Skip to main content

Full text of "The earth as modified by human action : a last revision of "Man and nature""

See other formats 


A te Sp re eet 


a Ee 


ets 


eta rtyy 


Sed: 


pe 
t 


yess rr y 
sir test 
i ; 


ERS 


Ue? 
IErusaneat 
feartass 


ies i ea 
_. 


a 
| : . ; 
sss as 5d, 
se ie 
Liss 
a 42 
4), His 


sort 
ie 


<: 
Meer 
ont 


é 


< ie. 
; ~ =e 
Perr a A 
Wo Seaiher seat 
“Sarre eens, 
SI 


—S 
ae > 


Se 


rate 
Sate ee me 


158i 
ohh 
Ge 


A 
Ua 
nes Aa 
At en 


imen 
eon 


Ht 
Ss 


oy 


of 


oe 


Fists) 


Son Las 
i 


Age: 


Srotee 


a 


NA 


ibstle 
RAY 


me 


9) 


4 


SS Ze 


eo 
eee 


pos 
meee, 


ioe 
Rie ie - 
| 


es t 


‘ 
3555 


ik 2S fa 

ties psp Wy alba 
Dieae SHEYTy 

Hy ONS, 
Ves 


: cli 
Gh Naas 
; a 


St af) on 
HAR Os 
. . 

WER 


er 


~ 


ee ae 
ae . Ve : 
rf is ‘ 


iss 
Nae 


oe SeiT 


Vitae 


ee ae ae apes 


GI ee ee ee ; 
Fees 


a 


See See 
ae oS 


ees 
See 


nd Steen 
ere 


a a 
Meee 


we 
era 


23 


ate 


eek 


Ore? 
aero, 
aces 


oy 
eee 


a> Me 
ote 


eel 7 


ae 


Re 
Hoe : 


. 
a ts 


ean crass 


UP) 


ov 


ay 
Rens 
y AH ‘ 
dicate 
fe YS 
at 
FEISS : 
te 
i: 


sees 


a Set is fir See 


ERED. 
ie kode 


potest 
ey 
oe 


vm 
os 
“ade 


os Sars ahs, 
ooh: 


Bc ena AM et 


i) 


aya sit aie 
we a ; Pea 

ay, iy eek ri) 

re : yi Tatty} AN 


Hea a { 
ey 


= 


ers: 


re 


Ha 


alee “a 
BER i 


o 
fee, 


és ae ee 
& we a 


WHITNEY LIBRARY, 


HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 


THE GIFT OF 


dis) Ds Woh ToN-E.Y, 
Sturgis Hooper Professor 


IN THE 


MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. 
9494 


\ 
Ti ean \] 1, 1903 


dis Ay 


Pk 


J : , ry 4 
os antes 


on 


BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 


LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 
First Series, fourth edition, revised and enlarged. One 


vol, crown 8yo, half calf, $5; cloth, $3.00. 


THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH | 
Language, and of the Early Literature it Embodies. One 


vol, crown 8vo, half calf, $5; cloth, $3.00. 
Sent, post-paid, on receipt of price by the Publishers. 
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO., 


654 BRoapway, NEW York. 


THE WAdR 


AS 


LOD LET Wit y TeUNLAN ACTION: 


A NEW EDITION OF MAN AND NATURE. 


BY 


GEORGE P. MARSH. 


‘Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world, have 
done so much to revolutionize the earth as Man, the power of an endless life, has done since 
the day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it.”"—H. BUSHNELL, Sermon on the 
Power of an Endless Life. 


NE Via ta Cy tue 
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO., No. 654 BROADWAY. 
1874. 


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO., 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 


Joun F. Trow & Son, 
PRINTERS AND BOOKBINDERS, 
205 to 213 East Twelfth Street, 
New York. 


PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 


Tue object of the present volume is: to indicate the char- 
acter and, approximately, the extent of the changes produced 
by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we 
inhabit ; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the neces- 
sity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, inter- 
fere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the 
inorganic world; to suggest the possibility and the importance 
of the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material im- 
provement of waste and exhausted regions; and, incidentally, 
to illustrate the doctrine that man is, in both kind and degree, 
a power of a higher order than any of the other forms of ani- 
mated life, which, like him, are nourished at the table of boun- 
teous nature. 

In the rudest stages of life, man depends upon spontaneous 


o, and his 


animal and vegetable growth for food and clothing, 


consumption of such products consequently diminishes the nu- 
merical abundance of the species which serve his uses. At 


more advanced periods, he protects and propagates certain es 


iv PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 


culent vegetables and certain fowls and quadrupeds, and, at 
the same time, wars upon rival organisms which prey upon 
these objects of his care or obstruct the increase of their num- 
bers. Hence the action of man upon the organic world tends 
to derange its original balances, and while it reduces the num- 
bers of some species, or even extirpates them altogether, it mul- 
tiplies other forms of animal and vegetable life. 

The extension of agricultural and pastoral industry involves 
an enlargement of the sphere of man’s domain, by encroach- 
ment upon the forests which once covered the greater part of the 
earth’s surface otherwise adapted to his occupation. The fell- 
ing of the woods has been attended with momentous conse- 
quences to the drainage of the soil, to the external configura- 
tion of its surface, and probably, also, to local climate ; and 
the importance of human life as a transforming power is, per- 
haps, more clearly demonstrable in the influence man has thus 
exerted upon superficial geography than in any other result of 
his material effort. 

Lands won from the woods must be both drained and irri- 
gated; river-banks and maritime coasts must be secured by 
means of artificial bulwarks against inundation by inland and 
by ocean floods ; and the needs of commerce require the im- 
provement of natural and the construction of artificial chan- 
nels of navigation. Thus man is compelled to extend over the 
unstable waters the empire he had already founded upon the 
solid land. 

The upheaval of the bed of seas and the movements of 


water and of wind expose vast deposits of sand, which occupy 


PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. Vv 


space required for the convenience of man, and often, by the 
drifting of their particles, overwhelm the fields of human indus- 
try with invasions as disastrous as the incursions of the ocean. 
On the other hand, on many coasts, sand-hills both protect the 
shores from erosion by the waves and currents, and shelter 
yaluabie grounds from blasting sea-winds. Man, therefore, 
must sometimes resist, sometimes promote, the formation and 
growth of dunes, and subject the barren and flying sands to 
the same obedience to his will to which he has reduced other 
forms of terrestrial surface. 

Besides these old and comparatively familiar methods of 
material improvement, modern ambition aspires to yet grander 
achievements in the conquest of physical nature, and projects 
are meditated which quite eclipse the boldest enterprises hith- 
erto undertaken for the modification of geographical surface. 

The natural character of the various fields where human 
industry has effected revolutions so important, and where the 
multiplying population and the impoverished resources of the 
globe demand new triumphs of mind over matter, suggests a 
corresponding division of the general subject, and I have con- 
formed the distribution of the several topics to the chronologi- 
cal succession in which man must be supposed to have ex- 
tended his sway over the different provinces of his material 
kingdom. I have, then, in the introductory chapter, stated, 
in a comprehensive way, the general effects and the prospec- 
tive consequences of human action upon the earth’s surface 
and the life which peoples it. This chapter is followed by 


four others in which I have traced the history of man’s indus- 


vi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 


try as exerted upon Animal and Vegetable Life, upon the 
Woods, upon the Waters, and upon the Sands; and to these 
I have added a concluding chapter upon Man. 

It is perhaps superfluous to add, what indeed sufliciently 
appears upon every page of the volume, that I address myself 
not to professed physicists, but to the general intelligence of 
observing and thinking men; and that my purpose is rather to 
make practical suggestions than to indulge in theoretical specu- 
lations more properly suited to a different class from that for 
which I write. 

GEORGE P. MARSH. 

December 1, 1863. 


PREFACE TO THE PRESENT EDITION. 


In preparing for the press an Italian translation of this 
work, published at Florence in 1870, I made numerous correc- 
tions in the statement of both facts and opinions; I incorpo- 
rated into the text and introduced in notes a large amount of 
new data and other illustrative matter; I attempted to improve 
the method by differently arranging many of the minor subdi- 
visions of the chapters; and I suppressed a few passages which 
seemed to me superfluous. 

In the present edition, which is based on the Italian transla- 
tion, I have made many further corrections and changes of 
arrangement of the original matter; I have rewritten a con- 
siderable portion of the work, and have made, in the text and 
in notes, numerous and important additions, founded partly on 
observations of my own, partly on those of other students of 
Physical Geography, and though my general conclusions re- 
main substantially the same as those I first announced, yet IL 
think I may claim to have given greater completeness and a 


more consequent and logical form to the whole argument. 


Vili PREFACE TO THE PRESENT EDITION. 


Since the publication of the original edition, Mr. Elisée 
Reclus, in the second volume of his admirable work, La Terre 
(Paris, 1868), lately made accessible to English-reading stu- 
dents, has treated, in a general way, the subject I have under- 
taken to discuss. He has, however, occupied himself with the 
conservative and restorative, rather than with the destructive, 
effects of human industry, and he has drawn an attractive and 
encouraging picture of the ameliorating influences of the ac- 
tion of man, and of the compensations by which he, consciously 
or unconsciously, makes amends for the deterioration which he 
has produced in the medium he inhabits. The labors of 
Mr. Reclus, therefore, though aiming at a much higher and 
wider scope than I have had in view, are, in this particular 
point, a complement to my own. I earnestly recommend the 


work of this able writer to the attention of my readers. 


GEORGE P. MARSH. 
Rome, May 1, 1873. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST 


OF WORKS CONSULTED IN THE PREPARATION OF THIS VOLUME. 


Amersfoordt, J. P. Het Haarlemmermeer, Oorsprong, Geschiedenis, 
Droogmaking. Haarlem, 1857. 8yo. 

Andresen, C. C. Om Klitformationen og Klittens Behandling og Besty- 
relse. Kjébenhavn, 1861. 8vo. 

Annali di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio. Pubblicati per cura del 
Ministero d’Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio. Fasc i-v. Torino, 
1862-3. 8vo. 

Arago, F. Extracts from, in Becquerel, Des Climats. 

Arriani, Opera. Lipsiw, 1856. 2 vols. 12mo. 

Asbjérnsen, P. Chr. Om Skovene og om et ordnet Skovbrug i Norge. 
Christiania, 1855. 12mo. 

Aus der Natur. Die neuesten Entdeckungen auf dem Gebiete der Natur- 
wissenschaften. Leipzig, various years. 20 vols. 8vo. 

Avé-Lallemant, K. C. B. Die Benutzung der Palmen am Amazonenstrom 
in der Oeckonomie der Indier. Hamburg, 1861. 18mo, 

Babinet. Etudes et Lectures sur les Sciences d’Observation. Paris, 1855- 
1863. 7 vols. 18mo. 

Baer, von. Kaspische Studien. St. Petersburg, 1855-1859. 8vo. 

Barth, Heinrich. Wanderungen durcli die Kiistenliinder des Mittelmeeres. 
V.i. Berlin, 1849. 8vo. 

Barth, J. B. Om Skovene i deres Forhold til Nationaleeconomien. Chris- 
tiania, 1857. 8vo. 

Buaude, J. J. Les Cdtes de la Manche, Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 Jan- 
vier, 1859. 

Baumgarten. Notics sur les Rivicéres de la Lombardie; in Annales des 
Ponts et Chaussées, 1847, ler s¢mestre, pp. 129-199. 

Beckwith, Lieut. Repcrt in Pacific Railroad Report, vol. ii, 


x BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. 


Lecquerel. Des Climats et de I’Influence qu’exercent les Sols boisés et non- 
boisés. Paris, 1853. S8vo. 

Eléments de Physique Terrestre et de Météorologie. Paris, 1847. 
8vo. 

Belgrand. De VInfluence des Foréts sur l’écoulement des Eaux Pluviales; 
in Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1854, ler s¢mestre, pp. 1, 27. 
Berg, Edmund von. Das Verdriingen der Laubwiilder im Nérdlichen 
Deutschlande durch die Fichte und die Kiefer. Darmstadt, 1844. 

8vo. 

Bergsie, A. F. Greve Ch. Ditlevy Frederik Reventlovs Virksomhed som 
Kongens Embedsmand og Statens Borger. Kjébenhavn, 1837. 2 
vols. 8vo. 

Berlepsch, H. Die Alpen in Natur-und Lebensbildern. Leipzig, 1862. Syo. 

Bianchi, Celestino. Compendio di Geografia Fisica Speciale d'Italia. Ap- 
pendice alla traduzione Italiana della Geog.-Fisica di Maria Somerville. 
Firenze, 1861. (2d vol. of translation.) 

Bigelow, John. Les Etats Unis d’Amérique en 1863. Paris, 1863. 8vo. 

Blake, Wm. P. Reports in Pacific Railroad Report, vols. ii and v. 

Bianqui. Mémoire sur les Populations des Hautes Alpes; in Mémoires de 
l Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 1848. 

Voyage en Bulgarie. Paris, 1848. 12mo. 

Précis Elémentaire d’Economie Politique, suivi du Résumé de I’His- 
toire du Commerce et de Industrie. Paris, 1857. 12mo. 

Boitel, Amédée. Mise en valeur des Terres pauvres par le Pin Maritime. 
2d edition. Paris, 1857. 8vo. 

Bonnemére, Eugéne. Wistoire des Paysans depuis la fin du Moyen Age 
jusqu’a nos jours. Paris, 1856. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Bittger, C. Das Mittelmeer. Leipzig, 1859. 

Boussingault, J. B. Economie Rurale considerée dans ses Rapports avec 
la Chimie, la Physique, et la Métcorologie. 2d edition. Paris, 1851. 
2 vols. 8vo. 

Brémontier, N. T. Mémoire sur les Dunes; in Annales des Ponts et Chaus- 
sées, 1833, ler s¢mestre, pp. 145, 223. 

Brincken, J. von den. Ansichten tiber die Bewaldung der Steppen des 
Europeischen Russland. Braunschweig, 1854. 4to. 

Bittner, J. G. Zur Physikalischen Geographie; in Berghaus, Geo- 
graphisches Jahrbuch, No. iv, 1852, pp. 9-19. 

Caimi, Pietro. Oenni sulla Importanza e Oolttra dei Boschi. Milano, 
1857. 8vo. 

Cantegril, and others. Extracts in Comptes Rendus 4 ]’Académie des Sci- 
ences. Paris, 1861. 

Castellani. Dell immediata influenza delle Selve sul corso delle acque. 
Torino, 1818, 1819, 2 vols. 4to, 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. 5 al 


Census of the United States for 1860. Preliminary Report on, Washington, | 


1862. 8vo. | 
Cerini, Giuseppe. Dell’ Impianto e Conservazione dei Boschi. Milano,! 
1844. S8vo. 


Champion, Maurice. Les Inondations en France depuis le VIme Sitcie 
jusqu’a nos jours. Paris, 1858, 1862. Vols. i-iv, 8vo. | 

Chateauvieur, F. Lullin de. Lettressur Italie. Seconde edition, Genéve, 
1834. 8vo. 

Chevandier. Extracts in Comptes Rendus 4 l’Académie des Sciences. 
Juillet-Decembre, 1844. Paris. 

Clavé, Jules. Etudes sur Economie Forestitre. Paris, 1862. 12mo. 

La Forét de Fontainebleau ; Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 Mai, 1863. 

Cooper, J. G. The Forests and Trees of Northern America; in Report of 
the Commissioner of Patents for the year 1860, pp. 416 445. 

Cotta, Bernhard. Deutschlands Boden. Leipzig, 1858. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Vorwort zu Paramelle’s Quellenkunde. See Paramelle. 

Die Alpen. Leipzig, 1851. 8vo. 

Ooultas, Harland. What may be Learned from a Tree. New York, 1860. 
8vo. 

Courier, Paul-Louis, C&uvres Complttes. Bruxelles, 1833. 8vo. 

Dana, James D. Manual of Geology. Philadelphia, 1863. 8vo. 

Delamarre, L. G. Historique de Ja Création dune Richesse Millionaire 
par la culture des Pins. Paris, 1827. 8vo. 

D.Heéricourt, A. F. Les Inondations et le livre de M. Vallés; Annales 
Forestitres, December, 1857, pp. 310, 321. Paris. 

Diggelen, B. P. G. van. Groote Werken in Nederland. Zwolle, 1855. 
8vo. 

Dumas, MW. J. Wa Science des Fontaines. 2me edition, Paris, 1857. 8vo. 

Dumont, Aristide. Des Travaux Publics dans leurs Rapports avec lAgri- 
culture. Paris, 1847. S8vo. 

Dwight, Timothy. Travels in New England and New York. New Haven, 
1821. 4 vols. 8vo. 

Emerson, George B. A Report on the Trees and Shrubs growing naturally 
in Massachusetts. Boston, 1850. 8vo. 

Emory, Wm. H., Col. Report of Commissioners of the United States and 
Mexican Boundary Survey, vol. i, 1857. 

Escourrou-Miliago, A. L'Italie 4 propos de l’Exposition Universelle de 
Paris. Paris, 1856. 8vo. 

Evelyn, John. Silva; or, a Discourse of Forest Trees. With Notes by A. 
Hunter. York, 1786. 2 vols. 4to. 

Terra, a Philosophical Discourse of Earth. York, 1786. 4to. in 
vol. ii of Silva. 

Féraud-Giraud, L. J. D. Police des Bois, Défrichements et Reboisements 


xii BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIS'’ OF WORKS CONSULTED. 


Commentaire pratique sur les lois promulguées en 1859 et 1860. Paria, 
1861. 8vo. 

Ferrara, Francesco. Descrizione dell’ Etna. Palermo, 1818. 8vo. 

Feuillide, C. de. W’Algérie Francaise. Paris, 1856. 8vo. 

Figuier, Louis. VL’ Année Scientifique et Industrielle. Paris, 1862-3. 12mo., 

Finnboga Saga hins rama. Kaupmannahdfn, 1812. 4to. 

Foissac, P. Meteorologie mit Riicksicht auf die Lehre vom Kosmos, 
Deutsch von A. H. Emsmann. Leipzig, 1859. 8vo. 

Forchhammer, G. Geognostische Studien am Meeres-Ufer; in Leonhard 
und Bronn’s Neues Jahrbuch fiir Mineralogie, Geognosie, Geologie, etc. 
Jahrgang, 1841, pp. 1-38. 

Fossombroni, Vittorio. Memorie Idraulico-Storiche sopra la Val-di-Chiana, 
Montepulciano, 3za edizione, 1835. 8vo. 

Fraas, C. Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit. Landshut, 1847. 8vo. 

Frisi, Paolo. Del Modo diregolare i Fiumiei Torrenti. Lucca, 1762. 4to. 

Fuller, Thomas. The History of the Worthies of England. London, 1662. 
Folio. 

Gilliss, J. M., Capt. United States Naval Astronomical Expedition to the 
Southern Hemisphere. Washington, 1855. 2 vols. 4to. 

Giorgini. Paper by; in Salvagnoli-Marchetti, Rapporto sul Bonificamente 
delle Maremme, App. v. 

Girard et Parent-Duchatelet. Rapport sur les Puits forés dits Artésiens ; 
Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1833, 2me sémestre, 3138-344. 

Graham, J. D., Liewt.-Col. A Lunar Tidal Wave in the North American 
Lakes demonstrated. Cambridge, 1861. 8vo. pamphlet. Also in vol. 
xiv, Proc. Am. Ass. for Adv. of Science for 1860. 

Hakluyt, Richard. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, &c., of the Eng- 
lish Nation. London, 15989. 8 vols. folio. 

Harrison, W. An Historicall Description of the Iland of Britaine; in 
Holinshed’s Chronicles. Reprint of 1807, vol. i. 

Hartwig, G. Das Leben des Meeres, Frankfurt, 1857. 8vo. 

Haxthausen, August von. Transkaukasia. Leipzig, 1856. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Henry, Prof. Joseph. Paper on Meteorology in its connection with Agri- 
culture; in United States Patent Office Report for 1857, pp. 419-550. 

Herschel, Sir J. F. W. Physical Geography. Edinburgh, 1861. 12mo. 

Heyer, Gustav. Das Verhalten der Waldbiiume gegen Licht und Schatten. 
Erlangen, 1852. 8vo. 

Hohenstein, Adolph. Der Wald sammt dessen wichtigem Einfluss auf dag 
Klima, &e. Wien, 1860. 8vo. 

Humboldt, Alexander von. Ansichten der Natur. Dritte Ausgabe, Stutt- 
gart und Tibingen, 1849. 2 vols. 12mo. 

Hummel, Karl. Physische Geographie. Graz, 1855. 8vo. 

Hunter, A. Notes to Evelyn, Silva, and Terra. York, 1786. See Avelyn. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. xill 


Jacini, Stefano. a Proprieta Fondiaria e le Popolazioni agricole in Lom- 
bardia. Milano e Verona, 1857. 8vo. 

Joinville. Histoire de Saint-Louis. Nouvelle Collection des Mémoires 
pour servir 4 l’Histoire de France, par Michaud et Poujoulat. Tomei. 
Paris, 1836. 8vo. 

Josselyn, John. New England Rarities. London, 1672. 12mo. 

Knorr, £. A. Studien iiber die Buchen-Wirthschaft. Nordhausen, 1863. 
8yvo. 

Kohl, J. G. Alpenreisen. Dresden und Leipzig, 1849. 38 vols. 8vo. 

Die Marschen und InseJn der Herzogthiimer Schleswig und Hol- 
stein. Dresden und Leipzig, 1846. 3 vols. 8vo. 

Kramer, Gustav. Der Fuciner-See. Berlin, 1839. 4to. 

Krause, G. C. A. Der Diinenbau auf den Ostsee-Kiisten West-Preussens. 
1850. 8vo. 

Kremer, Alfred von. /&gypten, Forschungen tiber Land und Volk. Leip- 
zig, 1868. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Kriegk, G. Z. Schriften zur allgemeinen Erdkunde. Leipzig, 1840. 8vo. 
Ladoucette, J. C. F. Histoire, Topographie, Antiquités, Usages, Dialectes 
des Hautes Alpes. Seconde édition, i834. 1 vol. 8vo. and Atlas. 
Lestadius, Lars Levi. Om Méjligheten och Férdelen af allminna Uppod- 

lingar i Lappmarken. Stockholm, 1824. 12mo. 

Lestadius, Petrus. Journal fir férsta aret af hans Tjenstgéring sasom 
Missionaire i Lappmarken. Stockholm, 1831. 8vyo. 

Fortsittning af Journalen éfver Missions-Resor i Lappmarken. 
Stockholm, 1833. 8vo. 

Lampridius. Vita Elagabali in Script. Hist., August. 

Landgrebe, Georg. Naturgeschichte der Vuleane. Gotha, 1855. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Laurent, Ch. Mémoires sur le Sahara Oriental au point de vue des Puits 
Artésiens. Paris, 1859. 8vo. pamphlet. Also, in Mém de la Soe. des 
Ingénieurs Civils, and the Bulletin de la Soc. Géologique de France. 

Laval. Mémoire sur les Dunes du Golfe de Gascogne; in Annales des Ponts 
et Chaussées, 1847, 2me sémestre, pp. 218-268. 

Lavergne, M. L. de. Economie Rurale de la France, depuis 1789. 2me 
édition, Paris, 1861. 12mo. 

Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia. Parte ler, vol. ler. Torino, 1845. 8vo. 

Lefort. Notice sur les travaux de Fixation des Dunes; in Annales des Ponts 
et Chaussées, 1831, 2me sémestre, pp. 320-832. 

Lenormant. Note relative 4 l’Execution d’un Puits Artésien en Egypte 
sous la XVIII™ Dynastie; Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 
12 Novembre, 1852. 

Liber Albus: The White Book of the City of London. London, 1861. 4to. 

Loftus, W. K. Travels and Researches in Chaldsea and Susiana. New 
York, 1857. 8vo. 


X1V BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. 


Lombardini. Cenni Idrografi sulla Lombardia; Intorno al Sistema Idraulico 
del P6; epitomized by Baumgarten in Annales des Ponts et Chaussées. 
1847, ler sémestre, pp. 129, 199; and in Dumont, Des Travaux Pub- 
lics, pp. 268, 335. 

Sui progetti intesi ad estendere Virrigazione della Pianura del P6. 
Politecnico. Gennajo, 1863, pp. 5-50. 

Lorentz. Cours Elémentaire de Culture des Bois, complété et publie par 
A. Parade, 4me edition. Paris et Nancy, 1860. 8vo. 

Lyell, Sir Charles. The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man. 
London, 1863. 8vo. Principles of Geology. New York, 1862. 8vo. 

Mardigny, M. de. Mémoire sur les Inondations des Rivitres de l Ardéche. 
Paris, 1860. 8vo. 

Marschand, A. Ueber die Entwaldung der Gebirge. Bern, 1849. 12mo. 
pamphlet. 

Martineau. Endeavors after the Christian Life. Boston, 1858. 

Martins. Revue des Deux Mondes, Avril, 1863. 

Maury, M. F. The Physical Geography of the Sea. Tenth edition. Lon- 
don, 1861. 8vo. 

Medlicott, Dr. Observations of, quoted from London Athenzum, 1863. 

Meguscher, Francesco. Memorie sulla migliore maniera per rimettere i 
Boschi della Lombardia, etc. Milano, 1859. S8vo. 

Mejdell, Th. Om Foranstaltninger til Behandling af Norges Skove. Chris- 
tiania, 1858. 8vo. 

Mella. Delle Inondazioni del Mella nella notte del 14 al 15 Agosto, 1850. 
Brescia, 1851. 8vo. 

Meyer, J. Physik der Schweiz. Leipzig, 1854. 8vo. 

Michelet, J. L’Insecte, 4me edition. Paris, 1860. 12mo. 

L’Oiseau, 7me edition. Paris, 1861. 12mo. 

Monestier-Savignat, A. Etude sur les Phénomtnes, l’Aménagement et la 
Législation des Eaux au point de vue des Inondations. Paris, 1858. 8vo. 

Montluisant. Note sur les Desséchements, les Endiguements et les Irri- 
gations; in Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1833, 2me sémestre, pp. 
281-294. 

Morozzi, Ferdinando. Dello Stato Antico e Moderno del Fiume Arno. 
Firenze, 1762. 4to. 

Miller, K. Das Buch der Pflanzenwelt. Leipzig, 1857. 2 vols. 12mo. 

Nangis, Guillaume de, Extracts from, in Nouvelle Collection des Mémoires 
pour servir par Michaud et Poujoulat. Vol. i. Paris, 1836. 

Nanquette, Henri. Cours d’Aménagement des Foréts. Paris et Nancy, 
1860. 8vo. 

Newberry, Dr. Report in Pacific Railroad Report, vol. vi. 

Niebelunge-Lied, Der. Abdruck der Handschrift von Joseph von Lassberg. 
Leipzig, 1840. Folio. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. XV 


Nicl. Agriculture des Etats Sardes. Turin, 1857. 8vo. 

Pacific Railroad Report. Reports of Explorations and Surveys for a Rail- 
road Route to the Pacific. Washington, various years. 12 vols. 4to. 

Palissy, Bernard. uvres Completes, avec des Notes, etc., par Paul- 
Antoine Cap. Paris, 1844. 12mo. 

Parade, A. See Lorentz. 

Paramelle, Abbé. Quellenkunde, Lehre von der Bildung und Auffindung 
der Quellen; mit einem Vorwort von B. Cotta. Leipzig, 1856. 12mo. 

Parish, Dr. Wife of Dr. Eleazer Wheelock. 8vo. 

Parry, C. C. Report in United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, vol. i. 

Purthey, G. Wanderungen durch Sicilien und die Levante. Berlin, 1834. 
2 vols. 12mo. 

Piper, R. U. The Trees of America. Boston, 1858, Nos. i-iv. 4to. 

Plinii, Historia Naturalis, ed. Hardouin. Paris, 1723. 3 vols. folio. 

Ponz, Antonio, Viage de Espafa. Madrid, 1788, ete. 18 vols. 12mo. 

Quatrefages, A. de. Souvenirs d’un Naturaliste. Paris, 1854. 2 vols. 12mo. 

Reclus, Elisée. Le Littoral de la France; Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 De- 
cembre, 1862. 

Rentzsch, Hermann. Der Wald im Haushalt der Natur und der Volks- 
wirthschaft. Leipzig, 1862. S8vo. 

Ribbe, Charles de. La Provence au point de vue des Bois, des Torrents et 
des Inondations. Paris, 1857. 8vo. 

Ridolfi, Cosimo. Lezioni Orali. Firenze, 1862. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Ritter, Carl. Einleitung zur allgemeinen vergleichenden Geographie. 
Berlin, 185%. 8vo. 

Die Erdkunde im Verhiiltniss zur Natur und zur Geschichte des 
Menschen. Berlin, various years. 19 vols. 8vo. 

Rosa, G. Le Condizioni de’ boschi, de’ fiumi e de’ torrenti nella provincia 
di Bergamo. Politecnico, Dicembre, 1861, pp. 606, 621. 

Studii sui Boschi. Peclitecnico, Maggio, 1862, pp. 232, 238. 

Rossmissler, C.A. Der Wald. Leipzig und Heidelberg, 1863. 8vo. 

Roth, J. Der Vesuv und die Umgebung von Neapel. Berlin, 1857. 8vo. 

