What audacity in man! What criminal perverseness! thus to sow a thing in the ground for the purpose of catching the winds and the tempests, it being not enough for him, forsooth, to be borne upon the waves alone! Nay, still more than this, sails even that are bigger than the very ships themselves will not suffice for him, and although it takes a whole tree to make a mast to carry the cross-yards, above those cross-yards sails upon sails must still be added, with others swelling at the prow and at the stern as well—so many devices, in fact, to challenge death! Only to think, in fine, that that which moves to and fro, as it were, the various countries of the earth, should spring from a seed so minute, and make its appearance in a stem so fine, so little elevated above the surface of the earth! And then, besides, it is not in all its native strength that it is employed for the purposes of a tissue; no, it must first be rent asunder, and then tawed and beaten, till it is reduced to the softness of wool; indeed, it is only by such violence done to its nature, and prompted by the extreme audacity of man, and[806] * * * that it is rendered subservient to his purposes. The inventor of this art has been already mentioned by us on a more appropriate occasion;[807] not satisfied that his fellow-men should perish upon land, but anxious that they should meet their end with no sepulchral rites to await them, there are no execrations[808] to be found that can equal his demerits! It is only in the preceding Book[809] that I was warning the agriculturist, as he values the grain that is to form our daily sustenance, to be on his guard against the storm and the tempest; and yet, here we have man sowing with his own hand, man racking his invention how best to gather, an object the only aspirations of which upon the deep are the winds of heaven! And then, too, as if to let us understand all the better how highly favoured is this instrument of our punishment, there is no vegetable production that grows with greater facility;[810] and, to prove to us that it is in despite of Nature herself that it exists, it has the property of scorching[811] the ground where it is grown, and of deteriorating the quality of the very soil itself. CHAP. 2. (1.)—HOW FLAX IS SOWN: TWENTY-SEVEN PRINCIPAL VARIETIES OF IT.