The Press. — London, England, 1857-12-19 00:00:00

1134 either by the showers, the excessive heat of summer, or the svfere cold of winter. Now the advantages recognised at the present day as arising from the practice of burning the soil, and the plants which cover its surface, are very much of the de scripti in which Virgil has stated In ;he first place, when a large amount of slowly decom posing vegetable matter happens to be present, it accele• rates the return into the body of the soil of the alkaline and earthly constituents which the plants contain, so as to render these essential ingredients immediately available for the ensuing crop. In other words : Occultas vires et pabula terror Concipiunt. This is the source of the fertility imparted to the soil in America by the combustion of the timber in its extensive forests; the tire unlocking, as it were, these accumulations of potass, phosphate of lime, and other valuaole matters, which the trees in their growth had gradually drawn from the soil, and restoring them at once in a condition in which they can minister to the wants of the forthcoming crops. Secondly, when the soil is sour, or contains peaty matter, which generates acetic or other acids prejudicial to the growth of plants, the practice of burning dissipates and destroys the injurious principle, ur, as Virgil says— _ tins omne per ignera Eicoquitur vitium, atque exsudat inutilis humor. Burning also may do good to the soil, when it is too reten tive of moisture, and too adhesive in quality. My friend Mr. Barwick Baker of Hardwick l'ou't in Gloucestershire has by this treatment improved the soil of his garden, which was a tenacious clay, converting it into a kind of brick earth, which possesses much of the mechanical qualities of a sandstone. For such a case it may be said in the beautiful language of the Roman poet Plures calor ille vies et MCA re lexat Spiramenta, novas veniat qua succus in herbas Whether the process of burning can ever act in the last of the ways hinted at by Virgil, that is, by rendering loose soils more compact, is very problematical ; indeed it is even generally considered by agriculturists, that light and sandy soils are injured by the operation. In his handling of the pone asinorum of the first Georgic—the description of the plough — the Doctor has not, we think, been very suc cessful. There seems to have been some blunder in this part of his work, for the letters in the letterpress do not correspond with those in the plates. At all events, we have not been much enlightened by this particular piece of explanation. In his lecture upon the cultivation of trees, the most remarkable points dwelt upon by our author are the great disproportion between the yields of modern and ancient vineyards— the latter appearing to be the fuller by nearly two-thirds—and the fallacies of Roman writers on the subject of grafting. According to modern notions, very few trees admit of being successfully grafted : so that most of the directions given by Virgil are useless, and the seventeen or twenty kinds of grafting enume rated by Palladius are found to be fabulous. The mistake seems to have originated in the practice of grafting by boring a hole in the trunk (the enodes trunei of Virgil), and insert ing a cutter, which sometimes struck through to the ground, and took root in the soil, while it was all the time supposed to be growing out of the wood. We may observe in passing that the fourteenth book of Palladius' " De Insi tione "—which, in imitation of Columella's last book, he has thrown into verse—deserves to be better known. The versification is very smooth, and the command of expression mar vellous—the poet describing the same process nearly twenty times over, each time in different, but perfectly appropriate, phraseology. Pal ladius is supposed to have lived in the fourth century. Dr. Daubeny now proceeds to the subject of live stock. After briefly adverting to the fact that oxen and sheep among the ancients were in demand rather for the purposes of draught than for the supply cf beef and mutton, and showing that Virgil's enumeration of the " points " of a horse or a bullock still in the main hold good, the Doctor passes on to the consideration' of the aviaries, fishponds, and other still more peculiar preserves, in fashion among the ancients. As beef, mutton, and veal were in little request at Roman ban quets, the value of poultry, game, and fish was proportionably enhanced. Columella, though ho says little or nothing of fattening sheep or beasts, gives minute directions for the cramming of fowls, pigeons, and thrushes Dormice, too, were another peculiar Roman luxury, and were usually fattened in stone jars upon acorns, walnuts, and chesnuts. The lnagnitude of the Roman preserves fin• fish of all kinds, shell fish, sea fish, and fresh-water ~_ THE PRESS, DECEMBER 19, 1857. fish, is well