Fozet, IM. Moyens de forcer les Torrents des Montagnes de rendre une 
partie du sol qwils ravagent. Paris, 1856. 8vo. pamphlet. 

Salvagnoli-Marchetti, Antonio. Memorie Economico-Statistiche sulle Ma- 
remme Toscane. Firenze, 1846. 8vo. 

Raccolta di Documenti sul Bonificamento delle Maremme Toscane. 

Firenze, 1861. 8vo. 

Rapporto sul Bonificamento delle Maremme Toscane. Firenze, 

1859. 8vo. 

Rapporto sulle Operazioni Idrauliche ed Economiche eseguite nel 

1859-’60 nelle Maremme Toscane. Firenze, 1860. 8vo. 


xvi BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. 


Sandys, George. A Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610. Lon. 
don, 1627. Folio. 

Schacht, H. Wes Arbres, Etudes sur leur Structure et leur Végétation, 
traduit par E. Morren. Bruxelles et Leipzig, 1862. 8vo. 

Schleiden, M. J. Die Landenge von Sués. Leipzig, 1858. 8vo. 

Die Pflanze und ihr Leben. Leipzig, 1848. 8vo. 

Schubert, W. von. Resa genom Sverige, Norrige, Lappland, ete. Stocks 
holm, 1823. 3 vols. 8vo. 

Seneca, L. A. Opera Omnia que supersunt, ex rec. Ruhkopf. Aug. Tauri- 
norum, 1831. 6 vois. 8vo. 

Simonde, J. E. L. Tableau de l’Agriculture Toscane. Genéve, 1801. 8vo. 

Smith, Dr. William. A Dictionary of the Bible. London, 1860. 3 vols. 
8vo. 

A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. London, 1854, 
1857. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Smith, John. Historie of Virginia. London, 1624. Folio. 

Somerville, Mary. Physical Geography. Fifth edition. London, 1862. 
12mo. 

Springer, John 8. Forest-Life and Forest-Trees. New York, 1851. 12mo, 

Stanley, Dr. Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church. London, 
1863. 8vo. 

Staring, W. H. De Bodem van Nederland. Haarlem, 1856. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Voormaals en Thans. Haarlem, 1858. 8vo. 

Stevens, Gov. Report in Pacific Railroad Report, vol. xii. 

Strain, Lieut. J. C. Darien Exploring Expedition, by J. T. Headley, in 
Harper’s Magazine. New York, March, April, and May, 1855. 

Strefieur, V. Ueber die Natur und die Wirkungen der Wildbiiche. Sitz. 
Ber. der M. N. W. Classe der Kaiserl. Akad. der Wis. February, 1852, 
viii, p. 248. 

Strom, Isr. Om Skogarnas Vard och Skotsel. Upsala, 1853. Pamphlet. 

Surell, Alezondre. ‘Etude sur les Torrents des Hautes Alpes. Paris, 
1844. Ato. 

Tartini, Ferdinando. Memorie sul Bonificamento delle Maremme Toscane. 
Firenze, 1888. Folio. 

Thomas and Baldwin. Gazetteer. Philadelphia, 1855. 1 vol. 8vo. 

Thompson, Z. History of Vermont, Natural, Civil, and Statistical. Bur. 
lington, 1842. 8vo. 

Appendix to History of Vermont. Burlington, 1853. 8vo. 

Titcomb, Timothy. Lessons in Life. New York, 1861. 12mo. 

Treadwell, Dr. Observations of, quoted from Report of Commissioner of 
Patents. 

Troy, Paul. Etude sur le Reboisement des Montagnes. Paris et Toulouse, 
1861. 8yvo. pamphlet. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED. xvii 


Tschudi, Friedrich von. Ueber die Landwirthschaftliche Bedeutung der 
Vogel. St. Gallen, 1854. 12mo. 

Tschudi, J. J. von. Travelsin Peru. New York, 1848. 8vo. 

Vallés, M. F. Etudes sur les Inondations, leurs causes et leurs effets, 
Paris, 1857. 8vo. 

Valoasor, Johann Weichard. Die Ehre des Herzogthums Crain. Laybach, 
1689. 4 vols. folio. 

Van Lennep. Extracts from Journal of, in the Missionary Herald. 

Vaupell, Chr. Boégens Indvandring ide Danske Skove. Kjébenhavn, 1857. 
8vo. 

De Nordsjellandske Skovmoser. Kjébenhavn, 1851. 4to. pamphlet. 

Venema, G. A. Over het Dalen van de Noordelijke Kuststreken van ons 
Land. Groningen, 1854. 8vo. 

Villa, Antonio Giovanni Batt.  Necessiti dei Boschi nella Lombardia. 
Milano, 1850. 4to. 

Viollet, J. B. Théorie des Puits Artésiens. Paris, 1840. 8vo. 

Waltershausen, W. Sartorius von. Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau 
Gottingen, 1863. 

Webster, Noah. A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary, and Moral 
Subjects. New York, 1843. 8vo. 

Wessely, Joseph. Die Oesterreichischen Alpenliinder und ihre Forste. 
Wien, 1853. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Wetestein, J. G. Reisebericht tiber Hauran und die Trachonen. Berlin, 
1860. 8vo. 

Wild, Albert. Die Niederlande. Leipzig, 1862. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Wilhelm, Gustav. Der Boden und das Wasser.. Wien, 1861. 8vo. 

Williams, Dr. History of Vermont. 2 vols. 8vo. 

Wittwer, W. C. Die Physikalische Geographie. Leipzig, 1855. 8vo. 

Young, Arthur. Voyages en France, pendant les années 1787, 1788, 1789, 
précédée d’une introduction par Lavergne. Paris, 1860. 2 vols. 12mo. 

Voyages en Italie et en Espagne, pendant les années 1787, 1789. 

Paris, 1860. 1 vol. 12mo. 


« al a ‘y 
: fi 
as 


‘ial ems rs 


. in hit 
ye aie ned 6 


: mo" re i 
ties Lit: Rit a 
whavie wid. Adh Spye, aa 
. an f vfi-ty bit 53 Ait ; 

“ne | 


in wr tbs 


an pA Rat ae 
& pe cease ad one 
sd F 
an ing a 
aaa re) 4 le i 
=) bi oa wy y 


nyt" 
Rt 


TABLE OF CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER I. 


INTRODUCTORY. 
PAGE 
Natural Advantages of the Territory of the Roman Empire—Physical 


Decay of that Territory—Causes of the Decay—Reaction of Man on 
Nature—-Observation of Nature—Uncertainty of Our Historical 
Knowledge of Ancient Climates—Uncertainty of Modern Meteoro- 
logy—Stability of Nature—Formation of Bogs—Natural Condi- 
tions Favorable to Geographical Change—Destructiveness of Man— 
Human and Brute Action Compared—Limits of Human Power— 
Importance of Physical Conservation and Restoration—Uncertainty 
as to Effects of Human Action......... Sereet=te BMcioorn ond code oe 1 


CHAPTER II. 


TRANSFER, MODIFICATION, AND EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLE AND OF 
ANIMAL SPECIES, 


Modern Geography takes Account of Organic Life—Geographical Impor- 
tance of Plants—Origin of Domestic Vegetables—Transfer of Vege- 
table Life—Objects of Modern Commerce—Foreign Plants, how In- 
troduced—Vegetable Power of Accommodation—Agricultural Pro- 
ducts of the United States—Useful American Plants Grown in Eu- 
rope—Kxtirpation of Vegetables—Animal Life as a Geological and 
Geographical Agency—Origin and Transfer of Domestic Quadrupeds 
—Extirpation of Wild Quadrupeds—Large Marine Animals Relatively 
Unimportant in Geography—Introduction and Breeding of Fish— 
Destruction of Fish—Geographical Importance of Birds—Introduction 
of Birds—Destruction of Birds—Utility and Destruction of Reptiles 
—-Utility of Insects and Worms—Injury to the Forest by Insects—In- 
troduction of Insects—Destruction of Insects—Minute Organisms... 56 


xX 


TABLE OF CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER III. 


THE WOODS. 


The Habitable Earth Originally Wooded—General Meteorological Influence 


of the Forest—Electrical Action of Trees—Chemical Influence of 
Woods—Trees as Protection against Malaria—Trees as Shelter to 
Ground to the Leeward—Influence of the Forest as Inorganic on 
Temperature—Thermometrical Action of Trees as Organic—Total 
Influence of the Forest on Temperature—Influence of Forests as In- 
organic on Humidity of Air and Earth—Influence as Organic—Balance 
of Conflicting Influences—Influence of Woods on Precipitation—Total 
Climatic Action of the Forest—Influence of the Forest on Humidity 
of Soil—The Forest in Winter—Summer Rain, Importance of—In- 
fluence of the Forest on the Flow of Springs—Influence of the Forest 
on Inundations and Torrents—Destructive Action of Torrents—Floods 


PAGE 


of the Ardéche—Excavation by Torrents—Extinction of Torrents— . 


Crushing Force of Torrents—Transporting Power of Water—The Po 
and its Deposits—Mountain Slides—Forest as Protection against 
Avalanches—Minor Uses of the Forest—Small Forest Plants and 
Vitality of Seeds—Locusts do not Breed in Forests—General Func- 
tions of Forest—General Consequences of Destruction of—Due Propor- 
tion of Woodland—Proportion of Woodland in European Countries— 
Forests of Great Britain—Forests of France—Forests of Italy— 
Forests of Germany—Forests of United States—American Forest 
Trees—Huropean and American Forest Trees Compared—The Forest 
does not furnish Food for Man—First Removal of the Forest—Prin- 
cipal Causes of Destruction of Forest—Destruction and Protection of 
Forests by Governments—Royal Forests and Game-laws—Effects of 
the French Revolution—Increased Demand for Lumber—Effects of 
Burning Forest—Floating of Timber—Restoration of the Forest— 
Economy of the Forest—Forest Legislation—Plantation of Forests 
in America—Financial Results of Forest Plantations—Instability 
DEVAMPTICAD TILE I, oct ss ws fe, sleccisie SE miele mioidia cite’ Bene sete) s atime 


CHAPTER IV. 


THE WATERS. 


Land Artificially Won from the Waters—Great Works of Material Improve- 


ment—Draining of Lincolnshire Fens—Incursions of the Sea in the 
Netherlands—Origin of Sea-dikes—Gain and Loss of Land in the Neth- 
erlands—Marine Deposits on the Coast of Netherlands—Draining of 
Lake of Haarlem—Draining of the Zuiderzee—Geographical Effects of 


148 


TABLE OF CONTENTS. XXxi 


; PAGE 
Improvements in the Netherlands—Ancient Hydraulic Works—Drain- 


ing of Lake Celano by Prince Torlonia—Incidental Consequences of 
Draining Lakes—Draining of Marshes—Agricultural Draining—Meteor- 
ological Effects of Draining—Geographical Effects of Draining—Geo- 
graphical Effects of Aqueducts and Canals—Antiquity of Irrigation— 
Lrrigation in Palestine, India, and Egypt—Ivrigation in Europe—Me- 
teorological Effects of Irrigation—Water withdrawn from Rivers for 
Trrigation—Injurious Effects of Rice-culture—Salts Deposited by 
Water of Irrigation—Subterranean Waters—Artesian Wells—Artificial 
Springs—Economizing Precipitation—Inundations in France—Basins 
of Reception—Diversion of Rivers—Glacier Lakes—River Embank- 
ments—Other Remedies against Inundations—Dikes of the Nile—De- 
posits of Tuscan Rivers—Improvements in Tuscan Maremma—Im- 
provements in Val di Chiana—Coast of the Netherlands......... .. 398 


CHAPTER: V: 


THE SANDS. 


Origin of Sand—Sand now Carried to the Sea—Beach Sands of Northern 
Africa—Sands of Egypt—Sand Dunes and Sand Plains—Coast Dunes 
—Sand Banks—Character of Dune Sand—Interior Structure of 
Dunes—Geological Importance of Dunes—Dunes on American Coasts 
—Dunes of Western Europe—Age, Character, and Permanence of 
Dunes—Dunes as a Barrier against the Sea—-Eucroachments of the 
Sea—Liimfjord—Coasts of Schieswig-Holstein, Netherlands, and 
France—Moyement of Dunes—Control of Dunes by Man—Inland 
Dunes-—Iniand) Sand! Plains: (4-1. <1) \edefarawerea/ss «la: sls| ois <)</as sie sce sete’ ote 545 


CHATTER VE 


GREAT PROJECTS OF PHYSICAL CHANGE ACCOMPLISHED OR PROPOSED 
BY MAN. 


Cutting of Isthmuses—Canal of Suez—Maritime Canals in Greece—Canals 
to Dead Sea—Canals to Libyan Desert—Maritime Canals in Europe 
—Cape Cod Canal—Changes in Caspian—Diversion of the Nile—Diver- 
sion of the Rhine—Improvements in North American Hydrography 
—Soil below Rock—Covering Rock with Harth—Desert Valleys— 
Effects of Mining—Duponchel’s Plans of Improvement—Action of 
Man on the Weather—Resistance to Great Natural Forces—Incidental 
Effects of Human Action—Nothing Smallin Nature........... Meters (609 


ed ° 7 
x > 
LY 


Bat. te A884 "2 
“aa 


. oer 
i eed Jr wore Avera resent a 
| tM es ei they at nett alk Yo a 
121) CURES STE ea aR DR a sieuttses toy" anki ging ea 
to i Aw: gaa ee eta al ie Rie Sigal 
Hal ag pan My High: ©» nhs Tit ete. 


ee ie, toh Dy A 
ae hy Bib sidal, ¢ Bis». ay ine 
eae le xc rm Valet aa Reap hts Ww obit 

Hin i‘ Ahi snare sgeaal Rar paved oanneyi 

ie h f Lae lan ® 

Ey Ses en 


Bal pier naar | uy ae 
ay ee ra ae eal: pig ey vasaeyh theo Lira wee ae 
ier it, xe cpap Mime, ake Mapa ay IVD a ne ik 
%; £ PR ‘ae Vee pebaeny endl. aii payee Wiki Gia 
a, ace WAI ee Jae MS ae Nee, i Zed 


ra)? ein Riki sa Ore 4 AOL AY Ai Af Sere UP 
ey 


” ; Re rhc dh 4 orev Adee me KEUUATS ts st eng 


at) reareney willy yoo Me vn cies Ly GOmbr i 
vane Ky We ae *: Se ba ae meme Kea cae se) 7 a 
v MTT. . i) i). 
‘ae SPU, nite svi stele noel HG ia\ eet y. 
mee: Wha 24 gh wc 2hl Chapa Sale ir appncagsmed hay vo reg ell Pore Mar Ar ve 
Brn 5c Otay anf Alli aden pce ance ET Ag ARR BED Nac 
i ERR 0A Seg mTAEY a aah AL Napcosetl nie rseggin ET dil a aa eee? 
cng AACN TEAM itp e, Mesteatuldaelit MA Raa nD oa ved ldyy ude ; 
“tik ith et nh Me eR Yat jal 
“atepuagesaenttin ipl ned oR inertia sraatteit 
huey ile ital _ aM) Racing ae 


medina 
ead Sor dazgahls rte i 


Pee) BL AARED EL. 


AS MO DIED. BY). MAW AC TRON. 


CHAPTER I. 


INTRODUCTORY. 


Natural Advantages of the Territory of the Roman Empire.—Physical Decay 
of that Territory.—Causes of the Decay.—Reaction of Man on Nature.— 
Observation of Nature.—Uncertainty of Our Historical Knowledge of 
Ancient Climates,—Uncertainty of Modern Meteorology.—Stability of 
Nature.—Formation of Bogs.—Natural Conditions Favorable to Geogra- 
phical Change.—Destructiveness of Man.—Human and Brute Action 
Compared.—Limits of Human Power.—Importance of Physical Conser- 
vation and Restoration.—Uncertainty as to Effects of Human Action. 


Natural Advantages of the Territory of the Roman Empire. 


Tut Roman Empire, at the period of its greatest expansion, 
comprised the regions of the earth most distinguished by a 
happy combination of physical conditions. The provinces bor- 
dering on the principal and the secondary basins of the Medi- 
terranean enjoyed in healthfulness and equability of climate, in 
fertility of soil, in variety of vegetable and mineral products, 
and in natural facilities for the transportation and distribution 
of exchangeable commodities, advantages which have not been 
possessed in any equal degree by any territory of like extent 
in the Old World or the New. The abundance of the land and 
of the waters adequately supplied every material want, minis- 
tered liberally to every sensuous enjoyment. Gold and silver, 
indeed, were not found in the profusion which has proved so 
baneful to the industry of lands richer in veins of the precious 


2) THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 


metals; but mines and river beds yielded them in the spare 
measure most favorable to stability of value in the medium of 
exchange, and, consequently, to the regularity of commercial 
transactions. The ornaments of the barbaric pride of the 
East, the pearl, the ruby, the sapphire, and the diamond— 
though not unknown to the luxury of a people whose conquests 
and whose wealth commanded whatever the habitable world 
could contribute to augment the material splendor of their 
social life—were scarcely native to the territory of the empire ; 
but the comparative rarity of these gems in Europe, at some- 
what earlier periods, was, perhaps, the very circumstance that 
led the cunning artists of classic antiquity to enrich softer stones 
with engravings, which invest the common onyx and cornelian 
with a worth surpassing, in cultivated eyes, the lustre of the 
most brilliant oriental jewels. 

Of these manifold blessings the temperature of the air, the 
distribution of the rains, the relative disposition of land and 
water, the plenty of the sea, the composition of the soil, and 
the raw material of the primitive arts, were wholly gratuitous 
gifts. Yet the spontaneous nature of Europe, of Western 
Asia, of Libya, neither fed nor clothed the civilized inhabitants 
of those provinces. The luxuriant harvests of cereals that 
waved on every field from the shores of the Rhine to the banks 
of the Nile, the vines that festooned the hillsides of Syria, of 
Italy and of Greece, the olives of Spain, the fruits of the gar- 
dens of the Hesperides, the domestic quadrupeds and fowls 
known in ancient rural husbandry—all these were original pro- 
ducts of foreign climes, naturalized in new homes, and gradu- 
ally ennobled by the art of man, while centuries of persevering 
labor were expelling the wild vegetation, and fitting the earth 
for the production of more generous growths. Every loaf was 
eaten in the sweat of the brow. All must be earned by toil. 
But toil was nowhere else rewarded by so generous wages; for 
nowhere would a given amount of intelligent labor produce so 
abundant, and, at the same time,so varied returns of the good 
things of material existence. 


PHYSICAL DECAY OF ROMAN EMPIRE. 3 


Physical Decay of the Territory of the Roman Empire. 


If we compare the present physical condition of the coun- 
tries of which I am speaking, with the descriptions that ancient 
historians and geographers have given of their fertility and 
general capability of ministering to human uses, we shall find 
that more than one-half their whole extent—not excluding the 
provinces most celebrated for the profusion and variety of 
their spontaneous and their cultivated products, and for the 
wealth and social advancement of their inhabitants—is either 
deserted by civilized man and surrendered to hopeless desola- 
lation, or at least greatly reduced in both productiveness and 
population. Vast forests have disappeared from mountain 
spurs and ridges; the vegetable earth accumulated beneath 
the trees by the decay of leaves and fallen trunks, the soil of 
the alpine pastures which skirted and indented the woods, and 
the mould of the upland fields, are washed away ; meadows, 
once fertilized by irrigation, are waste and wnproductive be- 
cause the cisterns and reservoirs that supplied the ancient 
canals are broken, or the springs that fed them dried up; rivers 
famous in history and song have shrunk to humble brooklets ; 
the willows that ornamented and protected the banks of the 
lesser watercourses are gone, and the rivulets have ceased to 
exist as perennial currents, because the little water that finds 
its way into their old channels is evaporated by the droughts of 
summer, or absorbed by the parched earth before it reaches 
the lowlands; the beds of the brooks have widened into broad 
expanses of pebbles and gravel, over which, though in the hot 
season passed dryshod, in winter sealike torrents thunder ; 
the entrances of navigable streams are obstructed by sandbars ; 
and harbors, once marts of an extensive commerce, are shoaled 
by the deposits of the rivers at whose mouths they lie; the 
elevation of the beds of estuaries, and the consequently dimin- 
ished velocity and increased lateral spread of the streams which 
flow into them, have converted thousands of leagues of shallow 


4 PHYSICAL DECAY OF ROMAN EMPIRE. 


sea and fertile lowland into unproductive and miasmatic mo- 
rasses. 

Besides the direct testimony of history to the ancient fer- 
tility of the now exhausted regions to which I refer—Northern 
Africa, the greater Arabian peninsula, Syria, Mesopotamia, Ar- 
menia and many other provinces of Asia Minor, Greece, Sicily, 
and parts of even Italy and Spain—the multitude and extent 
of yet remaining architectural ruins, and of decayed works of 
internal improvement, show that at former epochs a dense pop- 
ulation inhabited those now lonely districts. Such a popula- 
tion could have been sustained only by a productiveness of soil 
of which we at present discover but slender traces; and the 
abundance derived from that fertility serves to explain how 
large armies, like those of the ancient Persians, and of the Cru- 
saders and the Tartars in later ages, could, without an organ- 
_ ized commissariat, secure adequate supplies in long marches 
through territories which, in our times, would scarcely afford 
forage for a single regiment. 

It appears then, that the fairest and fruitfulest provinces 
of the Roman Empire, precisely that portion of terrestrial sur- 
face, in short, which, about the commencement of the Chris- 
tian era, was endowed with the greatest superiority of soil, 
climate, and position, which had been carried to the highest 
pitch of physical improvement, and which thus combined the 
natural and artificial conditions best fitting it for the habita- 
tion and enjoyment of a dense and highly refined and cultivated 
population, are now completely exhausted of their fertility, or 
so diminished in productiveness, as, with the exception of a few 
favored oases that have escaped the general ruin, to be no 
longer capable of affording sustenance to civilized man. If to 
this realm of desolation we add the now wasted and solitary 
soils of Persia and the remoter East that once fed their millions 
with milk and honey, we shall see that a territory larger than 
all Europe, the abundance of which sustained in bygone centu- 
ries a population scarcely inferior to that of the whole Christian 
world at the present day, has been entirely withdrawn from 


CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. 5 


human use, or, at best, is thinly inhabited by tribes too few in 
numbers, too poor in superfluous products, and too little ad- 
vanced in culture and the social arts, to contribute anything to 
the general moral or material interests of the great common- 
wealth of man. 


Causes of this Decay. 


The decay of these once flourishing countries is partly due, 
no doubt, to that class of geological causes whose action we can 
neither resist nor guide, and partly also to the direct violence 
of hostile human force; but it is, in a far greater proportion, 
either the result of man’s ignorant disregard of the laws of 
nature, or an incidental consequence of war and of civil and 
ecclesiastical tyranny and misrule. Next to ignorance of these 
laws, the primitive source, the causa causarum, of the acts and 
neglects which have blasted with sterility and physical decrepi- 
tude the noblest half of the empire of the Ceesars, is, first, the bru- 
tal and exhausting despotism which Rome herself exercised over 
her conquered kingdoms, and even over her Italian territory ; 
then, the host of temporal and spiritual tyrannies which she 
left as her dying curse to all her wide dominion, and which, in 
some form of violence or of fraud, still brood over almost 
every soil subdued by the Roman legions.* Man cannot 


* In the Middle Ages, feudalism, and a nominal Christianity, whose corrup- 
tions had converted the most beneficent of religions into the most baneful of 
superstitions, perpetuated every abuse of Roman tyranny, and added new 
oppressions and new methods of extortion to those invented by older despot- 
isms. The burdens in question fell most heavily on the provinces that had 
been longest colonized by the Latin race, and these are the portions of Europe 
which have suffered the greatest physical degradation. ‘‘ Feudalism,” says 
Blanqui, ‘‘ was a concentration of scourges. The peasant, stripped of the 
inheritance of his fathers, became the property of inflexible, ignorant, indo- 
lent masters ; he was obliged to travel fifty leagues with their carts whenever 
they required it; he labored for them three days in the week, and surrendered 
to them half the product of his earnings during the other three; without 
their consent he could not change his residence, or marry. And why, indeed, 
should he wish to marry, when he could scarcely save enough to maintain 


6 CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. 


struggle at once against human oppression and the destructive 
forces of inorganic nature. When both are combined against 
him, he succumbs after a shorter or longer struggle, and the 
fields he has won from the primeval wood relapse into their 
original state of wild and luxuriant, but unprofitable forest 
growth, or fall into that of a dry and barren wilderness. 


himself ? The Abbot Alcuin had twenty thousand slaves, called serfs, who 
were forever attached to the soil. This is the great cause of the rapid depop- 
ulation observed in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of mon- 
asteries which sprang up on every side. It was doubtless a relief to such 
miserable men to find in the cloisters a retreat from oppression; but the human 
race never suffered a more cruel outrage, industry never received a wound 
better calculated to plunge the world again into the darkness of the rudest 
antiquity. It suffices to say that the prediction of the approaching end of the 
world, industriously spread by the rapacious monks at this time, was received 
without terror.” — Résumé de I) Histoire du Commerce, p. 1656. 

The abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which, in the time of Charlemagne, 
had possessed a million of acres, was, down to the Reyolution, still so 
wealthy, that the personal income of the abbot was 300,000 livres. The abbey 
of Saint-Denis was nearly as rich as that of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.— 
LAVERGNE, Economie Rurale dela France, p. 104. 

Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruyére the following striking picture of 
the condition of the French peasantry in his time: ‘‘ One sees certain dark, 
livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scattered over the 
country and attached to the soil, which they root and turn over with indomi- 
table perseverance. They have, as it were, an articulate voice, and when 
they rise to their feet, they show a human face. They are, in fact, men}; 
they creep at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots, 
They spare other men the labor of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting, and 
therefore deserve some small share of the bread they have grown.” ‘* These 
are his own words,” adds Courier, ‘‘and he is speaking of the fortunate 
peasants, of those who had work and bread, and they were then the few.”— 
Péitition d la Chambre des Députés pour les Villageois que Ven empéche de danser. 

Arthur Young, who travelled in France from 1787 to 1789, gives, in the 
twenty-first chapter of his Travels, a frightful account of the burdens of the 
rural population even at that late period. Besides the regular governmental 
taxes, and a multitude of heavy fines imposed for trifling offences, he 
enumerates about thirty seignorial rights, the very origin and nature of some 
of which are now unknown, while those of some others are as repulsive to 
humanity and morality, as the worst abuses ever practised by heathen 
despotism. But Young underrates the number of these oppressive impo- 
sitions. Moreau de Jonnés, a higher authority, asserts that in a brief exam- 


CAUSES OF PHYSICAL DECAY. fi 


Rome imposed on the products of agricultural labor in the 
rural districts taxes which the sale of the entire harvest would 
scarcely discharge; she drained them of their population by 
military conscription; she impoverished the peasantry by 
forced and unpaid labor on public works; she hampered 
industry and both foreign and internal commerce by absurd 
restrictions and unwise regulations.* Hence, large tracts of 
land were left uncultivated, or altogether deserted, and exposed 
to all the destructive forces which act with such energy on the 
surface of the earth when it is deprived of those protections by 
which nature originally guarded it, and for which, in well- 
ordered husbandry, human ingennity has contrived more or less 
efficient substitutes.t Similar abuses have tended to perpetuate 
and extend these evils in later ages, and it is but recently that, 
even in the most populous parts of Europe, public attention 


ination he had discovered upwards of three hundred distinct rights of the 
feudatory over the person or the property of his vassal. See Htat Economique 
et Sociai de la France, Paris, 1870, p. 389. Most of these, indeed, had been 
commuted for money payments, and were levied on the peasantry as pecuniary 
imposts for the benefit of prelates and lay lords, who, by virtue of their nobil- 
ity, were exempt from taxation. The collection of the taxes was enforced with 
unrelenting severity. On one occasion, in the reign of Louis XIV., the troops 
sent out against the recreant peasants made more than 3,000 prisoners, of whom 
409 were condemned to the galleys for life, and a number so large that the 
government did not dare to disclose it, were hung on trees or broken on the 
wheel.—_MornAvU DE Jonnis, “tat Economique et Social de la France, p. 420. 
Who can wonder at the hostility of the French plebeian classes towards the 
aristocracy in the days of the Revolution ? 

* Commerce, in common with all gainful occupations except agriculture, was 
despised by the Romans, and the exercise of it was forbidden to the higher 
ranks. Cicero, however, admits that though retail trade, which could only 
prosper by lying and knavery, was contemptible, yet wholesale commerce was 
not altogether to be condemned, and might even be laudable, provided the 
merchant retired early from trade and invested his gains in farm lands.—De 
Officits, lib. i., 42. 

+ The temporary depopulation of an exhausted soil may be, in some cases, 
a physical, though, like fallows in agriculture, a dear-bought advantage. 
Under favorable circumstances, the withdrawal of man and his flocks allows 
the earth to clothe itself again with forests, and in a few generations to 
recover its ancient productiveness. In the Middle Ages, worn-out fields were 


§ REACTION OF MAN ON NATURE. 


has been half awakened to the necessity of restoring the dis- 
turbed harmonies of nature, whose well-balanced influences are 
so propitious to all her organic offspring, and of repaying to our 
great mother the debt which the prodigality and the thrift- 
lessness of former generations have imposed upon their succes- 
sors—thus fulfilling the command of religion and of practical 
wisdom, to use this world as not abusing it. 


