reason for this marked
fertility of the cultivated soil should be mentioned, namely, that the
natives understand and fully appreciate the great value of manure, which
no artificial fertilizer can equal in permanent results. Like the
Chinese, the people here achieve excellent returns in agriculture by
deserving them. The most unwilling soil will succumb to such persevering
and intelligent treatment. The careful collection and application of
domestic refuse to the land is systematically pursued by the farmers,
which process is conducive to cleanliness and health as well as to good
husbandry, thus serving a twofold purpose.

Were the same liberal use of easily obtained enrichment, together with a
system of irrigation (also well understood in Malta), to be applied to
our constantly abandoned farms in New England, we should hear much less
grumbling as regards their sterility, while the returns which would be
realized in the shape of an ample harvest would liberally compensate for
all cost of time and labor. There is no zone where nature will do
everything for man; his work upon the farm is only begun with the
planting of the seed. The fact is, many of our farmers work on the
principle of the Kodak man,--"You touch the button, and we do the rest."
Sitting down in indolence and despair, such men wonder that their
utterly neglected lands do not yield better crops, talking the while
about rich fields and virgin soil which are supposed to exist somewhere,
far away in Utopia.

Until the author visited Malta, he thought that the British island of
Barbadoes, the farthest windward of the West Indian group, was the most
densely populated spot on the globe, but here we find human beings
numbering over thirteen hundred to the productive square mile. One
intelligent statistician places the population at fourteen hundred, but
the first estimate is quite extraordinary enough. As a matter of
comparison, it may be mentioned that the population of England averages
three hundred souls to a similar space. The steady increase of the
people in numbers speaks well for the average health of Malta, on whose
dry soil and in whose usually pure air children thrive and adults live
to an extreme old age. The residents have a saying that invalids are
obliged to go away to Nice or Mentone, on the mainland, to die, since no
one shuffles off this mortal coil by natural means in Malta. There is
certainly nothing in the local conditions or in the geographical