interesting and seemed so strange that Pliny himself wrote:

Flax is sowed only in sandy places and after a single
ploughing. Perhaps Egypt may be pardoned for sowing it,
because with it she buys the merchandise of India and Arabia.
But, look you!--even Gaul is famous for this plant. What
matters it, if huge mountains shut away the sea; if on the
ocean side it has for confines what is called emptiness?
Notwithstanding that, Gaul cultivates flax like Egypt: the
Cadurci, the Caleti, the Ruteni, the Biturigi, the Morini, who
are considered tribes of the ends of the earth ... but what am
I saying? All Gaul makes sails,--till the enemies beyond the
Rhine imitate them, and the linen is more beautiful to the
eyes than are their women.

These descriptions show Gaul to be one of the new countries, like the
Argentine Republic or the United States, in which the land has still
almost its natural pristine fecundity and brings forth a marvellous
abundance of plants that clothe and nourish man. We know that in Gaul
under the Empire there were immense fortunes in land in face of which
the fortunes of wealthy Italian proprietors shrink like the fortunes
of Europe when compared with the great ranch fortunes of the Argentine
Republic or the United States. Twenty years ago they began to excavate
in France the ruins of the great Gallo-Roman villas: these are
constructed on the plan of the Italian villa, decorated in the same
way, but are much larger, more sumptuous, more sightly; one feels
in them the pride of a new people which has adopted the Latin
civilisation, but has infused into that, derived from the wealth of
their land, a spirit of grandeur and of luxury that poorer and older
Latins did not know, exactly as to-day the Americans infuse a spirit
of greater magnitude and boldness into so many things that they take
from timid, old Europe. Perhaps there was also in this Gallic luxury,
as in the American, a bit of ostentation, intended to humiliate the
masters remaining poorer and more modest.

But Gaul was a nation not only rich in fertilest agriculture; side by
side with that, progressed its industry. This, according to my
notion, is one of the vital points in ancient history. Under the Roman
domination, Gaul was not restricted to the better cultivation of its
productive soil; but alone among the peoples of the Occident, became,
as we might now say, an industrial nation, that manufac