236 HENRY HILL GOODELL 



Flanders or Belgium with religious, who, by their unwearied 

 industry, reclaimed those arid wastes and turned those 

 burning sands into one vast garden? Need we speak of the 

 country separating Belgium from Holland, and how it was 

 cleared by the monks who taught its wild inhabitants agri- 

 culture as well as Christianity? In a manuscript bearing 

 date of 1420 a monk proposed the artificial propagation of 

 trout. It was the monks of Fulda who started the cele- 

 brated vineyards of Johannisberg, the Cistercian monks 

 that of Clos Vougeot. The Benedictines brought vines from 

 Beaune to plant on the banks of the Allier. The monks of 

 Mozat set out walnut trees, still so abundant in Lower Au- 

 vergne. They first cared for the preservation of forests as 

 affecting climate and fertility. They stored up the waters 

 of springs and distributed them in drought; and it was the 

 monks of the abbeys of St. Laurent and St. Martin who 

 first brought together and conducted to Paris the waters of 

 springs wasting themselves on the meadows of St. Gervais 

 and Belleville; and in Lombardy it was the followers of St. 

 Bernard who taught the peasants the art of irrigation, and 

 made that country the most fertile and the richest in Europe. 

 We approach now another and higher phase of monastic 

 life. In its earlier days we find the monks engaging in the 

 practice of agriculture from the necessities arising out of 

 the conditions in which they were placed. They had 

 ploughed, they had sowed, they had reaped, in order to 

 preserve their lives. But now agriculture becomes a part 

 of their religion, and the great St. Benedict enjoins upon 

 his disciples three objects for filling up their time : Agricul- 

 ture, literary pursuits, and copying manuscripts. 1 He 

 1 Weishardt, History of Monasticism. 



