68 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



causes.* As to the necessity of creating for the earlier 

 life of the plant a warm soil and atmosphere, forty years 

 ago Le'once de Lavergne foretold that the next step in 

 culture would be to warm the soil. Heating pipes give 

 the same results as the fermenting manures, but at a 

 much smaller expense of human labour. And already 

 the system works on a large scale, as will be seen from 

 the next chapter. Through it the productive powers 

 of a given area of land are increased more than a hun- 

 dred times. 



Of course now, when the capitalist system makes 

 us pay for everything four or five times its labour 

 value, we often spend about i for each square yard 

 of a heated conservatory. But how many middlemen 

 are making fortunes on the wooden sashes imported 

 from Drontheim? If we only could reckon our ex- 

 penses in labour, we should discover to our amazement 

 that, thanks to the use of machinery, the square yard 

 of a conservatory does not cost more than half a day 

 of human labour; and we will see presently that the 

 Jersey and Guernsey average for cultivating one acre 

 under glass is only three men working ten hours a day. 

 Therefore the conservatory, which formerly was a luxury, 

 is rapidly entering into the domain of high culture. And 

 we may foresee the day when the glass conservatory 

 will be considered as a necessary appendix to the field, 

 both for the growth of those fruits and vegetables which 

 cannot succeed in the open air, and for the preliminary 



* Already it is partly removed in France and Belgium, owing to the 

 public laboratories where analyses of seeds and manure are made 

 free. The falsifications discovered by these laboratories exceed all that 

 could have been imagined. Manures, containing only one-fifth part of 

 the nutritious elements they were supposed to contain, were found to be 

 quite common ; while manures containing injurious matters, and no 

 nutritious parts whatever, were not unfrequently supplied by firms of 

 " respectable " repute. With seeds, things stand even worse. Samples 

 of grass seeds which contained 20 per cent, of injurious grasses, or 20 per 

 cent, of grains of sand, so coloured as to deceive the buyer, or even 

 10 per cent, of a deadly poisonous grass, passed through the Ghent 

 laboratory. 



