Growing grass and fodder, cattle-breeding, and cheese-making are the most important branches of Swiss agriculture. For ages the forest Cantons had little tillable land reclaimed, and from difficulty of communication with the outside world the people were thrown almost entirely upon their own scanty local resources. With hardly any means of getting supplies from without, with very little land for cultivating cereals, and in the days before maize and potatoes, their chief reliance was upon their cows. It is very much so even at this day, but in those days the reliance was all but unqualified. Their cows supplied them not only with a great part of their food, but also, through the surplus cheese, with tools, and everything else they were incapable of producing themselves, from the singularly limited resources of their secluded valleys. The Switzer was then the parasite of the cow. There were no ways in which money could be made; there were no manufactures and no travellers; and so there were no inn-keepers to supply travellers, nor shop-keepers to supply the wants of operatives, manufacturers, and travellers; and there were none who had been educated up to the point that would enable them to go abroad to make money with which they might return to their old home. If the general population had not had the means of keeping cows, they would not have had the means for livelihood. The problem therefore for them to solve was,--how was every family to be enabled to keep cows? The solution was found in the _Allmends_,--lands held and used in common. The natural summer pastures were common, and every burgher had the right to keep as many cows upon them in the summer as he had himself kept during the previous winter with the hay he had made from his labor-created and labor-maintained patch of cultivated ground, or, as it was called, prairies; or, if as yet he had no prairies, with the dried leaves and coarse stuff he had been able to collect from the common forest. This system was both necessary and fair. It originated in the nature of the country, and its then economical condition, and in turn it created the Swiss life and character. Every one knows La Fontaine’s story of Perrette going to the market to buy eggs; the eggs are hatched into chickens, the chickens produce a pig and then a calf, and the calf becomes a cow. This dream of Perrette’s is daily realized by the Swiss peasant farmer. He picks up grass and manure along the road; he raises rabbits, and with the money they bring he buys first a goat, then a pig, next a calf, by which he gets a cow producing calves in her turn. Milk is the great thing desired by the pastoral people, and not to possess a milk-giving animal is esteemed such a misfortune that, as a little solace to the poor, cream is in certain places regularly distributed to them on the third Sunday in August. Switzerland varies, through a decennial period, from thirty to thirty-five head of horned cattle to every hundred inhabitants,