Reaction of Man on Nature. 


The revolutions of the seasons, with their alternations of 
temperature and of length of day and night, the climates of 
different zones, and the general conditions and movements of 
the atmosphere and the seas, depend upon causes for the most 
part cosmical, and, of course, wholly beyond our control. The 
elevation, configuration, and composition of the great masses 
of terrestrial surface, and the relative extent and distribution 
of land and water, are determined by geological influences 
equally remote from our jurisdiction. It would hence seem 
that the physical adaptation of different portions of the earth 
to the use and enjoyment of man is a matter so strictly belong- 
ing to mightier than human powers, that we can only accept 
geographical nature as we find her, and be content with such 
soils and such skies as she spontaneously offers. 

But it is certain that man has reacted upon organized and 
inorganic nature, and thereby modified, if not determined, the 
material structure of his earthly home. The measure of that 
reaction manifestly constitutes a very important element in the 
appreciation of the relations between mind and matter, as well 
as in the discussion of many purely physical problems. But 
though the subject has been incidentally touched upon by 


depopulated, in many parts of the Continent, by civil and ecclesiastical 
tyrannies, which insisted on the surrender of the half of a loaf already too 
small to sustain its producer. Thus abandoned, these lands often relapsed 
into the forest state, and, some centuries later, were again brought under 
cultivation with renovated fertility. 


REACTION OF MAN ON NATURE. 9 


many geographers, and treated with much fulness of detail in 
regard to certain limited fields of human effort and to certain 
specific effects of human action, it has not, as a whole, so far 
as | know, been made matter of special observation, or of his- 
torical research, by any scientific inquirer. Indeed, until the 
influence of geographical conditions upon human life was 
recognized as a distinct branch of* philosophical investigation, 
there was no motive for the pursuit of such speculations; and 
it was desirable to inquire how far we have, or can, become 
the architects of our own abiding place, only when it was 
known how the mode of our physical, moral, and intellectual 
being is affected by the character of the home which Provi- 
dence has appointed, and we have fashioned, for our material 
habitation.* 

It is still too early to attempt scientific method in discussing 
this problem, nor is our present store of the necessary facts by 
any means complete enough to warrant me in promising any 
approach to fulness of statement respecting them. Systematic 
observation in relation to this subject has hardly yet begun, 
and the scattered data which have chanced to be recorded have 
never been collected. It has now no place in the general 
scheme of physical science, and is matter of suggestion and 
speculation only, not of established and positive conclusion. 
At present, then, all that I can hope isto excite an interest in 
a topic of much economical importance, by pointing ont the 
directions and illustrating the modes in which human action 
has been, or may be, most injurious or most beneficial in its 
influence upon the physical conditions of the earth we inhabit. 

We cannot always distinguish between the results of man’s 
action and the effects of purely geological or cosmical causes. 
The destruction of the forests, the drainage of lakes and marsh- 
es, and the operations of rural husbandry and industrial art have 


* Gods Almagt wenkte van den troon, 
En schiep elk volk een land ter woon : 
Hier vestte Zij een grondgebied, 

Dat Zij ons zelyen scheppen liet, 


10 INFLUENCE OF HUMAN ACTION. 


unquestionably tended to produce great changes in the hygro- 
metric, thermometric, electric, and chemical condition of the 
atmosphere, though we are not yet able to measure the force of 
the different elements of disturbance, or to say how far they 
have been neutralised by each other, or by still obscurer infiu- 
ences; and it is equally certain that the myriad forms of animal 
and vegetable life, which covered the earth when man first en- 
tered upon the theatre of a nature whose harmonies he was 
destined to derange, have been, through his interference, greatly 
changed in numerical proportion, sometimes much modified in 
form and product, and sometimes entirely extirpated.* 


* Man has not only subverted the natural numerical relations of wild as well 
as domestic quadrupeds, fish, birds, reptiles, insects, and common plants, and 
even of still humbler tribes of animal and vegetable life, but he has effected 
in the forms, habits, nutriment and products of the organisms which minister 
to his wants and his pleasures, changes which, more than any other manifesta- 
tion of human energy, resemble the exercise of a creative power. Even wild 
animals have been compelled by him, through the destruction of plants and 
insects which furnished their proper aliment, to resort to food belonging to 
a different kingdom of nature. Thus a New Zealand bird, originally gran- 
ivorous and insectivorous, has become carnivorous, from the want of its natural 
supplies, and now tears the fleeces from the backs of the sheep, in order to 
feed on their living flesh. 

All these changes have exercised more or less direct or indirect action on 
the inorganic surface of the globe; and the history of the geographical revo- 
lutions thus produced would furnish ample material for a volume. 

The modification of organic species by domestication is a branch of philo- 
sophic inquiry which we may almost say has been created by Darwin; but 
the geographical results of these modifications do not appear to have yet been 
made a subject of scientific investigation. 

I do not know that the following passage from Pliny has ever been cited in 
connection with the Darwinian theories, but it is worth a reference : 

‘* But behold a very strange and new fashion of them [cucumbers] in Cam- 
pane, for there you shall have abundance of them come up in forme of a 
Quince. And as I heare say, one of them chaunced so to grow first at a very 
venture; but afterwards from the seed of it came a whole race and progenie 
of the like, which therefore they call Melopopones, as a man would say, the 
Quince-pompions or cucumbers.”—PLiny, Vat. Hist., Holland’s translation, 
book xix., ¢. 5. 

The word cucumis used in the original of this passage embraces many of 
the cucurbitacee, but the context shows that it here means the cucumber. 


OBSERVATION OF NATURE. 11 


The physical revolutions thus wrought by man have not in- 
deed all been destructive to human interests, and the heaviest 
blows he has inflicted upon nature have not been wholly with- 
out their compensations. Soils to which no nutritious vege- 
table was indigenous, countries which once brought forth but 
the fewest products suited for the sustenance and comfort of 
man—while the severity of their ¢limates created and stimu- 
lated the greatest number and the most imperious urgency of 
physical wants—surfaces the most rugged and intractable, and 
least blessed with natural facilities of communication, have 
been brought in modern times to yield and distribute all that 
supplies the material necessities, all that contributes to the sen- 
suous enjoyments and conveniences of civilized life. The 
Scythia, the Thule, the Britain, the Germany, and the Gaul 
which the Roman writers describe in such forbidding terms, 
have been brought almost to rival the native luxuriance and 
easily won plenty of Southern Italy; and, while the fountains 
of oil and wine that refreshed old Greece and Syria and 
Northern Africa have almost ceased to flow, and the soils of 
those fair lands are turned to thirsty and inhospitable deserts, 
the hyperborean regions of Europe have learned to conquer, 
or rather compensate, the rigors of climate, and have attained 
to a material wealth and variety of product that, with all their 
natural advantages, the granaries of the ancient world can 
hardly be said to have enjoyed. 


Observation of Nature. 


In these pages it is my aim to stimulate, not to satisfy, curl- 
osity, and it is no part of my object to save my readers the labor 
of observation or of thought. For labor is life, and 


Death lives where power lives unused.* 


Self is the schoolmaster whose lessons are best worth his wages; 
and since the subject I am considering has not yet become a 


* Verses addressed by G. C. to Sir Walter Raleigh.—HAxkuvyt, i., p. 668, 


12 OBSERVATION OF NATURE. 


branch of formal instruction, those whom it may interest can, 
fortunately, have no pedagogue but themselves. To the natu- 
ral philosopher, the descriptive poet, the painter, the sculptor, 
and indeed every earnest observer, the power most important 
to cultivate, and, at the same time, hardest to acquire, is that of 
seeing what is before him. Sight is a faculty; seeing, an art. 
The eye is a physical but not a self-acting apparatus, and in 
general it sees only what it seeks. Like a mirror, it reflects 
objects presented to it; but it may be as insensible as a mirror, 
and not consciously perceive what it refiects.* 

It has been maintained by high authority, that the natural 
acuteness of our sensuous faculties cannot be heightened by 
use, and hence, that the minutest details of the image formed 
on the retina are as perfect in the most untrained as in the 
most thoroughly disciplined organ. This may be questioned, 
and it is agreed on all hands that the power of multifarious 
perception and rapid discrimination may be immensely in- 
creased by well-directed practice.t This exercise of the eye 


I troer, at Synets Sands er lagt i Oiet, 

Mens dette kun er Redskab. Synet strémmer 

Fra Sjzlens Dyb, og Oiets fine Nerver 

Gaae ud fra Hjernens hemmelige Verksted. 

HENRIK HERTZ, Kong René’s Datter, sc. ii. 


In the material eye, you think, sight lodgeth! 

The eye is but an organ. Seeing streameth 

From the soul’s inmost depths. The fine perceptive 
Nerve springeth from the brain’s mysterious workshop. 

+ Skill in marksmanship, whether with firearms or with other projectile wea- 
pons, depends more upon the training of the eye than is generally supposed, and 
Thave often found particularly good shots to possess an almost telescopic vision. 
In the ordinary use of the rifle, the barrel is guided by the eye, but there are 
sportsmen who fire with the butt of the gun at the hip. In this case, as in 
the use of the sling, the lasso, and the bolas, in hurling the knife (see BABI- 
NET, Lectures, vii., p. 84), in throwing the boomerang, the javelin, or a stone, 
and in the employment of the blowpipe and the bow, the movements of the 
hand and arm are guided by that mysterious sympathy which exists between 
the eye and the unseeing organs of the body. 

‘‘Some men wonder whye, in casting a man’s eye at the marke, the hand 


OBSERVATION OF NATURE. 13 


I desire to promote, and, next to moral and religious doctrine, 
I know no more important practical lessons in this earthly life 
of ours—which, to the wise man, is a school from the cradle to 
the grave—than those relating to the employment of the sense 
of vision in the study of nature. 

The pursuit of physical geography, embracing actual observa- 
tion of terrestrial surface, affords to the eye the best general train- 
ing that is accessible to all. The majority of even cultivated men 
have not the time and means of acquiring anything beyond a 
very superficial acquaintance with any branch of physical know- 
ledge. Natural science has become so vastly extended, its re- 
corded facts and its unanswered questions so immensely multi- 
plied, that every strictly scientific man must be a specialist, and 
confine the researches of a whole life within a comparatively 
narrow circle. The study I am recommending, in the view I pro- 


should go streighte. Surely if he considered the nature of a man’s eye he 
would not wonder at it: for this I am certaine of, that no servaunt to his 
maister, no childe to his father, is so obedient, as every joynte and peece of 
the bodye is to do whatsover the eye biddes,”—RoGER Ascuam, Toxophilus, 
Book ii. 

In shooting the tortoises of the Amazon and its tributaries, the Indians use 
an arrow with a long twine and a float attached to it. Avé-Lallemant (Die 
Benutzung der Palmen am Amazonenstrom, p. 32) thus describes their mode of 
aiming: ‘‘ As the arrow, if aimed directly at the floating tortoise, would strike 
it at a small angle and glance from its flat and wet shell, the archers have a 
peculiar method of shooting. They are able to calculate exactly their own 
muscular effort, the velocity of the stream, the distance and size of the tor- 
toise, and they shoot the arrow directly up into the air, so that it falls almost 
vertically upon the shell of the tortoise, and sticks in it.” Analogous calcula- 
tions—if such physico-mental operations can properly be so called—are made 
in the use of other missiles; for no projectile flies in a right line to its mark. 
But the exact training of the eye lies at the bottom of them all, and marks- 
manship depends almost wholly upon the power of that organ, whose direc- 
tions the blind muscles implicitly follow. Savages accustomed only to the 
use of the bow become good shots with firearms after very little practice. 
It is perhaps not out of place to observe here that our English word aim 
comes from the Latin estimo, I calculate or estimate. See WEDGWwooD’s Dic- 
tionary of English Etymology, and the note to the American edition, under 
Aim. 

Another proof of the control of the limbs by the eye has been observed in 


14 MEASUREMENT OF MAN’S INFLUENCE. 


pose to take of it, is yet in that imperfectly developed state 
which allows its votaries to occupy themselves with broad and 
general views attainable by every person of culture, and it does 
not now require a knowledge of special details which only years 
of application can master. It may be profitably pursued by 
all; and every traveller, every lover of rural scenery, every agri- 
culturist, who will wisely use the gift of sight, may add valuable 
contributions to the common stock of knowledge on a subject 
which, as I hope to convince my readers, though long neglected, 
and now inartificially presented, is not only a very important 
but a very interesting field of inquiry. 


Measurement of Man's Influence. 


The exact measurement of the geographical and climatic 
changes hitherto effected by man is impracticable, and we pos- 
sess, in relation to them, the means of only qualitative, not 
quantitative analysis. The fact of such revolutions is established 


deaf-and-dumb schools, and others where pupils are first taught to write on 
large slates or blackboards. The writing is in large characters, the small 
letters being an inch or more high. They are formed with chalk or a slate 
pencil firmly grasped in the fingers, and by appropriate motions of the wrist, 
elbow, and shoulder, not of the finger joints. Nevertheless, when a pen is 
put into the hand of a pupil thus taught, his handwriting, though produced 
by a totally different set of muscles and muscular movements, is identical in 
character with that which he has practised on the blackboard. 

For a very remarkable account of the restoration of vision impaired from 
age, by judicious training, see Lessons in Life, by TrmoTHy TITCOMB, les- 
son xi, 

It has been much doubted whether the artists of the classic ages possessed 
amore perfect sight than those of modern times, or whether, in executing 
their minute mosaics and gem engravings, they used magnifiers. Glasses 
ground convex have been found at Pompeii, but they are too rudely fashioned 
and too imperfectly polished to have been of any practical use for optical pur- 
poses. But though the ancient artists may have had a microscopic vision, 
their astronomers cannot have had a telescopic power of sight; for they did 
not discover the satellites of Jupiter, which are often seen with the naked eye 
at Oormeeah, in Persia, and sometimes, as I can testify by personal observa- 
tion, at Cairo. 


CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. 15 


partly by historical evidence, partly by analogical deduction from 
effects produced, in our own time, by operations similar in char- 
acter to those which must have taken place in more or less 
remote ages of human action. Both sources of information 
are alike defective in precision; the latter, for general reasons 
too obvious to require specification; the former, because the 
facts to which it bears testimony occurred before the habit or 
the means of rigorously scientific observation upon any branch 
of physical research, and especially upon climatic changes, 
existed. 


Uncertainty of our Historical Conclusions on Ancient 
Climates. 


The invention of measures of heat and of atmospheric mois- 
ture, pressure, and precipitation, is extremely recent. Henee, 
ancient physicists have left us no thermometric or barometric 
records, no tables of the fall, evaporation, and flow of waters, 
and even no accurate maps of coast lines and the course of rivers. 
Their notices of these phenomena are almost wholly confined to 
excessive and exceptional instances of high or of low tempera- 
tures, extraordinary falls of rain and snow, and unusual floods 
or droughts. Our knowledge of the meteorological condition 
of the earth, at any period more than two centuries before our 
own time, is derived from these imperfect details, from the 
vague statements of ancient historians and geographers in re- 
gard to the volume of rivers and the relative extent of forest 
and cultivated land, from the indications furnished by the history 
of the agriculture and rural economy of past generations, and 
from other almost purely casual sources of information.* 


* The subject of climatic change, with and without reference to human 
action as a cause, has been much Ciscussed by Moreau de Jonnés, Dureau de la 
Malle, Arago, Humboldt, Fuster, Gasparin, Becquerel, Schleiden, and many 
other writers in Europe, and by Noah Webster, Forry, Drake, and others in 
America. Fraas has endeavored to show, by the history of vegetation in 
Greece, not merely that clearing and cultivation have affected climate, but 
that change of climate has essentially modified the character of vegetable life. 
See his Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit. 


16 CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. 


Among these latter we must rank certain newly laid open 
fields of investigation, from which facts bearing on the point 
now under consideration have been gathered. I allude to the 
discovery of artificial objects in geological formations older than 
any hitherto recognized as exhibiting traces of the existence 
of man; to the ancient lacustrine habitations of Switzerland 
and of the terremare of Italy,* containing the implements of 
the occupants, remains of their food, and other relics of human 
life; to the curious revelations of the Kjékkenméddinger, or 
heaps of kitchen refuse, in Denmark and elsewhere, and of the 
peat mosses in the same and other northern countries; to the 
dwellings and other evidences of the industry of man in remote 
ages sometimes laid bare by the movement of sand dunes on the 
coasts of France and of the North Sea; and to the facts disclosed 
on the tide-washed flats of the latter shores by excavations in 
Halligs or inhabited mounds which were probably raised before 
the era of the Roman Empire.t These remains are memorials 
of races which have left no written records, which perished at a 
period beyond the reach of even historical tradition. The plants 
and animals that furnished the relics found in the deposits were 
certainly contemporaneous with man; for they are associated 
with his works, and have evidently served his uses. In some 
eases, the animals belonged to species well ascertained to be 
now altogether extinct ; in some others, both the animals and 
the vegetables, though extant elsewhere, have ceased to inhabit 
the regions where their remains are discovered. Irom the char- 
acter of the artificial objects, as compared with others belong- 
ing to known dates, or at least to known periods of civiliza- 
tion, ingenious inferences have been drawn as to their age; 
and from the vegetable remains which accompany them, as to 
the climates of Central and Northern Europe at the time of their 
production. 


* See two learned articles by Pigorini, in the Nuova Antologia for January 
and October, 1870. 

+ For a very picturesque description of the Halligs, see PLuny, V. H., Book 
phy (hale 


CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. Ae 


There are, however, sources of error which have not always 
been sufficiently guarded against in making these estimates. 
When a boat, composed of several pieces of wood fastened 
together by pins of the same material, is dug out of a bog, it is 
inferred that the vessel, and the skeletons and implements 
found with it, belong to an age when the use of iron was not 
known to the builders. Dut this conclusion is not warranted 
by the simple fact that metals were not employed in its con- 
struction; for the Nubians at this day build boats large enough 
to carry half a dozen persons across the Nile, out of small 
pieces of acacia wood pinned together entirely with wooden 
bolts, and large vessels of similar construction are used by the 
islanders of the Malay archipelago. Nor is the occurrence of 
flint arrow heads and knives, in conjunction with other evidences 
of human life, conclusive proof as to the antiquity of the latter. 
Lyell informs us that some Oriental tribes still continue to use 
the same stone implements as their ancestors, “after that 
mighty empires, where the use of metals in the arts was well 
known, had flourished for three thousand years in their neigh- 
borhood;” * and the North American Indians now manufacture 
weapons of stone, and even of glass, chipping them in the latter 
case out of the bottoms of thick bottles, with great facility.+ 

We may also be misled by our ignorance of the commercial 
relations existing between savage tribes. Extremely rude 


* Antiquity of Man, p. 377. 

+ ‘‘One of the Indians seated himself near me, and made from a fragment 
of quartz, with a simple piece of round bone, one end of which was hemi- 
spherical, with a small crease in it (as if worn by a thread) the sixteenth of an 
inch deep, an arrow head which was very sharp and piercing, and such as they 
use on all their arrows. The skill and rapidity with which it was made, with. 
out a blow, but by simply breaking the sharp edges with the creased bone by 
the strength of his hands—for the crease merely served to prevent the instru- 
ment from slipping, affording no leverage—was remarkable.”—Reports of Hz- 
plorations and Surveys for Pacific Railroad, vol. ii., 1855, Lieut. Breexwrrn’s 
Report, p. 43. See also American Naturalist for May, 1870, and especially 
STEVENS, Flint Chips, London, 1870, pp. 77 et seq. 

Mariette Bey lately saw an Egyptian barber shave the head of an Arab with 
a flint razor. 


18 CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. 


nations, in spite of their jealousies and their perpetual wars, 
sometimes contrive to exchange the products of provinces very 
widely separated from each other. The mounds of Ohio con- 
tain pearls, thought to be marine, which must have come from 
the Gulf of Mexico, or perhaps even from California, and the 
knives and pipes found in the same graves are often formed of 
far-fetched material, that was naturally paid for by some home 
product exported to the locality whence the material was 
derived. The art of preserving fish, flesh, and fowl by drying 
and smoking is widely diffused, and of great antiquity. The 
Indians of Long Island Sound are said to have carried on a 
trade in dried shell fish with tribes residing very far inland. 
From the earliest ages, the inhabitants of the Faroe and Orkney 
Islands, and of the opposite mainland coasts, have smoked wild 
fowl and other flesh. Hence it is possible that the animal and 
the vegetable food, the remains of which are found in the 
ancient deposits [am speaking of, may sometimes have been 
brought from climates remote from that where it was consumed. 

The most important, as well as the most trustworthy con- 
clusions with respect to the climate of ancient Europe and 
Asia, are those drawn from the accounts given by the classical 
writers of the growth of cultivated plants; but these are by no 
means free from uncertainty, because we can seldom be sure 
of an identity of species, almost never of an identity of race or 
variety, between vegetables known to the agriculturists of 
Greece and Rome and those of modern times which are thought 
most nearly to resemble them. Besides this, there is always 
room for doubt whether the habits of plants long grown in 
different countries may not have been so changed by domestica- 
tion or by natural selection, that the conditions of temperature 
and humidity which they required twenty centuries ago were 
different from those at present demanded for their advan- 
tageous cultivation.* 


* Probably no cultivated vegetable affords so good an opportunity of study- 
ing the laws of acclimation of plants as maize or Indiancorn. Maize is grown 
from the tropics to at least lat. 47° in Northeastern America, and farther 


CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. 19 


Even if we suppose an identity of species, of race, and of 
habit to be established between a given ancient and modern 
plant, the negative fact that the latter will not grow now where 
it flourished two thousand years ago does not in all cases prove 
a change of climate. The same result might follow from the 
exhaustion of the soil,* or from a change in the quantity of 
moisture it habitually contains. After a district of country has 


north in Hurope. Every two or three degrees of latitude brings you to a new 
variety, with new climatic adaptations, and the capacity of the plant to 
accommodate itself to new conditions of temperature and season seems almost 
unlimited. 

Many persons now living remember that, when the common tomato was 
first introduced into Northern New England, it often failed to ripen; but, in 
the course of avery few years, it completely adapted itself to the climate, 
and now not only matures both its fruit and its seeds with as much certainty 
as any cultivated vegetable, but regularly propagates itself by self-sown seed. 
Meteorological observations, however, do not show any amelioration of the 
summer climate in those States within that period. 

It may be said that these cases—and indeed all cases of a supposed acclima- 
tion consisting in physiological changes—are instances of the origination of 
new varieties by natural selection, the hardier maize, tomato, and other 
vegetables of the North, being the progeny of seeds of individuals endowed, 
exceptionally, with greater power of resisting cold than belongs in general to 
the species which produced them. But, so far as the evidence of change of 
climate, from a difference in vegetable growth, is concerned, it is immaterial 
whether we adopt this view or maintain the older and more familiar doctrine 
of a local modification of character in the plants in question. 

Maize and the tomato, if not new to human use, have not been long known 
to civilization, and were, very probably, reclaimed and domesticated at a 
much more recent period than the plants which form the great staples of 
agricultural husbandry in Europe and Asia. Is the great power of accommoda- 
tion to climate possessed by them due to this circumstance? There is some 
reason to suppose that the character of maize has been sensibly changed by 
cultivation in South America; for, according to Tschudi, the ears of this grain 
found in old Peruvian tombs belong to varieties not now known in Peru.— 
Travels in Peru, chap. vii. See important observations in SCHUBELER, Die 
Pflanzenwat Norwegens (Aligemeiner Theil), Christiania, 1873, 77 and follow- 
ing pp. 

* The cultivation of madder is said to have been introduced into Europe 
by an Oriental in the year 1765, and it was first planted in the neighborhood 
of Avignon. Of course, it has been grown in that district for less than a 
century ;.but upon soils where it has been a frequent crop, it is already losing 


20 CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. 


been completely or even partially cleared of its forest growth, 
and brought under cultivation, the drying of the soil, under 
favorable circumstances, goes on for generations, perhaps for 
ages.* In other cases, from injudicious husbandry, or the diver- 


much of its coloring properties. —LAVERGNE, Economie Ruraie de la France, 
pp. 259-291. 

I believe there is no doubt that the cultivation of madder in the vicinity of 
Avignon is of recent introduction; but it is certain that it was grown by the 
ancient Romans, and throughout nearly all Europe in the middle ages. The 
madder brought from Persia to France, may belong to a diiferent species, or at 
least variety. 

* In many parts of New England there are tracts, many square miles in ex- - 
tent and presenting all varieties of surface and exposure, which were partially 
cleared sixty or seventy years ago, and where little or no change in the pro- 
portion of cultivated ground, pasturage, and woodland has taken place since. 
In some cases, these tracts compose basins apparently scarcely at all exposed 
to any local influence in the way of percolation or infiltration of water towards 
or from neighboring valleys. But in such situations, apart from accidental 
disturbances, the ground is growing drier and drier from year to year, springs 
are still disappearing, and rivulets still diminishing in their summer supply of 
water. A probable explanation of this is to be found in the rapid drainage 
of the surface of cleared ground, which prevents the subterranean natural 
reservoirs, whether cavities or merely strata of bibulous earth, from filling up. 
How long’ this process is to last before an equilibrium is reached, none can 
say. It may be, for years; it may be, for centuries. 

Livingstone states facts which strongly favor the supposition that a secular 
desiccation is still going on in central Africa, and there is reason to suspect 
that a like change is taking place in California. When the regions where the 
earth is growing drier were cleared of wood, or, indeed, whether forests ever 
grew there, we are unable to say, but the change appears to have been long in 
progress. A similar revolution appears to have occurred in Arabia Petreea. In 
many of the wadis, and particularly in the gorges between Wadi Feiran and 
Wadi Esh Sheikh, there are water-worn banks showing that, at no very remote 
period, the winter floods must have risen fifty feet in channels where the 
growth of acacias and tamarisks and the testimony of the Arabs concur to 
prove that they have not risen six feet within the memory or tradition of the 
present inhabitants. Recent travellers have discovered traces of extensive 
ancient cultivation, and of the former existence of large towns in the Tih 
desert, in localities where all agriculture is now impossible for want of water. 
Is this drought due to the destruction of ancient forests or to some other 
cause ? 

For important observations on supposed changes of climate in our Western 


CONCLUSIONS ON ANCIENT CLIMATES. 21 


sion or choking up of natural water-courses, it may become 
more highly charged with humidity. An increase or diminu- 
tion of the moisture of a soil almost necessarily supposes an 
elevation or a depression of its winter or its summer heat, and 
of its extreme if not of its mean annual temperature, though 
such elevation or depression may be so slight as not sensibly to 
raise or lower the mercury in a thermometer exposed to the 
open air. Any of these causes, more or less humidity, or more 
or less warmth of soil, would affect the growth both of wild 
and of cultivated vegetation, and consequently, without any 
appreciable change in atmospheric temperature, precipitation, 
or evaporation, plants of a particular species might cease to be 
advantageously cultivated where they had once been easily 
reared.* 


prairie region, from cultivation of the soil and the introduction of domestic 
cattle, see BRYANT’S valuable Horest T’rees, 1871, chapter v., and HAYDEN, 
Preliminary Report on Survey of Wyoming, p. 455. 

Some physicists believe that the waters of our earth are, from chemical or 
other less known causes, diminishing by entering into new inorganic combina. 
tions, and that this element will finally disappear from the globe. 

* The soil of newly subdued countries is genera'ly highly favorable to the 
erowth of the fruits of the garden and the orchard, but usually becomes 
much less so in a very few years. Plums, of many varieties, were formerly 
grown, in great perfection and abundance. in many parts of New England 
where at present they can scarcely be reared at all; and the peach, which, a 
generation or two ago, succeeded admirably in the southern portion of the 
same States, has almost ceased to be cultivated there. The disappearance of 
these fruits is partly due to the ravages of insects, which have in later years 
attacked them; but this is evidently by no means the sole, or even the prin- 
cipal cause of their decay. In these cases, it is not to the exhaustion of the 
particular acres on which the fruit trees have grown that we are to ascribe 
their degeneracy, but to a general change in the condition of the soil or the 
air; for it is equally impossible to rear them successfully on absolutely new 
land in the neighborhood of grounds where, not long since, they bore the 
finest fruit. 

I remember being told, many years ago, by intelligent early settlers of the 
State of Ohio, that the apple trees raised there from seed sown soon after the 
land was cleared, bore fruit in less than half the time required to bring to 
bearing those reared from seed sown when the ground had been twenty years 
under cultivation, 


22 UNCERTAINTY OF MODERN METEOROLOGY. 


Uncertainty of Modern Meteorology. 


We are very imperfectly acquainted with the present mean 
and extreme temperature, or the precipitation and the evapora- 
tion of any extensive region, even in countries most densely 
peopled and best supplied with instruments and observers. 
The progress of science is constantly detecting errors of method 
in older observations, and many laboriously constructed tables 
of meteorological phenomena are now thrown aside as falla- 
cious, and therefore worse than useless, because some condition 
necessary to secure accuracy of result was neglected, in obtain- 
ing and recording the data on which they were founded. 

