The System of Htisbandry. 29 



to note about those early historians of this science the veins of 

 religion and superstition which crop up throughout their 

 writings. Whether we take up the volumes of Roman or 

 Englishman, Virgil or Fitzherbert, Pliny or Googe, the result 

 is the same. There is a devotion which associates religion 

 with agriculture, and a superstition which intermingles mys- 

 tery with its precepts. Such associations excite respectively 

 our admiration and our laughter. When Virgil, for example, 

 pays a devout tribute to Bacchus, to Ceres, to Neptune, or to 

 Pan before he sets about his task of teaching ; when Fitz- 

 herbert ends up with an essay on the joys of heaven and the 

 duties of prayer, or when Googe prefaces his book with " a 

 sweete contemplation of God and his woorkes," we bow the 

 head in approval. But when Pliny talks rubbish about ser- 

 pents' teeth, animals with two hearts,^ and the poison of yew- 

 trees neutralised by means of brass nails ; or when the early 

 English agricultural authors write about their mystery as 

 though they understand by the term not simply a craft, but 

 that occult process which it suggests to modern ears, we are 

 more inclined to ridicule. 



Unhappily the Puritan times, when Bible texts became 

 political watchwords, put an end to the former practice, and 

 happily the spread of chemical science effectually killed the 

 latter. 



But let us examine the Georgics, and see what the old 

 Briton farmers could have gleaned from Roman writings in 

 the days when it became fashionable to wear the toga and 

 study continental manners and customs in the subjected 

 country. 



Here in the first book we find the fullest instructions on the 

 subject of wheat-culture. The bare fallow, the rotation of 

 crops,^ the methods for obtaining a fine tilth,^ the pickling of 

 the grain, "^ the drainage of land, the pasturing of sheep on 

 " winter proud braird," ° the cleaning of the young crop from 

 noxious weeds,*^ and the bird-scaring are all advocated with 



1 Plinius, Hist. Nat., lib, xi. * Id. Ibid., 193. 



^ Virgil, Georg., lib. i. 1. 71. * Id. E>id., iii. 



* Id. Ibid., 94. « Id. Ibid., 156.] 



