plined 70,000
infantry and 4000 cavalry after the fashion of legions; when a Roman,
after a century of devastating wars between the Rhine and the Elbe,
puts before us with great emphasis the powerful masses of the
Germans,--we may conclude that single tribes which, with their allies,
could sometimes bring into the field more than 100,000 warriors, must
have counted a population of hundreds of thousands. And we equally
approach to a second conclusion, that such a multitude in a narrowly
limited space, surrounded by warlike neighbours, could only exist by
means of a simple, perhaps, but regular and extensive cultivation of
field products. That the agriculture of the Germans should appear
meagre to the Romans, after the garden cultivation of Italy and Gaul,
is comprehensible; nevertheless they found corn, millet, wheat, and
barley; but the common corn of the country was oats, the meal of which
they despised, and rye, which Pliny calls an unpalatable growth of the
Alpine country, productive of colic. But in the year 301, the corn
which made the German black bread, was introduced as the third article
of commerce in the corn bourse of Greece and Asia Minor. And from
barley the German brewed his home drink, beer; he also brewed from
wheat.

Now we know that in the time of the Romans, most of the German races
lived in a condition similar to that in which it appears from records
they lived shortly after their great exodus, in the early centuries of
the Christian era: sometimes on single farms, but generally in enclosed
villages, with boundaries marked out by posts. They had a peculiar
method of laying out new village districts, and the Romans found it
difficult to understand the mode of farming customary to the country.
Probably the dwellers in the marshes near the North Sea had, as Pliny
writes, made the first simple dykes against the encroachments of the
water; already were their dwellings built on small hillocks, which, in
high tides, raised them above the water, and their sheep pastured in
the summer on the grass of the new alluvial soil;[2] but further from
the coast the peasant dwelt in his blockhouse, or within mud walls,
which he then loved to whitewash. Herds of swine lay in the shadows of
the woods,[3] horses and cattle grazed on the village meadows, and
long-woolled sheep on the dry declivities of the hills. Large flocks of
geese furnished down for soft pillows; the women wove linen on a simple
loom, and dyed it with