similar even at the present day; the pestilential atmosphere exists, but the peasant avoids its injurious effects by caution in reference to clothing, food, and the choice of his hours of labour. In fact, nothing is so certain a protection against the "aria cattiva" as wearing the fleece of animals and keeping a blazing fire; which explains why the Roman countryman constantly went clothed in heavy woollen stuffs, and never allowed the fire on his hearth to be extinguished. In other respects such a district must have appeared inviting to an immigrant agricultural people: the soil is easily laboured with mattock and hoe, and is productive even without being manured, although, tried by an Italian standard, it does not yield any extraordinary return: wheat yields on an average about five-fold.[1] Good water is not abundant: the higher and more sacred on that account was the esteem in which every fresh spring was held by the inhabitants.
Latin settlements. No accounts have been preserved of the mode in which the settlements of the Latins took place in the district which has since borne their name; and we are almost wholly left to gather what we can from à posteriori inference regarding them. Some knowledge may, however, in this way be gained, or at any rate some conjectures that wear an aspect of probability.
Clan-villages. The Roman territory was divided in the earliest times into a number of clan-districts, which were subsequently employed in the formation of the earliest "rural wards" (tribus rusticæ). Tradition informs us as to the tribus Claudia,- ↑ A French statist, Dureau de la Malle (Econ. Pol. des Romains, ii. 226), compares with the Roman Campagna the district of Limagne in Auvergne, which is likewise a wide, much intersected, and uneven plain, with a superficial soil of decomposed lava and ashes the remains of extinct volcanoes. The population, at least 2500 to the square league, is one of the densest to be found in purely agricultural districts: property is subdivided to an extraordinary extent. Tillage is carried on almost entirely by manual labour, with spade, hoe, or mattock; only in exceptional cases a light plough is substituted, drawn by two cows, the wife of the peasant not unfrequently taking the place of the cows in the yoke. The team serves at once to furnish milk and to till the land. They have two harvests in the year, corn and vegetables; there is no fallow. The average yearly rent for an arpent of arable land is 100 francs. If, instead of such an arrangement, this same land were to be divided among six or seven large landholders, and a system of management by stewards and day-labourers were to supersede the husbandry of the small proprietors, in a hundred years the Limagne would doubtless be as waste, forsaken, and miserable as the Campagna of Rome is at the present day.
