No. 129.] 457 



of Coblentz alone, they have made every year six thousand new 

 parcels. There are parcels of meadows and of vineyards which 

 pay a rent of only one pfenning (a liard) equal to the French 

 farthing; so that the land is almost divided into dust. 



This is, however, as it is in France, a melancholy state of things. 

 Under such a system, what must become of stock and grain-rais- 

 ing ? And the improvement of meadows becomes almost impos- 

 sible. In the most fertile but most parcelled lands on the Mo- 

 selle, the peasant is poorest — his poverty excels that of the peasant 

 of the lands of Luneburg. On the lelt bank of the Rhine, espe- 

 cially in the circles of Ooblentz and Treves, the lands are the 

 most dividedj generally the farms are about from eight to twenty 

 acres each, worth, on an average, two hundred dollars an acre, 

 and. frequently two or three times that. In the four hundred and 

 fifty-nine square miles of Rhenine' Prussia, there are but four 

 hundred and twenty-one proprietors, whose taxes amount to sixty 

 dollars each. This gives to the owners the privilege of beino- 

 chosen deputies of the province. After leaving the fertile plains 

 of Treves, Cologne and Coblentz, and entering the mountains of 

 the Eifel and the Hundstruch,you find in the midst of this beau- 

 tiful country a striking example of the want of intelligence in 

 agriculture. In the mountains of the Eifel, the peasant, a rou- 

 Hniere par excellence, is behind modern improvements many cen- 

 turies, and the fine example of his neighbors in the adjacent 

 vallies does not affect him at all. He goes on with the habits 

 transmitted to him by his ancestors, and if any one of these peas- 

 ants venture to take a little step towards amelioration, he does it 

 with desperate slowness. 



There are in Germany two hundred and thirty-three agricultu- 

 ral, horticultural, pomological, vine, silk, bee, horses, cattle, kc, 

 societies, the members of which amount to 466,000, more or less 

 instructed, of whom a great number are very learned men, some 

 able, practical men, and all of them Avith the most ardent desire 

 to give progress to agriculture. 



"We live (said the President, M. de EUrichshaussen) in an 

 epoch of reforms of a serious nature and of bold emancipations. 



