AND RURAL ECONOMY. 221

sometimes to a distance of one or two hundred versts. The
straw is consumed by the cattle, and is also used in the steppes,
where wood is scarce, for heating the stoves. There is, how-
ever, often a surplus, which is employed to make fences for
gardens, or embankments for ponds and marshes. Our roads
and highways not being stoned, the immense transports of
produce can, generally speaking, only be made in winter on
sledges. If the transport ever takes place in summer, it is
effected by means of oxen, the keep of which costs nothing,
since the road itself supplies them with pasture ; for it is no
less than two hundred and ten feet, or thirty sagines, wide, and
all as green as a meadow. These oxen, which are seldom
employed in tilling the land, but always in transporting goods,
come to us from the vast steppes of the Volga and the Don, and
from the Caucasus ; and this periodical influx of homed beasts,
which are brought in great numbers from all the confines of
the empire, is the source of frequent plagues and distempers,
which destroy our cattle and frustrate all our endeavours to
improve the breed. Some amateur agriculturists of large
fortune possess fine cattle, imported at a great expense from
England and Holland ; but all the profit, hitherto at least, has
been absorbed by the expense and precautions * necessary for
the preservation of these animals — precautions indeed which,
for the generality of proprietors, and still more for the peasants,
are totally out of the question. This is the reason why, with
our fine pastures and apparently with all the means of having an
excellent breed of homed cattle, we have nothing but poor and
miserable animals. With Merino sheep the case is very dif-
ferent ; our wools, indeed, are not first-rate, becauge at present
quantity is found more profitable than quality, and our cloth
factories are not yet adapted for manufacturing the fine sorts
of wool. The consequence is, that, while coarse wool affords
to the grower an immense profit, fine wool fetches less than
prime cost, and the owners of flocks of superior breeds are only
paid by the sale of rams. 