92 AGRICULTURE O.N THE RHIXE. 



points of view from which the stranger must judge of 

 them. The position of nearly every old village was usually 

 determined by flo\ving water, and the care bestowed 

 upon the stream that runs apparently disregarded in its 

 irreonlar meanderings through the mass of houses, whose 

 position has, by its course, been no less irregularly 

 fixed, is greater than a superficial glance would lead one 

 to su])pose. Endless are the difficulties which the pre- 

 servation of this running water in its full purity opposes 

 to changes, and often to improvements. Prosaic as it may 

 seem, we are inclined to ascribe the early use of liquid 

 manure amongst the German peasanti-jt to the obligation 

 enforced upon all neighbours to the stream to prevent the 

 issue of drains into it. This restriction does not apply 

 to rivers, which in Germany, as elsewhere, are made the 

 means of impoverishing the people by ministering to their 

 wasteful convenience. But the brook, which is the centre 

 round which village arrangements revolve in their daily 

 homely course, is consecrated to cleanliness, being, we 

 are sorry to say, almost the only sacrifice on the altar of 

 that deity that is conspicuous. The details of the best 

 managed farm -yard suppose some portions of ground 

 devoted to what in its place is prized as highly valuable, 

 but out of its place is mere filth. A German village is 

 an assemblage of diminutive farm-yards, where the dung- 

 heaps, with all their accompanying odours and unsavoury 

 streams, subdivided like the land they are destined to 

 fertilise, are reproduced at every house ; and, as the neat 

 and ingenious contrivances to keep these matters out of 

 sight, which are practicable on a large scale, are out of 

 the question when they require to be repeated in innu- 

 merable varieties around every man's tenement, they are 



