their waters, rich in the elements of veg- other rivers have been tapped by numer. etable growth. The soils along the Tiberous canals. So that there are nearly one are chiefly of the dull yellowish-grey color which characterizes so much of the country through which it flows, and give their color to its waters. The lower mountains are thinly covered with soil, of which the best use is made by terracing in suitable situations, while the valleys among the hills have large accumulations of moranic matter which the streams are working away, and this is the chief cause of the dull, muddy appearance of the waters they contain.

the fields and bush-harrowed into the has to pay him, the sums brought out in grass-land. Silt from the watercourses, the revaluation. This is a simple and where of value, is also used, and every efficient way of solving the question of vegetable or animal substance procurable tenants' improvements, so much disis turned to account for manure. Guano cussed at present throughout this country. has been, and is still, in use, as well as From what I could learn of the estimaphosphates. All the processes of hus- tion in which this method is held, both bandry are carried out in a thorough way. the landlord and tenant seemed satisfied. It is strange to see so many trees sur- When the tenant invests capital in the round the fields. The poplars are cut farm and improves the property he is sure straight up and regularly branched. Mul- of receiving the fair value for it when he berries, elms, and maples abound, while leaves, and the landlord of paying no cherry and other fruit trees are not want more than the actual value of the improveing. At certain yearly intervals these are ment made. In this country there are no lopped and dressed for firewood and fenc- such educated professional valuers as are ing, while vines also form an important found in Milan or Lombardy. This branch of culture in different localities. would operate against the success of the Milk, cheese, grain, and wine are the introduction of the system at present. chief articles of produce, with some flax The tenantry have no great confidence in and hemp, besides medick, clover, tur- land valuers, who are paid by the landnips, potatoes, and other vegetables. Of lords. The establishment of a school for course, silk culture is carried out where the training of agricultural surveyors on the mulberry-trees abound. The greatest the lines of that of Piedmont seems the watchfulness is exercised over the water first step, and the next, that landlords supply, the canals and minor channels consent to allow such valuation to be being closely looked at under the super-made, and the tenant to appoint a valuer vision of a class of engineers trained along with his. from their boyhood, and who add to their acquirements a thorough knowledge of practical agriculture as carried on in the district, and act as valuers in connection with the entry and the removal of tenants. These engineers have a thorough training in all questions of hydraulic art, and a knowledge of the system of irrigation and the rights of property.

The part they play in the irrigated districts is most important. They not only design and superintend the construction of all works in connection therewith, but also arrange the whole details of leases, as those are for a term of years, and usually at a fixed rent in money and certain quantities of produce. On the entrance of a tenant to a farm the proprietor appoints an engineer to make out a list of its fixtures and stock, and to report on the state of every field, its size, cultivation, and condition. Plantations are noted and trees numbered, and everything of a permanent nature stated, and the whole valued according to a scale of prices. The tenant has the right to associate an engineer of his own choice with the one appointed by the proprietor. When the lease expires, the same work is gone over again, and should ameliorations have been made by the tenant he is credited with these at their value; and, on the other hand, should deteriorations have taken place he is debited with them, and he either receives from his landlord, or

over the

While the valuations made by parties employed to ascertain the rental of land are being continually challenged in this country, I heard comparatively little of this from those I conversed with who knew the work of the Italian valuers; and what succeeds in Piedmont and Lombardy is surely worth considering here, seeing that it has long been in practice among farms of different sizes — from not very small to very large wide lower plains of those provinces. Tenants are entitled to assign their leases in the absence of provisions in the lease to the contrary; the consent of the landlord is not required to such assignments; the principal tenant remains bound to the landlord. In the case of loss of crop, or half loss, the tenant is entitled to claim a reduction of rent, which is allowed unless compensated for in previous years' excess. The tenant for a single year is also so entitled to claim for the whole or half loss of year's crop. This, or something like it, was understood to be the law of Scotland, although not acted on of late. The landlord has also a right over the tenant's stock and crop for rent due and to become due.

