24 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



pasturage. The love of solitude, the desire of placing by 

 every means possible a check to human passion, inspired 

 them to seek out sites the most unhealthy and to render 

 them by cultivation not only sanitary but even profitable. 

 Modern writers recognize that Italy, devastated by the re- 

 peated incursions of Barbarians, owed its restoration, its 

 tranquillity and the preservation of the last remains of art 

 to the monasteries. Wherever we see them rise we see 

 agriculture reappear, — the people relieved from their bur- 

 dens, and kindly relations established between the master 

 and the slave. 



In the twelfth century impenetrable forests still covered 

 the valley of the Jura. A monastery of the order of Pre- 

 montre cut down the first trees in their forests and attracted 

 there the first colonists. A monastery of the order of 

 Citeaux had but a short time previously restricted within its 

 banks the river Saone, which covered with its overflow the 

 foot of Rodmont. It cleared the soil of the virgin forest 

 where now is situated the little city of Rougemont with its 

 two thousand inhabitants. At great expense and by almost 

 superhuman effort dykes were opposed to the waves of the 

 ocean, and they snatched from the element a soil which the 

 work of man chanoed afterward into fertile fields. Marshes 

 became arable land and the home of man. The monks 

 loved to acquire these marshes in order to render them 

 amenable to cultivation, and frequently even their monas- 

 teries rose out of the bosom of the waters. When it was 

 impossible to drain them or when economy demanded it, 

 they brought straw and laid it down in bundles and upon 

 these bundles earth was placed. They dug out ponds into 

 which they collected the superfluous waters by tiles used to 

 drain the land. In this way the monastic orders extended 

 the cultivation of the soil from the south of Europe even 

 to the most distant north. They facilitated communication 

 between different points and were the organizers of different 

 kinds of industry. Sweden owes to them the perfection of 

 its race of horses and the beginnings of commerce in wheat. 

 On the island of Tuteron, where was formerly located a 

 monastery of the order of Citeaux, plants still grow spon- 