known. One gentleman alone lent 6,000 lampreys to Julius Caesar for his tri umphal banquets. Bees, too—with which sub ject this lecture is concluded—were of much more value to a people ignorant of the sugar cane than to the moderns, and honey accor dingly formed a staple branch of their agricul tural produce. Columella tells us little which is not in Virgil, though we could have wished the following ingenious scheme for the dis covery of wild bees had been painted by the master's hand, and adorned with all the elegant fancy and golden versification of the Georgics - • • • I►. is known that when the pastures afford suitable materials for honey, bees are fond of resorting to the fountains that lie near, and to these the bee hunter resorts, in order to observe the number that come. Should this be small, he concludes the spot to be un favourable ; but if considerable, he is encouraged to pro ceed ; and for this purpose the following was the method adopted by the Roman bee hunter : In the first place, he mixed up some red ochre with water, and smeared with it the grass in the neighbourhood of the spring. By this means the backs of all the bees that resort there became coloured red, and this mark enabled him to recognise them when they returned from their Rights ; from the time occupied in which, he could tell the distance of their hives from the spot to which they had re sorted. If this were near. there would be little difficulty in discovering where it lay, which may then be done simply by following the bees in their track homewards. If however it be distant, the bee hunter took a reed, and made a hole in it, which he filled with honey, or some sweet syrup. When several bees, attracted by this, entered the hole, he closed it with his thumb, and let out one single bee ate time. This he chased as far as he could, and when he had lost sight of it, let out another, and then another, until lie could follow it to the entrance of the hive. Should this be a cave, he smoked out the bees, and drove them into some contiguous bush or tree, where he could collect them in an appropriate vessel. But if it were an hollow tree, be sawed it across at a little distance both above and below the hive, and covered over the apertures with cloths. He was thus enabled to carry home the hive of bees which he had discovered. Dr Danbeny's two concluding lectures are de voted to horticulture, known among the ancients as ars topiaria, the art, namely, of giving fanciful forms to trees and flowers, and corresponding to the Dutch style once prevalent amongst ourselves, rather than the modern landscape gardening, of which the Romans seem to have had no idea. Before, however, wo convict them too hastily of want of taste in this matter, we must remember that there was not the same need of landscape gardening among the ancient Italians as there is among our selves. Horace, as he looked out on the tumbling Anio, the grove of Tiburnus, and the orchards intersected by streamlets, had his garden ready made to his eye. In treating of this subject Columella had the ground to himself. No previous writerhad ven tured to subject himself to the comparison that must infallibly be instituted between him who dropped and him who should take up the biferi rosaria Pdsti. Columella, however, scarcely challenges comparison. He perhaps did not profess to be a poet ; and his verses are sufficiently smooth and classical to entitle him. to high praise upon any lower ground. These two concluding lectures will be found very interesting to scientific florists and botanists, and very useful to all students of the Georgics who are so much puzzled to identify the various shrubs, plants, and flowers there introduced. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. By David Livingstone, LL.D., D.C.L. London : Murray. ;Second Notice.) Ix accomplishing his two journies so suc cessfully, Dr. Livingstone owed much of that success to having lived some twelve years among the Bechuanas, whose mode of thought and action and whose language he had tho roughly mastered. He had served his appren ticeship, as it were, to savage life, and he faced strange tribes with a confidence no ordinary traveller could hope to possess. He had per fect reliance upon his bodyguard of Makololo men who accompanied him, and they in their turn had implicit faith in their " father." He had long resided among their people : ho had taught them and tended them, had nursed their wives through labour and sickness, and he was beloved by their chief. Then, again, the fame of the Makololo extended far into the interior--few tribes within reach of tho Makololo chief Sekeletu would have dared to plunder or kill ono who travelled under such distinguished protection ; and though, when he got beyond the bounds of Makololo fame or fear, he found tribes, especially within slave-trading boundaries, evince a certain amount