14 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



tyon, fitter to be used outside as a waterproofe than inside." 

 They taught the necessity of letting the land be fallow for a 

 time after several years of continuous cropping ; they prac- 

 tised rotation of crops, using clover as the last in the series ; 

 they improved the different varieties of fruits and learned 

 the art of grafting, budding and layering ; they taught by 

 precept and example the value of drainage and irrigation. 

 In short, in everything making for progressive agriculture 

 we find them blazing the way, and when the monasteries 

 were suppressed by Henry VIII. a death-blow was struck 

 for a time at scientific agriculture and horticulture. 



And what they did for England was paralleled by their 

 work upon the continent. Need we point to any other in- 

 stance than that of Vitrucius peopling the sand banks of 

 Flanders or Belgium with religious who, by their unwearied 

 industry, reclaimed those arid wastes and turned those burn- 

 ing 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 plowed, 



