260 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Our course lay through Leghorn to Pisa and Florence. 

 The tourist always stops at Pisa to see the leaning tower, 

 and the far-famed cathedral. The tower is the campanile, 

 built for the bells of the cathedral long ago, when Pisa, but 

 eight miles from the mouth of the Arno, was powerful, the 

 head of a great republic, independent on the sea and on the . 

 land. It is only since the beginning of the fifteenth century that 

 it has formed a part of Tuscany. The jealousies and the strug- 

 gles to which they gave rise, between Pisa and the republic of 

 Genoa and that of Florence, ended at last in a death-blow 

 from which the former never recovered. But the cathedral, 

 the tower, the baptistry, and the Campo Santo still stand, as the 

 gray monuments of its age of glory, extending over a long 

 period, from the tenth to the fourteenth century. In this old 

 cathedral, built in the eleventh century, Galileo, then but 

 eighteen, first discovered the principle of the pendulum, which 

 was suggested by the swinging of a lamp suspended from the 

 ceiling. Here is an old antique statue of the god Mars, found 

 near by, and to make it at all appropriate as an ornament to a 

 Christian church, it was baptized, or christened — a marble 

 statue — as San Piso. 



The Campo Santo is a museum of monuments, or tombs, 

 the corridors filled with headless, or noseless, or armless, or 

 otherwise mutilated figures, while the soil of the graveyard, 

 surrounded by a marble railing, was all brought from Jerusalem 

 in fifty galleys owned by the republic. 



After tearing ourselves away from the crowd of the most 

 abject and troublesome beggars, men, women and children, 

 whose importunities were in the highest degree annoying, we 

 ascended to the top of the tower, and had a fine view of the 

 whole surrounding country. The neighborhood is very produc- 

 tive ; in fact one vast fertile plain. Apples hung in immense 

 quantities. The grape is here trained to trees planted for the 

 purpose, and allowed to climb often to considerable heights, 

 and not kept down as in the vineyards of France. Mulberries 

 are growing everywhere. Here we saw grain threshed by the 

 treading of cattle, as in ancient times. In the yard of almost 

 every farm-house is a large circular floor, which appeared to be 

 paved or laid in a kind of cement, made for the purpose of 

 treading out the grain. The ploughs were of the most primi- 

 tive construction, having one upriglit stick which served for a 



