horses are standing idle, so that, to farm fifty acres, you need to have one hundred broken, and crop it alternately, fifty each year.' Where such a system is pursued, the expenses of the whole acreage should be charged against the cropped portion, and this is never done in the fantastical estimates of the cost of wheat-growing in Manitoba and the rest of the Canadian NorthWest, which have appeared from time to time in English papers. According to Major Bell and his numerous English admirers, a large profit was obtained on the great Bell Farm, Qu'Appelle Valley, by growing wheat at 11s. 2d. a quarter. At least, it was said that 8 per cent. on the capital was returned by crediting that amount to each quarter grown. Unfortunately the Great Bell Farm has gone the way of nearly all the other "Mammoth farms' of the North American Continent, and has been placed in the market, as visitors to the Colonial Exhibition may have noticed. The shareholders apparently were not satisfied with 8 per cent.

There are always dissatisfied people in a colony ready to abuse it, and Manitoba can scarcely be so black as it has been painted by some writers, while it certainly is not the agricultural El Dorado depicted by others. The correspondent of an agricultural paper previously quoted said, in 1885, that there were 300 farms in a single county near Winnipeg, to be sold for taxes. That may have been an exaggeration; but that farms in considerable number in Ontario and Manitoba alike have been sold to satisfy the demands of tax-collectors is a fact beyond all dispute. When it is seen that the total value of agricultural products exported from Canada fell from 31 million dollars in 1881-2 to a little over 14 million in 1884-5, it would be strange indeed if the country had not suffered from agricultural depression.

Even if all the accounts of destitution among settlers in Manitoba be discredited, it is obvious that a country which has added to its wheat area less than 330,000 acres in five years, will be a long time in becoming the 'granary of the world.' The fact is, that nothing short of the prospect of a handsome fortune will tempt a large population to a colony far colder than Siberia, and it is certain that no fortunes have yet been made by wheat-growing in Manitoba. As in most parts of the United States, it is land-jobbing, and not farming, which has enriched the few who have made much money in the agricultural districts of that Colony.

Twenty years ago Chili and the Argentine Republic were each described as 'the future granary of the world.' From Chili

in

in 1874 we received over two million hundredweights of wheat, and, except in 1883, we have never received nearly as much from that country since. In 1886 the quantity was 1,701,695 cwts., or less than 400,000 qrs., not enough to feed the people of the United Kingdom for six out of the 365 days in a year. According to a recent Consular Report there has been very little advance in Chilian agriculture in recent years. The farmer still ploughs with a pointed piece of wood, and his harrow is a bundle of bushes. The yield of wheat averages about 4 bushels to the acre, including a large proportion of dirt. In 1880 the wheat area was about 6,000,000 acres, and there appeared to be no increase in 1885.

The Argentine Republic sent us 77,421 qrs. of wheat in 1885, a little over a day's consumption for the United Kingdom, and that is the largest quantity we have ever received from the country. Last year, wheat was so scarce in the Republic that it was 6s. 6d. per bushel of 56 lb., or 54s. per English quarter, and there were outcries for the removal of the duty of 40 per cent. levied on foreign wheat. The Buenos Ayres Standard' admits that the River Plate Provinces cannot compete with the United States in the production of wheat for export, and recommends the devotion of an increased proportion of the capital of the country to pastoral industry.

It has been too hastily assumed that, in the struggle for existence among wheat-growers, the British, the best farmers in the world, will not be among the fittest who will survive. The evidence adduced in the foregoing remarks appears to show this assumption to be unfounded. In all parts of the world, with the doubtful exception of India, wheat growers have been partly or wholly ruined by the long period of low prices, and British growers have only suffered with the rest. If we are to have another year of such low prices as had prevailed for three years up to the end of 1886, the wheat area of the world will probably be contracted by many millions of acres, and bread once more may become temporarily dear. At the time of writing, however, there is reason to expect a sufficient rise in the price of wheat to encourage farmers everywhere to sow at least their usual acreage for another year. A very great rise in price is neither to be expected nor desired, even in the interest of growers, as it would infallibly lead to over-production once more.

ART..

ART. VII.-1. Christophe Plantin, Imprimeur Anversois. Par Max Rooses, Conservateur du Musée Plantin-Moretus. Anvers, 1882.

2. Correspondance de Christophe Plantin. Publiée par Max Rooses. Anvers. Vol. I. 1883, Vol. II. 1885.

3. La Maison Plantin à Anvers. Monographie complète de cette Imprimerie célèbre, Documents historiques sur l'Imprimerie, etc. Par Léon Degeorge. Paris, 1886.

4. Annales Plantiniennes depuis la fondation de l'ImprimeriePlantinienne à Anvers jusqu'à la mort de Chr. Plantin. Par C. Ruelens et A. De Backer. Paris, 1866. 5. Catalogue du Musée Plantin-Moretus. Anvers, 1881.

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Par Max Rooses.

