[Footnote 208-5: In Moscow, merchants close their accounts at Easter. Then begins a new cycle of fashions, after which all that remains is sold at mock-prices. (_Kohl_, Reise, 98.) In Paris, there are houses which buy up everything as it begins to go out of fashion and then send it into the provinces and to foreign parts. Thus, there are immense amounts of old clothing shipped from France and England to Ireland. Hence, the latter country can have no national costume appropriate to the different classes; and the traveler sees with regret, crowds of Irish going to work in ragged frock-coats, short trowsers and old silk hats. In Prussia, many of the peasantry, in the time of Frederick the Great, wore the discarded uniforms of the soldiery.] [Footnote 208-6: _Schäffle_, N. Oek. _Hermann_, Staatsw. Untersuchungen, II, Aufl., 100.] SECTION CCIX. CONSUMPTION WHICH IS THE WORK OF NATURE. The least enjoyable of all consumption (_loss-consumption_) is that which is the work of nature; and nature is certainly most consuming in the tropics. During the rainy season, in the region of the upper Ganges, mushrooms shoot up in every corner of the houses; books on shelves swell to such an extent that three occupy the place previously occupied by four; those left on the table get covered over with a coat of moss one-eighth of an inch in thickness. The saltpetre that gathers on the walls has to be removed every week in baskets, to keep it from eating into the bricks. Numberless moths devour the clothing. Schomburgk found that, in Guiana, iron instruments which lay on the ground during the rainy season became entirely useless within a few days, that silver coins oxydized, etc.; evidently a great obstacle in the way of the employment of machinery. In summer, the soil of this same region, so rich in roots, is so parched by the heat, that subterranean fires sometimes cause the most frightful destruction. In Spanish America, there are so many termites and other destructive insects that paper more than sixty years old is very seldom to be found there.[209-1]