The System of Husbandry. 31 



writer's exaggerated description of the frosts and rigours ex- 

 perienced by nations in liigher latitudes, nor need we examine 

 his fourth book, which is mainly occupied by the culture of 

 bees. 



The prose works of his countryman Pliny must, however, 

 detain us for a space. Here we find a higher flight attempted, 

 which carries us into the dangerous area of scientific farming, 

 wherein those favoured with the chemical knowledge of a later 

 era cannot fail to detect inaccuracy and exaggeration. 



Passing over his learned essays on the varieties and habits 

 of trees, we shall confine ourselves to Book xvii., which is 

 devoted to subjects of especial interest to the matters in hand. 

 The author commences with a few facts about climates and 

 soils whose vagaries he does not profess to explain, and which 

 have puzzled the brain of many a modern expert. The vicinity 

 of Larissa in Thessaly, he states, was a district suitable to olive 

 culture ; but a lake was drained, and the olives ceased to bear. 

 Near the town of ^nos a channel was cut for the river Hebrus, 

 and for the first time within the memory of man the vines were 

 frost-bitten. About Philippi the country was drained, and the 

 climate began to alter. Thrace, he says, is fruitful in corn be- 

 cause it is cold ; Africa and Egypt are equally fruitful because 

 they are hot. Chalcia is an island so fertile that a fresh crop 

 can be sown after barley harvest and reaped as early as the 

 crop on the wheat land. In Venafrium the gravel soil is best 

 for olive culture ; but in Bsetica, a rich soil ; Pacumian vines are 

 ripened upon the rock ; and Csecuban vines upon lands irrigated 

 from the Pontine Marshes. Without in any way committing 

 ourselves to an opinion on the causes of these incongruities 

 mentioned by Pliny, we may at least take the effects stated bj^ 

 him as correct, and point out that the goiit de terrain was not 

 only known to this clever writer, but was as explicable (neither 

 more nor less) as it is to the wine merchants of the present day. 



The defects of empirical knowledge when wholly unsupported 

 by science strike us most forcibly in his chapter on Manures.^ 

 We wonder why M. Varro gave preference to thrushes' manure, 



^ Plinius, Nat. Hist., lib. xvii. cL. (1. 



