10 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



year fallow ; and there has been a great increase of stock and 

 manure, and a diminution of naked fallow from one-third to 

 one-seventh ; that France has gone on in the old way, the area 

 of fallow land being about the same as it was a century ago. 

 The writer has taken the live stock of Germany — the sheep, 

 horses, asses and swine — and reduced them to the value of 

 horned cattle, and he finds by the agricultural census of 1865, 

 in Germany, 100 units of such value for 138 inhabitants, while 

 France had only 100 units to 185 inhabitants. Going back forty 

 years, he finds that the position of the two countries was exactly 

 the reverse of what it is at the present time. Germany, as well 

 as France, manufactures nearly all her own sugar from beets. 

 In 1837 the product of Germany was three millions of pounds, 

 while in 1865 it had reached the enormous amount of three 

 hundred and seventy-five millions of pounds. Under the 

 improved system of agriculture, land has advanced, upon the 

 average, 150 per cent. Most striking is the difference in popu- 

 lation. From 1846 to 1860 — fourteen years — North Germany 

 added, in round numbers, one million to its agricultural popu- 

 lation ; while France, during the same period, lost seven hun- 

 dred thousand of its farming population. The writer inquires 

 into the causes of this marked divergence between the two 

 countries in agriculture — the constant growth of Germany and 

 the constant decrease of France — and comes to the conclusion 

 that it arises from the fact that Germany has adopted a system- 

 atic course of instruction, embracing the physical sciences and 

 political economy as well as mere farming. Tbis, with the 

 economical habits of the Germans, is the cause of the unex- 

 ampled prosperity of that country. Germany, as you know, 

 has instituted schools for instruction in farming — agricultural 

 schools — in which not only general agriculture, but all the 

 specialties of agriculture, the cultivation of the vineyard, and 

 all other branches, are taught by professors devoted to that par- 

 ticular duty ; and the result has been an extraordinary increase 

 in the production and in the wealth of that country ; and such, 

 I cannot doubt, will be the result here. 



But perhaps the most brilliant discoveries of the day are those 

 of Prof. Ville, Professor of Vegetable Physiology at the Museum 

 of Natural History at Paris, who for more than ten years has 

 devoted his time to the discovery, if it were possible, of those 



