bedded in the open ground, where they grow till ripe. 



* Assuming that 9000 lb. of dry hay are necessary for keeping one 

 head of horned cattle every year, the following figures (taken from 

 Toubeau's Repartition metrique des impots) will show what we obtain 

 now under usual and under intensive culture: 



