not having it in their power to slay off all the living population, and call up at will some millions of Fourierists and Owenites. Our northern notions of advancement are far less suited for this latitude than even the now antiquated and absurd ideas of Fontenelle, who deemed ox labour so indispensable to good farming, that he roundly condemned every description of agricultural machine which tended to diminish it. We can smile at this in England, but in the south of Europe, where the plough of the Georgics is still dragged by ox and goad in the aboriginal form, all rapid improvement is impossible, and all advancement slow; and the rudiments of political science teach us to make the most of existing materials. If the race of the ox became extinct here, there would probably be no tillage at all, for the horses are generally too weak for the work, and the peasants too lazy to dig.

Had the Provincial Deputations established model farms, and conducted a series of experiments upon scientific principles, in accordance with climate, chemistry, and the geological conditions of the soil, the results might have then been imparted to the old Labradores, and to their new-made agriculturists with beneficial effect. But general principles were peremptorily laid down without the sanction of experience or recognised authority, and the consequence was general failure. The Ayuntamientos all through Spain were required by a general order to plant chesnuts, pines, and mulberries, without consideration of the properties of various soils, or of peculiar fitness or unfitness. The bulk of the trees thus

planted failed. Though the chesnuts were put in at Todos-Santos,* they were planted in sand, where there were no nutritious juices; and accordingly perished. The mulberries too were planted in dry soils, from which no sap could be extracted, while the heavy soils were often pertinaciously chosen for the hardy olives and pines. They would have forced plantations as you do cucumbers, but the trees would not be forced. The constitutional Alcaldes stared, but the village Domines,† with a shake of the head, quoted Virgil, to confound them;" Before ye open the virgin soil be assured of the influence of air and sky."

From the earliest ages of the world it appears to have been customary to leave the ground around fruit-trees untouched by husbandry, in the natural belief that, drawing their nutriment from the earth around them, to divide their empire over the soil must be to weaken their dominion and impair their vigour. The Provincial Deputations and Municipalities reformed all this, remodelled the essence of things, and put Nature on her better behaviour. They argued that it was by no means requisite to make a wilderness round a few olive, almond, or chesnuttrees-and to some extent they were right; the learned Doctor Moncada, whose doctorate decides the question, pronouncing this practice of non-cultivation, where fruit-trees are planted, to be a remnant of Gothic barbarism. But they carried their principles into prodigiously vigorous execution, running the plough right up into the stems of the invaded

* All Saints.

+ The name given by schoolboys to classical masters.

fruit-trees, and tearing up the rich soil from about their roots. The reward of this rapid progress was, that the plum-like olive of Andalucía became reduced to the dimensions of the olive of Galicia, being now no bigger than a gooseberry; the walnut was compressed to the girth of a filbert, and the almond to the size of a sickly pea The immemorial practice of trenching around the orange-tree, and allotting to it its own circle of manured and watered soil, was treated with high contempt by these vigorous reformers; and to reward their pioneering industry, the large, smooth-skinned, beautifully-coloured and succulent Seville orange, was pinched and contracted to the span of a stunted Tangerina, with none of the delicious flavour of that exquisite miniature orange, but with a rough and blotched coat, and with abundant pith instead of sap. These splendid improvements awoke even Spaniards from their listlessness. If the cherished fruit became so small in a year or two, it seemed probable enough that it would soon be entirely invisible, and that they would have no bad harvests-in fact, no harvests at all. The preponderance of opinion was, however, in favour of average crops as before; and their unanimous sentiment was, that though "la teoria" was a particularly fine thing, "la experiencia" had been invented by the devil, to give it the lie in practice.

The authorities being thus thrown off their hightrotting horse, and theorists being permitted to bestride their hobbies no longer, things soon returned to their primitive state of negligence; the plough was not suffered to approach within a rood of the

humblest fruit-tree, and the spaces around them were converted again into deserts. Thus do we jump from extreme to extreme, for popular prejudice has no juste milieu. Yet there does seem to be a medium between leaving a couple of hundred fanegas* of uncultivated ground in the vicinity of every knot of fruit-trees, and ploughing up all the pasture-land of a district; and the rearing of cattle appears not less worthy than husbandry to receive some tutelary care. Instead of cutting up districts into arbitrary lots of a few acres each, the more judicious course would be to leave them to the adjusting influences which operate upon ordinary markets; to sell by auction or make subject to a reasonable rent, and let each purchaser buy and cultivate that quantity of land which suits his agricultural capacity and his purse. Where the intelligent guardianship of a truly patriotic body might make itself judiciously manifest, would be in providing the best and newest agricultural implements, in selecting seeds, in adopting the most effectual system of irrigation, and in teaching by the powerful agency of example.

* The quantity of ground requisite to sow a bushel of corn.

CHAPTER XXI.

FARMING IN SOUTHERN SPAIN.

In this delicious climate, vegetation is never sus. pended, except by the excessive heats of summer. The genuine spring is usually a little after Christmas, and the choicest fruit is in bloom when the ground of England is locked up with frost; when vegetation is hoarnipped, and the snow is heaped on every bough and twig. It is in winter here that the climate is truly lovely, and in summer and autumn only that one might sigh to be elsewhere. From November to May, it is Heaven, or an Elysium. In winter the only drawbacks are the excessive rains; but the alternation of shower and sunbeam is even then extremely frequent, and whenever it occurs, delightful. The sunbeams sparkle out like molten brilliants, with a lustre that happily does not smite, and pierce the brain (as too often in the depth of summer), and the light, "through purest crystal gleaming," is mild, ethereal, and benignant. Inconvenient as are at times these terrible showers, pouring on, on, like a deluge, for days and nights without intermission, no milder treatment would soften and prepare the ground, break up the indurated soil of summer, and fit it for the reception of seed. But there are always brilliant intervals of sunshine, and it was in Andalucía that the ancients placed the Elysian Fields.