Report on the Agriculture of Belgium. 
69 
of their seed, frequently sowing; a mixture of black and white 
oats, for instance, or planting red and white potatoes indis- 
criminately. Occasionally a few roots are taken instead of oats, 
but they are badly cultivated. They are left too close together, 
are allowed to be nearly choked with weeds, and the land 
eviilently does not receive a proper preparation for them in the 
first place. But a large proportion of the Ardennes farmers are 
proprietors, and farm better. In the midst of this cold and 
desolate country, consisting mostly of forest or waste, inter- 
spersed with badly cultivated arable land and poor fallow-pasture, 
you find labourers earning nearly twice the wages that can be 
got ill Flanders, and living, by comparison, in a state of luxury. 
'J'he farms are even larger than in the Condroz, and the popula- 
tion is not too numerous for the requirements of the country. 
The " bruyere " can be bought at about 5/. per acre ; it is 
generally disforested by the proprietors, and will afterwards let 
at from 12.9. to 15*. per acre. 
The process of disforestation is very simple. The trees, 
which are mostly stunted oaks and beeches, yield little return 
except as firewood ; they are therefore cut down, and the roots 
either dug out, or ploughed out with a heavy plough. The land 
is then ploughed to a depth of about 4 inches and sown with rye. 
About this stage of the proceedings a peculiar practice is adopted. 
The roots, underwood, and some soil, are burnt, and then spread 
over the land, as we use burnt clay. The soil is then traversed 
by lines of parallel trenches, from C to 8 inches wide, 4 inches 
deep, and about 2 feet apart, the earth out of them being thrown 
over the burnt soil on the intervening spaces. This is a repre- 
sentative of the sand-land system pursued under spade culture in 
Flanders and the Campine ; but as the trenches are not deeper than 
4 inches in this district, it seems as if their only possible use is to 
carry olF surface-water. All these operations, including ploughing 
out the roots, ploughing the land, burning, trenching, sowing, 
r.nd other operations until the rye is harvested, are done in some 
tlistricts by gangs of men who take the crop of rye as their pay- 
ment. Thus the proprietor is at no cost for the labour of bring- 
ing his land into cultivation, and as either pine-seeds or grass- 
seeds are sown with the rye, he has in addition a crop coming on 
without any expense to him. 
VVe went over one estate, near Couvin, in process of dis- 
forestation, which was managed for a German banker by a very 
energetic Dutch farmer, M. Schellinx. He had found that the 
poverty of the land, the severity of the climate, and the high 
price of labour, rendered arable cultivation barely profitable, or 
at any rate a speculative business. The estate consisted of 
between 9000 and 10,000 acres, of which about 1750 had been 
