Part 22 (2/2)
[Footnote 54: Eggs were the first course, as apples were the last, at a Roman dinner, hence the saying ”ab ovo usque ad mala.”]
[Footnote 55: Cf. Gilbert Murray's version of Euripides' _Troades_, 799:
In Salamis, filled with the foaming Of billows and murmur of bees, Old Telamon stayed from his roaming, Long ago, on a throne of the seas; Looking out on the hills olive laden, Enchanted, where first from the earth.
The gray-gleaming fruit of the Maiden Athena had birth.
The physical reason why the olive flourished in Attica, as Theophrastus points out (C.P.V. II, 2), was because it craves a thin soil, and that of Attica, with its out-croppings of calcareous rock, suits the olive perfectly, while fit for little else agricultural.]
[Footnote 56: In the _Geoponica_ (XIII, 15) there has been preserved a remedy for a similar evil, which, in all fairness, should be credited to Saserna. In any event, it is what the newspapers used to call ”important, if true,” viz: ”If ever you come into a place where fleas abound, cry Och! Och! ([Greek: och, och]) and they will not touch you.”]
[Footnote 57: The editor of an Iowa farm journal, who has been making a study of agricultural Europe, has recently reported an interesting comparison between the results of extensive farming as practised in Iowa and intensive farming as practised in Bavaria. He begins with the thesis that the object of agriculture is to put the energy of the sun's rays into forms which animals and human beings can use, and, reducing the crop production of each country to thermal units, he finds ”that for every man, woman and child connected with farming in Iowa 14,200 therms of sun's energy were imprisoned, while for every man, woman and child connected with farming in Bavaria only 2,600 therms were stored up. In other words, the average Iowa farmer is six times as successful in his efforts to capture the power of the sun's rays as the average Bavarian farmer. On the other hand, the average acre of Iowa land is only about one-seventh as successful as the average acre of Bavarian land in supporting those who live on it. If we look on land as the unit, then the Bavarians get better results than we in Iowa, but if we look on human labor as the unit, then the Iowa farmers are far ahead of those of Bavaria.”
It may be remarked that if the Iowa farmer, who gets his results by the use of machinery, was to adopt also the intensive practice of the Bavarian farmer, he would secure at once the greatest efficiency per acre and per man, and that is the true purpose of agriculture.]
[Footnote 58: It is one of the charms of Varro's treatise that he always insists cheerfully on the pleasure to be derived from the land.
It is the same spirit which Conington has remarked cropping out in many places in Virgil's _Georgics_--the joy of the husbandman in his work, as in the ”iuvat” of
”iuvat Ismara Baccho Conserere, atque olea magnum vestire Taburnum.”
This is the blessed ”surcease of sorrow” of which the crowded life of the modern city knows nothing: but, as the practical Roman indicates, it will not support life of its own mere motion. Cf. Dr. Johnson's picture of Shenstone: ”He began from this time to entangle his walks and to wind his waters: which he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skillful. His house was mean, and he did not improve it: his care was of his grounds.... In time his expences brought clamours about him, that overpowered the lambs' bleat and the linnets' song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fawns and fairies.”]
[Footnote 59: Walter of Henley, in thirteenth century England, drove home a shrewd comment on the country gentleman who farms without keeping accounts and thinks he is engaged in a profitable industry.
”You know surely,” he says, ”that an acre sown with wheat takes three ploughings, except lands which are sown yearly, and that one with another each ploughing is worth six pence, and harrowing a penny, and on the acre it is necessary to sow at least two bushels. Now two bushels at Michaelmas are worth at least twelve pence, and weeding a half penny and reaping five pence, and carrying in August a penny: the straw will pay for the thres.h.i.+ng. At three times your sowing you ought to have six bushels, worth three s.h.i.+llings; and the cost amounts to three s.h.i.+llings and three half pence, and the ground is yours and not reckoned.”
