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It is a matter in which every one is entitled to hold his own opinion. To say nothing of the other extant shreds of his writings and I never found any one who had anything to say for them I cannot account even the De Re Rustica as much higher in literary rank than a Farmers' and Gardeners' Calendar.
The only work of Cato's which has been preserved in its integrity is that variously known under the titles De Re Rustica or De Agri Cultura. It is one of a number of treatises of a severely didactic nature, which he published on various subjects agricultural, sanitary, military, and legal. This treatise was primarily written for a friend who owned and cultivated farms in Campania.
To wind up the feast, we had pipes of excellent mild yellow Chinese tobacco called "Tseang," made from Nicotiana rustica, which is cultivated in East Tibet, and in West China according to MM. Huc and Gabet. It resembles in flavour the finest Syrian tobacco, and is most agreeable when the smoke is passed through the nose.
Old Cato, whose "De Re Rustica" is my "Cultivator," says and the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage "When you think of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good."
This is the only sparrow found at Darjeeling. It has the habits of the house-sparrow. The sexes are alike in appearance. The head is chestnut and the cheeks are white. There is a black patch under the eye, and the chin and throat are black. The remainder of the plumage is very like that of the house-sparrow. Hirundo rustica. The common swallow. Hirundo nepalensis. Hodgson's striated swallow.
Excepting Varro, who was born but ten years before him, no earlier Latin prose writer has left more than a name to us; and the one work by which Varro is at all known, the De Re Rustica, was written after Cicero's death. Lucretius, whose language we regard as almost archaic, so unlike is it to that of Virgil or Horace, was born eight years after Cicero.
But your land and your own baby's care and milk will probably be enough for you to attend to promptly and thoroughly every day and night. It is an age-old experience that if we take care of a little land, the land will take care of us. In Ferrero's "Grandezza e Decadenza di Roma" is an interesting account of Marcus Terentius Varro's "De Re Rustica."
As regards the familia rustica, the working population of the farm, the evidence is much more definite. The old Roman farm, in which the paterfamilias lived with his wife, children, and slaves, was, no doubt, like the old English holding in a manor, for the most part self-sufficing, doing little in the way of sale or purchase, and worked by all the members of the familia, bond and free.
We think the light pipe-smoker will find a combination of German and Turkish smoking-tobaccoes a happy thought. The old smoker may secure the best union of delicacy and strength in the Virginia "natural leaf." Among the eight or ten species of the tobacco-plant now recognized by botanists, the Nicotiana tabacum and the Nicotiana rustica hold the chief place.
"If man be a bubble of air, it is then time that I should hasten my task; for my eightieth year admonishes me to get my baggage together ere I leave the world," wrote VARBO, in opening his curious treatise de Re Rustica, which the sage lived to finish, and which, after nearly two thousand years, the world possesses.
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