The Court of Assize holds its sittings in Bastia, and consists of three appeal-councillors, the procurator-general, and a clerk of court. It sits usually once every four months. There is a Tribunal of First Instance in the principal town of each arrondissement. There is also in each canton a justice of the peace. Each commune has a tribunal of simple municipal police, consisting of the mayor and his adjuncts. The ecclesiastical administration is subject to the diocese of Ajaccio, the bishop of which--the only one in Corsica--is a suffragan of the Archbishop of Aix. Corsica forms the seventeenth military division of France. Its head-quarters are in Bastia, where the general of the division resides. The gendarmerie, so important for Corsica, forms the seventeenth legion, and is also stationed in Bastia. It is composed of four companies, with four _chefs_, sixteen lieutenancies, and one hundred and two brigades. I add a few particulars in regard to agriculture and industrial affairs. Agriculture, the foundation of all national wealth, is very low in Corsica. This is very evident from the single fact, that the cultivated lands of the island amount to a trifle more than three-tenths of the surface. The exact area of the island is 874,741 hectars.[C] The progress of agriculture is infinitely retarded by family feuds, bandit-life, the community of land in the parishes, the want of roads, the great distance of the tilled grounds from the dwellings, the unwholesome atmosphere of the plains, and most of all by the Corsican indolence. Native industry is in a very languishing state. It is confined to the merest necessaries--the articles indispensable to the common handicrafts, and to sustenance; the women almost everywhere wear the coarse brown Corsican cloth (_panno Corso_), called also _pelvue_; the herdsmen prepare cheese, and a sort of cheesecake, called _broccio_; the only saltworks are in the Gulf of Porto Vecchio. There are anchovy, tunny, and coral fisheries on many parts of the coast, but they are not diligently pursued. The commerce of Corsica is equally trifling. The principle export is oil, which the island yields so abundantly, that with more cultivation it might produce to the value of sixty millions of francs; it also exports pulse, chestnuts, fish, fresh and salted, wood, dyeing plants, hides, corals, marble, a considerable amount of manufactured tobacco, especially cigars, for which the leaf is imported. The main imports are--grain of various kinds, as rye, wheat, and rice; sugar, coffee, cattle, cotton, lint, leather, wrought and unwrought iron, brick, glass, stoneware.