REPORT OF MR. FRANCIS H. APPLETON.
523
great piece of* labor, but Dr. Schmidt has conducted it most judiciously and artistically, as he previously did that of the large vineyards at Unterberkowitz. He afterwards laid out similar tracts at Liboch, Beraun, and Chrudim, and thus erected to himself an imperishable monument, while he infused new life into the Bohemian grape-culture.
Immediately on purchasing my estate, I paid particular attention to the care of the woods. The trees were judiciously thinned out, and the litter which formerly sold for $1,400 to $1,600 per year, was no longer removed.
The mulberry bushes planted between the rows of fruit- trees, in the hopes of some day introducing the silk-worm and serving at the time as a hedge, had to be removed, as they were destroyed by hares and rabbits.
The meadows lying near the Elbe are provided with facilities for irrigation. A movable engine, with a centrifugal pump, draws 2,700 cubic feet of w T ater per hour from the Elbe. It is also used to fill the pond of Mnekovina formerly existing in the Elbe suburb. This pond is furnished with a sluice and is filled immediately before the setting in of the frost’, in order to get ice for the brewery before it forms on the running water of the Elbe.
The banks of the Elbe are protected from injury through the water, by heaps of stones, fascines, and interlaced willow- work. ,
The swampy meadows and fields are sown wuth coarse grass, also the wider ditches. I have, further, two threshing- machines, driven by movable engines of ten to fourteen horsepower, which are also employed for cutting up straw. The field-hands have as much grain as they can thresh by hand.
After the North-western Railway had become a certainty, and the transportation of beets from a distance rendered a possibility, I determined, in the year 1869, to complete the sugar-factory commenced in the Elbe suburb of Kolin, and on which labor had been suspended for several years, for I felt that, without factories, farming can never give the highest returns possible otherwise to be reached.
It is through the influence of this feeling that so many sugar and alcohol-factories and distilleries have just come into existence. It is only to be ivished that the government