To take a familiar instance: it is but recently that attention 
has been drawn to the great influence of slight differences in 
station upon the results of observations of temperature and 
precipitation. Two thermometers hung but a few hundred 
yards from each other differ not unfrequently five, sometimes 


even ten degrees in their readings;* and when we are told 


Analogous changes occur slowly and almost imperceptibly even in sponta- 
neous vegetation. In the peat mosses of Denmark, Scotch firs and other trees 
not now growing in the same localities, are found in abundance. Every gen- 
eration of trees leaves the soil in a different state from that in which it found 
it; every tree that springs up in a group of trees of another species than its 
own, grows under different influences of light and shade and atmosphere from 
its predecessors. Hence the succession of crops, which occurs in all natural 
forests, seems to be due rather to changes of condition than of climate. See 
chapter iil., post. 

* Tyndall, in a lecture on Radiation, expresses the opinion that from ten to 
fifteen per cent. of the heat radiated from the earth is absorbed by aquecus 
vapor within ten feet of the earth’s surface.—Hvragments of Science, 34 edi- 
tion, London, 1871, p. 203. 

Thermometers at most meteorological stations, when not suspended at 
points regulated by the mere personal convenience of the observer, are hung 
from 20 to 40 feet above the ground. In such positions they are less exposed 
to disturbance from the action of surrounding bodies than at a lower level, 
and their indications are consequently more uniform; but according to Tyn- 
dall’s views they do not mark the temperature of the atmospheric stratum in 
which nearly all the vegetables useful to man, except forest trees, bud and 
blossom and ripen, and in which a vast majority of the ordinary operations of 


UNCERTAINTY OF MODERN METEOROLOGY. 23 


that the annual fall of rain on the roof of the observatory at 
Paris is two inches less than on the ground by the side of it, 
we mnay see that the height of the rain-gauge above the earth 
is a point of much consequence in making estimates from its 
measurements.* The data from which results have been de- 
duced with respect to the hygrometrical and thermometrical 
conditions, to the climate in short, of different countries, have 
very often been derived from observations at single points in 
cities or districts separated by considerable distances. The 
tendency of errors and accidents to balance each other author- 
izes us, indeed, to entertain greater confidence than we could 
otherwise feel in the conclusions drawn from such tables; but 
it is in the highest degree probable that they would be much 
modified by more numerous series of observations, at different 
stations within narrow limits.t 


material life are performed. They give the rise and fall of the mercury at 
heights arbitrarily taken, without reference to the relations of temperature to 
human interests, or to any other scientific consideration than a somewhat less 
liability to accidental disturbance. 

* Careful observations by the late lamented Dallas Bache appeared to show 
that there is no such difference in the quantity of precipitation falling at 
slightly different levels as has been generally supposed. The apparent differ- 
ence was ascribed by Prof. Bache to the irregular distribution of the drops of 
rain and flakes of snow, exposed, as they are, to local disturbances by the cur- 
rents of air around the corners of buildings or other accidents of the surface. 
This consideration much increases the importance of great care in the selec- 
tion of positions for rain-gauges. 

But Mr. Bache’s conclusions seem not to be accepted by late experimenters 
in England. See Quarterly Journal of Science for January, 1871, p. 123. 

+ The nomenclature of meteorology is vague and sometimes equivocal. 
Not long since, it was suspected that the observers reporting to a scientific 
institution did not agree in their understanding of the mode of expressing the 
direction of the wind prescribed by their instructions. It was found, upon 
inquiry, that very many of them used the names of the compass-points to 
indicate the quarter from which the wind blew, while others employed them 
to signify the quarter towards which the atmospheric currents were moving. 
In some instances, the observers were no longer within the reach of inquiry, 
and of course their tables of the wind were of no value. 

‘‘ Winds,” says Mrs. Somerville, ‘‘are named from the points whence they 
blow, currents exactly the reverse. An easterly wind comes from the east; 


24 UNCERTAINTY OF MODERN METEOROLOGY. 


There is one branch of research which is of the utmost im- 
portance in reference to these questions, but which, from the 
great difficulty of direct observation upon it, has been less suc- 
cessfully studied than almost any other problem of physical 
science. I refer to the proportions between precipitation, 
superficial drainage, absorption, and evaporation. Precise ac- 
tual measurement of these quantities upon even a single acre of 
ground is impossible ; and in all cabinet experiments on the sub- 
ject, the conditions of the surface observed are so different from 
those which occur in nature, that we cannot safely reason from 
one case to the other. In nature, the inclination and exposure 
of the ground, the degree of freedom or obstruction of the flow 
of water over the surface, the composition and density of the 
soil, the presence or absence of perforations by worms and small 
burrowing quadrupeds—upon which the permeability of the 
ground by water and its power of absorbing and retaining or 
transmitting moisture depend—its temperature, the dryness or 


whereas an easterly current comes from the west, and flows towards the east.” 
—Pihysical Geography, p. 229. 

There is no philological ground for this distinction, and it probably originated 
in a confusion of the terminations -wardly and -e7ly, both of which are mod- 
ern. The root of the former ending implies the direction to or to-wards which 
motion is supposed. It corresponds to, and is probably allied with, the Latin 
versus. ‘the termination -erly is a corruption or softening of -ernly, easterly 
for easternly, and many authors ef the seventeenth century so write it. In 
BHakluyt (i., p. 2), easterly is applied to place, ‘‘ casterly bounds,” and means 
eastern. Ina passage in Drayton, ‘‘ easterly winds”? must mean winds from 
the east; but the same author, in speaking of nations, uses northerly for 
northern. Hakewell says: ‘‘ The sonne cannot goe more southerney from ys, 
nor come more northernely towards vs.” Holland, in his translation of Pliny, 
referring to the moon, has: ‘‘ When shee is northerly,” and ‘‘shee is gone 
southerly.” Richardson, to whom I am indebted for the above citations, 
quotes a passage from Dampier where westerly is applied to the wind, but the 
context does not determine the direction. The only example of the termina- 
tion in -wardly given by this lexicographer is from Donne, where it means 
towards the west. 

Shakspeare, in Hamlet (v., ii.), uses northerly wind for wind from the north. 
Milton does not employ either of these terminations, nor were they known to 
the Anglo-Saxons, who, however, had adjectives of direction in- an or -en, 


UNCERTAINTY OF MODERN METEOROLOGY. 25 


saturation of the subsoil, vary at comparatively short distances ; 
and though the precipitation upon very small geographical 
basins and the superficial flow from them may be estimated 
with an approach to precision, yet even here we have no present 
wneans of knowing how much of the water absorbed by the 
earth is restored to the atmosphere by evaporation, and how 
much carried off by infiltration or other modes of underground 
discharge. When, therefore, we attempt to use the phenomena 
observed on a few square or cubic yards of earth, as a basis of 
reasoning upon the meteorology of a province, it is evident that 
our data must be insufficient to warrant positive general con- 
clusions. In discussing the climatology of whole countries, or 
even of comparatively small local divisions, we may safely say 
that none can tell what percentage of the water they receive 
from the atmosphere is evaporated ; what absorbed by the ground 
and conveyed off by subterranean conduits; what carried down 
to the sea by superficial channels; what drawn from the earth 
or the air by a given extent of forest, of short pasture vegeta- 


-ern and -weard, the last always meaning the point towards which motion is 
supposed, the others that from which it proceeds. 

The vocabulary of science has no specific name for one of the most impor- 
tant phenomera in meteorology—I mean for watery vapor condensed and 
rendered visible by cold. The Latins expressed this condition of water by the 
word vapor. For invisible vapor they had no name, because they did not 
know that it existed, and Van Helmont was obliged to invent a word, gas, 
as a generic name for watery and other fluids in the invisible state. 
The moderns have perverted the meaning of the word vapor, and in 
science its use is confined to express water in the gaseous and invisible 
state. When vapor is rendered visible by condensation, we call it jog or nzst— 
between which two words there is no clearly established distinction—if it is 
lying on or near the surface of the earth or of water; when it floats in the 
air we call it clowd. But these words express the form and position of the 
humid aggregation, not the condition of the water-globules which compose it. 

The breath from our mouths, the steam from an engine, thrown out into 
cold air, become visible, and consist of water in the same state as in fog or 
cloud; but we do not apply those terms to these phenomena. It would be 
an improvement in meteorological nomenclature to restore vapor to its original 
meaning, and to employ a new word, such for example as ydrogas, to ex- 
press the new scientific idea of water in the invisible state. 


26 STABILITY OF NATURE. 


tion, or of tall meadow-grass ; what given out again by surfaces 
so covered, or by bare ground of various textures and compo- 
sition, under different conditions of atmospheric temperature, 
pressure, and humidity; or what is the amount of evaporation 
from water, ice, or snow, under the varying exposures to which, 
in actual nature, they are constantly subjected. If, then, we 
are so ignorant of all these climatic phenomena in the best- 
known regions inhabited by man, it is evident that we can rely 
little upon theoretical deductions applied to the former more 
natural state of the same regions—less still to such as are adopt- 
ed with respect to distant, strange, and primitive countries. 


Stability of Nature. 


Nature, left undisturbed, so fashions her territory as to give 
it almost unchanging permanence of form, outline, and propor- 
tion, except when shattered by geologic convulsions; and in 
these comparatively rare cases of derangement, she sets herself 
at once to repair the superficial damage, and to restore, as nearly 
as practicable, the former aspect of her dominion. In new 
countries, the natural inclination of the ground, the self-formed 
slopes and levels, are generally such as best secure the stability 
of the soil. They have been graded and lowered or elevated 
by frost and chemical forces and gravitation and the flow of 
water and vegetable deposit and the action of the winds, until, 
by a general compensation of conflicting forces, a condition of 
equilibrium has been reached which, without the action of man, 
would remain, with little fluctuation, for countless ages. 

We need not go far back to reach a period when, in all that 
portion of the North American continent which has been occu- 
pied by British colonization, the geographical elements very 
nearly balanced and compensated each other. At the commence- 
ment of the seventeenth century, the soil, with insignificant ex- 
ceptions, was covered with forests ; * and whenever the Indian, 


*T do not here speak of the vast prairie region of the Mississippi valley, 
which cannot properly be said ever to have been a field of British colonization; 


FORMATION OF BOGS. oF 


in consequence of war or the exhaustion of the beasts of the 
chase, abandoned the narrow fields he had planted and the woods 
he had burned over, they speedily returned, by a succession of 
herbaceous, arborescent, and arboreal growths, to their original 
state. Even a single generation sufliced to restore them almost 
to their primitive luxuriance of forest vegetation.* The un- 
broken forests had attained to their maximum density and 
strength of growth, and, as the older trees decayed and fell, 
they were succeeded by new shoots or seedlings, so that from 
century to century no perceptible change seems to have occurred 
in the wood, except the slow, spontaneous succession of crops. 
This succession involved no interruption of growth, and but 
little break in the “boundless contiguity of shade ; ” for, in the 
husbandry of nature, there are no fallows. Trees fall singly, 
not by square roods, and the tall pine is hardly prostrate, before 
the light and heat, admitted to the ground by the removal of 
the dense crown of foliage which had shut them out, stimulate 
the germination of the seeds of broad-leaved trees that had 
lain, waiting this kindly influence, perhaps for centuries. 


formation of Bogs. 


Two natural causes, destructive in character, were, indeed, 
in operation in the primitive American forests, though, in 
the Northern colonies, at least, there were sufficient com- 
pensations; for we do not discover that any considerable 


but of the criginal colonies, and their dependencies in the territory of the pres- 
ent United States, and in Canada. It is, however, equally true of the Western 
prairies as of the Eastern forest land, that they had arrived at a state of equi- 
librium, though under very different conditions. 

* The great fire of Miramichi in 1825, probably the most extensive and 
terrific conflagration recorded in authentic history, spread its ravages over 
nearly six thousand square miles, chiefly of woodland, and was of such in- 
tensity that it seemed to consume the very soil itself. But so great are the 
recuperative powers of nature, that, in twenty-five years, the ground was 
thickly covered again with trees of fair dimensions, except where cultivation 
and pasturage kept down the forest growth. 


28 FORMATION OF BOGS. 


permanent change was produced by them. I refer to the 
action of beavers and of fallen trees in producing bogs,* 


.* The English nomenclature of this geographical feature does not seem well 
settled. We have bog, swamp, marsh, morass, moor, fen, turf-moss, peat-moss, 
quagmire, all of which, though sometimes more or less accurately discriminated, 
are often used interchangeably, or are perhaps employed, each exclusively, in 
a particular district. In Sweden, where, especially in the Lappish provinces, 
this terr-aqueous formation is very extensive and important, the names of its 
different kinds are more specific in their application. The general designa- 
tion of all soils permanently pervaded with water is Kdrr. The elder Lesta- 
dius divides the Harr into two genera: Myror (sing. myra), and Mossar (sing, 
mossc). ‘* The former,” he observes, ‘‘ are grass-grown, and overflowed with 
water through almost the whole summer; the latter are covered with mosses 
and always moist, but very seldom overflowed.” He enumerates the following 
species of Myra, the character of which will perhaps be sufficiently under- 
stood by the Latin terms into which he translates the vernacular names, for 
the benefit of strangers not altogether familiar with the language and the 
subject: 1. Hémyror, paludes graminose. 2. Dy, paludes profunde. 3. 
Flarkmyror, or proper kdrr, paludes limose, 4. Fyjdlimyror, paludes uligi- 
nose. 5. Yufmyror, paludes cespitose. 6. Rismyror, paludes virgate. 
7. Starvdngar, prata irrigata, with their subdivisions, dry starrdngar or 7i- 
singar, wet starrdngar and fradkengropar. 8. Pilar, lacune. 9. Gélar, fos- 
se inundate. The Mossar, paludes turfose, which are of great extent, have 
but two species: 1. Torfmossar, called also Mossmyror and Snottermyror, 
and, 2. Bjornmossar. 

The accumulations of stagnant or stagnating water originating in bogs are 
distinguished into 77désk, stagna, and Tjernar or Tjdrnar (sing. Tjern or 
Tjdrn), stagnatiles. Trdsk are pools fed by bogs, or water emanating from 
them, and their bottoms are slimy; Zjernar are small 7’rdsk situated within 
the limits of Mossar.—L. L. Lastraprus, om Méjligheten af Uppodlingar ¢ 
Lappmarken, pp. 23, 24. 

Although the quantity of bog land in New England is less than in many 
other regions of equal area, yet there is a considerable extent of this forma- 
tion in some of the Northeastern States. Dana (Manual of Geology, p. 614) 
states that the quantity of peat in Massachusetts is estimated at 120,000,000 
cords, or nearly 569,000,000 cubic yards, but he does not give either the area 
or the depth of the deposits. In any event, however, bogs cover but a small 
percentage of the territory in any of the Northern States, while it is said that 
one tenth of the whole surface of Ireland is composed of bogs, and there are 
still extensive tracts of undrained marsh in England. The amount of this for- 
mation in Great Britain is estimated at 6,000,000 acres, with an average depth 
of twelve feet, which would yield 21,600,000 tons of air-dried peat.—AsBJORN- 
sEN, Zorv og Torvdrift, Christiania, 1868, p. 6. 


FORMATION OF BOGS. 29 


and of smaller animals, insects, and birds, in destroying the 
woods.* 

Bogs generally originate in the checking of watercourses by 
the falling of timber or of earth and rocks, or by artificial ob- 
structions across their channels. If the impediment is sufficient 
to retain a permanent accumulation of water behind it, the 
trees whose roots are overflowed soon perish, and then by their 
fall increase the obstruction, and, of course, occasion a still 
wider spread of the stagnating stream. This process goes on 
until the water finds a new outlet, at a higher level, not lable 


Peat beds have sometimes a thickness of ten or twelve yards, or even more. 
A depth of ten yards would give 48,000 cubic yards to the acre. The greatest 
quantity of firewood yielded by the forests of New England to the acre is 100 
cords solid measure, or 474 cubic yards; but this comprises only the trunks 
and larger branches. If we add the small branches and twigs, it is possible 
that 600 cubic yards might, in some cases, be cut on an acre. This is only 
one eightieth part of the quantity of peat sometimes found on the same area. 
It is true that a yardof peat and a yard of wood are not the equivalents of 
each other, but the fuel on an acre of deep peat is worth much more than 
that on an acre of the best woodland. Besides this, wood is perishable, and 
the quantity on an acre cannot be increased beyond the amount just stated ; 
peat is indestructible, and the beds are always growing. See post, Chap. IV. 
Cold favors the conversion of aquatic vegetables into peat. Asbjdrnsen says 
some of the best peat he has met with is from a bog which is frozen for forty 
weeks in the year. 

The Greeks and Romans were not acquainted with the employment of peat 
as fuel, but it appears from a curious passage which I have already cited from 
Pliny, WV. H., book xvi., chap. 1, that the inhabitants of the North Sea coast 
used what is called kneaded turf in his time. This is the finer and more 
thoroughly decomposed matter lying at the bottom of the peat, kneaded 
by the hands, formed into small blocks and dried. It is still prepared in pre- 
cisely the same way by the poorer inhabitants of those shores. 

But though the Low German tribes, including probably the Anglo-Saxons, 
have used peat as fuel from time immemorial, it appears not to have been 
known to the High Germans until arecent period. At least, Ican find neither 
in Old nor in Middle High German lexicons and glossaries any word signifying 
peat. Zurb indeed is found in Graff as an Old High German word, but only 
in the sense of grass-turf, or greensward. Peat bogs of vast extent occur in 
many Hich German localities, but the former abundance of wood in the same 
regions rendered the use of peat unnecessary. 

* Seo Chapter II., post. 


30 FORMATION OF BOGS. 


to similar interruption. The fallen trees not completely cov- 
ered by water are soon overgrown with mosses; aquatic and 
semiaquatic plants propagate themselves, and spread until they 
more or less completely fill up the space occupied by the waters 
and the surface is gradually converted from a pond to a 
quaking morass. The morass is slowly solidified by vegetable 
production and deposit, then very often restored to the forest 
condition by the growth of black ashes, cedars, or, in southern 
latitudes, cypresses, and other trees suited to such a soil, and 
thus the interrupted harmony of nature is at last reéstab- 
lished.* 

In countries somewhat further advanced in civilization than 
those occupied by the North American Indians, as in medizyval 
Ireland, the formation of bogs may be commenced by the neg- 
lect of man to remove, from the natural channels of superti- 
cial drainage, the tops and branches of trees felled for the 
various purposes to which wood is applicable in his rude indus- 
try; and, when the flow of the water is thus checked, nature 
goes on with the processes I have already described. In such 


* *¢ Aquatic plants have a utility in raising the level of marshy grounds, 
which renders them very valuable, and may well be called a geological func- 
tion. * * ¢ * 

‘‘ The engineer drains ponds at a great expense by lowering the surface of 
the water; nature attains the same end, gratuitously, by raising the level of 
the soil without depressing that of the water; but she proceeds more slowly. 
There are, in the Landes, marshes where this natural filling has a thickness of 
four métres, and some of them, at first lower than the sea, have been thus 
raised and drained so as to grow summer crops, such, for example, as maize.” 
—BoitEL, Mise en valeur des Terres pauores, p. 227. 

The bogs of Denmark—the examination of which by Steenstrup and Vaupell 
has presented such curious results with respect to the natural succession of 
forest trees—appear to have gone through this gradual process of drying, and 
the birch, which grows freely in very wet soils, has contributed very effectu- 
ally by its annual deposits to raise the surface above the water level, and thus 
to prepare the ground for the oak.—VAUPELL, Bigens Indvandring, pp. 89, 40. 

The growth of the peat not unfrequently raises the surface of bogs consid- 
erably above the level of the surrounding country, and they sometimes burst 
and overflow lower grounds with a torrent of mud and water as destructive as 
a current of lava, 


GEOGRAPHICAL CHANGE. ok 


half-civilized regions, too, windfalls are more frequent than in 
those where the forest is unbroken, because, when openings have 
been made in it for agricultural or other purposes, the entrance 
thus afforded to the wind occasions the sudden overthrow of 
hundreds of trees which might otherwise have stood for gene- 
rations and have fallen to the ground, only one by one, as natu- 
ral decay brought them down.* Besides this, the flocks bred 
by man in the pastoral state keep down the incipient growth of 
trees on the half-dried bogs, and prevent them from recovering 
their primitive condition. 

Young trees in the native forest are sometimes girdled and 
killed by the smaller rodent quadrupeds, and their growth is 
checked by birds which feed on the terminal bud; but these 
animals, as we shall see, are generally found on the skirts of 
the wood only, not in its deeper recesses, and hence the mis- 
chief they do is not extensive. 

In fine, in countries untrodden by man, the proportions and 
relative positions of land and water, the atmospheric precipita- 
tion and evaporation, the thermometric mean, and the distribu- 
tion of vegetable and animal life, are maintained by natural 
compensations, in a state of approximate equilibrium, and are 
ubject to appreciable change only from geological influences 
so slow in their operation that the geographical conditions may 
be regarded as substantially constant and immutable. 


Natural Conditions favorable to Geographical Change. 


There are, nevertheless, certain climatic conditions and cer- 
tain forms and formations of terrestrial surface, which tend 
respectively to impede and to facilitate the physical degrada- 


* Careful examination of the peat mosses in North Sjalland—which are so 
abundant in fossil wood that, within thirty years, they have yielded above a 
million of trees—shows that the trees have generally fallen from age and not 
from wind. They are found in depressions on the declivities of which they 
grew, and they lie with the top lowest, always falling towards the bottom 
of the valley.—VAUPELL, Bégens Indvandring i de Danske Skove, pp. 10, 14. 


32 GEOGRAPHICAL CHANGE. 


tion both of new countries and of old. If the precipitation, 
whether great or small in amount, be equally distributed 
through the seasons, so that there are neither torrential rains 
nor parching droughts, and if, further, the general inclination 
of ground be moderate, so that the superficial waters are car- 
ried off without destructive rapidity of flow, and without sud- 
den accumulation in the channels of natural drainage, there is 
little danger of the degradation of the soil in consequence of 
the removal of forest or other vegetable covering, and the natu- 
ral face of the earth may be considered as virtually perma- 
nent. These conditions are well exemplified in Ireland, in a 
great part of England, in extensive districts in Germany and 
France, and, fortunately, in an immense proportion of the 
valley of the Mississippi and the basin of the great American 
lakes, as well as in many parts of the continents of South 
America and of Africa, and it is partly, though by no means 
entirely, owing to topographical and climatic causes that the 
blight, which has smitten the fairest and most fertile provinces 
of Imperial Rome, has spared Britannia, Germania, Pannonia, 
and Meesia, the comparatively inhospitable homes of barbarous 
races, who, in the days of the Ceesars, were too little advanced 
in civilized life to possess either the power or the will to wage 
that war against the order of. nature which seems, hitherto, an 
almost inseparable condition precedent of high social culture, 
and of great progress in fine and mechanical art. 

Destructive changes are most frequent in countries of irregu- 
lar and mountainous surface, and in climates where the pre- 
cipitation is confined chiefly to a single season, and where, of 
course, the year is divided into a wet and a dry period, as is the 
case throughout a great part of the Ottoman empire, and, in- 
deed, in a large proportion of the whole Mediterranean basin. 

In mountainous countries various causes combine to expose 
the soil to constant dangers. The rain and snow usually fall in 
ereater quantity, and with much inequality of distribution; the 
snow on the summits accumulates for many months in succes- 
sion, and then is not unfrequently almost wholly dissolved in a 


DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 33 
single thaw, so that the entire precipitation of months is in a 
few hours hurried down the flanks of the mountains, and through 
the ravines that furrow them; the natural inclination of the 
surface promotes the swiftness of the gathering currents of 
diluvial rain and of melting snow, which soon acquire an almost 
irresistible force and power of removal and transportation; the 
soil itself is less compact and tenacious than that of the plains, 
and if the sheltering forest has been destroyed, it is confined by 
few of the threads and ligaments by which nature had bound 
it together, and attached it to the rocky groundwork. Hence 
every considerable shower lays bare its roods of rock, and the 
torrents sent down by the thaws of spring, and by occasional 
heavy discharges of the summer and autumnal rains, are seas 
of mud and rolling stones that sometimes lay waste and bury 
beneath them acres, and even miles, of pasture and field and 
vineyard.* 


Destructiveness of Man. 


Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him 
for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate 
waste. Nature has provided against the absolute destruction 
of any of her elementary matter, the raw material of her works ; 
the thunderbolt and the tornado, the most convulsive throes of 
even the volcano and the earthquake, being only phenomena of 
decomposition and recomposition. But she has left it within 


* The character of geological formation is an element of very great import- 
ance in determining the amount of erosion produced by running water, and, 
of course, in measuring the consequences of clearing off the forests. The soil 
of the French Alps yields very readily to the force of currents, and the decliv- 
ities of the northern Apennines, as well as of many minor mountain ridges 
in Tuscany and other parts of Italy, are covered with earth which becomes 
itself almost a fluid when saturated with water. Hence the erosion of such 
surfaces is vastly greater than on many other mountains of equal steepness of 
inclination. The traveller who passes over the route between Bologna and 
Florence, and the Perugia and the Siena roads from the latter city to Rome, 
will have many opportunities of observing such localities. 


34 DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 


the power of man irreparably to derange the combinations 
of inorganic matter and of organic life, which through the 
night of sons she had been proportioning and balancing, to 
prepare the earth for his habitation, when in the fulness of time 
his Creator should call him forth to enter into its possession. 

Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the 
inorganic world are, as I have remarked, bound together by 
such mutual relations and adaptations as secure, if not the abso- 
lute permanence and equilibrium of both, a long continuance 
of the established conditions of each at any given time and 
place, or at least, a very slow and gradual succession of changes 
in those conditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing 
agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature 
are turned to discords. The proportions and accommodations 
which insured the stability of existing arrangements are over- 
thrown. Indigenous vegetable and animal species are extir- 
pated, and supplanted by others of foreign origin, spontaneous 
production is forbidden or restricted, and the face of the earth 
is vither laid bare or covered with a new and reluctant growth 
of vegetable forms, and with alien tribes of animal life. These 
intentional changes and substitutions constitute, indeed, great 
revolutions ; but vast as is their magnitude and importance, they 
are, as we shall see, insignificant in comparison with the con- 
tingent and unsought results which have flowed from them. 

The fact that, of all organic beings, man alone is to be re- 
garded as essentially a destructive power, and that he wields 
energies to resist which Nature—that nature whom all material 
life and all inorganic substance obey—is wholly impotent, tends 
to prove that, though living in physical nature, he is not of her, 
that he is of more exalted parentage, and belongs to a higher 
order of existences, than those which are born of her womb and 
live in blind submission to her dictates. 

There are, indeed, brute destroyers, beasts and birds and in- 
sects of prey—all animal life feeds upon, and, of course, destroys 
other life,—but this destruction is balanced by compensations. 
It is, in fact, the very means by which the existence of one 


DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 36 


tribe of animals or of vegetables is secured against being smoth- 
ered by the encroachments of another; and the reproductive 
powers of species, which serve as the food of others, are always 
proportioned to the demand they are destined to supply. Man 
pursues his victims with reckless destructiveness ; and, while the 
sacrifice of life by the lower animals is limited by the cravings 
of appetite, he unsparingly persecutes, even to extirpation, 
thousands of organic forms which he cannot consume.* 


* The terrible destructiveness of man is remarkably exemplified in the chase 
of large mammalia and birds for single products, attended with the entire 
waste of enormous quantities of flesh, and of other parts of the ‘animal 
which are capable of valuable uses. The wild cattle of South America are 
slaughtered by millions for their hides and horns; the buffalo of North 
America for his skin or his tongue; the elephant, the walrus, and the nar- 
whal for their tusks; the cetacea, and some other marine animals, for their 
whalebone and oil; the ostrich and other large birds, for their plumage. 
Within a few years, sheep have been killed in New England, by whole flocks, 
for their pelts and suet alone, the flesh being thrown away ; and it is even said 
that the bodies of the same quadrupeds have been used in Australia as fuel for 
limekilns. What avast amount of human nutriment, of bone, and of other 
animal products valuable in the arts, is thus recklessly squandered! In nearly 
all these cases, the part which constitutes the motive for this wholesale de- 
struction, and is alone saved, is essentially of insignificant value as compared 
with what is thrown away. The horns and hide of an ox are not economically 
worth a tenth part as much as the entire carcass. During the present year, 
large quantities of Indian corn have been used as domestic fuel, and even for 
burning lime, in Iowa and other Western States. Corn at from fifteen to 
eighteen cents per bushel is found cheaper than wood at from five to seven 
dollars per cord, or coal at six or seven dollars per ton.—Mep. Agric. Dept., 
Noy. and Dec., 1872, p. 487. 

One of the greatest benefits to be expected from the improvements of civi- 
lization is, that increased facilities of communication will render it possible to 
transport to places of consumption much valuable material that is now wasted 
because the price at the nearest market will not pay freight. The cattle 
slaughtered in South America for their hides would feed millions of the stary- 
ing population of the Old World, if their flesh could be economically preserved 
and transported across the ocean. This, indeed, is already done, but ona 
scale which, though absolutely considerable, is relatively insignificant. South 
America sends to Europe a certain quantity of nutriment in the form of meat 
extracts, Liebig’s and others; and preserved flesh from Australia is beginning 
to figure in the English market. 

