At this time prizes for poetry were being awarded every day. Thousands of societies had been founded for this purpose and their members lived on the fat of the land, while making upon fixed dates large benefices to poets. But the 26th of January was the day upon which the largest associations, companies, boards of directors, academies, committees, juries, etc., of the whole world bestowed their awards. Upon this day 8,019 prizes for poetry were distributed, the total of which aggregated 50,005,225 francs.[14] On the other hand, since the taste for poetry had never spread among any class of the population of any country, public opinion had risen powerfully against the poets who were called parasites, lazy, useless, and so forth. The 26th of January of this year passed without incident, but on the following day the great newspaper, La Voix, published at Adelaide (Australia) in the French language, contained an article by the distinguished agricultural chemist Horace Tograth (a German born at Leipzig), whose discoveries and inventions had frequently seemed to border on the miraculous. The article, entitled _The Laurel_, contained a sort of chronology of the culture of the laurel in Judea, in Greece, in Italy, in Africa and in Provence. The author gave counsel to those who had laurel trees in their gardens, indicating the multiple usage of the laurel, as a food, in art, in poetry, and its rôle as a symbol of poetic glory. He then began to talk of mythology, making allusions to Apollo and the fable of Daphné. Finally, Horace Tograth changed his tone brusquely and concluded his article as follows: "And furthermore, I say candidly, this useless tree is still too common, and we have less glorious symbolisms to which people attribute the famous savour of the laurel. The laurel holds too large a place upon our overpopulated earth, the laurels are unworthy of living. Each one of them takes the place of two in the sun. Let them be chopped down, and let their leaves be feared as a poison. Hitherto symbols of poetry and literary science, they are nothing more today than that death-glory which is to glory as death is to life, and as the hand of glory is to the key.