In the flat, alluvial land by Capua, Caserta Averso, and the banks of the Volturno on to Naples the cultivation is by the hand, few animals being employed in ploughing. The oxen may draw on the manure, which is often laid out in drills

two feet or more wide, and at the rate of | northern countries injure the quality of ten to sixteen tons per acre or so. It is the grain grown. Here it has not that spread in the rows and dug in with a effect; there is ample light, and the wheat spade, which has a long handle, and a -grown among them-is capable of spur on the lower part for the foot to press making excellent flour, though its produce it into the soil. Bands of men are seen at may be reduced. work in spring digging in the manure and sovericio, the latter a mixture of green lupines and beans, raised in autumn and kept growing during winter for green manuring. This second crop in the year keeps the land in heart. There are no fences here.

erected, and the people interested in the land appear to reside in the villages or small towns on the high land or rocky eminences on the edge of flat country; rough vegetation is allowed to spread over the district; scrubby timber also abounds, which charcoal-burners utilize in the winter season. It is still, as it has been, subject during summer and autumn to pestilential exhalations, which strike down even the natives, and much more strangers; the wet, rancid soils, the rank vegetation allowed to decay on the surface, and the sun's heat produce the reek from the rotting fens, so destructive to health. Following the example of the monks at Tre Fontane, near Rome, the railway authorities have of late been draining pieces of land around the stations on the

one, for the purpose of filling it up with the silt and rougher deposits it fetches down from the upper country. A large extent of the lake has been made dry by this operation of warping; the process is not yet completed. Over the Maremma, the rivers run in shallow beds, and the drainage into them is difficult. Water underlies the soil, and where drainage operations were in progress much water was drawn out of the subsoil, showing that it exists there to the injury of the crops grown and the health of the inhabitants. The Maremma is the least inviting, and it is, indeed, the most dismal district in Italy, forming a portion of the land occupied by the ancient Etruscans, who had much of it under cultivation. It is said to be from the overflow of the streams, the growth of marsh land, and the rough, coarse veg-line along the flat country, digging pits etation and constant neglect, that it has reached its fever-stricken condition. Making all allowances for the effect of neglect, it is scarcely possible to believe that all this country was ever thoroughly cultivated. A large portion is covered with a thin, poor soil resting on stiff, tenacious clay of all colors of yellow, grey, or whitish. Here and there apparently driftshingle is met with covered by a finer soil, drier and deeper. Much, however, of this large district has an inferior soil on a cold subsoil, unfit for cultivation in its present state. This state seems very like that condition described by Palladius, where he writes of those stiff, lean soils which should be shunned as land that breeds the pestilence. There is land met with here and there, such as is described by Virgil as being a loose and crumbling mould fit for any crop; on such, a goodly field of wheat may be seen, but very little other cultivation.

Large herds of cattle, supplemented by young horses, graze among the creeks in the scrubby woods, while in the open land you see flocks of sheep. Buffaloes of a not very inviting appearance frequent the marshes and less accessible land. These animals are said to have been brought to Tuscany by Lorenzo the Magnificent. Save for such districts they are not of much account. Attempts have been made by opening canals and carry ing the waters more directly to the sea to improve the sanitary condition of parts of the country. All such local attempts never can effect what only thorough and complete drainage operations and cultivation can secure, and certainly such attempts are not now being made.

Neither farmhouses nor cottages are

four feet deep and square, exposing the output to the atmosphere, and planting blue-gum trees. These trees spring up with great rapidity in a few years; those first planted are thriving and healthy, and in the deep, rich soil at Grossetta, the chief city of the Maremma, about four acres of land were being planted last spring around the station. In soil as shown in the pits, they will have very favorable conditions for growth; and if, as is expected, they extract from the air the miasma as it rises, in a few years they will be so grown as to test the correctness of the opinion, as every station is to have a surrounding of these eucalyptus or blue gums. The dwellers there will realize their value, and it may be hoped will enjoy better health than they hitherto have done.

