rnally
resist the relentless tooth of Time. Full of interest as is everything
in Venice, I do not remember to have detected there the effectual
working of a single idea of the last century, save in the Railroad,
which barely touches without enlivening her, the solitary steamboat
belonging to Trieste, and two or three larger gondolas marked
"_Omnibus_" this or that, which appeared to be conveying good loads of
passengers from one end of the city to the other for one-sixth or eighth
of the price which the same journey _solus_ cost me. The Omnibus
typifies ASSOCIATION--the simple but grandly fruitful idea which is
destined to renovate the world of Industry and Production, substituting
Abundance and Comfort for Penury and Misery. For Man, I trust, this
quickening word is yet seasonable; for Venice it is too late. It is far
easier to found two new cities than to restore one dead one. Fallen Queen
of the Adriatic! a long and mournful Adieu!

XXX.

LOMBARDY.

MILAN, Thursday, July 10, 1851.

Lombardy is of course the richest and most productive portion of Italy.
Piedmont alone vies with her, and is improving far more rapidly, but
Lombardy has great natural capacities peculiarly her own. Her soil,
fertile and easily tilled from the first, was long ago improved by a
system of irrigation which, probably from small and casual beginnings,
gradually overspread the whole table land, embracing, beside that of the
Adige, the broad valley of the Po and the narrower intervals of its many
tributaries, which, rushing down from the gorges of the Alps on the west
and the north, are skillfully conducted so as to refresh and fertilize
the whole plain, and, finding their way ultimately to the Po, are thence
drawn again by new canals to render like beneficence to the lower,
flatter intervals of Venezia and the Northern Papal States. Nowhere can
be found a region capable of supporting a larger population to the
square mile than Lombardy.

American Agriculture has just two arts to learn from Lombardy--IRRIGATION
and TREE-PLANTING. Nearly all our great intervales might be irrigated
immensely to the profit of their cultivators. Even where the vicinity of
mountains or other high grounds did not afford the facility here taken
advantage of, I am confident that many plains as well as valleys might be
profitably irrigated by lifting water to the requisite height and thence
distributing it through little canals or ditches as here. Where