Further, there is not one kind only of stalwart elms, or of the willow and the lotus, or the cypresses of Ida, nor are fat olives all produced after one type-orchads and radii--and pausians with their bitter fruit; nor yet the apple-forests of Alcinous; nor is the scion the same which produces Syrian and Crustumian pears and big hand-fillers. The vintage that hangs from our trees is not the same which Lesbos gathers from the tendrils of Methymna. There are Thasian vines, there are Mareotids, which are white; these suited for rich soils, those for the lighter sort; and the Psithian, which does better for raisin-wine; and the Lageos, whose thin light juice will one day trouble the feet and tie up the tongue; and purples, and early-ripes-thou, too, grape of Rhætia, how shall I sing thy praises? Yet measure not thyself, therefore, against cellars of Falernum. Then there are the Aminæan vines-best of wines to keep-to which the Tmolian veils his crest, and the royal Phanæus himself, and the lesser Argitis, with which none will be found. to vie, either for the streams of juice that it yields, or for the length of years that it lasts. Far be it from me to pass over thee, Rhodian-welcome to the gods and to the banquet's second course-or Bumastus, with thy big swelling clusters. But there is no number to tell how many kinds there are, or what their names; indeed, it skills not to measure them by number. The man who would have such knowledge would wish also to know how many sand-grains are lashed by the zephyr on the Libyan waste, or when the east wind falls with violence on the shipping, to tell how many waves the Ionian sea sends rolling to the shore.

Nor, indeed, is every soil able to produce everything. Willows grow by rivers, alders in rank boggy ground, barren The most luxuriant

ashes in a stony mountainous country.

myrtle groves are on the shore. Lastly, Bacchus is partial to

broad sunny hills, the yew-tree to north winds and cold. Look also at the extremities of the earth as subdued by tillage, the Eastern homes of the Arabs and the tattooed Gelonians. There you will find trees with their countries portioned out to them. None but India produces black ebony; the spray of frankincense belongs to none but the Sabæans. Why tell thee of the balsams, the sweat of the fragrant wood, or of the berries of the evergreen acanthus? Why speak of the woods of the Ethiopians, with their hoary locks of soft wool, or how the Seres comb silky fleeces from the lambs? Or the forests which India bears, hard by the ocean, the utmost corner of the world -forests where no shot of an arrow can reach the sky that tops the trees; and the natives are not slow, either, when they take up the quiver? Media produces the bitter juice and lingering flavour of the benignant citron; no more present help than that, if ever cruel stepdames have drugged the draught, mingling herbs and charms not less baleful, to come and expel the deadly poison from the frame. The tree itself is large, and very like a bay to look at; nay, if the scent it flings about were not different, a bay it had been. No wound can make it shed its leaves, and the blossom, too, holds fast as few. The Medes use it for purifying noisome breath, and relieving the asthma of old age.

But neither Median forests, wealthiest of climes, nor lovely Ganges, nor Hermus, whose mud is gold, may vie with the glories of Italy. No, nor Bactria, nor Ind, nor Panchaïa, with all the richness of its incense-bearing sands. Here is a land where no bulls, breathing fire from their nostrils, have ploughed the soil; where no enormous dragons' teeth were ever sown; where no human harvest started up, bristling with helms and crowded lances; but teeming corn and the vine-god's Massic juice have made it their own; its tenants are olives and luxuriant herds of cattle. Hence comes the war-horse, that prances