We are beginning to learn a better economy in dealing with the inorganic 


36 DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 


The earth was not, in its natural condition, completely 
adapted to the use of man, but only to the sustenance of wild 
animals and wild vegetation. These live, multiply their kind 
in just proportion, and attain their perfect measure of strength 
and beauty, without producing or requiring any important 
change in the natural arrangements of surface, or in each other’s 
spontaneous tendencies, except such mutual repression of 
excessive increase as may prevent the extirpation of one species 
by the encroachments of another. In short, without man, lower 
animal and spontaneous vegetable life would have been prac- 
tically constant in type, distribution, and proportion, and the 
physical geography of the earth would have remained undis- 
turbed for indefinite periods, and been subject to revolution 


world. The utilization—or, as the Germans more happily call it, the Verwer- 
thung, the Jeworthing—of waste from metallurgical, chemical, and manufac- 
turing establishments, is among the most important results of the application 
of science to industrial purposes. The incidental products from the laborato- 
ries of manufacturing chemists often become more valuable than those for the 
preparation of which they were erected. The slags from silver refineries, and 
even from smelting houses of the coarser metals, have not unfrequently 
yielded to a second operator a better return than the first had derived from 
dealing with the natural ore; and the saving of lead carried off in the smoke 
of furnaces has, of itself, given a large profit on the capital invested in the 
works. According to Ures Dictionary of Aris, see yol. ii., p. 832, an Eng- 
lish miner has constructed flues five miles in length for the condensation 
of the smoke from his lead-works, and makes thereby an annual saving of 
metal to the value of ten thousand pounds sterling. A few years ago, an 
officer of an American mint was charged with embezzling gold committed to 
him for coinage. He insisted, in his defence, that much of the metal was 
volatilized and lost in refining and melting, and upon scraping the chimneys 
of the melting furnaces and the roofs of the adjacent houses, gold enough 
was found in the soot to account for no small part of the deficiency. 

The substitution of expensive machinery for manual labor, even in agricul- 
ture—not to speak of older and more familiar applications—besides being 
highly remunerative, has better secured the harvests, and it is computed that 
the 230,000 threshing machines used in the United States in 1870 obtained five 
per cent. more grain from the sheaves which passed through them than could 
have been secured by the use of the flail. 

The cotton growing States in America produce annually nearly three million 
tons of cotton seed. This, until very recently, has been thrown away as a 


DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. an. 


only from slow development, from possible, unknown cosmical 
causes, or from geological action. 

But man, the domestic animals that serve him, the field and 
garden plants the products of which supply him with food and 
clothing, cannot subsist and rise to the full development of 
their higher properties, unless brute and unconscious nature be 
effectually combated, and, in a great degree, vanquished by 
human art. Hence, a certain measure of transformation of 
terrestrial surface, of suppression of natural, and stimulation of 
artificially modified productivity becomes necessary. This 
measure man has unfortunately exceeded. He has felled the 
forests whose network of fibrous roots bound the mould to the 
rocky skeleton of the earth; but had he allowed here and there 
a belt of woodland to reproduce itself by spontaneous propaga- 
tion, most of the mischiefs which his reckless destruction of the 
natural protection of the soil has occasioned would have been 


useless incumbrance, but it is now valued at ten or twelve dollars per ton for 
the cotton fibre which adheres to it, for the oil extracted from it, and for the 
feed which the refuse furnishes to cattle. The oil—which may be described 
as neutral—is used very largely for mixing with other oils, many of which 
bear a large proportion of it without injury to their special properties. 

There are still, however, cases of enormous waste in many mineral and me- 
chanical industries. ' Thus, while in many European countries common salt is 
a government monopoly, and consequently so dear that the poor do not use as 
much of it as health requires, in others, as in Transylvania, where it is quar- 
ried like stone, the large blocks only are saved, the fragments, to the amount 
of millions of hundred weights, being thrown away.—Bonar, TJransylvania, 
p. 455, 6. 

One of the most interesting and important branches of economy at the 
present day is the recovery of agents such as ammonia and others which had 
been utilized in chemical manufactures, and re-employing them indefinitely 
aiterwards in repeating the same process. 

Among the supplemental exhibitions which will be formed in connection 
with the Vienna Universal Exhibition is to be one showing what steps have 
been taken since 1851 (the date of the first London Exhibition) in the utiliza- 
tion of substances previously regarded as waste. On the one hand will be 
shown the waste products in allthe industrial processes included in the forth- 
coming Exhibition; on the other hand, the useful products which have been 
obtained from such wastes since 1851. This is intended to serve as an incen- 
tive to further researches in the same important direction, 


68 DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 


averted. He has broken up the mountain reservoirs, the perco- 
lation of whose waters through unseen channels supplied the 
fountains that refreshed his cattle and fertilized his fields; but 
he has neglected to maintain the cisterns and the canals of 
irrigation which a wise antiquity had constructed to neutralize 
the consequences of its own imprndence. While he has torn 
the thin glebe which confined the light earth of extensive plains, 
and has destroyed the fringe of semiaquatic plants which 
skirted the coast and checked the drifting of the sea sand, he 
has failed to prevent the spreading of the dunes by clothing 
them with artificially propagated vegetation. He has ruthlessly 
warred on all the tribes of animated nature whose spoil he 
could convert to his own uses, and he has not protected the 
birds which prey on the insects most destructive to his own 
harvests. 

Purely untutored humanity, it is true, interferes compara- 
tively little with the arrangements of nature,* and the destrue- 


* It is an interesting and not hitherto sufficiently noticed fact, that the 
domestication of the organic world, so far as it has yet been achieved, be- 
longs, not indeed to the savage state, but to the earliest dawn of civilization, 
the conquest of inorganic nature almost as exclusively to the most advanced 
stages of artificial culture. Civilization has added little to the number of vege- 
table or animal species grown in our fields or bred in our foids—the cranberry 
and the wild grape being almost the only plants which the Anglo-American has 
reclaimed out of our vast native flora and added to his harvests—while, on the 
contrary, the subjugation of the inorganic forces, and the consequent extension 
of man’s sway over, not the annual products of the earth only, but her sub- 
stance and her springs of action, is almost entirely the work of highly refined 
and cultivated ages. The employment of the elasticity of wood and of horn, as 
a projectile power in the bow, is nearly universal among the rudest sayages. 
The application of compressed air to the same purpose, in the blowpipe, is 
more restricted, and the use of the mechanical powers, the inclined plane, the 
wheel and axle, and even the wedge and lever, seems almost unknown except 
to civilized man. I have myself seen European peasants to whom one of the 
simplest applications of this latter power was a revelation. 

It is familiarly known to all who have occupied themselves with the psy- 
chology and habits of the ruder races, and of persons with imperfectly 
developed intellects in civilized life, that although these humble tribes and 
individuals sacrifice, without scruple, the lives of the lower animals to the 
gratification of their appetites and the supply of their other physical wants, 


DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 39 


tive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and 
unsparing as he advances in civilization, until the impoverish- 
ment, with which his exhaustion of the natural resources of the 
soil is threatening him, at last awakens him to the necessity of 
preserving what is left, if not of restoring what has been 
wantonly wasted. The wandering savage grows no cultivated 


yet they nevertheless seem to cherish with brutes, and even with vegetable 
life, sympathies which are much more feebly felt by civilized men. The 
popular traditions of the simpler peoples recognize a certain community of 
nature between man, brute animals, and even plants; and this serves to 
explain why the apologue or fable, which ascribes the power of speech and 
the faculty of reason to birds, quadrupeds, insects, flowers, and trees, is one 
of the earliest forms of literary composition. 

In almost every wild tribe, some particular quadruped or bird, though 
persecuted as a destroyer of other animals more useful to man, or hunted for 
food, is regarded with peculiar respect, one might almost say, affection. Some 
ef the North American aboriginal nations celebrate a propitiatory feast to the 
manes of the intended victim before they commence a bear hunt; and the 
Norwegian peasantry have not only retained an old proverb which ascribes to 
the same animal *‘ ¢? Mands Styrke og tolv Mends Vid,” ten men’s strength 
and twelve men’s cunning, but they still pay to him something of the rever- 
ence with which ancient superstition invested him. ‘The student of Icelandic 
literature will find in the saga of Finnbogi hinn rami a curious illustration of 
this feeling, in an account of a dialogue between a Norwegian bear and an 
Icelandic champion-—-dumb show on the part of Bruin, and chivalric words on 
that of Finnbogi—followed by a duel, in which the latter, who had thrown 
away his arms and armor in order that the combatants might meet on equal 
terms, was victorious. See also Friis, Lappisk Mythologi, Christiania, 1871, 
§ 37, and the earlier authors there cited. Drummond Hay’s very interesting 
work on Morocco contains many amusing notices of a similar feeling enter- 
tained by the Moors towards the redoubtable enemy of their flocks—the lion. 

This sympathy helps us to understand how itis that most if not all the 
domestic animals—if indeed they ever existed in a wild state—were appro- 
priated, reclaimed and trained before men had been gathered into organized 
and fixed communities, that almost every known esculent plant had acquired 
substantially its present artificial character, and that the properties of nearly 
all vegetable drugs and poisons were known at the remotest period to which 
historical records reach. Did nature bestow upon primitive man some instinct 
akin to that by which she has been supposed to teach the brute to select the 
nutritious and to reject the noxious vegetables indiscriminately mixed in 
forest and pasture ? 

This instinct, it must be admitted, is far from infallible, and, as has been 


40 DESTRUCTIVENESS OF MAN. 


vegetable, fells no forest, and extirpates no useful plant, no 
noxious weed. If his skill in the chase enables him to entrap 
numbers of the animals on which he feeds, he compensates this 
loss by destroying also the lion, the tiger, the wolf, the otter, the 
seal, and the eagle, thus indirectly protecting the feebler 
quadrupeds and fish and fowls, which would otherwise become 


hundreds of times remarked by naturalists, it is in many cases not an original 
faculty but an acquired and transmitted habit. It is a fact familiar to persons 
engaged in sheep husbandry in New England—and I have seen it confirmed by 
personal observation—that sheep bred where the commun laurel, as it is called, 
Kalmia angustifolia, abounds, almost always avoid browsing upon the leaves 
of that plant, while those brought from districts where laurel is unknown, 
and turned into pastures where it grows, very often feed upon it and are 
poisoned by it. A curious acquired and hereditary instinct, of a different 
character, may not improperly be noticed here. I refer to that by which 
horses bred in provinces where quicksands are common avoid their dangers or 
extricate themselves from them. See BREMONTIER, Mémoire sur les Dunes, 
Annales des Ponts et Charssées, 1833: premier sémestre, pp. 155-157. 

Tt is commonly said in New England, and I believe with reason, that the 
crows of this generation are wiser than their ancestors. Scarecrows which 
were effectual fifty years ago are no longer respected by the plunderers of the 
cornfield, and new terrors must from time to time be invented for its protec- 
tion. ; 

Schroeder van der Kolk, in Het Verschil tusschen den Psychischen Aanleg 
van het Dier en van den Mensch, cites many interesting facts respecting 
instincts lost, or newly developed and become hereditary, in the lower animals, 
and he quotes Aristotle and Pliny as evidence that the common quadrupeds 
and fowls of our fields and our poultry yards were much less perfectly domes- 
ticated in their times than long, long ages of servitude have now made them. 

Among other instances of obliterated instincts, this author states that in 
Holland, where, for centuries, the young of the cow has been usually taken 
from the dam at birth and fed by hand, calves, even if left with the mother, 
make no attempt to suck; while in England, where calves are not weaned 
until several weeks old, they resort to the udder as naturally as the young of 
wild quadrupeds.— Zid en Ligchaam, p. 128, n. 

Perhaps the half-wild character ascribed by P. Lestadius and other 
Swedish writers to the reindeer of Lapland, may be in some degree due to the 
comparative shortness of the period during which he has been partially tamed, 
The domestic swine bred in the woods of Hungary and the buffalo of Southern 
Italy are so wild and savage as to be very dangerous to all but their keepers, 
The former have relapsed into their original condition, the latter, perhaps, have 
never been fully reclaimed from it. 


HUMAN AND BRUTE ACTION COMPARED 41 


the booty of beasts and birds of prey. But with stationary life, 
or at latest with the pastoral state, man at once commences an 
almost indiscriminate warfare upon all the forms of animal 
and vegetable existence around him, and as he advances in 
civilization, he gradually eradicates or transforms every spon- 
taneous product of the soil he occupies.* 


Human and Brute Action Compared. 


It is maintained by authorities as high as any known to mod- 
ern science, that the action of man upon nature, though greater 
in degree, does not differ in kind from that of wild animals. 
It is perhaps impossible to establish a radical distinction 
genere between the two classes of effects, but there is an essential 
difference between the motive of action which calls out the en- 
ergies of civilized man and the mere appetite which controls the 
life of the beast. The action of man, indeed, is frequently fol- 
lowed by unforeseen and undesired results, yet it is nevertheless 
guided by a self-conscious will aiming as often at secondary and 
remote as at immediate objects. The wild animal, on the other 
hand, acts instinctively, and, so far as we are able to perceive, 
always with a view to single and direct purposes. The back- 
woodsman and the beaver alike fell trees ; the man that he may 
convert the forest into an olive grove that will mature its fruit 
only for a succeeding generation, the beaver that he may feed 
upon the bark of the trees or use them in the construction of his 
habitation. The action of brutes upon the material world is 
slow and gradual, and usually limited, in any given case, to a 


* The difference between the relations of savage life, and of incipient 
civilization, to nature, is well seen in that part of the valley of the Missis- 
sippi which was once occupied by the mound builders and afterwards by the 
far less developed Indian tribes. When the tillers of the fields, which must 
have been cultivated to sustain the large population that once inhabited those 
regions, perished, or were driven out, the soil fell back to the normal forest 
state, and the savages who succeeded the more advanced race interfered very 
little, if at all, with the ordinary course of spontancous nature. 


42 HUMAN AND BRUTE ACTION COMPARED. 


narrow extent of territory. Nature is allowed time and oppor- 
tunity to set her restorative powers at work, and the destructive 
animal has hardly retired from the field of his ravages before 
nature has repaired the damages occasioned by his operations. 
In fact, he is expelled from the scene by the very efforts which 
she makes for the restoration of her dominion. Man, on the 
contrary, extends his action over vast spaces, his revolutions are 
swift and radical, and his devastations are, for an almost ineal- 
culable time after he has withdrawn the arm that gave the blow, 
irreparable. 

The form of geographical surface, and very probably the 
climate of a given country, depend much on the character of 
the vegetable life belonging to it. Man has, by domestication, 
greatly changed the habits and properties of the plants he rears ; 
he has, by voluntary selection, immensely modified the forms 
and qualities of the animated creatures that serve him; and he 
has, at the same time, completely rooted out many forms of ani- 
mal if not of vegetable being.* What is there, in the influence 
of brute life, that corresponds to this? We have no reason to 
believe that, in that portion of the American continent which, 
though peopled by many tribes of quadruped and fowl, re- 
mained uninhabited by man or only thinly occupied by purely 
savage tribes, any sensible geographical change had occurred 
within twenty centuries before the epoch of discovery and colo- 
nization, while, during the same period, man had changed mil- 


* Whatever may be thought of the modification of organic species by natural 
selection, there is certainly no evidence that animals have exerted upon any 
form of life an influence analogous to that of domestication upon plants, quad- 
rupeds, and birds reared artificially by man; and this is as true of unforeseen 
as of purposely effected improvements accomplished by voluntary selection of 
breeding animals, 

It is true that nature employs birds and quadrupeds for the dissemination 
of vegetable and even of animal species. But when the bird drops the seed 
of a fruit it has swallowed, and when the sheep transports in its fieece the 
seed-vessel of a burdock from the plain to the mountain, its action is purely 
mechanical and unconscious, and does not differ from that of the wind in pro- 
ducing the same effect. 


HUMAN AND BRUTE ACTION COMPARED. 43 


lions of square miles, in the fairest and most fertile regions of 
the Old World, into the barrenest deserts. 

The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and de- 
stroy the balance which nature had established between her 
organized and her inorganic creations, and she avenges herself 
upon the intruder, by letting loose upon her defaced provinces 
destructive energies hitherto kept in check by organic forces 
destined to be his best auxiliaries, but which he has unwisely 
dispersed and driven from the field of action, When the forest 
is gone, the great reservoir of moisture stored up in its vegetable 
mould is evaporated, and returns only in deluges of rain to wash 
away the parched dust into which that mould has been con- 
verted. The well-wooded and humid hills are turned to ridges 
of dry rock, which encumbers the low grounds and chokes the 
watercourses with its débris, and—except in countries favored 
with an equable distribution of rain through the seasons, and a 
moderate and regular inclination of surface—the whole earth, 
unless rescued by human art from the physical degradation to 
which it tends, becomes an assemblage of bald mountains, of 
barren, turfless hills, and of swampy and malarious plains. 
There are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece, 
and even of Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes set in 
action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation 
almost as complete as that of the moon; and though, within 
that brief space of time which we call “the historical period,” 
they are known to have been covered with luxuriant woods, ver- 
dant pastures, and fertile meadows, they are now too far deterio- 
rated to be reclaimable by man, nor can they become again fitted 
for human use, except through great geological changes, or other 
mysterious influences or agencies of which we have no present 
knowledge, and over which we have no prospective control. 
The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhab- 
itant, and another era of equal human crime and human im- 
providence, and of like duration with that through which traces 
of that crime and that improvidence extend, would reduce it to 
such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered 


44 PHYSICAL IMPROVEMENT. 


surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, bar- 
barism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.* 


Physical Improvement. 


True, there is a partial reverse to this picture. On narrow 
theatres, new forests have been planted ; inundations of flowing 
streams restrained by heavy walls of masonry and other con- 
structions ; torrents compelled to aid, by depositing the slime 
with which they are charged, in filling up lowlands, and raising 
the level of morasses which their own overflows had created ; 
ground submerged by the encroachments of the ocean, or ex- 
posed to be covered by its tides, has been rescued from its do- 
minion by diking; swamps and even lakes have been drained, 
and their beds brought within the domain of agricultural indus- 
try ; drifting coast dunes have been checked and made produc- 
tive by plantation ; seas and inland waters have been repeopled 
with fish, and even the sands of the Sahara have been fertilized 
by artesian fountains. These achievements are more glorious 
than the proudest triumphs of war, but, thus far, they give but 
faint hope that we shall yet make full atonement for our spend- 
thrift waste of the bounties of nature. 


¥ ‘And it may be remarked that, as the world has passed through 
these several stages of strife to produce a Christendom, so by relaxing in the 
enterprises it has learnt, does it tend downwards, through inverted steps, to 
wildness and the waste again. Leta people give up their contest with moral 
evil; disregard the injustice, the ignorance, the greediness, that may prevail 
among them, and part more and more with the Christian element of their ciy- 
ilization; and in declining this battle with sin, they will inevitably get em- 
broiled with men. Threats of war and revolution punish their unfaithfulness ; 
and if then, instead of retracing their steps, they yield again, and are driven 
before the storm, the very arts they had created, the structures they had 
raised, the usages they had established, are swept away; ‘in that very day 
their thoughts perish.’ The portion they had reclaimed from the young 
earth’s ruggedness is lost; and failing to stand fast against man, they finally 
get embroiled with nature, and are thrust down beneath her ever-living hand.” 
—MARTINEAU’s Sermon, ‘‘ The Good Soldier of Jesus Christ.” 

+ The wonderful success which has attended the measures for subduing 
torrents and preventing inundations employed in Southern France since 1865, 


LIMITS OF HUMAN POWER. 45 


Limits of Human Power. 


It is, on the one hand, rash and unphilosophical to attempt to 
set limits to the ultimate power of man over inorganic nature, 
and it is unprofitable, on the other, to speculate on what may 
be accomplished by the discovery of now unknown and unima- 
gined natural forces, or even by the invention of new arts and 
new processes. But since we have seen aerostation, the motive 
power of elastic vapors, the wonders of modern telegraphy, the 
destructive explosiveness of gunpowder, of nitro-glycerine, and 
even of a substance so harmless, unresisting, and inert as cotton, 
there is little in the way of mechanical achievement which seems 
hopelessly impossible, and it is hard to restrain the imagination 
from wandering forward a couple of generations to an epoch 
when our descendants shall have advanced as far beyond us in 
physical conquest, as we have marched beyond the trophies 
erected by our grandfathers. There are, nevertheless, in actual 
practice, limits to the efficiency of the forces which we are now 
able to bring into the field, and we must admit that, for the 
present, the agencies known to man and controlled by him are 
inadequate to the reducing of great Alpine precipices to such 
slopes as would enable them to support a vegetable clothing, 
or to the covering of large extents of denuded rock with earth, 
and planting upon them a forest growth. Yet among the 
mysteries which science is hereafter to reveal, there may be still 
undiscovered methods of accomplishing even grander wonders 
than these. Mechanical philosophers have suggested the pos- 
sibility of accumulating and treasuring up for human use some 
of the greater natural forces, which the action of the elements 
puts forth with such astonishing energy. Could we gather, 
and bind, and make subservient to our control, the power 
which a West Indian hurricane exerts through a small area in 


and described in Chapter III., post, ought to be here noticed asa splendid and 
most encouraging example of well-directed effort in the way of physical resto- 
ration. 


46 LIMITS OF HUMAN POWER. 


one continuous blast, or the momentum expended by the waves, 
in a tempestuous winter, upon the breakwater at Cherbourg,* 
or the lifting power of the tide, for a month, at the head of the 
Bay of Fundy, or the pressure of a square mile of sea water at the 
depth of five thousand fathoms, or a moment of the might of 
an earthquake or a volcano, our age—which moves no moun- 
tains and casts them into the sea by faith alone—might hope 
to scarp the rugged walls of the Alps and Pyrenees and Mount 
Taurus, robe them once more in a vegetation as rich as that of 
their pristine woods, and turn their wasting torrents into re- 
freshing streams.t 

Could this old world, which man has overthrown, be rebuild. 


* In heavy storms, the force of the waves as they strike against a sea-wall 

-is from one and a half to two tons to the square foot, and Stevenson, in one 

instance at Skerryvore and in another at the Bell Rock lighthouse, found this 
force equal to nearly three tons per foot. 

The seaward front of the breakwater at Cherbourg exposes a surface of 
about 2,500,000 square feet. In rough weather the waves beat against this 
whole face, though at the depth of twenty-two yards, which is the height of 
the breakwater, they exert a very much less violent motive force than at and 
near the surface of the sea, because this force diminishes in geometrical, as 
the distance below the surface increases in arithmetical, proportion. The 
shock of the waves is received several thousand times in the course of twenty- 
four hours, and hence the sum of impulse which the breakwater resists in one 
stormy day amounts to many thousands of millions of tons. The breakwater 
is entirely an artificial construction. If then man could accumulate and con- 
trol the forces which he is able effectually to resist, he might be said to be, 
physically speaking, omnipotent. 

+ Some well-known experiments show that it is quite possible to accumulate 
the solar heat by a simple apparatus, and thus to obtain a temperature which 
might be economically important even in the climate of Switzerland. Saus- 
sure, by receiving the sun’s rays in a nest of boxes blackened within and coy- 
ered with glass, raised a thermometer enclosed in the inner box to the boiling 
point; and under the more powerful sun of the Cape of Good Hope, Sir John 
Herschel cooked the materials for a family dinner by a similar process, using, 
however, but a single box, surrounded with dry sand and covered with two 
glasses. Why should not so easy a method of economizing fuel be resorted to 
in Italy, in Spain, and even in more northerly climates? 

The unfortunate John Davidson records in his journal that he saved fuel in 
Morocco by exposing his teakettle to the sun on the roof of his house, where 
the water rose to the temperature of one hundred and forty degrees, and, of 


LIMITS OF HUMAN POWER. 47 


ed, could human cunning rescue its wasted hillsides and its 
deserted plains from solitude or mere nomade occupation, from 
‘barrenness, from nakedness, and from insalubrity, and restore 
the ancient fertility and healthfulness of the Etruscan sea coast, 
the Campagna and the Pontine marshes, of Calabria, of Sicily, 
of the Peloponnesus and insular and continental Greece, of 
Asia Minor, of the slopes of Lebanon and Hermon, of Pales- 
tine, of the Syrian desert, of Mesopotamia and the delta of the 
Euphrates, of the Cyrenaica, of Africa proper, Numidia, and 
Mauritania, the thronging millions of Europe might still find 
room on the Eastern continent, and the main current of emi- 
gration be turned towards the rising instead of the setting sun. 
But changes like these must await not only great political 
and moral revolutions in the governments and peoples by whom 
those regions are now possessed, but, especially, a command of 
pecuniary and of mechanical means not at present enjoyed by 
those nations, and a more advanced and generally diffused 
knowledge of the processes by which the amelioration of soil 
and climate is possible than now anywhere exists. Until such 
circumstances shall conspire to favor the work of geographical 
regeneration, the countries I have mentioned, with here and 
there a local exception, will continue to sink into yet deeper 
desolation, and in the meantime the American continent, 
Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the smaller 
oceanic islands, will be almost the only theatres where man is 
engaged, on a great scale, in transforming the face of nature. 


course, needed little fire to bring it to boil. But this was the direct and sim- 
ple, not the concentrated or accumulated heat of the sun. 

On the utilizing of the solar heat, simply as heat, see the work of Moucnor, 
La Chaleur solaire et ses applications industrielles. Paris, 1869. 

The reciprocal convertibility of the natural forces has suggested the possi- 
bility of advantageously converting the heat of the sun into mechanical power. 
Ericsson calculates that in all latitudes between the equator and 45°, a hun- 
dred square feet of surface exposed to the solar rays develop continuously, for 
nine hours a day on an average, eight and one fifth horse-power. 

I do not know that any attempts have been made to accumulate and store 
up, for use at pleasure, force derived from this powerful source. 


48 PHYSICAL CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. 


Importance of Physical Conservation and Restoration. 


Comparatively short as is the period through which the colo- 
nization of foreign lands by European emigrants extends, 
great and, it is to be feared, sometimes irreparable injury has 
already been done in the various processes by which man seeks 
to subjugate the virgin earth; and many provinces, first trod- 
den by the homo sapiens Lurope within the last two centuries, 
begin to show signs of that melancholy dilapidation which is 
now driving so many of the peasantry of Europe from their 
native hearths. It is evidently a matter of great moment, not 
only to the population of the states where these symptoms are 
manifesting themselves, but to the general interests of hnuman- 
ity, that this decay should be arrested, and that the future ope- 
rations of rural husbandry and of forest industry, in districts 
yet remaining substantially in their native condition, should be 
so conducted as to prevent the widespread mischiefs which have 
been elsewhere produced by thoughtless or wanton destruction 
of the natural safeguards of the soil. This can be done only 
by the diffusion of knowledge on this subject among the classes 
that, in earlier days, subdued and tilled ground in which they 
had no vested rights, but who, in our time, own their woods, 
their pastures, and their ploughlands as a perpetual possession 
for them and theirs, and have, therefore, a strong interest in the 
protection of their domain against deterioration. 


Physical Restoration. 


Many circumstances conspire to invest with great present 
interest the questions: how far man can permanently modify 
and ameliorate those physical conditions of terrestrial surface 
and climate on which his material welfare depends; how far 
he can compensate, arrest, or retard the deterioration which 
many of his agricultural and industrial processes tend to pro- 
duce; and how far he can restore fertilitv and salubrity to soils 


PHYSICAL CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. 49 


which his follies or his crimes have made barren or pestilential. 
Among these circumstances, the most prominent, perhaps, is 
the necessity of providing new homes for a European popula- 
tion which is increasing more rapidly than its means of subsist- 
ence, new physical comforts for classes of the people that have 
now become too much enlightened and have imbibed too much 
culture to submit to a longer deprivation of a share in the 
material enjoyments which the privileged ranks have hitherto 
monopolized. 

To supply new hives for the emigrant swarms, there are, 
first, the vast unoccupied prairies and forests of America, of 
Australia, and of many other great oceanic islands, the sparsely 
inhabited and still unexhausted soils of Southern and even 
Central Africa, and, finally, the impoverished and half-depopu- 
lated shores of the Mediterranean, and the interior of Asia 
Minor and the farther East. To furnish to those who shall 
remain after emigration shall have conveniently reduced the 
too dense population of many European states, those means of 
sensuous and of intellectual well-being which are styled “ arti- 
ficial wants” when demanded by the humble and the poor, but 
are admitted to be “necessaries” when claimed by the noble 
and the rich, the soil must be stimulated to its highest powers 
of production, and man’s utmost ingenuity and energy must be 
tasked to renovate a nature drained, by his improvidence, of | 
fountains which a wise economy would have made plenteous 
and perennial sources of beauty, health, and wealth. 

In those yet virgin lands which the progress of modern dis- 
covery in both hemispheres has brought and is still bringing to 
the knowledge and control of civilized man, not much improve- 
ment of great physical conditions is to be looked for. The 
proportion of forest is indeed to be considerably reduced, super- 
fluous waters to be drawn off, and routes of internal communica- 
tion to be constructed; but the primitive geographical and cli- 
matic features of these countries ought to be, as far as possible, 
retained. 


