66 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



years ago the culture maratchere was quite primitive. 

 But now the Paris gardener not only defies the soil he 

 would grow the same crops on an asphalt pavement 

 he defies climate. His walls, which are built to reflect 

 light and to protect the wall-trees from the northern 

 winds, his wall-tree shades and glass protectors, his 

 frames and pepinieres have made a real garden, a rich 

 Southern garden, out of the suburbs of Paris. He has 

 given to Paris the "two degrees less of latitude" after 

 which a French scientific writer was longing ; he supplies 

 his city with mountains of grapes and fruit at any 

 season ; and in the early spring he inundates and per- 

 fumes it with flowers. But he does not only grow 

 articles of luxury. The culture of plain vegetables on 

 a large scale is spreading every year; and the results 

 are so good that there are now practical maraichers 

 who venture to maintain that if all the food, animal and 

 vegetable, necessary for 3,500,000 inhabitants of the 

 departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise had to be 

 grown on their own territory (3250 square miles), it 

 could be grown without resorting to any other methods 

 of culture than those already in use methods already 

 tested on a large scale and proved to be successful. 



And yet the Paris gardener is not our ideal of an 

 agriculturist. In the painful work of civilisation he 

 has shown us the way to follow ; but the ideal of modern 

 civilisation is elsewher^. He toils, with but a short 

 interruption, from three in the morning till late in the 

 night. He knows no leisure ; he has no time to live 

 the life of a human being ; the commonwealth does not 

 exist for him; his world is his garden, more than his 

 family. He cannot be our ideal; neither he nor his 

 system of agriculture. Our ambition is, that he should 

 produce even more than he does with less labour, and 

 should enjoy all the joys of human life. And this is 

 fully possible. 



