148 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



In Brittany, in the neighbourhood of Quimperle', a 

 great number of small workshops for the fabrication of 

 the felt hats which are worn by the peasants is scattered 

 in the villages ; and rapidly improving agriculture goes 

 hand in hand with that trade. Well-being is a dis- 

 tinctive feature of these villages.* At Hennebout (on 

 the southern coast of Brittany) 1400 workers are em- 

 ployed in an immense factory in the fabrication of tins 

 for preserves, and every year twenty-two to twenty- 

 three tons of iron are transformed into steel, and next 

 into tins, which are sent to Paris, Bordeaux, Nantes, and 

 so on. But the factory has created " quite a world of 

 tiny workshops " in this purely agricultural region : 

 small tin- ware workshops, tanneries, potteries, and so 

 on, while the slags are transformed in small workshops 

 into manure. Agriculture and industry go here hand 

 in hand, the importance of not severing the union being 

 perhaps best seen at Loude'ac, a small town in the midst 

 of Brittany (department of C6tes-du-Nord). Formerly 

 the villages in this neighbourhood were industrial, all 

 hamlets being peopled with weavers who fabricated the 

 well-known Brittany linen. Now, this industry having 

 very much gone down, the weavers have simply returned 

 to the soil. Out of an industrial town, Louddac has 

 become an agricultural market town ; t and, what is 

 most interesting, these populations conquer new lands 

 for agriculture and turn the formerly quite unproductive 

 landes into rich corn fields ; t while on the northern coast 

 of Brittany, around Dol, on land which began to be 

 conquered from the sea in the twelfth century, market- 

 gardening is now carried on to a very great extent for 

 export to England. Altogether, it is striking to observe, 

 on perusing M. Ardouin Dumazet's little volumes, how 

 domestic industries go hand in hand with all sorts of small 

 industries in agriculture gardening, poultry-farming, 



* Ardouin Dumazet, vol. v., p. 215. 

 f Ibid., vol. v., pp. 259-266 



