g of the
seventeenth, century. Potatoes and tomatoes were brought from
America; artichokes seem to be nothing but a cultivated variety of the
cardoon which was known to the Romans, yet the peculiar character
superinduced by cultivation appears of more recent origin. The
almond, again, or "Greek nut," the peach, or "Persian nut," and also
the "soft nut" (-nux mollusca-), although originally foreign to Italy,
are met with there at least 150 years before Christ. The date-palm,
introduced into Italy from Greece as into Greece from the East, and
forming a living attestation of the primitive commercial-religious
intercourse between the west and the east, was already cultivated in
Italy 300 years before Christ (Liv. x. 47; Pallad. v. 5, 2; xi. 12, i)
not for its fruit (Plin. H. N. xiii. 4, 26), but, just as in the
present day, as a handsome plant, and for the sake of the leaves which
were used at public festivals. The cherry, or fruit of Cerasus on the
Black Sea, was later in being introduced, and only began to be planted
in Italy in the time of Cicero, although the wild cherry is indigenous
there; still later, perhaps, came the apricot, or "Armenian plum." The
citron-tree was not cultivated in Italy till the later ages of the
empire; the orange was only introduced by the Moors in the twelfth or
thirteenth, and the aloe (Agave Americana) from America only in the
sixteenth, century. Cotton was first cultivated in Europe by the
Arabs. The buffalo also and the silkworm belong only to modern, not
to ancient Italy.

It is obvious that the products which Italy had not originally are for
the most part those very products which seem to us truly "Italian;"
and if modern Germany, as compared with the Germany visited by Caesar,
may be called a southern land, Italy has since in no less degree
acquired a "more southern" aspect.

2. II. III. Licinio-Sextian Laws

3. According to Cato, de R. R, 137 (comp. 16), in the case of a lease
with division of the produce the gross produce of the estate, after
deduction of the fodder necessary for the oxen that drew the plough,
was divided between lessor and lessee (-colonus partiarius-) in the
proportions agreed upon between them. That the shares were ordinarily
equal may be conjectured from the analogy of the French -bail a
cheptel- and the similar Italian system of half-and-half leases,
as well as from the absence of all trace of any other scheme of
partition. It is erroneous to refer t