The condition of the provinces of Thuringia and Franconia is not ill adapted for a comparison of the past with the present; neither of them were more afflicted by the visitation of war than other countries; the state of cultivation of both provinces, up to the present time, answers pretty accurately to the general average of German industry and agriculture: neither of them are on the whole rich: both were hilly countries, without large rivers, or any considerable coal strata, with low lands, of which only certain tracts were distinguished by especial fertility, and were up to modern times devoted to agriculture, garden culture, and small mining industry. Thus this portion of Germany had known no powerful stream of human enterprise or capital, nor, on the other hand, was it the theatre of the destructive wars of Louis XIV.'s time, and the rulers, especially the grandson of Frederic the Wise, were even in the worst times tolerably sparing of the national strength. There have been preserved to us from these districts, amongst other things, accurate statistical notices of twenty communities, which once were in the Hennebergen domain; but now, with the exception of one that is Bavarian, belong to Saxe Meiningen. It is nowhere mentioned, and from their condition need not be concluded, that the devastation in them had been greater than in other portions of the province. The government in 1649 ordered an accurate report to be given of the number of inhabited houses, barns, and head of cattle that existed when the worst sufferings of the war began in 1634. According to the reports delivered by the magistrates of the places, there had perished in the twenty communities more than eighty-two per cent, of families, eighty-five per cent, of horses, more than eighty-three of goats, and eighty-two of cows, and more than sixty-three per cent. of houses. The remaining houses were described as in many places damaged and in ruins, the still surviving horses as lame and blind, and the fields and meadows as devastated and much overgrown with underwood; but the sheep were everywhere altogether destroyed.[40] It is a bloody and terrible tale which these numbers tell us. More than four fifths of the population, far more than four fifths of their property were destroyed. And in what a condition was the remainder!