“While science devotes its chief attention to industrial pursuits, a limited number of lovers of nature and a legion of workers, whose very names will remain unknown to posterity, have created of late a quite new agriculture, as superior to modern farming as modern farming is superior to the old three-fields system of our ancestors. They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops every three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of land every twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they make the soil themselves, and make it in such quantities as to be compelled yearly to sell some of it; otherwise, it would raise up the levels of their gardens by half an inch every year. They aim at cropping, not five or six tons of grass to the acre, as we do, but from fifty to one hundred tons of various vegetables on the same space; not twenty-five dollars’ worth of hay, but five hundred dollars’ worth of vegetables, of the plainest description, cabbages and carrots. That is where agriculture is going now.” The writer tells about all these things in detail. Here is the _culture maraîchere_ of Paris—a M. Ponce, with a tiny orchard of two and seven-tenths acres, for which he pays five hundred dollars rent a year, and from which he takes produce that could not be named short of several pages of figures: twenty thousand pounds of carrots, twenty thousand of onions and radishes, six thousand heads of cabbage, three thousand of cauliflower, five thousand baskets of tomatoes, five thousand dozen choice fruit, one hundred and fifty-four thousand heads of “salad”—in all, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds of vegetables. Says the author: “The Paris gardener not only defies the soil—he would grow the same crops on an asphalt pavement—he defies climate. His walls, which are built to reflect light and to protect the wall-trees from the northern winds, his wall-tree shades and glass protectors, his _pépinières_, have made a rich Southern garden out of the suburbs of Paris.”