Agbicultuke on the khine.
people turn the advantages of soil and climate with
which they are endowed. In this volume we propose to
afford the inquiring traveller, or such as are not less
inquiringly disposed because they stay at home, a clue to
the varied map of agricultural activity which the banks
of the Rhine unfold. A greater variety of objects and
modes of cultivation is assuredly presented by no other
region of equal space. In no country has the well-being
of the people been more intimately interwoven with its
agricultural policy and prosperity than in Germany.
Few tours present a larger sphere of observation to the
landowner, the farmer, and the statesman, than that
which, with the aid of Rhenish steamers and railroads,
he can accomplish in the space of a few wτeeks. With
these preliminary observations we enter at once upon our
task of tracing the peasant to his cottage, the lord to his
castle, and both to the great mart of the world, at which
all are buyers and sellers, not alone of produce and ma-
nufactures, but of consideration, influence, comfort, and
independence. He is but a sorry calculator who does
not look beyond the money price at which he buys and
sells, as we shall have frequent occasion to show in the
course of this tour. We shall often have to test the value
of the epithets dear and cheap; and perhaps no other
district can so fully illustrate how relative the notions
are that attach to those words.
The entrance into Germany by the Rhine presents
nothing very attractive to the eye. Long before the
traveller reaches the Prussian frontier, the neat farm-
houses that in Holland line the carefully walled or fas-
cined banks of the great stream, gay in their shutters
and doors of red or green, and grouped with the coppice
Agkicultube on the Rhine,
or willow so familiar to us from the landscapes of the
Dutch masters, give way to continued plantations of
osiers and wave-washed banks, that seem to indicate a
change of no pleasing kind. The transition is on both
banks sudden, from a people whom trade early attracted
to the banks of the river and familiarised with its utility,
to one almost exclusively agricultural, which long looked
wholly to the land for nourishment and power. The
face of the country has also changed materially by the
time the boat in which you ascend the Rhine reaches
the Prussian boundary. The level of the back country
has risen considerably above the stream, which may here
chafe against the bank without, as in Holland, endan-
gering the lives and property of the inhabitants of whole
provinces. This change is not perceptible from the
river except to the practised eye of the geographer,
who recognises, in the circumstance that the stream is
confined within a single bed, the existence of rocky
strata in the banks, and suspects that it has eaten its way
through the lower offsets of some mountain-chain. On
the right bank, i. e. on the traveller’s left as he ascends
the river, the rise is trifling, and a well-cultivated strip
of land flanking the river, formerly a portion of the
duchy of Cleves, intervenes between the Rhine and the
immense heaths which separate Holland from Germany,
to whose extent, untraversed for centuries by roads, the
Dutch are indebted for their independent nationality.
The want of roads in the inland German states gave
an early pre-eminence to those districts that commanded
water-navigation, and among-`t the navigable rivers of
Germany the Rhine was prominent. The Lower Rhine,
as that portion of the river lying between the Seven