proudly into the battle-field. Hence, Clitumnus, those white flocks, and the bull, that majestic victim, which oft ere now, bathed in thy sacred flood, have ushered a Roman triumph to the temples of the gods. Here is ceaseless spring, and summer in months where summer is strange. Twice the cattle give increase, twice the tree yields its service of fruit. But far away are fierce tigers and the savage seed of lions; nor does aconite grow to beguile the wretched herb-gatherer; nor does the serpent roll his huge circles swiftly along the ground, or gather his scales into a coil with so vast a sweep. Think, too, of all those stately cities and trophies of human toil, all those towns piled by man's hand on beetling rocks, with rivers flowing beneath their time-honoured walls. Or shall I speak of the two seas that wash it above and below? or of those mighty lakes-of thee, Larius, the greatest, and thee, Benacus, heaving with the swell and the roar of ocean? or tell of the harbours and the barrier thrown across the Lucrine, and the rage and loud thunder of the baffled waters, where the sound of the sea beaten back echoes far over the Julian wave, and the Tyrrhenian billows come foaming up into the creeks of Avernus ? It is a land, too, which has disclosed currents of silver and of copper ore mantling in its veins, and has streamed profusely with gold-a land that has produced tribes of manly temperthe Marsian, the Sabine stock, the Ligurian, inured to hardship, and the Volscian spearmen; the families of the Decii and the great Camilli, the Scipios-those iron warriors—and thee, Cæsar, greatest of all, who now, crowned with conquest in Asia's utmost bounds, art driving back the unwarlike Indian from the towers of Rome. Hail to thee, land of Saturn, mighty mother of noble fruits and noble men! For thee I essay the theme of the glory and the skill of olden days. For thee I adventure to break the seal of those hallowed springs, and sing the song of Ascra through the towns of Rome.

Now for the tempers of fields-what are the powers of each, what the distinguishing colour, and what the natural aptitude for gendering things. First, then, those churlish soils and niggardly hills, where hungry marl and gravel form a bed for brambles, rejoice in the forest-growth of Minerva's long-lived olive. You may tell it by the many wild olives that spring up in the same line of country, and the ground strewn all over with their woodland berries. But a rich soil, which luxuriates in the moisture of fresh springs, a plain with abundant herbage and a teeming bosom, such as we often see at the bottom of a mountain hollow-for the streams pour down into it from the tops of the rocks, and carry with them fertilising slime; a plain which rises to the south, and produces fern, that enemy of the crooked ploughshare; such a soil will one day bear you good store of vines of excellent health, and yielding rivers of Bacchic juice: it will teem with grapes, and with liquor, such as we pour in libations from golden cups, when the plump Etruscan at the altar blows through the pipe, and we offer entrails smoking hot in chargers that bend under the weight. But if your care be rather to rear cattle, bullocks, lambs, or goats that kill young shoots, go to the distant lawns of luxuriant Tarentum, or plains such as that which poor Mantua lost, supporting silver swans with its weedy stream: there will be no lack of clear springs or grass for your cattle. Nay, all that your herds can devour on a summer's day, will be replaced by the cold fresh dew of one short night.

For corn, the best land in the main is that which is black, and shows itself rich when the ploughshare is driven into it, and whose soil is crumbling, that being what we seek to reproduce by ploughing; there is no sort of ground from which you will see more wains dragged home by sturdy toiling bullocks; or again, land from which timber has been carted away by the provoked husbandman, levelling wood

which has been doing no good these many years, and upsetting the leafy homes of the birds, roots and all-the tenants, ejected from their nests, have gone up into the air, while the rude field has been brightened up by dint of the ploughshare. As for the hungry gravel of the hill country, it can barely furnish shrubs like casia and rosemary for bees; and the rugged tufa and the marl all eaten away by black snakes, tell you plainly that no other ground is so good at supplying serpents with food that they like, and holes where they may wind and lurk. But the land which exhales thin vapours and light steam, which drinks in moisture, and gives it off again at pleasure, which keeps itself constantly clothed with the verdure of its own grass, and breeds no scurfy salt rust to corrode the plough-here is a land which will yield you luxuriant vines to twine round your elms-a land which produces olives abundantly—a land which the experience of cultivation will show to be at once well natured for cattle and submissive to the crooked share. Such is the land that is fenced by wealthy Capua and the coast neighbouring the Vesuvian ridge, and Clanius, the oppressor of desolate Acerræ.

Now I will tell you how you may distinguish each. If you want to know whether a soil be loose or exceedingly stiff, seeing that the one is partial to corn, the other to vines; the stiffer to the corn-goddess, the loosest to the wine-god, fix on a spot of ground, and cause a pit to be sunk in the solid earth, then put all the mould back again, and stamp the surface level. If there is too little, the soil will be loose and more suited for pasture and fruitful vines; but if it refuses to go into its place, so that when the hole is full the earth still dominates, the clay is thick-prepare yourself for resistance in the clods and stiffness in the ridges, and let the oxen with which you break up the ground be strong.

As for a salt or bitter soil, as it is called, which is unkindly