[4] 



of the soil s productiveness, that the coincidence cannot escape the eye 

 of any student of history. It was so in Greece and Rome; and 

 neither Greece nor Italy have recovered from the depopulation result 

 ing from the emigration of the most vigorous portion of their once 

 teeming population, to regions possessing soils unexhausted, and 

 offering a larger reward for their toil. What were once the most fertile 

 portions of ancient Latium, are now wastes of grass and thistles, sup 

 porting but a sparse pastoral population ; and the dreaded Pontine 

 swamps were, at that time, the site of numerous thriving villages. The 

 Georgics of Virgil, and the treatises of Columella, show that the same 

 difficulties we are now beginning to experience, were seriously felt in 

 their times ; and the desolation of the once fertile Roman Campagua 

 has its parallel in the gullied commons waving with broom-sedge, that 

 surround most of our older country-towns. 



Spain is another case in point ; and as we are much in the habit of 

 sneering at the &quot; decline and fall&quot; which that once potent empire has 

 experienced, let us be sure to profit by the teachings of its history. 

 Hispania was esteemed the most fertile province of the Roman empire ; 

 and in the reign of Abd Errahman III. (A. D. 961), Mohametan 

 Spain alone counted some thirty millions of inhabitants. 



Six centuries later, under the reign of Philip the Second, the 

 Spanish writer Herrera says, in his treatise on agriculture : 



&quot;What may be the cause that now-a-days the deficiency of food 

 makes itself felt in the whole land, and that now, in times of peace, a 

 pound of meat costs as much as, not long ago, a whole mutton in the 

 midst of war? Over-population cannot be the cause, for where a thou 

 sand Moors once found employment, there is now scarcely room for five 

 hundred Christians. Neither can it be the importation of gold from India. 

 Is it perhaps the soil which lies dormant f But the soil does not need any 

 other rest than the winter s sleep; and there was no lack of winter 

 rains to refresh it, and to provide it with force for the sprouting ot 

 seeds. What, then, is the cause that the soil will not nourish us any 

 more ?&quot; And, like some of our modern believers in quack nostrums 

 and panaceas, he answers: &quot;The mule is the cause. In the 13th cen 

 tury it gained ground, since which time dates the desolation of Spain. 

 It has not the strength to plow deep enough.&quot; 



Doubtless, with deeper tillage, productiveness might have been 

 longer maintained ; even as with us, subsoiliug is the first step toward?&quot; 

 the reclamation of worn soils. But the real fault lay in the idea, that 

 &quot;the winter s sleep&quot; was sufficient to restore the soil s loss from crop- 