In reclaiming and reoccupying lands laid waste by human im- 
4 


50 PHYSICAL CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. 


providence or malice, and abandoned by man, or occupied only 
by a nomade or thinly scattered population, the task of the 
pioneer settler is of a very different character. He is to become 
a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the damaged 
fabric which the negligence or the wantonness of former lodgers 
has rendered untenantable. He must aid her in reclothing the 
mountain slopes with forests and vegetable mould, thereby re- 
storing the fountains which she provided to water them; in 
checking the devastating fury of torrents, and bringing back 
the surface drainage to its primitive narrow channels; and in 
drying deadly morasses by opening the natural sluices which 
have been choked up, and cutting new canals for drawing off 
their stagnant waters. He must thus, on the one hand, create 
new reservoirs, and, on the other, remove mischievous accumula- 
tions of moisture, thereby equalizing and regulating the sources 
of atmospheric humidity and of flowing water, both which are 
so essential to all vegetable growth, and, of course, to human 
and lower animal life. 

I have remarked that the effects of human action on the forms 
of the earth’s surface could not always be distinguished from 
those resulting from geological causes, and there is also much 
uncertainty in respect to the precise influence of the clearing 
and cultivating of the ground, and of other rural operations, upon 
climate. It is disputed whether either the mean or the extremes 
of temperature, the periods of the seasons, or the amount or dis- 
tribution of precipitation and of evaporation, in any country 
whose annals are known, have undergone any change during 
the historical period. It is, indeed, as has been already obser- 
ved, impossible to doubt that many of the operations of the 
pioneer settler tend to produce great modifications in atmos- 
pheric humidity, temperature, and electricity; but we are at 
present unable to determine how far one set of effects is neutral- 
ized by another, or compensated by unknown agencies. This 
question scientific research is inadequate to solve, for want of 
the necessary data; but well conducted observation, in regions 
now first brought under the occupation of man, combined with 


PHYSICAL CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. oat 


such historical evidence as still exists, may be expected at no 
distant period to throw much light on this subject. 

Australia and New Zealand are, perhaps, the countries from 
which we have a right to expect the fullest elucidation of these 
difficult and disputable problems. Their colonization did not 
commence until the physical sciences had become matter of 
almost universal attention, and is, indeed, so recent that the 
memory of living men embraces the principal epochs of their 
history; the peculiarities of their fauna, their flora, and their 
geology are such as to have excited for them the liveliest inter- 
est of the votaries of natural science; their mines have given 
their people the necessary wealth for procuring the means of 
instrumental observation, and the leisure required for the pursuit 
of scientific research; and large tracts of virgin forest and 
natural meadow are rapidly passing under the control of civil- 
ized man. Here, then, exist greater facilities and stronger 
motives for the careful study of the topics in question than have 
ever been found combined in any other theatre of European 
colonization. 

In North America, the change from the natural to the arti- 
ficial condition of terrestrial surface began about the period 
when the most important instruments of meteorological obser- 
vation were invented. The first settlers in the territory now 
constituting the United States and the British American proy- 
inces had other things to do than to tabulate barometrical and 
thermometrical readings, but there remain some interesting 
physical records from the early days of the colonies,* and there 


* The Travels of Dr. Dwight, president of Yale College, which embody the 
results of his personal observations, and of his inquiries among the early set- 
tlers, in his vacation excursions in the Northern States of the American 
Union, though presenting few instrumental measurements or tabulated re- 
sults, are of value for the powers of observation they exhibit, and for the 
sound common sense with which many natural phenomena, such for instance 
as the formation of the river meadows, called ‘‘intervales,” in New England, 
ave explained. They present a true and interesting picture of physical condi- 
tions, many of which have long ceased to exist in the theatre of his researches, 
and of which few other records are extant, 


52 PHYSICAL CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. 


is still an immense extent of North American soil where the 
industry and the folly of man have as yet produced little 
appreciable change. Here, too, with the present increased 
facilities for scientific observation, the future effects, direct and 
contingent, of man’s labors, can be measured, and such precau- 
tions taken in those rural processes which we call improve- 
ments, as to mitigate evils, perhaps, in some degree, insepara- 
ble from every attempt to control the action of natural laws. 
In order to arrive at safe conclusions, we must first obtain 
a more exact knowledge of the topography, and of the pres- 
ent superficial and climatic condition of countries where the 
natural surface is as yet more or less unbroken. This can 
only be accomplished by accurate surveys, and by a great mul- 
tiplication of the points of meteorological registry,* already so 
numerous ; and as, moreover, considerable changes in the pro- 
portion of forest and of cultivated land, or of dry and wholly 
or partially submerged surface, will often take place within 
brief periods, it is highly desirable that the attention of 
observers, in whose neighborhood the clearing of the soil, or 
the drainage of lakes and swamps, or other great works of 
rural improvement, are going on or meditated, should be espe- 
cially drawn not only to revolutions in atmospheric tempera- 


* The general law of temperature is that it decreases as we ascend. But, 
in hilly regions, the law is reversed in cold, still weather, the cold air descend- 
ing, by reason of its greater gravity, into the valleys. If there be wind enough, 
however, to produce a disturbance and intermixture of higher and lower 
atmospheric strata, this exception to the general law does not take place. 
These facts have long been familiar to the common people of Switzerland and 
of New England, but their importance has not been sufficiently taken into 
account in the discussion of meteorological observations. The descent of the 
cold air and the rise of the warm affect the relative temperatures of hills and 
valleys to a much greater extent than has been usually supposed. A gentle- 
man well known to me kept a thermometrical record for nearly half a century, 
in a New England country town, at an elevation of at least 1,500 feet above 
the sea. During these years his thermometer never fell lower than 26°— 
Fahrenheit, while at the shire town of the county, situated in a basin one 
thousand feet lower, and only ten miles distant, as well as at other points in 
similar positions, the mercury froze several times in the same period. 


PHYSICAL CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. 53 


ture and precipitation, but to the more easily ascertained and 
perhaps more important local changes produced by these ope- 
rations in the temperature and the hygrometric state of the 
superficial strata of the earth, and in its spontaneous vegetable 
and animal products. 

The rapid extension of railroads, which now everywhere 
keep pace with, and sometimes even precede, the occupation 
of new soil for agricultural purposes, furnishes great facilities 
for enlarging our knowledge of the topography of the territory 
they traverse, because their cuttings reveal the composition 
and general structure of surface, and the inclination and eleva- 
tion of their lines constitute known hypsometrical sections, 
which give numerous points of departure for the measure- 
ment of higher and lower stations, and of course for deter- 
mining the relief and depression of surface, the slope of the 
beds of watercourses, and many other not less important ques- 
tions.* 


* Railroad surveys must be received with great caution where any motive 
exists for cooking them. Capitalists are shy of investments in roads with 
steep grades, and of course it is important to make a fair show of facilities in 
obtaining funds for new routes. Joint-stock companies have no souls; their 
managers, In general, no consciences. Cases can be cited where engineers 
and directors of railroads, with long grades above one hundred feet to the 
mile, have regularly sworn in their annual reports, for years in succession, 
that there were no grades upon their routes exceeding half that elevation. In 
fact, every person conversant with the history of these enterprises knows that 
in their public statements falsehood is the rule, truth the exception. 

What I am about to remark is not exactly relevant to my subject ; but it is 
hard to ‘‘ get the floor” in the world’s great debating society, and when a 
speaker who has anything to say once finds access to the public ear, he must 
make the most of his opportunity, without inquiring too nicely whether his 
observations are ‘‘in order.” I shall harm no honest man by endeavoring, as 
I have often done elsewhere, to excite the attention of thinking and conscien- 
tious men to the dangers which threaten the great moral and even political in- 
terests of Christendom, from the unscrupulousness of the private associations 
that now control the monetary affairs, and regulate the transit of persons and 
property, in almost every civilized country. More than one American State 
is literally governed by unprincipled corporations, which not only defy the legis- 
lative power, but have, too often, corrupted even the administration of jus- 


54 PHYSICAL CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. 


The geological, hydrographical, and topographical surveys, 
which almost every general and even local government of the 
civilized world is carrying on, are making yet more important 
contributions to our stock of geographical and general physical 
knowledge, and, within a comparatively short space, there will 
be an accumulation of well established constant and historical 
facts, from which we can safely reason upon all the relations 
of action and reaction between man and external nature. 

But we are, even now, breaking up the floor and wain- 
scoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling, for fuel 
to warm our bodies and to seethe our pottage, and the world 
cannot afford to wait till the slow and sure progress of exact 
science has taught it a better economy. Many practical lessons 
haye been learned by the common observation of unschooled 


tice. The tremendous power of these associations is due not merely to 
pecuniary corruption, but partly to an old legal superstition—fostered by the 
decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the famous Dartmouth 
College case—in regard to the sacredness of corporate prerogatives. There is 
no good reason why private rigits derived from God and the very constitu- 
tion of society should be iess respected than privileges granted by legislatures. 
It should never be forgotten that no privilege can be a right, and legislative 
bodies ought never to make a grant to a corporation, without express reser- 
vation of what many sound jurists now hold to be involved in the very nature 
of such grants, the power of revocation. Similar evils have become almost 
equally rife in England, and on the Continent; and I believe the decay of 
commercial morality, and of the sense of all higher obligations than those of 
@ pecuniary nature, on both sides of the Atlantic, is to be ascribed more to 
the influence of joint-stock banks and manufacturing and railway companies, 
to the workings, in short, of what is called the principle of ‘‘ associate ac- 
tion,” than to any other one cause of demoralization. 

The apophthegm, ‘‘ the world is governed too much,” though unhappily too 
truly spoken of many countries—and perhaps, in some aspects, true of all— 
has done much mischief whenever it has been too unconditionally accepted as 
a political axiom. The popular apprehension of being over-governed, and, I 
am afraid, more emphatically the fear of being over-taxed, has had much to 
do with the general abandonment of certain governmental duties by the ruling 
powers of most modern states. It is theoretically the duty of government to 
provide all those public facilities of intercommunication and commerce, which 
are essential to the prosperity of civilized commonwealths, but which indi- 
vidual means are inadequate to furnish, and for the due administration of 


PHYSICAL CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION. 55 


men; and the teachings of simple experience, on topics where 
natural philosophy has scarcely yet spoken, are not to be 
despised. 

In these humble pages, which do not in the least aspire to 
rank among scientific expositions of the laws of nature, I shall 
attempt to give the most important practical conclusions sug- 
gested by the history of man’s efforts to replenish the earth and 
subdue it; and I shall aim to support those conclusions by such 
facts and illustrations only as address themselves to the under- 
standing of every intelligent reader, and as are to be found 
recorded in works capable of profitable perusal, or at least con- 
sultation, by persons who have not enjoyed a special scientific 
training. 


which individual guaranties are insufficient. Hence public roads, canals, rail- 
roads, postal communications, the circulating medium of exchange whether 
metallic or representative, armies, navies, being all matters in which the na- 
tion at large has a vastly deeper interest than any private association can have, 
ought legitimately to be constructed and provided only by that which is the 
visible personification and embodiment of the nation, namely, its legislative 
head. No doubt the organization and management of these institutions by 
government are liable, as are all things human, to great abuses. .The multi- 
plication of public placeholders, which they imply, is a serious evil. But the 
corruption thus engendered, foul as it is, does not strike so deep as the rot- 
tenness of private corporations; and official rank, position, and duty have, in 
practice, proved better securities for fidelity and pecuniary integrity in the 
conduct of the interests in question, than the suretyships of private corporate 
agents, whose bondsmen so often fail or abscond before their principal is de- 
tected. 

Many theoretical statesmen have thought that voluntary associations for 
strictly pecuniary and industrial purposes, and for the construction and con- 
trol of public works, might furnish, in democratic countries, a compensation 
for the small and doubtful advantages, and at the same time secure an ex- 
emption from the great and certain evils, of aristocratic institutions. The 
example of the American States shows that private corporations—whose rule 
of action is the interest of the association, not the conscience of the indi- 
vidual—though composed of ultra-democratic elements, may become most 
dangerous enemies to rational liberty, to the moral interests of the common- 
wealth, to the purity of legislation and of judicial action, and to the sacred- 
ness of private rights. 


CHAPTER II. 


TRANSFER, MODIFICATION, AND EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLE AND 
OF ANIMAL SPECIES. 


Modern geography takes account of organic life-—-Geographical importance 
of plants—Origin of domestic vegetables—Transfer of vegetable life— 
Objects of modern commerce—Foreign plants, how introduced—Vegetable 
power of accommodation—Agricultural products of the United States— 
Useful American plants grown in Europe—Extirpation of vegetables— 
Animal life as a geological and geographical agency—Origin and transfer 
of domestic quadrupeds—Extirpation of wild quadrupeds—Large marine 
animals relatively unimportant in geography—Introduction and breeding 
of fish—Destruction of fish—Geographical importance of birds—Introduc- 
tion of birds—-Destruction of birds—Utility and destruction of reptiles— 
Utility of insects and worms—Injury to the forest by insects—Introduc- 
tion of insects—Destruction of insects—Minute organisms. 


Modern Geography embraces Organic Life. 


Ir was a narrow view of geography which confined that 
science to delineation of terrestrial surface and outline, and to 
description of the relative position and magnitude of land and 
water. In its improved form it embraces not only the globe 
itself and the atmosphere which bathes it, but the living 
things which vegetate or move upon it, the varied influences 
they exert upon each other, the reciprocal action and reaction 
between them and the earth they inhabit. Even if the end of 
geographical studies were only to obtain a knowledge of the 
external forms of the mineral and fluid masses which constitute 
the globe, it would still be necessary to take into account the 
element of life ; for every plant, every animal, is a geographical 
agency, man a destructive, vegetables, and in some cases even 
wild beasts, restorative powers. 


MODERN GEOGRAPHY EMBRACES ORGANIC LIFE. ay ( 


The rushing waters sweep down earth from the uplands ; in 
the first moment of repose, vegetation seeks to reéstablish itself 
on the bared surface, and, by the slow deposit of its decaying 
products, to raise again the soil which the torrent had lowered. 
So important an element of reconstruction is this, that it has 
been seriously questioned whether, upon the whole, vegetation 
does not contribute as much to elevate, as the waters to depress, 
the level of the surface. 

Whenever man has transported a plant from its native 
habitat to a new soil, he has introduced anew geographical 
force to act upon it, and this generally at the expense of some 
indigenous growth which the foreign vegetable has supplanted. 
The new and the old plants are rarely the equivalents of each 
other, and the substitution of an exotic for a native tree, shrub, 
or grass, increases or diminishes the relative importance of the 
vegetable element in the geography of the country to which it 
is removed. Further, man sows that he may reap. The pro- 
ducts of agricultural industry are not suffered to rot upon the 
ground, and thus raise it by an annual stratum of new mould. 
They are gathered, transported to greater or less distances, and 
after they have served their uses in human economy, they 
enter, on the final decomposition of their elements, into new 
combinations, and are only in small proportion returned to the 
soil on which they grew. The roots of the grasses, and of 
many other cultivated plants, however, usually remain and 
decay in the earth, and contribute to raise its surface, though 
certainly not in the same degree as the forest. 

The smaller vegetables which have taken the place of trees 
unquestionably perform many of the same functions. They 
radiate heat, they absorb gases, and exhale uncombined gases 
and watery vapor, and consequently act upon the chemical con- 
stitution and hygrometrical condition of the air, their roots pene- 
trate the earth to greater depths than is commonly supposed, and 
form an inextricable labyrinth of filaments which bind the soil 
together and prevent its erosion by water. The broad-leaved 
annuals and perennials, too, shade the ground, and prevent the 


58 ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC PLANTS. 


evaporation of moisture from its surface by wind and sun.* 
Ata certain stage of growth, grass land is probably a more 
energetic evaporator and refrigerator than even the forest, but 
this powerful action is exerted, in its full intensity, for a com- 
paratively short time only, while trees continue such functions, 
with unabated vigor, for many months in succession. Upon 
the whole, it seems quite certain, that no cultivated ground is 
as efficient in tempering climatic extremes, or in conservation 
of geographical surface and outline, as is the soil which nature 
herself has planted. 


Origin of Domestic Planis. 


One of the most important questions connected with our sub- 
ject is: how far we are to regard our cereal grains, our esculent 
bulbs and roots, and the multiplied tree fruits of our gardens, 
as artificially modified and improved forms of wild, self-propa- 
gating vegetation. The narratives of botanical travellers have 
often announced the discovery of the original form and habitat 


* Tt is impossible to say how far the abstraction of water from the earth 
by broad-leaved field and garden plants—such as maize, the gourd family, the 
cabbage, &c.—is compensated by the condensation of dew, which sometimes 
pours from them in a stream, by the exhalation of aqueous vapor from their 
leaves, which is directly absorbed by the ground, and by the shelter they 
afford the soil from sun and wind, thus preventing evaporation. American 
farmers often say that after the leaves of Indian corn are large enough to 
“‘shade the ground,’’ there is little danger that the plants will suffer from 
drought; but it is probable that the comparative security of the fields from 
this evilis in part due to the fact that, at this period of growth, the roots 
penetrate down to a permanently humid stratum of soil, and draw from it the 
moisture they require. Stirring the ground between the rows of maize with 
a light harrow or cultivator, in very dry seasons, is often recommended as a 
preventive of injury by drought. It would seem, indeed, that loosening and 
turning over the surface earth might aggravate the evil by promoting the 
evaporation of the little remaining moisture; but the practice is founded 
partly on the belief that the hygroscopicity of the soil is increased by it to 
such a degree that it gains more by absorption than it loses by evaporation, 
and partly on the doctrine that to admit air to the rootlets, or at least to the 
earth near them, is to supply directly elements of vegetable growth. 


ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC PLANTS. 59 


of domesticated plants, and scientific journals have described 
the experiments by which the identity of particular wild and 
cultivated vegetables has been thought to be established. It is 
confidently aftirmed that maize and the potato—which we must 
suppose to have been first cultivated at a much later period 
than the breadstuffs and most other esculent vegetables of 
Europe and the East—are found wild and self-propagating in 
Spanish America, though in forms not recognizable by the 
common observer as identical with the familiar corn and tuber 
of modern agriculture. It was lately asserted, upon what 
seemed very strong evidence, that the Zylops ovata, a plant 
growing wild in Southern France, had been actually converted 
into common wheat ; but, upon a repetition of the experiments, 
later observers have declared that the apparent change was 
only a case of temporary hybridation or fecundation by the 
pollen of true wheat, and that the grass alleged to be trans- 
formed into wheat could not be perpetuated as such from its 
own seed. 

The very great modifications which cultivated plants are con- 
stantly undergoing under our eyes, and the numerous varieties 
and races which spring up among them, certainly countenance 
the doctrine, that every domesticated vegetable, however de- 
pendent upon human care for growth and propagation in its 
present form, may have been really derived, by a long succes- 
sion of changes, from some wild plant not now perhaps much 
resembling it.* But it is, in every case, a question of evidence. 


* What is the possible limit of such changes, we do not know, but they may 
doubtless be carried vastly beyond what experience has yet shown to be practi- 
eable. Civilized man has experimented little on wild plants, and especially on 
forest trees. He has indeed improved the fruit, and developed new varieties, 
of the chestnut, by cultivation, and it is observed that our American forest-tree 
nuts and berries, such as the butternut and the wild mulberry, become larger 
and better flavored in a single generation by planting and training. (BRYANT, 
Forest Trees, 1871, pp. 99, 115.) Why should not the industry and ingenu- 
ity which have wrought such wonders in our horticulture produce analo- 
gous results when applied to the cultivation and amelioration of larger vege- 
tables? Might not, for instance, the ivory nut, the fruit of the Phytcephas 


60 ORIGIN OF DOMESTIC PLANTS. 


The only satisfactory proof that a given wild plant is identical 
with a given garden or field vegetable, is the test of experi- 
ment, the actual growing of the one from the seed of the other, 
or the conversion of the one into the other by transplantation 
and change of conditions.* It is hardly contended that any of 
the cereals or other plants important as human aliment, or 
as objects of agricultural industry, exist and propagate them- 
selves uncultivated in the same form and with the same pro- 
perties as when sown and reared by human art.t In fact, 
the cases are rare where the identity of a wild with a domes- 
ticated plant is considered by the best authorities as conclu- 
sively established, and we are warranted in affirming of but 
few of the latter, as a historically known or experimentally 


macrocarpa, possibly be so increased in size as to serve nearly all the purposes 
of animal ivory now becoming so scarce? Might not the various milk-pro- 
ducing trees become, by cultivation, a really important source of nutriment 
to the inhabitants of warm climates? In short, there is room to hope incal- 
culable advantage from the exercise of human skill in the improvement of 
yet untamed forms of vegetable life. 

* The poisonous wild parsnip of New England has been often asserted to be 
convertible into the common garden parsnip by cultivation, or rather to be 
the same vegetable growing under different conditions, and it is said to be de- 
prived of its deleterious qualities simply by an increased luxuriance of growth 
in rich, tilled earth. Wild medicinal plants, so important in the rustic mate- 
ria medica of New England—such as pennyroyal, for example—are generally 
much less aromatic and powerful when cultivated in gardens than when self- 
sown on meagre soils, On the other hand, the eznchona, lately introduced 
from South America into British India and carefully cultivated there, is found 
to be richer in quinine than the American tree. 

+ Some recent observations of Wetzstein are worthy of special notice, 
“The soil of the Haurin,” he remarks, ‘‘ produces, in its primitive condition, 
much wild rye, which is not known as a cultivated plant in Syria, and much 
wild barley and oats. These cereals precisely resemble the corresponding cul- 
tivated plants in leaf, ear, size, and height of straw, but their grains are sen- 
sibly flatter and poorer in flour.”"—Retsebericht iiber Haurin und die Tracho- 


nen, p. 40. 
Some of the cereals are, to a certain extent, self-propagating in the soil 
and climate of California. ‘‘ Volunteer crops are grown from the seed which 


falls out in harvesting. Barley has been known to volunteer five crops in suc- 
cession,””—-PRAYER-FROWD, Six Months in California, p. 189. 


TRANSFER OF VEGETABLE LIFE. 61 


proved fact, that they ever did exist, or could exist, independ- 
ently of man.* 


Transfer of Vegetable Life. 


It belongs to vegetable and animal geography, which are 
almost sciences of themselves, to point out in detail what man 
has done to change the distribution of plants and of animated 


* This remark is much less applicable to fruit trees than to garden vegeta- 
bles and the cerealia. The wild orange of Florida, though once considered 
indigenous, is now generally thought by botanists to be descended from the 
European orange introduced by the early colonists. On the wild apple trees 
of Massachusetts see an interesting chapter in THOREAU, Hacursions. The 
fir and the olive are found growing wild in every country where those trees 
are cultivated. The wild fig differs from the domesticated in its habits, its 
season of fructification, and its insect population, but is, I believe, not spe- 
cifically distinguishable from the garden fig, though I do not know that it is 
reclaimable by cultivation. The wild olive, which is so abundant in the Tus- 
can Maremma, produces good fruit without further care, when thinned out 
and freed from the shade of other trees, and is particularly suited for graft- 
ing. See SALVAGNOLI, Memorie sulle Maremme, pp. 63-73. The olive is indi- 
genous in Syria and in the Punjaub, and forms vast forests in the Himalayas 
at from 1,400 to 2,100 feet above the level of the sea.—CLEGHORN, Memoir 
on the Timber procured from the Indus, ete., pp. 8-15. 

Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit, pp. 35-38, gives, upon the 
authority of Link and other botanical writers, a list of the native habitats of 
most cereals and of many fruits, or at least of localities where these plants 
are said to be now found wild; but the data do not appear to rest, in general, 
upon very trustworthy evidence. Theoretically, there can be little doubt that 
all our cultivated plants are modified forms of spontaneous vegetation, 
though the connection is not historically shown, nor are we able to say that 
the originals of some domesticated vegetables may not be now extinct and 
unrepresented in the existing wild flora. See, on this subject, HUMBOLDT, 
Ansichten der Natur, i., pp. 208, 209. 

The Adams of modern botany and zodlogy have been put to hard shifts in 
finding names for the multiplied organisms which the Creator has brought 
before them, ‘‘to see what they would call them ;” and naturalists and phi- 
losophers have shown much moral courage in setting at naught the laws of 
philology in the coinage of uncouth words to express scientific ideas. It is 
much to be wished that some bold neologist would devise English technical 
equivalents for the German verwildert, run-wild, and veredelt, improved by 
cultivation. 


62 TRANSFER OF VEGETABLE LIFE. 


life and to revolutionize the aspect of organic nature ; but some 
of the more important facts bearing on the first branch of this 
subject may pertinently be introduced here. Most of the cereal 
erains, the pulse, the edible roots, the tree fruits, and other im- 
portant forms of esculent vegetation grown in Europe and the 
United States are believed, and—if the testimony of Pliny and 
other ancient naturalists is to be depended upon—many of them 
are historically known, to have originated in the temperate 
climates of Asia. The agriculture of even so old a country as 
Egypt has been almost completely revolutionized by the intro- 
duction of foreign plants, within the historical period. “With 
the exception of wheat,” says Hehn, “the Nile valley now 
yields only new products, cotton, rice, sugar, indigo, sorghum, 
dates,” being all unknown to its most ancient rural husbandry.* 
The wine grape has been thought to be truly indigenous only 
in the regions bordering on the eastern end of the Black Sea, 
where it now, particularly on the banks of the Rion, the ancient 
Phasis, propagates itself spontaneously, and grows with un- 
exampled luxuriance.t But some species of the vine seem 
native to Europe, and many varieties of grape have been too 
long known as common to every part of the United States to 


* On these points see the learned work of Henn, Kultur. Pflanzen und 
Thiere in threm Uebergang aus Asien, 1870. On the migration of plants 
generally, see LYELL, Principles of Geology, 10th ed., vol. ii., ¢. 

+ The vine-wood planks of the ancient great door of the cathedral at 
Ravenna, which measured thirteen feet in length by a foot and a quarter in 
width, are traditionally said to have been brought from the Black Sea, by way 
of Constantinople, about the eleventh or twelfth century. Vines of such 
dimensions are now very rarely found in any other part of the Hast, and, 
though I have taken some pains on the subject, I never found in Syria or in 
Turkey a vine stock exceeding six inches in diameter, bark excluded. Schulz, 
however, saw at Beitschin, near Ptolemais, a vine measuring eighteen inches in 
diameter. Strabo speaks of vine-stocks in Margiana (Khorasan) of such dimen- 
sions that two men, with outstretched arms, could scarcely embrace them. 
See SrRABO, ed. Casaubon, pp. 73, 516, 826. Statues of vine wood are mentioned 
by ancient writers. Very large vine-stems are not common in Italy, but the 
vine-wood panels of the door of the chapter-hall of the church of St. John at 
Saluzzo are not less than ten inches in width, and I observed not long since, in 
a garden at Pid di Mulera, a vine stock with a circumference of thirty inches. 


OBJECTS OF MODERN COMMERCE. 63 


admit of the supposition that they were introduced by European 
colonists.* 


Objects of Modern Commerce. 


It is an interesting fact that the commerce—or at least the 
maritime carrying trade—and the agricultural and mechanical 
industry of the world are, in very large proportion, dependent 
on vegetable and animal products little or not at all known to 
ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish civilization. In many 
instances, the chief supply of these articles comes from coun- 
tries to which they are probably indigenous, and where they are 
still almost exclusively grown; but in most cases, the plants or 
animals from which they are derived have been introduced by 
man into regions now remarkable for their successful cultiva- 
tion, and that, too, in comparatively recent times, or, in other 
words, within two or three centuries. 

Something of detail on this subject cannot, I think, fail to 
prove interesting. Pliny mentions about thirty or forty oils as 
known to the ancients, of which only olive, sesame, rape seed 
and walnut oil-—for except in one or two doubtful passages I 
find in this author no notice of linseed oil—appear to have been 
used in such quantities as to have had any serious importance 
in the carrying trade. At the present time, the new oils, linseed 
oil, the oil of the whale and other large marine animals, 
petroleam—of which the total consumption of the world in 
1871 is estimated at 6,000,000 barrels, the port of Philadelphia 


* The Northmen who—as I think it has been indisputably established by 
Professor Rafn of Copenhagen—visited the coast of Massachusetts about the 
year 1000, found grapes growing there in profusion, and the wild vine still 
flourishes in great variety and abundance in the southeastern counties of 
that State. The townships in the vicinity of the Dighton rock, supposed by 
many—with whom, however, I am sorry I cannot agree—to bear a Scandi- 
navian inscription, abound in wild vines. According to LAUDONNIERE, Histoire 
Notable dela Floride, reprint, Paris, 1853, p 5, the French navigators in 1562 
found in that peninsula ‘‘ wild vines which climb the trees and produce good 


grapes.” 


