216 VEGETABLE SUBSTANCES. 



in these memorials of the monastic ages. The monks, 

 with all their faults, were generally men of peace and 

 study; and these monuments show that they were 

 improving the world, while the warriors were spend- 

 ing their lives to spoil it. In many parts of Italy 

 and France, which had lain in desolation and ruin 

 from the time of the Goths, the monks restored the 

 whole surface to fertility; and in Scotland and Ire- 

 land, there probably would not have been a fruit-tree 

 till the sixteenth century, if it had not been for their 

 peaceful labours. It is generally supposed that the 

 monastic orchards were in their greatest perfection 

 from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. 



The crusades, impolitic and unjust as they were 

 in principle, contributed something to the improve- 

 ment of European society; and, by renewing a 

 communication with the countries of the East, they 

 again assisted the diffusion of those vegetable 

 treasures which had been neglected after the de- 

 struction of the Roman empire. The monastic 

 gardens owed many of their choicest fruits to the 

 care of those provident ecclesiastics who had accom- 

 panied the expeditions to the Holy Land. 



This improvement of the country by the monks 

 was a natural effect of their superiority in knowledge 

 and wealth to the people by whom they were sur- 

 rounded. In the same manner, the ecclesiastics who 

 have settled in South America, from the time of the 

 discovery of the New World, have caused almost all 

 the fruits, of temperate Europe to flourish amidst the 

 productions of the torrid zone. " In studying the 

 history of the conquest," says Humboldt, " we admire 

 the extraordinary rapidity with which the Spaniards 

 of the sixteenth century spread the cultivation of the 

 European vegetables along the ridge of the Cordil- 

 leras, from one extremity of the continent to the 

 other;" and he attributes this remarkable effect of 



