GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 



Among the ancients, the literature of Agriculture occupied a far liiglier place than that 

 to which it has attained in modern times ; although, within tliese twenty years, Great 

 Britain has made immense advances in the practical manipulations of the science. 

 Mago, the Carthaginian, who is supposed to have flourished in the time of Darius, and 

 to have been the founder of the great Punic family, from whicli Hannibal sprung, is 

 declared to have been the father of agricultural literature. After him come Hesiod, 

 Theophrastus, Xenophon, Cato, Varro, Virgil, Columella, Pliny, and Palladius — all of 

 whom say something, more or less, of Agriculture. Among the writers on this science, 

 if there were no great kings, there were certainly great generals. Columella tells us, 

 that Mago, the Carthaginian, and Hamilcar, did not consider it beneath their dignity, 

 when not engaged in the operations of war, to contribute, towards the general stock 

 of human knowledge, treatises on farming. The books which Mago wrote on the 

 subject amounted to twenty-eight, which were so highly esteemed, that, on the final 

 destruction of Carthage, when the whole of her literature was handed over by the 

 Eomans to their African allies, these were specially excepted, carried to Rome, and 

 ordered, by the senate, to be translated at the expense of the public. Such an honour 

 proves the estimation in which his books were held ; whilst it shows how deeply 

 interested the Eomans were in the subject of Agriculture. On neither Greek nor 

 Carthaginian Agriculture, however, have we the means of gathering very much 

 information. In reference to Greece, we know that Attica was arid, and Laconia full 

 of swamps ; that Megara was deformed with rocks ; and that Corinth depended on 

 foreign importations for her food-supply. But this is not telling us much ; although 

 she could not have been destitute of an agricultural literature, since Pliny laments the 

 loss, in his day, of forty treatises upon the subject. The incidental notices of Herodotus 

 and Thucydides do not yield us much information ; and although we have the work of 

 Theophrastus come down to us, it is not very satisfactory as a book on husbandry. The 

 (Economics of Xenophon are said to have been composed on a farm, which he had 

 bought and occupied near Smyrna, and which is frequently appended to the 

 Memorabilia. Farming, gardening, household management, and instructions relative 

 to the government of wives, form the staple of its pages ; and it contains the passage 

 in which Cyrus the younger presents himself to Lysander in the character of " The 

 Persian Farmer." 



Passing from Greece to Rome, Cato the censor is the first distinguished personage 

 that rises before us as an agricultural writer. He inherited from liis father a Sabine 

 farm, which he cultivated himself, but rather parsimoniously than otherwise. He was 

 by no means an advocate for " high farming ;" but preferred limiting his outlay to 

 making active efforts at improvement. He died 150 years before the birth of Christ; 

 and left room for Varro, one of Pompey's generals and admirals, to take his place in 

 the list of writers on rural affairs. His work, entitled De Re Rustica, has descended 