64 OBJECTS OF MODERN COMMERCE. 


alone exporting 56,000,000 gallons in that year—palm-oil recently 
introduced into commerce, and now imported into England 
from the coast of Africa at the rate of forty or fifty thousand 
tuns a year, these alone undoubtedly give employment to more 
shipping than the whole commerce of Italy—with the excep- 
tion of wheat—at the most flourishing period of the Roman 
empire.* England imports annually about 600,000 tons of 
sugar, 100,000 tons of jute, and about the same quantity of 
esparto, six million tons of cotton, of which the value of 
$30,000,000 is exported again in the form of manufactured 
goods—including, by a strange industrial revolution, a large 
amount of cotton yarn and cotton tissues sent to India and 
directly or indirectly paid for by raw cotton to be manufactured 
in England—30,000 tons of tobacco, from 100,000 to 850,000 
tons of guano, hundreds of thousands of tons of tea, coffee, 
cacao, caoutchoue, gutta-percha and numerous other important 
articles of trade wholly unknown, as objects of commerce, to 
the ancient European world; and this immense importation is 
balanced by a corresponding amount of exportation, not consist- 


* A very few years since, the United States had more than six hundred large 
ships engaged in the whale fishery, and the number of American whalers, in spite 
of the introduction of many new sources of oils, still amounts to two hundred 
and fifty. 

The city of Rome imported from Sicily, from Africa, and from the Levant, 
enormous quantities of grain for gratuitous distribution among the lower 
classes of the capital. The pecuniary value of the gems, the spices, the 
unguents, the perfumes, the cosmetics and the tissues, which came principally 
from the East, was great, but these articles were neither heavy nor bulky and 
their transportation required but a small amount of shipping. The marbles, 
the obelisks, the statuary and other objects of art plundered in conquered 
provinces by Roman generals and governors, the wild animals, such as elephants, 
rhinoceroses, hippopotami, camelopards and the larger beasts of prey imported 
for slaughter at the public games, and the prisoners captured in foreign wars 
and brought to Italy for sale as slaves or butchery as gladiators, furnished 
employment for much more tonnage than all the legitimate commerce of the 
empire, with the possible exception of wheat. 

Independently of the direct testimony of Latin authors, the Greek statuary, 
the Egyptian obelisks, and the vast quantities of foreign marbles, granite, por- 
phyry, basalt, and other stones used in sculpture and in architecture, which 


FOREIGN PLANTS, HOW INTRODUCED. 65 


ing, however, by any means, exclusively of articles new to com- 
™“ 
merce.* 


Foreign Plants, how Introduced. 


Besides the vegetables I have mentioned, we know that many 
plants of smaller economical value have been the subjects of 
international exchange in very recent times. Busbequius, Aus- 
trian ambassador at Constantinople about the middle of the 
sixteenth century—whose letters contain one of the best 
accounts of Turkish life which have appeared down to the 
present day—brought home from the Ottoman capital the lilae 
and the tulip. The Belgian Clusius about the same time intro- 
duced from the East the horse chestnut, which has since 
wandered to America. The weeping willows of Europe and 
the United States are said to have sprung from a slip received 


have been found in the remains of ancient Rome, show that the Imperial 
capital must have employed an immense amount of tonnage in the importation 
of heavy articles for which there could have been no return freight, unless in 
the way of military transportation. Some of the Egyptian obelisks at Rome 
weigh upwards of four hundred tons, and many of the red granite columns 
from the same country must have exceeded one hundred tons. Greek and 
African marbles were largely used not only for columns, entablatures, and 
solid walls, but for casing the exterior and veneering the interior of public 
and private buildings. Scaurus imported, for the scene alone of a temporary 
theatre designed to stand scarcely for a month, three hundred and sixty 
columns, which were disposed in three tiers, the lower range being forty-two 
feet in height.—See Purny, Nat. Hist., Lib. xxxvi. 

Italy produced very little for export, and her importations, when not consist- 
ing of booty, were chiefly paid for in coin which was principally either the 
spoil of war or the fruit of official extortion. 

* Many of these articles would undoubtedly have been made known to the 
Greeks and Romans and have figured in their commerce, but for the slowness 
and costliness of ancient navigation, which, in the seas familiar to them, was 
suspended for a full third of the year from the inability of their vessels to cope 
with winter weather, The present speed and economy of transportation haye 
wrought and are still working strange commercial and industrial revolutions, 
Algeria now supplies Northern Germany with fresh cauliflowers, and in the early 
spring the market-gardeners of Naples find it more profitable to send their first 
fruits to St. Petersburg than to furnish them to Florence and Rome. 

3) 


66 FOREIGN PLANTS, HOW INTRODUCED. 


from Smyrna by the poet Pope, and planted by him in an English 
garden; Drouyn de l’Huys, in a discourse delivered before the 
French Société d’Acclimatation, in 1860, claims for Rabelais 
the introduction of the melon, the artichoke and the Alexandria 
pink into France; and the Portuguese declare that the progeni- 
tor of all the European and American oranges was an Oriental 
tree transplanted to Lisbon, and still living in the last genera- 
tion.* The present favorite flowers of the parterres of Europe 
have been imported from America, Japan and other remote 
Oriental countries, within a century and a half, and, in fine, 
there are few vegetables of any agricultural importance, few 
ornamental trees or decorative plants, which are not now 
common to the three civilized continents. 

The statistics of vegetable emigration exhibit numerical 
results quite surprising to those not familiar with the subject. 
The lonely island of St. Helena is described as producing, at 
the time of its discovery in the year 1501, about sixty vegetable 
species, including some three or four known to grow elsewhere 
also.| At the present time its flora numbers seven hundred and 


* The name portogallo, so generally applied to the orange in Italy, seems to 
favor this claim. The orange, however, was known in Europe before the dis- 
covery of the Cape of Good Hope, and, therefore, before the establishment of 
direct relations between Portugal and the HEast.—See AMARI, Storia det 
Musulmani in Sicilia, vol. ti., p. 445, 

The date-palms of eastern and southern Spain were certainly introduced by 
the Moors. Leo von Rozmital, who visited Barcelona in 1476, says that the 
date-tree grew in great abundance in the environs of that city and ripened its 
fruit well. It is now scarcely cultivated further north than Valencia. It is 
singular that Ritter in his very full monograph on the palm does not mention 
those of Spain. 

On the introduction of conifere into England see an interesting article in the 
Edinburgh Review of October, 1864. 

MiLuer, Das Buch der Pflanzenwelt, p. 86, asserts that in 1802 the ancestor 
of all the mulberries in France, planted in 1500, was still standing in a garden 
in the village of Allan-Montélimart. 

+ It may be considered very highly probable, if not certain, that the undis- 
criminating herbalists of the sixteenth century must have overlooked many 
plants native to this island. An English botanist, in an hour’s visit to Aden, 
discovered several species of plants on rocks always reported, even by scien- 


FOREIGN PLANTS, HOW INTRODUCED. 67 


fifty species—a natural result of the position of the island as 
the half-way house on the great ocean highway between Europe 
and the East. Humboldt and Bonpland found, among the 
unquestionably indigenous plants of tropical America, mono- 
cotyledons only, all the dicotyledons of those extensive regions 
having been probably introduced after the colonization of the 
New World by Spain. 

The seven hundred new species which have found their way 
to St. Helena within three centuries and a half, were certainly 
not all, or even in the largest proportion, designedly planted 
there by human art, and if we were well acquainted with vege- 
table emigration, we should probably be able to show that man 
has intentionally transferred fewer plants than he has acci- 
dentally introduced into countries foreign to them. After the 
wheat, follow the tares that infest it. The weeds that grow 
among the cereal grains, the pests of the kitchen garden, are 
the same in America asin Europe.* The overturning of a 
wagon, or any of the thousand accidents which befall the 
emigrant in his journey across the Western plains, may scatter 
upon the ground the seeds he designed for his garden, and the 
herbs which fill so important a place in the rustic materia 
medica of the Eastern States, spring up along the prairie paths 
but just opened by the caravan of the settler. + 


tific travellers, as absolutely barren. But after all, it appears to be well 
established that the original flora of St. Helena was extremely limited, though 
now counting hundreds of species. 

* Some years ago I made a collection of weeds in the wheatfields of Upper 
Egypt, and another in the gardens on the Bosphorus. Nearly all the plants 
were identical with those which grow under the same conditions in New 
England. Ido not remember to have seen in America the scarlet wild poppy 
so common in European grainfields. I have heard, however, that it has lately 
crossed the Atlantic, and Iam not sorry for it. With our abundant harvests 
of wheat, we can well afford to pay now and then a loaf of bread for the 
cheerful radiance of this brilliant flower. 

+ Josselyn, who wrote about fifty years after the foundation of the first 
British colony in New England, says that the settlers at Plymouth had ob- 
served more than twenty English plants springing up spontaneously near their 
improvements. 


63 INTRODUCTION OF FOREIGN PLANTS. 


Introduction of Foreign Plants. 


“ A negro slave of the great Cortez,” says Humboldt, “ was 
the first who sowed wheat in New Spain. He found three 
grains of it among the rice which had been brought from Spain 
as food for the soldiers.” 

About twenty years ago, a Japanese forage plant, the Lespe- 
deza striata, whose seeds had been brought to the United 
States by some unknown accident, made its appearance in one 
of the Southern States. It spread spontaneously in various 
directions, and in a few years was widely diffused. It grows 
upon poor and exhausted soils, where the formation of a turf 
or sward by the ordinary grasses would be impossible, and 
where consequently no regular pastures or meadows can exist. 
It makes excellent fodder for stock, and though its value is 
contested, it is nevertheless generally thought a very important 
addition to the agricultural resources of the South.* 

In most of the Southern countries of Europe, the sheep and 
horned cattle winter on the plains, but in the summer are 


Every country has many plants not now, if ever, made use of by man, and 
therefore not designedly propagated by him, but which cluster around his 
dwelling, and continue to grow luxuriantly on the ruins of his rural habitation 
after he has abandoned it. The site of a cottage, the very foundation stones 
of which have been carried off, may often be recognized, years afterwards, by 
the rank weeds which cover it, though no others of the same species are found 
for miles. 

‘‘Medizval Catholicism,” says Vaupell, ‘‘ brought us the red horsehoof— 
whose reddish-brown flower buds shoot up from the ground when the snow 
melts, and are followed by the large leaves—comfrey and snake-root, which 
grow only where there were convents and other dwellings in the Middle Ages.” 
—Bigens Indvandring ¢ de Danske Skove, pp. 1, 2. 

* Accidents sometimes limit, as well as promote, the propagation of foreign 
vegetables in countries new to them. The Lombardy poplar is a dicecious 
tree, and is very easily grown from cuttings. In most of the countries into 
which it has been introduced the cuttings have been taken from the male, 
and as, consequently, males only have grown from them, the poplar does not 
produce seed in those regions. This is a fortunate circumstance, for other- 
wise this most worthless and least ornamental of trees would spread with a 
rapidity that would make it an annoyance to the agriculturist. 


ei ti 


INTRODUCTION OF FOREIGN PLANTS. 69 


driven, sometimes many days’ journey, to mountain pastures. 
Their coats and fleeces transport seeds in both directions. 
Hence we see Alpine plants in champaign districts, the plants 
of the plains on the borders of the glaciers, though in neither 
case do these vegetables ripen their seeds and propagate them- 
selves. This explains the occurrence of tufts of common red 
clover with pallid and sickly flowers, on the flanks of the Alps 
at heights exceeding seven thousand feet. 

The hortus siccus of a botanist may accidentally sow seeds 
from the foot of the Himalayas on the plains that skirt the 
Alps; and it is a fact of very familiar observation, that exotics, 
transplanted to foreign climates suited to their growth, often 
escape from the flower garden and naturalize themselves among 
the spontaneous vegetation of the pastures. When the cases 
containing the artistic treasures of Thorvaldsen were opened 
in the court of the museum where they are deposited, the 
straw and grass employed in packing them were scattered upon 
the ground, and the next season there sprang up from the 
seeds no less than twenty-five species of plants belonging to 
the Roman campagna, some of which were preserved and cul- 
tivated as a new tribute to the memory of the great Scandi- 
nayian sculptor, and at least four are said to have spontaneously 
naturalized themselves about Copenhagen.* The Turkish 
armies, in their incursions into Europe, brought Eastern vege- 
tables in their train, and left the seeds of Oriental wall plants 
to grow upon the ramparts of Buda and Vienna.t In the 
campaign of 1814, the Russian troops brought, in the stuffing 
of their saddles and by other accidental means, seeds from the 
banks of the Dnieper to the valley of the Rhine, and even 
introduced the plants of the steppes into the environs of Paris. 

The forage imported for the French army in the war of 


* VAUPELL, Bégens Indvandring i de Danske Skove, p. 2. 

+ i believe it is certain that the Turks introduced tobacco into Hungary, 
and probable that they in some measure compensated the injury by intro- 
ducing maize also, which, as well as tobacco, has been claimed as Hungarian by 
patriotic Magyars. 


70 VEGETABLE POWER OF ACCOMMODATION. 


1870-1871 has introduced numerous plants from Northern 
Africa and other countries into France, and this vegetable 
emigration is so extensive and so varied in character, that it 
will probably have an important botanical, and even economi- 
cal, effect on the flora of that country.* 

The Canada thistle, Hrigeron Canadense, which is said to 
have accompanied the early French voyagers to Canada from 
Normandy, is reported to have been introduced into other parts 
of Europe two hundred years ago by a seed which dropped out 
of the stuffed skin of an American bird. 


Vegetable Power of Accommodation. 


The vegetables which, so far as we know their history, seem 
to have been longest objects of human care, can, by painstaking 
industry, be made to grow under a great variety of circum- 
stances, and some of them prosper nearly equally well when 
planted and tended on soils of almost any geological character ; 
but the seeds of most of them vegetate only in artificially pre- 
pared ground, they have little self-sustaining power, and they 
soon perish when the nursing hand of man is withdrawn from 
them. 

The vine genus is very catholic and cosmopolite in its habits, 
but particular varieties are extremely fastidious and exclusive 
in their requirements as to soil and climate. The stocks of 
many celebrated vineyards lose their peculiar qualities by 


* In a communication lately made to the French Academy, M. Vibraye gives 
numerous interesting details on this subject, and says the appearance of the 
many new plants observed in France in 1871, ‘‘results from forage supplied 
from abroad, the seeds of which had fallen upon the ground. At the present 
time, several Mediterranean plants, chiefly Algerian, having braved the cold 
of an exceptionally severe winter, are being largely propagated, forming exten- 
sive meadows, and changing soil that was formerly arid and produced no 
vegetable of importance into veritable oases.” See NATURE, Aug. 1, 1872, 
p. 268. We shall see on a following page that canals are efficient agencies in 
the unintentional interchange of organic life, vegetable as well as animal, 
between regions connected by such channels, 


VEGETABLE POWER OF ACCOMMODATION. vel 


transplantation, and the most famous wines are capable of 
production only in certain well-defined and for the most part 
narrow districts. The Ionian vine which bears the little stone- 
less grape known in commerce as the Zante currant, has resisted 
almost all efforts to naturalize it elsewhere, and is scarcely 
grown except in two or three of the Ionian islands and in a 
narrow territory on the northern shores of the Morea. 

The attempts to introduce European varieties of the vine into 
the United States have not been successful except in California,* 
and it may be stated as a general rule that European forest 
and ornamental trees are not suited to the climate of North 
America, and that, at the same time, American garden vege- 
tables are less luxuriant, productive and tasteful in Europe than 
in the United States. 

The saline atmosphere of the sea is specially injurious both 
to seeds and to very many young plants, and it is only recently 
that the transportation of some very important vegetables 
across the ocean has been made practicable, through the inven- 
tion of Ward’s air-tight glass cases. By this means large num- 
bers of the trees which produce the Jesuit’s bark were success- 
fully transplanted from America to the British possessions in 
the East, where this valuable plant may now be said to have 
become fully naturalized.t+ 

Vegetables, naturalized abroad either by accident or design, 
sometimes exhibit a greatly increased luxuriance of growth. 


* In 1869, a vine of a European variety planted in Sta. Barbara county in 
1833 measured a foot in diameter four feet above the ground. Its ramifica- 
tions covered ten thousand square feet of surface and it annually produces 
twelve thousand pounds of grapes. The bunches are sixteen or eighteen 
inches long, and weigh six or seven pounds.—Letter from Commissioner of 
Land- Office, dated May 13, 1869. 

+ See CLEGHORN, Forests and Gardens of South India, Edinburgh, 1861, 
and The British Parliamentary Return on the Chinchona plant, 1866. Tt has 
been found that the seeds of several species of cinchona preserve their vitality 
long enough to be transported to distant regions. The swiftness of steam 
navigation renders it possible to transport to foreign countries not only seeds 
but delicate living plants which could not have borne a long voyage by sailing 
vessels, 


72 VEGETABLE POWER OF ACCOMMODATION. 


The European cardoon, an esculent thistle, has broken out from 
the gardens of the Spanish colonies on the La Plata, acquired 
a gigantic stature, and propagated itself, in impenetrable 
thickets, over hundreds of leagues of the Pampas; and the 
Anacharis alsinastrum, a water plant not much inclined to 
spread in its native American habitat, has found its way into 
English rivers, and extended itself to such a degree as to form 
a serious obstruction to the flow of the current, and even to 
navigation. 

Not only do many wild plants exhibit a remarkable facility 
of accommodation, but their seeds usually possess great tenacity 
of life, and their germinating power resists very severe trials. 
Hence, while the seeds of many cultivated vegetables lose 
their vitality in two or three years, and can be transported 
safely to distant countries only with great precautions, the 
weeds that infest those vegetables, though not cared for by 
man, continue to accompany him in his migrations, and find 
a new home on every soil he colonizes. Nature fights in 
defence of her free children, but wars upon them when they 
have deserted her banners and tamely submitted to the domin- 
ion of man.* 

Indeed, the faculty of spontaneous reproduction and perpetu- 
ation necessarily supposes a greater power of accommodation, 
within a certain range, than we find in most domesticated 
plants, for it would rarely happen that the seed of a wild plant 
would fall into ground as nearly similar, in composition and 
condition, to that where its parent grew, as the soils of different 
fields artificially prepared for growing a particular vegetable 
are to each other. Accordingly, though every wild species 
affects a habitat of a particular character, it is found that, if 


* Tempests, violent enough to destroy all cultivated plants, frequently 
spare those of spontaneous growth. I have often seen in Norther Italy, 
vineyards, maize fields, mulberry and fruit trees completely stripped of their 
foliage by hail, while the forest trees scattered through the meadows, and the 
shrubs and brambles which sprang up by the wayside, passed through the 
ordeal with scarcely the loss of a leaflet. 


AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS OF THE UNITED STATES. 73 
accidentally or designedly sown elsewhere, it will grow under 
conditions extremely unlike those of its birthplace. Cooper 
says: “We cannot say positively that any plant is uncultivable 
anywhere until it has been tried;” and this seems to be even 
more true of wild than of domesticated vegetation. 

The wild plant is much hardier than the domesticated vege- 
table, and the same law prevails in animated brute and even hu- 
man life. The beasts of the chase are nore capable of endur- 
ance and privation and more tenacious of life, than the domesti- 
cated animals which most nearly resemble them. The savage 
fights on, after he has received half a dozen mortal wounds, the 
least of which would have instantly paralyzed the strength of his 
civilized enemy, and, like the wild boar, he has been known to 
press forward along the shaft of the spear which was trans- 
piercing his vitals, and to deal a deathblow on the soldier who 
wielded it. 

True, domesticated plants can be gradually acclimatized to 
bear a degree of heat or of cold, which, in their wild state, 
they would not have supported ; the trained English racer out- 
strips the swiftest horse of the pampas or prairies, perhaps even 
the less systematically educated courser of the Arab; the 
strength of the European, as tested by the dynamometer, is 
greater than that of the New Zealander. But all these are 
instances of excessive development of particular capacities 
and faculties at the expense of general vital power. Expose 
untamed and domesticated forms of life, together, to an entire 
set of physical conditions equally alien to the former habits of 
both, so that every power of resistance and accommodation 
shall be called into action, and the wild plant or animal will 
live, while the domesticated will perish. 


Agriculiural Products of the United States. 


According to the census of 1870, the United States had, on 
the first of June in that year, in round numbers, 189,000,000 
acres of improved land, the quantity having been increased by 


74 AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS OF THE UNITED STATES. 


16,000,000 acres within the ten years next preceding.* Not to 
mention less important crops, this land produced, in the year 
ending on the day last mentioned, in round numbers, 288,000,- 
000 bushels of wheat, 17,000,000 bushels of rye, 282,000,000 
bushels of oats, 6,000,000 bushels of pease and beans, 30,000,000 
bushels of barley, orchard fruits to the value of $47,000,000, 
640,000 bushels of cloverseed, 580,000 bushels of other grass 
seed, 13,000 tons of hemp, 27,000,000 pounds of flax, and 
1,730,000 bushels of flaxseed. These vegetable growths were 
familiar to ancient European agriculture, but they were all 
introduced into North America after the close of the sixteenth 
century. 

Of the fruits of agricultural industry unknown to the Greeks 
and Romans, or too little employed by them to be of any com- 
mercial importance, the United States produced, in the same 
year, 74,000,000 pounds of rice, 10,000,000 bushels of buck- 
wheat, 3,000,000 bales of cotton,+ 87,000 hogsheads of cane 
sugar, 6,600,000 gallons of cane molasses, 16,000,000 gallons of 
sorghum molasses, all yielded by vegetables introduced into that 
country within two hundred years, and—with the exception of 
buckwheat, the origin of which is uncertain, and of cotton—all, 
directly or indirectly, from the East Indies; besides, from 


* Ninth Census of the United States, 1872, p. 341. By ‘‘ improved” land, 
in the reports on the census of the United States, is meant ‘‘ cleared land used 
for grazing, grass, or tillage, or which is now fallow, connected with or belong- 
ing to a farm.” —Jnstructions to Marshals and Assistants, Census of 1870. 

+ Cotton, though cultivated in Asia from the remotest antiquity, and known 
as arare and costly product to the Latins and the Greeks, was not used by 
them except as an article of luxury, nor did it enter into their commerce to 
any considerable extent as a regular object of importation. The early voyagers 
found it in common use in the West Indies and in the provinces first colonized 
by the Spaniards ; but it was introduced into the territory of the United States 
by European settlers, and did not become of any importance until after the 
Revolution. Cottonseed was sown in Virginia as early as 1621, but was not 
cultivated with a view to profit for more than a century afterwards. Sea-island 
cotton was first grown on the coast of Georgia in 1786, the seed having been 
brought from the Bahamas, where it had been introduced from Anguilla,— 
BicELow, Les Etats-Unis en 1863, p. 370. 


AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS OF THE UNITED STATES. 75 


indigenous plants unknown to ancient agriculture, 761,000,000 
bushels of Indian corn, 263,000,000 pounds of tobacco, 145,- 
000,000 bushels of potatoes, 22,000,000 bushels of sweet pota- 
toes, 28,000,000 pounds of maple sugar, and 925,000 gallons of 
maple molasses.* To all this we are to add 27,000,000 tons of 
hay,—produced partly by new, partly by long known, partly by 
exotic and partly by native herbs and grasses, the value of 
$21,000,000 in garden vegetables chiefly of European or Asiatic 
origin, 3,000,000 gallons of wine, and many minor agricultural 
products.t 

The weight of this harvest of a year would be many times 
the tonnage of all the shipping of the United States at the 
close of the year 1870—and, with the exception of the maple 
sugar, the maple molasses, and the products of the Western 
prairie lands and of some small Indian clearings, it was all 
erown upon lands wrested from the forest by the European 
race within little more than two hundred years. The wants of 
Europe have introduced into the colonies of tropical America 
the sugar cane, { the coffee plant, the orange and the lemon, 
all of Oriental origin, have immensely stimulated the cultiva- 
tion of the former two in the countries of which they are na- 
tives, and, of course, promoted agricultural operations which 


* There is a falling off since 1860 of 11,000,000 pounds in the quantity of 
maple sugar and of more than a million gallons of maple molasses. The 
hich price of cane sugar during and since the late civil war must have increased 
the product of maple sugar and molasses beyond what it otherwise would have 
been, but the domestic warfare on the woods has more than compensated this 
cause of increase. 

+ Ramie, Boehmeria tenacissima, a species of Chinese nettle producing a 
fibre which may be spun and woven, and which unites many of the properties 
of silk and of linen, has been completely naturalized in the United States, and 
results important to the industry of the country are expected from it. 

} The sugar cane was introduced by the Arabs into Sicily and Spain as 
early as the ninth century, and though it is now scarcely grown in those 
localities, Iam not aware of any reason to doubt that its cultivation might 
be revived with advantage. From Spain it was carried to the West Indies, 
though different varieties have since been introduced into those islands from 
other sources. 


76 EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLES. 


must have affected the geography of those regions to an extent 
proportionate to the scale on which they have been pursued. 


Useful American Plants grown in Europe. 


America has partially repaid her debt to the Eastern conti- 
nent. Maize and the potato are very valuable additions to. the 
field agriculture of Europe and the Hast, and the tomato is no 
mean gift to the kitchen gardens of the Old World, though 
certainly not an adequate return for the multitude of esculent 
roots and leguminous plants which the European colonists 
carried with them.* I wish I could believe, with some, that 
America is not alone responsible for the introduction of the 
filthy weed, tobacco, the use of which is the most vulgar and 
pernicious habit engrafted by the semi-barbarism of modern 
civilization upon the less multifarious sensualism of ancient 
life; but the alleged occurrence of pipe-like objects in old 
Sclavonic, and, it has been said, in Hungarian sepulchres, is 
hardly sufficient evidence to convict those races of complicity 
in this grave offence against the temperance and the refinement 
of modern society. 


Extirpation of Vegetables. 
Lamentable as are the evils produced by the too general 


felling of the woods in the Old World, I believe it does not 
appear that any species of native forest tree has yet been 


* John Smith mentions, in his Historie of Virginia, 1624, pease and beans 
as having been cultivated by the natives before the arrival of the whites, and 
there is no doubt, I believe, that several common cucurbitaceous plants are of 
American origin; but most, if not all the varieties of pease, beans, and other 
pod fruits now grown in American gardens, are from European and other 
foreign seed. 

Cartier, A.D. 1585-6, mentions ‘‘ vines, great melons, cucumbers, gourds 
[courges], pease, beans of various colors, but not like ours,” as common 
among the Indians of the banks of the St. Lawrence.—Bref Lecit, etc., re- 
print. Paris, 1863, pp. 18, a; 14, b; 20, b; 31, a. 


EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLES. Ts 


extirpated by man on the Eastern continent. The roots, 
stumps, trunks, and foliage found in bogs are recognized as 
belonging to still extant species. Except in some few cases 
where there is historical evidence that foreign material was 
employed, the timber of the oldest European buildings, and 
even of the lacustrine habitations of Switzerland, is evidently 
the product of trees still common in or near the countries 
where such architectural remains are found; nor have the 
Egyptian catacombs themselves revealed to us the former ex- 
istence of any woods not now familiar to us as the growth of 
still living trees.* It is, however, said that the yew tree, 
Taxus baccata, formerly very common in England, Germany, 
and—as we are authorized to infer from Theophrastus—in 
Greece, has almost wholly disappeared from the latter country, 
and seems to be dying out in Germany. The wood of the yew 
surpasses that of almost any other European tree in closeness 
and fineness of grain, and it is well known for the elasticity 
which of old made it so great a favorite with the English 
archer. It is much in request among wood carvers and turners, 
and the demand for it explains, in part, its Increasing scarcity. 


*Some botanists think that a species of water lily represented in many 
Egyptian tombs has become extinct, and the papyrus, which must have once 
been abundant in Egypt, is now found only in a very few localities near the 
mouth of the Nile. It grows very well and ripens its seeds in the waters of 
the Anapus near Syracuse, and I have seen it in garden ponds at Messina and 
in Malta. There is no apparent reason for believing that it could not be easily 
cultivated in Egypt, to any extent, if there were any special motive for en- 
couraging its growth. 

Silphium, a famous medicinal plant of Lybia and of Pezsia, seems to have dis- 
appeared entirely. At any rate there is no proof that it now exists in either 
of those regions. The Silphium of Greek and Roman commerce appears to 
have come wholly from Cyrene, that from the Asiatic deserts being generally 
of less value, or, as Strabo says, perhaps of an inferior variety. The province 
near Cyrene which produced it was very limited, and according to Strabo (ed. 
Casaukon, p. 837), it was at one time almost entirely extirpated by the nomade 
Africans who invaded the province and rooted out the plant. 

The vegetable which produced the Balm of Gilead has not been found in 
modern times, although the localities in which it anciently grew have been 
carefully explored, 


78 EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLES. 


It is also asserted that no insect depends upon it for food or 
shelter, or aids in its fructification, and birds very rarely feed 
upon its berries: these are circumstances of no small import- 
ance, because the tree hence wants means of propagation or 
diffusion common to so many other plants. But it is alleged 
that the reproductive power of the yew is exhausted, and that 
it can no longer be readily propagated by the natural sowing 
of its seeds, or by artificial methods. If further investigation 
and careful experiment should establish this fact, it will go far 
to show that a climatic change, of a character unfavorable to 
the growth of the yew, has really taken place in Germany, 
though not yet proved by instrumental observation, and the 
most probable cause of such change would be found in the 
diminution of the area covered by the forests. 

