CHAP. III.: What Countries are best cultivated.

COUNTRIES are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty; and, if we make an imaginary division of the earth, we shall be astonished to see, in most ages, desarts in the most fruitful parts, and great nations in those where nature seems to refuse every thing.

It is natural for a people to leave a bad soil to seek a better; and not to leave a good soil to go in search of a worse. Most invasions have, therefore, been made in countries which nature seems to have formed for happiness; and, as nothing is more nearly allied than desolation and invasion, the best provinces are most frequently depopulated; while the frightful countries of the North continue always inhabited, from their being almost uninhabitable.

We find, by what historians tell us of the passage of the people of Scandinavia along the banks of the Danube, that this was not a conquest, but only a migration into desart countries.

These happy climates must, therefore, have been depopulated by other migrations, though we know not the tragical scenes that happened.

“It appears, by many monuments of antiquity, says Aristotle Or he who wrote the book De mirabilibus. ^†612, that the Sardinians were a Grecian colony. They were formerly very rich; and Aristeus, so famed for his love of agriculture, was their law-giver. But they are since fallen to decay; for the Carthaginians, becoming their masters, destroyed every thing proper for the nourishment of man, and forbade the cultivation of

the lands on pain of death.” Sardinia was not recovered in the time of Aristotle, nor is it to this day.

The most temperate parts of Persia, Turkey, Muscovy, and Poland, have not been able to recover perfectly from the devastations of the Tartars.