Of Walter of Henley little is known, but it is conjectured that he was the bailiff of the manors near Henley which belonged to the Abbey of Canterbury. His curious and valuable _Dite de Hosebondrie_, which is as original in its way as Cato's treatise, being entirely free from mere literary tradition, is now available to the modern reader in a translation, from the original barbarous English law French, by Elizabeth Lamond, made for the Royal Historical Society in 1890.]
[Footnote 60: This was just before Pharsalia, and the army was that of Pompey which Varro had joined after surrendering to Caesar in Spain.]
[Footnote 61: In this enumeration of trees Varro does not include the chestnut which is now one of the features of the Italian mountain landscape and furnishes support for a considerable part of the Italian population, who subsist on _necci_, those indigestible chestnut flour cakes, just as the Irish peasants do on potatoes. The chestnut was late in getting a foothold in Italy but it was there in Varro's day.
He mentions the nuts as part of the diet of dormice (III, 15).
By the thirteenth century chestnuts had become an established article of human food in Italy. Pietro Crescenzi (1230-1307) describes two varieties, the cultivated and the wild, and quotes the Arabian physician Avicenna to the effect that chestnuts are ”di tarda digestione ma di buono nuttimento.” It is perhaps for this very reason that chestnut bread is acceptable to those engaged in heavy labor.
Fynes Moryson says in his _Itinerary_ (1617) that maslin bread made of a mixture of rye and wheat flour was used by labourers in England because it ”abode longer in the stomach and was not so soon digested with their labour.”
Crescenzi, who was a lawyer and a judge, says in his preface that he had left his native Bologna because of the civil strifes, had taken foreign service in several parts of Italy, and so had opportunity to see the world. He wrote his book on agriculture because, as he says, of all the things he learned on his travels there was nothing ”piu a bondevole, niuna piu dolce, et niuna piu degna de l'huomo libero,” a sentiment which Socrates had expressed sixteen hundred years earlier and which was echoed six hundred years later by another far-sighted Italian, the statesman Cavour.]
[Footnote 62: The white chalk which Scrofa saw used as manure in Transalpine Gaul, when he was serving in the army under Julius Caesar, was undoubtedly marl, the use of which in that region as in Britain was subsequently noted by Pliny (H.N. XVII, 4).
There were no deposits of marl in Italy, and so the Romans knew nothing of its use, from experience, but Pliny's treatment of the subject shows a sound source of information. In England, where several kinds of marl are found in quant.i.ties, its use was probably never discontinued after the Roman times. Walter of Henley discusses its use in the thirteenth century, and Sir Anthony Fitzherbert continues the discussion in the sixteenth century. In connection with the history of the use of marl in agriculture may be cited the tender tribute which Arthur Young recorded on the tombstone of his wife in Bradfield Church. The lady's chief virtue appears to have been, in the memory of her husband, that she was ”the great-grand-daughter of John Allen, esq. of Lyng House in the County of Norfolk, the first person according to the Comte de Boulainvilliers, who there used marl.”
The Romans did not have the fight against sour land which is the heritage of the modern farmer after years of continuous application to his land of phosphoric and sulphuric acid in the form of mineral fertilizers. What sour land the Romans had they corrected with humus making barnyard manure, or the rich compost which Cato and Columella recommend. They had, however, a test for sourness of land which is still practised even where the convenient litmus paper is available.
Virgil (_Georgic_ II, 241) gives the formula: ”Fill a basket with soil, and strain fresh water through it. The taste of water strained through sour soil will twist awry the taster's face.”]
[Footnote 63: This sounds like the boast of the modern proprietor of an old blue gra.s.s sod in Northern Virginia or Kentucky. On the general question of pasture vs. arable land, cf. Hartlib's _Legacie_: ”It is a misfortune that pasture lands are not more improved. England abounds in pasturage more than any other country, and is, therefore, richer.
In France, acre for acre, the land is not comparable to ours: and, therefore, Fortescue, chancellor to Henry VI, observes that we get more in England by standing still (alluding to our meadows) than the French do by working (that is, cultivating their vineyards and corn lands).”
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