N the year 1876 the city of Antwerp, aided by a subvention from the State, purchased the Hotel Plantin, with its entire contents and dependencies, for one million two hundred thousand francs. Large as was the price, it cannot be deemed excessive; for the Musée Plantin-Moretus, as it is now called, is unique among European Museums. The building forms a large quadrangle, and the visitor on entering finds himself carried back to the days of Alva and Farnese. Through the ample, but not extravagant, apartments of a wealthy merchant's dwelling he passes into the offices and workshops requisite for the business of a royal printer, bookseller, and publisher. Pictures and portraits by Rubens and other Flemish artists decorate the walls. Engravings of singular merit and rarity hang in profusion and fill quaint oaken presses. Copper-plates and wooden blocks-head- and tail-pieces-initial letters of giant size and dainty device countless store of type, Hebrew, Greek, Gothic, Italian, Roman, cast in the days when type-founding was an art which, like so many of its sisters, sprang into perfection from its birth, in contemptuous disregard of modern theories of gradual development-matrices, and punches, and printing presses, all occupy the places they filled three centuries ago. The correctors' tables suggest the memory of the painstaking accuracy with which (as we shall see) not only learned men,. but young girls, pored over proofs of sacred and classic literature in the original Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The library contains a very large and valuable collection of impressions from the famous press whose issues were of high, in some cases of unparalleled, artistic merit, and many of whose slight brochures have become rarities. The shop recals the days. when a passing student could purchase for a trifle editions for which the book-hunter now sighs in vain. Yet this enumera

tion embraces but a tithe of the contents of the Musée Plantin. The archives of the firm contain thousands of documentsminutes of Plantin's entire correspondence, as well as a multitude of letters addressed to him; account-books, day-books, and ledgers; inventories, catalogues, and price-lists; records of payments to authors and correctors, to printers, engravers, bookbinders, and workmen of every craft; deeds of conveyance, contracts, privileges, and royal warrants; cahiers of the halfyearly fairs at Frankfort; current accounts with sovereigns, princes, and cardinals, as well as with ordinary mercantile correspondents at home and abroad. So vast is the mass of material, that M. Rooses does not exaggerate in affirming that no similar record is in existence of the life of any private person who lived three centuries ago.

A

Christopher Plantin was born near Tours, in the year 1514. He lost his mother at an early age, and his father, flying from the plague, which was raging in Touraine, migrated to Lyons, where he entered the service of Canon Claude Porret. boyish intimacy with Pierre Porret-a nephew of the Canonripened into a lifelong friendship, and proved of lasting service. The two lads set off for Paris to take advantage of its schools. Porret remained in the French capital, where he seems to have combined very considerable mercantile transactions with the practice of medicine. Plantin eventually apprenticed himself to a bookbinder at Caen, from whence he removed with his wife in 1548 or 1549 to Antwerp. In the following year he was enrolled on the list of burgesses, and was admitted as a printer into the guild of S. Luke.

Antwerp, at the period of Plantin's arrival, was the commercial capital of the Netherlands and of Europe. Two thousand vessels of the largest tonnage could anchor within its spacious harbours; yet so thronged were its quays, that ships had frequently to wait for weeks before they were able to discharge their cargoes. The wealth, luxury, and magnificence of the city were unrivalled throughout Western Europe, and all the arts of civilized life flourished in so favourable an atmosphere. A special quarter-the Kammerstraete-was the resort of all sections of the book trade, and here printers, booksellers, typefounders, bookbinders, and clasp-makers abounded, when Plantin settled amongst them. He commenced business modestly enough as a bookbinder and tanner of morocco; his wife, as a dealer in linen, and the lace for which the Low Countries had even then long enjoyed a European reputation. Plantin's skill in bookbinding and casket-making-in which he is said to have been unrivalled-soon attracted attention and made

him known, writes a contemporary, both to Mercury and the Muses, to the rich merchants and the men of learning,' when an accident threatened a premature conclusion to so promising

a career.

Signor Gabriel de Cayas, Secretary of Philip II., having occasion to send a jewel of great value to the Queen of Spain, had ordered a casket for it from Plantin, and shortly after giving him this commission he sent an earnest request that the box might be finished and delivered the same evening, as the royal courier would start for Madrid on the morrow at high tide. Accordingly at nightfall Plantin set out with the casket, accompanied by a servant carrying a torch. Presently he fell in with some masked and drunken revellers, who, mistaking him for a musician from whom they had received some real or imaginary affront, attacked and wounded him so severely, that his life was despaired of. The disaster proved a blessing in disguise, and changed the whole current of Plantin's life. It rendered him incapable of pursuing without serious inconvenience his old occupation, and induced him to adopt that of a printer, and it secured him the lasting friendship of two powerful champions, Goropius Becanus, his physician, and Secretary Cayas.

Abundant illustration is afforded, in Plantin's correspondence, of the difficulties by which, in his time, publishers and booksellers were beset. I thought you were aware,' he writes to an author who complained of delay in the publication of his works, that we are not permitted to send anything to the press, from a single epigram or a notelet to a voluminous work, until the entire book has been perused, approved, and countersigned by the theologians appointed for the purpose, and then we must further obtain the licence of the Court to print.' We shall advert presently to the severity of the decrees by which the censorship of the press was defined; but in addition to the sterner perils thus involved, a host of minor but irritating inconveniences arose in the administration of the law. At one time, the authorized censor might lose the manuscript sent for his perusal; at another, he might prove unacquainted with the language in which it was written; on a third occasion, when his approbation had been obtained, the Privy Council might be absent from Brussels on more urgent business than according permission to print an alphabet or an almanack. Not unfrequently the literary inquisitor was in the pay and interest of a rival publisher, and would purposely delay his imprimatur until the appearance of a competing edition had rendered useless all the pains and expense which had been incurred.

Vol. 164.-No. 328.