A FINANCIAL MISFORTUNE. 73 



very small quantities. The prices of flour and fruit are 

 often shameful ; and so are the prices of other products 

 of the vegetable kingdom. But these high prices for 

 very ordinary goods do not usually profit the producer, 

 but only help the greedy or covetous middlemen. Vi- 

 enna spends yearly as much as 300,000 florins for the 

 cleaning of the sewers. The fecal matters of the me- 

 tropolis are wasted in the most grievous manner for 

 they are conducted into the channel of the Danube. 

 It is a financial misfortune, and certainly no honor, 

 that Vienna was not long ago, like the Italian and 

 French cities, surrounded on all sides by vegetable gar- 

 dens, fruit gardens and pleasure gardens. The environs 

 of Vienna ought to be so transformed in a wide circuit, 

 in an agricultural point of view, that a whole zone could 

 be cultivated with vegetables, another zone be covered 

 with leguminous plants, and still other zones be divided 

 between the growth and culture of large fruits and grape 

 vines and of strawberries grown in the open air, which 

 bring so much revenue to many a Thuringian locality. 

 Of flowers and fancy plants, of ornamental shrubs, etc., 

 the same may be said. These zones should be arranged 

 and established by the Royal Imperial Society of Agri- 

 culture. All this is practicable as soon as water is 

 brought into the city ; but who can believe that this 

 complete revolution can take place in the domain of 

 agriculture, in the environs of Vienna, if the rising gen- 

 eration does not receive the requisite incitements at the 

 school age, and in good school gardens ? 



North of Vienna, on the other side of the Danube, 

 stretches the " Marchfeld," an ugly strip of land of a 

 decided steppe character, passing here and there 

 through swamps. Its nearness to Vienna, which needs 



