Variation in the Price and Sup-ply of JVJieat. 
1G7 
the Romans, at the period of their agricultural celebrity, grew 
the artificial grasses which they had introduced from their 
forerunners in civilisation, the conquered empires of the East. 
Lucern was cultivated under irrigation in Media, where it is 
indigenous. It is so cultivated in Spain, and in Italy, where the 
peasant-proprietors of Tuscany and Lucca co-operate for the 
irrigation of their little domains. The Greeks were manufac- 
turers of linen, woollen, and silk fabrics in the days of Homer ; 
and they grew the raw products of their industry on irrigated 
lands, where the crops now too often fail under the visitation of 
scorching winds and drought. 
There is a strip of land of from 80 to 100 miles in breadth, 
extending 1500 miles along the coast between the Mediterranean 
and the great desert of Africa. Part of this dry tract was 
inhabited by the Moors, whose works of irrigation are still 
decaying in Spain. Algeria was once famous for corn ; it is 
at this moment the scene of fearful famine, through a failure of 
the crops from drought. Irrigation made these countries pro- 
ductive, and without it the coast of Africa could not be the seat 
of a modern Carthage, the centre of empire and commerce, which 
could be fairly described, like its predecessor, as being founded 
in a fertile country. Agricultural engineering is, however, more 
costly at the present day than in ancient times, when building a 
pyramid or cutting a canal across a desert amused the leisure of 
some Eastern King and used up the captives of his latest war. 
While on the subject of water, we may state that the Mediter- 
ranean receives 14 per cent, of the running water of Europe ; the 
Caspian Sea, 16 ; the Baltic, 13; the German Ocean, 13; and 
the Black Sea, 27, or nearly one-third. The Danube discharges 
12 per cent, of the water ; the Volga, 14 ; the Dnieper, '06 ; the 
Rhine, "03. These figures may be taken to show with tolerable 
accuracy the proportionate extent of river-basin and of fertile land 
on the banks of the different rivers. The Elbe, the Vistula, and 
the Guadalquivir are smaller even than the Rhine, which does 
not compare with the two great rivers of the Black and Caspian 
Spain, 
Or rather such small patches of it as could have been under 
cultivation, was carefully farmed both as a Roman province and 
by its subsequent conquerors, the Moors, whose works of irriga- 
tion, indispensable in a country where the rainfall is small and 
the soil light, may be still traced. Numberless rivers and streams 
drain the valleys where the more fertile land is situated. But in 
this dry and hot climate the grass-lands, excepting those under 
