nd closes with the
assertion that it is a good field withal for patents. We cull from the
letter as follows:

I have lived, says the writer, for a number of years in this beautiful
country, so little understood by foreigners, so little appreciated by
its own inhabitants. The Spain of romance, poetry, and song, is the
garden as well as the California of Europe. But it stands in great
need of the health-giving touch of the North American enterprise. We
have here the same mineral treasures, the same unrivaled advantages of
climate, that made Spain once the industrial and commercial emporium
of the world.

But Spain is awakening. She is endeavoring to shake off her lethargy.
The late Exhibition of Paris has proved this; and those who are
familiar with the past history and present condition of Spain have
been astonished at the result of this effort. A new era has commenced
for the country, and it is everywhere evident that a strong current of
enterprise and industry has set in. But it is with nations, as with
individuals, when they have remained long in complete inaction, brain
and muscles are torpid and cannot at first obey the will. Spain needs
the assistance of other nations hardened and inured to toil.

The plows now used to till the land are precisely such as were those
left by the Moors in the unfinished furrow, when with tears and sighs
they bade farewell to their broad fields, their mosques and palaces,
whose ideal architecture is still the wonder of the world, to go forth
as outcasts and exiles in obedience to the cruel edict that drove them
away to the deserts of Africa.

I doubt whether there is an American plow in Spain, much less a steam
plow. Sowing and reaping machines are here unknown, and grain is tread
out by oxen and mules just as it was in Scripture times, and cleaned
by women, who toss it in the air to scatter the chaff. Everything is
primitive and Oriental here as yet.

Spain could supply all Europe with butter and cheese, and, on the
contrary, these articles are imported in large quantities from
England, Holland, and Switzerland. The traveler crosses leagues and
leagues of meadow land where not a tree is to be seen, nor one sheep
pasture, and which are nevertheless watered by broad rivers that carry
away to the ocean the water that would, by irrigation, convert these
fields into productive farms. There are many places in Spain where the
wine is thrown away for want of purchasers and vats in which