of hostility towards his advance, he never experienced a decided attack, although upon many occasions a man with less self command, and less knowledge of the customs of the country, would have inevitably been destroyed. The condition and customs of the Central Africans are very primitive. The govern ment is patriarchal, each man being by virtue of paternity chief of his own children; poor men attach themselves to the families of rich under-chiefs, who again are attached by mar riage to the great chief of the tribe. In this chieftain is invested the power of life and death, and before him all cases, from family quarrels to grave political offences, are daily heard in a council of elders, who, if the chief does not see his way clearly to a decision, rise one by one and give their opinions on the cases. The decision of the chief is absolute. Towards one another the Bechuana people are remarkably truthful. In general they are not litigious, and, where untainted by slave dealing, they are industrious, and passionately fond of liberty. They believe in a Supreme Being and in a future state : On questioning intelligent men among the Bakwains as to their former knowledge of good and evil, of God, and the future state, they have scouted the idea of any of them ever having been without a tolerably clear conception on all these subjects. Respecting their sense of right and wrong, they profess that nothing we iutlicate as sin ever appeared to them as otherwise, except the statement that it was wrong to have more wives than one; and they declare that they spoke in the same way of the direct influence exercised by God in giving rain in answer to prayers of the rain makers, and iu granting deliverance in times of danger, as they do now, before they ever heard of white men. The want, however, of any form of public worship, or of idols, or of formal prayers or sacrifice, make both Caffres and Bechuanas appear as among the most godless races of mortals known am where. But though they all possess a distinct knowledge of a deity and of a future state, they show so little reverence, and feel so little connection with either, that it is not surprisiug that some have supposed them entirely ignorant on the subject. A`, Lotlakani we met an old Busman who at first seemed to have no con ceptiou of morality whatever; when his heart was warmed by our presents of meat, he sat by the fire relating his early adventures : among these was killing five other Bushmen, " Two," said he, counting on his fingers, " were females, one a male, and the other two calves.' —"What a villain you are to boast of killing women and children of your own nation ! what will God say when you appear before him ?" —" He will say " replied he," that I was a very clever fellow." This is not altogether an unfavourable picture of the people. Then they are inclined to live peacably with their neighbours; so that if there is not much material here for the mis sionary, there is a good deal for the merchant. With all this, however, we find a certain serf dom existing, each under-chief having a number of a subjected tribe at his disposal, and from whom, otherwise independent, is exacted a certain amount of daily labour. This appears to be the only form of domestic slavery permitted among them. It is impossible here to classify the various tribes whose villages Dr. Livingstone passed through, either to the west or east. In all tho patriarchal form of government exists; in all there is much the same amount of immorality and superstition, and much the same mixture of good and evil, as exists in more civilised communities. " After a long observation,' says Dr. Livingstone, " I have come to the "conclusion that they are just such a strange " mixture of good and evil as men are every " where else ": There is not among them an approach to that constant stream of benevolence flowing from the rich to the poor which we have in England, nor yet the unostentatious attentions which we have among our own poor to each other. Yet there are frequent instances of genuine kind ness and liberality, as well as actions of an opposite character. The rich show kindness to the poor, in expec tation of services, and a poor person who has no relatives will seldom be supplied even with water in illness, and, when dead, will be drsg4eti out to he devoured by the hytenas, instead of being buried. Relatives alone will condescend to touch a dead body. It would be easy to enumerate instances of inhumanity which I have witnessed. . . . On the other hand, I have seen instances in which both men and women have taken up little orphans, and carefully reared them as their own children. By a selection of cases of either kind, it would not be difficult to make these people appear excessively good or uncommonly bad. Their superstitious, on the whole, appear to be harmless. They believe firmly in the power of zll