I am afraid that at many of the railway stations the extent of land planted is too limited, and that the blue gum alone will not cure the evil. The whole district requires to be looked to; the government alone can secure such improvements as seem likely to overcome the poisoning emanations which from the earliest times have afflicted this part of the country. Draining from the sea upwards of all the stagnant flats during the winter season, when laborers can work with safety, clearing off the rough vegetation and burning and keeping the scrubby timber in check, would prove a sure means of preventing the decay of vegetable matter on the sur face of a moist soil under a hot sun. Various of the old Roman writers on agriculture praise the advantages of burning off all surface growths. It is a wellknown fact that in many gum-tree districts of Australia, when fresh taken up, much

fever prevailed. After repeated burning | districts, the produce of the fields could of the surface growths, a much healthier supply roots enough to yield sugar for the state of matters existed. If M. Lesseps whole of Italy, while the manure from can hope successfully to overcome the Rome and from cattle fed on the refuse of Chagres fever in making his Panama ca the factories would be sufficient for the nal, within nine degrees of the equator, land. Barley for exportation could be the opening up of the Campagna and had to succeed the beet, followed again Maremma may be more easily accom- by grasses for hay, which is in great deplished, with more beneficent results than mand for live stock in and near the city. in the big guns that the Italians boast of. Through a cheap system of tramways, The Roman Campagna is a continua- the work-people could be quickly contion of the Tuscan Maremma southwards; veyed from the highlands to their work it is more undulating, with outbursts of during winter and spring; and opening trap and deeper watercourses running the levels so that waters could not stagfrom the hills to the sea. The Tibernate anywhere, cultivating and exposing flows in a valley from a few hundred yards to more than a mile in width, and the bed it has cut out varies from fifty to fully a hundred yards broad. The other streams are sunk in the valleys, and all seem to indicate a much larger flow of water at one time than at present. In many of the brooks boulders occur, and such carried blocks are scattered over several districts. The rock covering here consists of material very much resembling the boulder clay with a covering of drift gravel, and the soils vary accordingly.

Outside of Rome the Appian Way passes over outbursts of bluish basalt, which is largely quarried for the streets of the city, as it had been for the old Roman roads. Onwards, Albano is largely composed of traps, the surface of which is decaying. The soils of the Roman Campagna in all the higher districts have little alluvial matter in them, while in general the quality is superior to the Maremma of Tuscany. The cultivation is better, though very antiquated. You see twenty old Roman ploughs each drawn by four oxen, in charge of one man who stands on it. They work in two lines and are attended by a man on horseback in charge. The work done is rough. In other large fields bands of thirty or forty men and youths are at work weeding wheat, which with hay is the principal crop in the Campagna. Sheep are grazed during winter over the hay-grounds, and cattle in herds are supplied with hay and straw out of doors. In summer the sheep are removed to the hills. Should the blue gums succeed in rendering the malaria barmless to the dwellers in the belts around the railway stations in the Maremma, much of the Campagna could be turned into the finest sugar-beet growing land in the world. With the manufactories placed in suitable situations, and surrounded by those trees, and by tramways of simple construction reaching over wide

the soil to the action of the atmosphere, and allowing nothing in the shape of animal or vegetable matter to decay in the soil or on the surface, but collecting all manure into heaps for fermentation, are among the most likely means of checking this deadly poison from getting into the air.

Occupation for an increasing population may some day, now that there is an Italian kingdom, force on such beneficent work. It ought to be the work of the nation. The Maremma being mostly in the hands of large proprietors and clear of inhabitants, arrangements could more easily be made to effect such a result. The finding of occupation for a poorly employed people, and prospectively adding to the home production of food, should surely induce Italian legislators to spend money on such improvements.

A large population occupies the hillsides and lower mountains of many districts. In general the soil is thin; and water, scarce at times, is over plentiful at others. By terracing or building up stone facings they check the waste of the soil by the sudden melting of the snow or rushes of the rain-water. Vines, walnuts, chestnuts, almonds, and many fruit-trees are grown, while vegetables provide food for their cattle, on which they depend for manure for their crop.

Many of the mountains have a bare, grey look, and the want of wood seems remarkable. The planting of timber would appear to have been neglected. Those stone pines, of which a few stately examples are seen about Rome and elsewhere, rarely meet the eye of a visitor on the mountain-sides. It is more frequently the juniper, the berries of which form an article of export to this country. At certain elevations the summer pastures prevail, to which so many of the sheep are driven in spring and removed in autumn.