The industry of man is said to have been so successful in 
the local extirpation of noxious or useless vegetables in China, 
that, with the exception of a few water plants in the rice 
grounds, it is sometimes impossible to find a single weed in an 
extensive district; and the late eminent agriculturist, Mr. 
Coke, is reported to have offered in vain a considerable reward 
for the detection of a weed in a large wheatfield on his estate 
in England. In these cases, however, there is no reason to sup- 
pose that diligent husbandry has done more than to eradicate 
the pests of agriculture within a comparatively limited area, 
and the cockle and the darnel will probably remain to plague 


the slovenly cultivator as long as the cereal grains continue to 
bless him.* 


* Although it isnot known that man has absolutely extirpated any vegetable, 
the mysterious diseases which have, for the last twenty years, so injuriously 
affected the potato, the vine, the orange, the olive, and silk husbandry, are 
ascribed by some to a climatic deterioration produced by excessive destruction 
of the woods. As will be seen in the next chapter, a retardation in the period 
of spring has been observed in numerous localities in Southern Europe, as well 
as in the United States, and this change has been thought to favor the multi- 
plication of the obscure parasites which cause the injury to the vegetables just 
mentioned, 

Babinet supposes the parasites which attack the grape and the potato to be 


EXTIRPATION OF VEGETABLES. 79 


All the operations of rural husbandry are destructive to 
spolitaneous vegetation by the voluntary substitution of domes- 
tic for wild plants, and, as we have seen, the armies of the 
colonist are attended by troops of irregular and unrecognized 
camp-followers, which soon establish and propagate themselves 
over the new conquests. These unbidden and hungry guests— 
the gipsies of the vegetable world—often have great aptitude 
for accommodation and acclimation, and sometimes even crowd 
out the native growth to make room for themselves. The 
botanist Latham informs us that indigenous flowering plants, 


animal, not vegetable, and he ascribes their multiplication to excessive manur- 
ing and stimulation of the growth of the plants on which they live. They are 
now generally, if not universally, regarded as vegetable, and. if they are so, 
Babinet’s theory would be even more plausible than on his own supposition.— 
Etudes et Lectures, ti., p. 269. 

Ti is a fact of some interest in agricultural economy, that the oidium, which 
is so destructive to the grape, has produced no pecuniary loss to the proprie- 
tors of the vineyards in France. ‘‘ The price of wine,” says Lavergne, ‘‘ has 
quintupled, and as the product of the vintage has not diminished in the same 
proportion, the crisis has been, on the whole, rather advantageous than detri- 
mental to the country. ”__ Economie Rurale de la France, pp. 263, 264. 

France produces a large surplus of wines for exportation, and the sales to 
foreign consumers are the principal source of profit to French vinegrowers. 
In Northern Italy, on the contrary, which exports little wine, there has been 
no such increase in the price of wine as to compensate the great diminution in 
the yield of the vines, and the loss of this harvest is severely felt. In Sicily, 
however, which exports much wine, prices have risen as rapidly as in France. 
Waltershausen informs us that in the years 185842, the red wine of Mount 
Etna sold at the rate of one kreuzer and a half, or one cent the bottle, and 
sometimes even at but two thirds that price, but that at present it commands 
five or six times as much. 

The grape disease has operated severely on small cultivators whose vine- 
yards only furnished a supply for domestic use, but Sicily has received a com- 
pensation in the immense increase which it has occasioned in both the product 
and the profits of the sulphur mines. Flour of sulphur is applied to the vine 
as a remedy against the disease, and the operation is repeated from two to three 
or four—and sometimes even eight or ten—times in a season. Hence there is 
a great demand for sulphur in all the vine-growing countries of Europe, and 
Waltershausen estimates the annual consumption of that mineral for this sin- 
gle purpose at 850,000 centner, or more than forty thousand tons. The price 
of sulphur has risen in about the same proportion as that of wine. —WALTERS- 
HAUSEN, Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau, pp. 19, 20. 


80 ANIMAL LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AGENCY. 


once abundant on the North-Western prairies, have been so 
nearly extirpated by the inroads of half-wild vegetables which 
have come in the train of the Eastern immigrant, that there is 
reason to fear that, in a few years, his herbarium will constitute 
the only evidence of their former existence.* 

There are plants—themselves perhaps sometimes stragglers 
from their proper habitat—which are found only in small num- 
bers and in few localities. These are eagerly sought by the 
botanist, and some such species are believed to be on the very 
verge of extinction, from the zeal of collectors. 


Animal Life as a Geological and Geographical Agency. 


The quantitative value of animated life, as a geological 
agency, seems to be inversely as the volume of the individual 
organism ; for nature supplies by numbers what is wanting in 
the bulk of the animal out of whose remains or structures she 
forms strata covering whole provinces, and builds up from the 
depths of the sea large islands, if not continents. There are, it 
is true, near the mouths of the great Siberian rivers which 
empty themselves into the Polar Sea, drift islands composed, in 
an incredibly large proportion, of the bones and tusks of 
elephants, mastodons, and other huge pachyderms, and many 
extensive caves in various parts of the world are half filled with 
the skeletons of quadrupeds, sometimes lying loose in the earth, 
sometimes cemented together into an osseous breccia by a cal- 
careous deposit or other binding material. These remains of 
large animals, though found in comparatively late formations, 
generally belong to extinct species, and their modern congeners 
or representatives do not exist in sufficient numbers to be of 
sensible importance in geology or in geography by the mere 
mass of their skeletons.+| But the vegetable products found 


* Report of Commissioner of Agriculture of the United States for 1870. 

+ Could the bones and other relics of the domestic quadrupeds destroyed by 
disease or slaughtered for human use in civilized countries be collected into 
large deposits, as obscure causes have gathered together those of extinct 


ANIMAL LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AGENCY. S1 


with them, and, in rare cases, in the stomachs of some of them, 
are those of yet extant plants; and besides this evidence, the 
discovery of works of human art, deposited in juxtaposition 
with fossil bones, and evidently at the same time and by the 
same agency which buried these latter—not to speak of human 
bones found in the same strata—proves that the animals whose 
former existence they testify were contemporaneous with man, 


animals, they would soon form aggregations which might almost be called 
mountains. There were’ in the United States, in 1870, as we shall see here- 
after, nearly one hundréd ‘iiillions of horses, black cattle, sheep, and swine. 
There are great numbers of all the same animalsin the British American Prov- 
inces and in Mexico, and there are large herds of wild horses on the plains, 
and of tamed among the independent Indian tribes of North America. It would 
perhaps not be extravagant to suppose that all these cattle may amount to 
two thirds as many as those of the United States, and thus we have in North 
America a total of 160,000,000 domestic quadrupeds belonging to species intro- 
duced by European colonization, besides dogs, cats, and other four-footed 
household pets and pests, also of foreign origin. 

If we allow half a solid foot to the skeleton and other slowly destructible 
parts of each animal, the remains of these herds would form a cubical mass 
measuring not much short of four hundred and fifty feet to the side, ora 
pyramid equal in dimensions to that of Cheops, and as the average life of these 
animals does not exceed six or seven years, the accumulations of their bones, 
horns, hoofs, and other durable remains would amount to at least fifteen times 
as great a volume in a single century. It is true that the actual mass of 
solid matter, left by the decay of dead domestic quadrupeds and permanently 
added to the crust of the earth, is not so great as this calculation makes it. 
The greatest proportion of the soft parts of domestic animals, and even of the 
bones, is soon decomposed, through direct consumption by man and other 
carnivora, industrial use, and employment as manure, and enters into new 
combinations in which its animal origin is scarcely traceable ; there is, never- 
theless, a large annual residuum, which, like decayed vegetable matter, be- 
comes a part of the superficial mould; and in any event, brute life immensely 
changes the form and character of the superficial strata, if it does not sensibly 
augment the quantity of the matter composing them. 

The remains of man, too, add to the earthy coating that covers the face of 
the globe. The human bodies deposited in the catacombs during the long, 
long ages of Egyptian history, would perhaps build as large a pile as one 
generation of the quadrupeds of the United States. Jn the barbarous days of 
old Moslem warfare, the conquerors erected large pyramids of human skulls. 
The soil of cemeteries in the great cities of Europe has sometimes been raised 
several feet by the deposit of the dead during a few generations. In the East, 


82 ANIMAL LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AGENCY. 


and possibly even extirpated by him.* Ido not propose to 
enter upon the thorny question, whether the existing races of 
man are genealogically connected with these ancient types of 
humanity, and I advert to these facts only for the sake of the 
suggestion, that man, in his earliest known stages of existence, 
was probably a destructive power upon the earth, though per- 
haps not so emphatically as his present representatives. 

The larger wild animals are not now numerous enough in any 
one region to form extensive deposits by their remains; but 
they have, nevertheless, a certain geographical importance. If 
the myriads of large browsing and grazing quadrupeds which 
wander over the plains of Southern Africa—and the slaughter 
of which by thousands is the source of a ferocious pleasure and 


Turks and Christians alike bury bodies but a couple of feet beneath the surface. 
The graye is respected as long as the tombstone remains, but the sepultures 
of the ignoble poor, and of those whose monuments time or accident has re- 
moved, are opened again and again to receive fresh occupants. Hence the 
ground in Oriental cemeteries is pervaded with relics of humanity, if not 
wholly composed of them ; and an examination of the soil of the lower part of 
the Petit Champ des Morts, at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the ob- 
server that it consists almost exclusively of the comminuted bones of his fel- 
low-man. 

* The bones of mammoths and mastodons, in many instances, appear to 
have been grazed or cut by flint arrow-heads or other stone weapons, and the 
bones of animals now extinct are often wrought into arms and utensils, or 
split to extract the marrow. These accounts have often been discredited, be- 
cause it has been assumed that the extinction of these animals was more 
ancient than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it certain that 
this conclusion has been too hastily adopied. 

On page 143 of the Antiquity of Man, Lyell remarks that man ‘‘ no doubt 
played his part in hastening the era of the extinction” of the large pachyderms 
and beasts of prey ; but, as contemporaneous species of other animals, which 
man cannot be supposed to haye extirpated, have also become extinct, he 
argues that the disappearance of the quadrupeds in question cannot be 
ascribed to human action alone. 

On this point it may be observed that, as we cannot know what precise 
physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct organ- 
ism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified by the 
action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of such organ- 
isms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no just idea, 


ANIMAL LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AGENCY. §3 


a brutal triumph to professedly civilized hunters—if the herds of 
the American bison, which are numbered by hundreds of thou- 
sands, do not produce visible changes in the forms of terrestrial 
surface, they have at least an immense influence on the growth 
and distribution of vegetable life, and, of course, indirectly 
upon all the physical conditions of soil and climate between 
which and vegetation a mutual interdependence exists. 

In the preceding chapter I referred to the agency of the 
beaver in the formation of bogs as producing sensible geograph- 
ical effects. 

I am disposed to think that more bogs in the Northern States 
owe their origin to beavers than to accidental obstructions of 
rivulets by wind-fallen or naturally decayed trees; for there 
are few swamps in those States, at the outlets of which we may 
not, by careful search, find the remains of a beaver dam. The 
beaver sometimes inhabits natural lakelets and even large rivers 
like the Upper Mississippi, when the current is not too rapid, but 
he prefers to owe his pond to his own ingenuity and toil. The 
reservoir once constructed, its inhabitants rapidly multiply so 
long as the trees, and the harvests of pond lilies and other 
aquatic plants on which this quadruped feeds in winter, suffice 
for the supply of the growing population. But the extension 
of the water causes the death of the neighboring trees, and the 
annual growth of those which could be reached by canals and 
floated to the pond soon becomes insufficient for the wants of 
the community, and the beaver metropolis now sends out expe- 
ditions of discovery and colonization. The pond gradually fills 
up, by the operation of the same causes as when it owes its exist- 
ence to an accidental obstruction, and when, at last, the original 
settlement is converted into a bog by the usual processes of 
vegetable life, the remaining inhabitants abandon it and build 
on some virgin brooklet a new city of the waters.* 


* T find confirmation of my own obseryations on this point (published in 
1863) in the Worth- West Passage by Land of Milton and Cheadle, London, 1865, 
These travellers observed ‘‘ a long chain of marshes formed by the damming 
up of a stream which had now ceased to exist,” Chap. X. In Chap. XII, 


84 INFLUENCE OF ANIMAL LIFE ON VEGETATION. 


Influence of Animal Life on Vegetation. 


The influence of wild quadrupeds upon vegetable life has 
been little studied, and not many facts bearing upon it have 
been recorded, but, so far as it is known, it appears to be con- 


they state that ‘‘ nearly every stream between the Pembina and the Athabasca 
—except the large river McLeod—appeared to have been destroyed by the 
agency of the beaver,” and they question whether the vast extent of swampy 
ground in that region ‘‘ has not been brought to this condition by the work 
of beavers who have thus destroyed, by their own labor, the streams neces- 
sary to their own existence.” 

But even here nature provides a remedy, for when the process of ‘‘ consoli- 
dation” referred to in treating of bogs in the first chapter shall have been 
completed, and the forest re-established upon the marshes, the water now dif- 
fused through them will be collected in the lower or more yielding portions, 
cut new channels for their flow, become running brooks, and thus restore the 
ancient aspect of the surface. 

The authors add the curious observation that the beavers of the present 
day seem to be a degenerate race, as they neither fell large trees nor con- 
struct great dams, while their progenitors cut down trees two feet in diam- 
eter and dammed up rivers a hundred feet in width. The change in the habits 
of the beaver is probably due to the diminution of their numbers since the 
introduction of fire-arms, and to the fact that their hydraulic operations are 
more frequently interrupted by the encroachments of man. 

In the valley of the Yellowstone, which has but lately been much visited by 
the white man, Hayden saw stumps of trees thirty inches in diameter which 
had been cut down by beavers.— Geological Survey of Wyoming, p. 185. 

The American beaver closely resembles his Huropean congener, and I believe 
most naturalists now regard them as identical. A difference of species had 
been inferred from a difference in their modes of life, the European animal 
being solitary and not a builder, the American gregarious and constructive. 
But late careful researches in Germany have shown the former existence of 
numerous beaver dams in that country, though the animal, having become too 
rare to form colonies, has of course ceased to attempt works which require 
the co-operation of numerous individuals.—ScuLEIDEN, Liir Baum und Wald, 
Leipzig, 1870, p. 68. 

On the question of identity and on all others relating to this interesting 
animal, see L. H. MorGan’s important monograph, Tie American Beaver and 
his Works, Philadelphia, 1868. Among the many new facts observed by this 
investigator is the construction of canals by the beaver to float trunks and 
branches of trees to his ponds. These canals are sometimes 600 or 700 feet 
long, with a width of two or three feet and a depth of one to one and a half. 


INFLUENCE OF ANIMAL LIFE ON VEGETATION. 85 


servative rather than pernicious. Few wild animals depend for 
their subsistence on vegetable products obtainable only by the 
destruction of the plant, and they seem to confine their con- 
sumption almost exclusively to the annual harvest of leaf or 
twig, or at least of parts of the vegetable easily reproduced. 
If there are exceptions to this rule, they are in cases where the 
numbers of the animal are so proportioned to the abundance of 
the vegetable that there is no danger of the extermination of 
the plant from the voracity of the quadruped, or of the extinc- 
tion of the quadruped from the scarcity of the plant.* In diet 
and natural wants the bison resembles the ox, the ibex and the 
chamois assimilate themselves to the goat and the sheep; but 
while the wild animal does not appear to be a destructive 
agency ia the garden of nature, his domestic congeners are 


* European foresters speak of the action of the squirrel as injurious to trees. 
Doubtless this is sometimes true in the case of artificial forests, but in woods 
of spontaneous growth, ordered and governed by nature, the squirrel does not 
attack trees, or at least the injury he may do is too trifling to be perceptible, 
but he is a formidable enemy to the plantation. ‘‘The squirrels bite the 
cones of the pine and consume the seed which might serve to restock the 
wood; they do still more mischief by gnawing off, near the leading shoot, a 
strip of bark, and thus often completely girdling the tree. Trees so injured 
must be felled, as they would never acquire a vigorous growth. The squirrel 
is especially destructive to the pine in Sologne, where he gnaws the bark of 
trees twenty or twenty-five years old.” But even here, nature sometimes 
provides a compensation, by making the appetite of this quadruped serve to 
prevent an excessive production of seed cones, which tends to obstruct the 
due growth of the leading shoot. ‘‘In some of the pimeries of Brittany 
which produce cones so abundantly as to strangle the development of the 
leading shoot of the maritime pine, it has been observed that the pines are 
most vigorous where the squirrels are most numerous, a result attributed to 
the repression of the cones by this rodent.”—Bo1rEeL, Mise en valeur des Terres 
pourres, p. 50. 

Very interesting observations, on the agency of the squirrel and other small 
animals in planting and in destroying nuts and other seeds of trees, may be 
found in a paper on the Succession of Forests in Thoreau’s Hzeursions, pp. 
135 et seqq. 

I once saw several quarts of beech-nuts taken from the winter quarters of a 
family of flying squirrels in a hollow tree. The kernels were neatly stripped 
of their shells and carefully stored in a dry cavity. 


86 ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF D-MESTIC QUADRUPEDS. 


eminently so.* This is partly from the change of habits re- 
sulting from domestication and association with man, partly 
from the fact that the number of reclaimed animals is not de- 
termined by the natural relation of demand and spontaneous 
supply which regulates the multiplication of wild creatures, 
but by the convenience of man, who is, in comparatively few 
things, amenable to the control of the merely physical arrange- 
ments of nature. When the domesticated animal escapes from 
human jurisdiction, as in the case of the ox, the horse, the goat, 
and perhaps the ass—which, so far as I know, are the only 
well-authenticated instances of the complete emancipation of 
household quadrupeds—he becomes again an unresisting sub- 
ject of nature, and all his economy is governed by the same 
laws as that of his fellows which have never been enslaved by 
man ; but, so long as he obeys a human lord, he is an auxiliary 
in the warfare his master is ever waging against all existences 
except those which he can tame to a willing servitude. 


Origin and Transfer of Domestic Quadrupeds. 


Civilization is so intimately associated with certain inferior 
forms of animal life, if not dependent on them, that cultivated 


* Evelyn thought the depasturing of grass by cattle serviceable to its 
growth, ‘‘ The biting of cattle,” he remarks, ‘‘ gives a gentle loosening to the 
roots of the herbage, and makes it to grow fine and sweet, and their very 
breath and treading as well as soil, and the comfort of their warm bodies, is 
wholesome and marvellously cherishing.”—Terra, or Philosophical Discourse 
of Earth, p. 36. 

In a note upon this passage, Hunter observes: ‘‘ Nice farmers consider the 
lying of a beast upon the ground, for one night only, as a sufficient tilth for 
the year. The breath of graminivorous quadrupeds does certainly enrich the 
roots of grass; a circumstance worthy of the attention of the philosophical 
farmer.”— Terra, same page. 

The ‘ philosophical farmer’? of the present day will not adopt these opinions 
without some qualification, and they certainly are not sustained by American 
observation, 

The Report of the Department of Agriculture for March and April, 1872, states 
that the native grasses are disappearing from the prairies of Texas, especially 
on the bottom-lands, depasturing by cattle being destructive to them. 


ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF DOMESTIC QUADRUPEDS. 87 


man has never failed to accompany himself, in all his migrations, 
with some of these humble attendants. The ox, the horse, the 
sheep, and even the comparatively useless dog and cat, as well as 
several species of poultry, are voluntarily transferred by every 
emigrant colony, and they soon multiply to numbers far exceed- 
ing those of the wild genera most nearly corresponding to them.* 

Of the origin of our domestic animals, we know historically 
nothing, because their domestication belongs to the ages which 
preceded written annals; but though they cannot all be specifi- 
rally identified with now extant wild animals, it is presumable 
that they have been reclaimed from an originally wild state. 
Ancient writers have preserved to us fewer data respecting the 
introduction of domestic animals into new countries than re- 
specting the transplantation of domestic vegetables. Ritter, in 
his learned essay on the camel, has shown that this animal was 
not employed by the Egyptians until a comparatively late 
period in their history; + that he was unknown to the Cartha- 


* The rat and the mouse, though not voluntarily transported, are passengers 
by every ship that sails for a foreign port, and several species of these quad- 
rupeds have, consequently, much extended their range and increased their 
numbers in modern times. From a story of Heliogabalus related by LAM- 
pripivs, Hist. Aug. Scriptores, ed. Casaubon, 1650, p. 110, it would seem that 
mice at least were not very common in ancient Rome. Among the capricious 
freaks of that emperor, it is said that he undertook to investigate the statistics 
of the arachnoid population of the capital, and that 10,000 pounds of spiders 
(or spiders’ webs—for aranea is equivocal) were readily collected; but when 
he got up a mouse-show, he thought ten thousand mice a very fair number. 
Rats are not less numerous in all great cities; and in Paris, where their skins 
are used for gloves, and their flesh, it is whispered, in some very complex and 
equivocal dishes, they are caught by legions. I have read of a manufacturer 
who contracted to buy of the rat-catchers, at a high price, all the rat-skins 
they could furnish before a certain date, and failed, within a week, for want 
of capital, when the stock of peltry had run up to 600,000. 

Civilization has not contented itself with the introduction of domestic 
animals alone. The English sportsman imports foxes from the continent, and 
Grimalkin-like turns them loose in order that he may have the pleasure of 
chasing them afterwards, 

+ The horse and the ass were equally unknown to ancient Egypt, and do not 
appear in the sculptures before the XV. and XVI. dynasties. But even then, 
the horse was only known as a draught animal, and the only representation of 


88 ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF DOMESTIC QUADRUPEDS. 


ginians until after the downfall of their commonwealth; and 
that his first appearance in Western Africa is more recent still. 
The Bactrian camel was certainly brought from Asia Minor to 
the Northern shores of the Black Sea, by the Goths, in the third 
or fourth century, and the buffalo first appeared in Italy about 
A.D. 600, though it is unknown whence or by whom he was 
introduced.* The Arabian single-humped camel, or dromedary, 
has been carried to the Canary Islands, partially introduced 
into Australia, Greece, Spain, and even Tuscany, experimented 
upon to little purpose in Venezuela, and finally imported by 
the American Government into Texas and New Mexico, where 
it finds the climate and the vegetable products best suited to its 
wants, and promises to become a very useful agent in the pro- 
motion of the special civilization for which those regions are 
adapted. 

Quadrupeds, both domestic and wild, bear the privations 
and discomforts of long voyages better than would be sup- 
posed. The elephant, the giratfe, the rhinoceros, and even the 
hippopotamus, do not seem to suffer much at sea. Some of the 
camels imported by the U. 8. government into Texas from the 
Crimea and Northern Africa were a whole year on shipboard. 
On the other hand, George Sand, in Un [Hiver au Midi, gives 
an amusing description of the sea-sickness of swine in the short 
passage from the Baleares to Barcelona. 

America had no domestic quadruped but a species of dog, the 
lama tribe, and, to a certain extent, the bison or buffalo.t Of 


a horseman yet found in the Egyptian tombs is on the blade of a battle axe 
of uncertain origin and period. 

* Irdkunde, viii., Asien, 1ste Abtheilung, pp. 660, 758. Heun, Kuttenpflanzen, 
p. 345, 

| See Chapter III, post; also HumBoupr, Ansichten der Natur, i., p. 71. 
From the anatomical character of the bones of the urus, or auerochs, found 
among the relics of the lacustrine population of ancient Switzerland, and 
from other circumstances, it is inferred that this animal had been domesti- 
cated by that people; and it is stated, I know not upon what authority, in 
Le Alpi che cingono U Italia, that it had been tamed by the Veneti also. See 
LYELL, Antiquity of Man, pp. 24, 25, and the last-named work, p. 489. This 
is a fact of much interest, because it is one of the very few historically known 


ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF DOMESTIC QUADRUPEDS. 89 


course, it owes the horse, the ass, the ox, the sheep, the goat, 
and the swine, as does also Australia, to European colonization. 
Modern Europe has, thus far, not accomplished much in the 
way of importation of new animals, though some interesting 
essays have been made. The reindeer was successfully intro- 
duced into Iceland about a century ago, while similar attempts 
failed, about the same time, in Scotland. The Cashmere or 
Thibet goat was brought to France a generation since, and 
succeeds well. The same or an allied species and the Asiatic 
buffalo were carried to South Carolina about the year 1850, 
and the former, at least, is thought likely to prove of perma- 
nent value in the United States.* The yak, or Tartary ox, 
seems to thrive in France, and it is hoped that success will 
attend the present efforts to introduce the South American 
alpaca into Europe.t 


instances of the extinction of a domestic quadruped, and the extreme im- 
probability of such an event gives some countenance to the theory of the 
identity of the domestic ox with, and its descent from, the urus. 

* The goat introduced into South Carolina was brought from the district of 
Angora, in Asia Minor, which has long been celebrated for flocks of this valu- 
able animal. It is calculated that more than a million of these goats are 
raised in that district, and it is commonly believed that the Angora goat and its 
wool degenerate when transported. Probably this is only an invention of 
the shepherds to prevent rivals from attempting to interfere with so profitable 
amonopoly. But if the popular prejudice has any foundation, the degene- 
racy is doubtless to be attributed to ignorance of the special treatment which 
long experience has taught the Angora shepherds, and the consequent neglect 
of such precautions as are necessary to the proper care of the animal. 
Throughout nearly the whole territory of the United States the success of the 
Angora goat is perfect, and it would undoubtedly thrive equally well in Italy, 
though it is very doubtful whether in either country the value of its fleece 
would compensate the damage it would do to the woods. 

+ The reproductive powers of animals, as well as of plants, seem to be some- 
times stimulated in an extraordinary way by transfer to a foreign clime. The 
common warren rabbit introduced by the early colonists into the island of 
Madeira multiplied to such a degree as to threaten the extirpation of vegeta- 
tion, and in Australia the same quadruped has become so numerous as to be 
a very serious evil. The colonists are obliged to employ professional rabbit- 
hunters, and one planter has enclosed his grounds by four miles of solid wall, 
at an expense of $6,000, to protect his crops against these ravagers.— Revue 
des Livux et Foréts, 1870, p. 38. 


90 ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF DOMESTIC QUADRUPEDS. 


According to the census of the United States for 1870,* the 
total number of horses in all the States of the American Union, 
was, in round numbers, 7,100,000 ; of asses and mules, 1,100,000; 
of the ox tribe, 25,000,000; of sheep, 28,000,000; and of 
swine, 25,000,000. The only indigenous North American 
quadruped sufficiently gregarious in habits, and sufliciently 
multiplied in numbers, to form really large herds, is the bison, 
or, as he is commonly called in America, the buffalo; and 
this animal is confined to the prairie region of the Mississippi 
basin, a small part of British America, and Northern Mexico. 
The engineers sent out to survey railroad routes to the Pacitic 
estimated the number of a single herd of bisons seen within 
the last fifteen years on the great plains near the Upper Mis- 
sourl, at not less than 200,000, and yet the range occupied by 
this animal is now very much smaller in area than it was when 
the whites first established themselves on the prairies.t But it 
must be remarked that the American buffalo is a migratory 
animal, and that, at the season of his annual journeys, the whole 
stock of a vast extent of pasture-ground is collected into a single 
army, which is seen at or very near any one point only fora 
few days during the entire season. Jence there is risk of great 


* In the enumeration of farm stock, ‘‘sucking pigs, spring lambs, and 
calves,” are omitted. I believe they are included in the numbers reported by the 
census of 1860. Horses and horned cattle in towns and cities were excluded 
from both enumerations, the law providing for returns on these points from 
rural districts only. On the whole, there is a diminution in the number of all 
farm stock, except sheep, since 1860. This is ascribed by the Report to the 
destruction of domestic quadrupeds during the civil war, but this hardly ex- 
plains the reduction in the number of swine from 389,000,000 in 1860 to 
25,000,000 in 1870. 

+ ‘‘ About five miles from camp we ascended to the top of a high hill, and 
for a great distance ahead every square mile seemed to have a herd of buffalo 
upon it. Their number was variously estimated by the members of the party ; 
by some as high as half a million. I do not think it any exaggeration to set 
it down at 200,000."—StEvENs’s Warrative and Final Report. teports of Ex- 
plorations and Surveys for Railroad to Pacific, vol. xii., book i., 1860. 

The next day the party fell in with a “‘ buffalo trail,” where at least 100,000 
were thought to have crossed a slough. 

As late as 1868, Sheridan’s party estimated the number of bisons seen by them 
in a single day at 200,000.—Sheridan’s Troopers on the Border, 1868, p. 41. 


EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS. 91 


error in estimating the numbers of the bison in a given district 
from the magnitude of the herds seen at or about the same 
time at a single place of observation ; and, upon the whole, it 
is neither proved nor probable that the bison was ever, at any 
one time, as numerous in North America as the domestic bovine 
species is at present. The elk, the moose, the musk ox, the 
caribou, and the smaller quadrupeds popularly embraced under 
the general name of deer, though suflicient for the wants of a 
sparse savage population, were never numerically very abun- 
dant, and the carnivora which fed upon them were still less so. 
It is almost needless to add that the Rocky Mountain sheep and 
goat must always have been very rare. 

Summing up the whole, then, it is evident that the wild 
quadrupeds of North America, even when most numerous, were 
few compared with their domestic successors, that they required 
a much less supply of vegetable food, and consequently were 
far less important as geographical elements than the many 
millions of hoofed and horned cattle now fed by civilized man 
on the same continent. 


Eixtirpation of Wild Quadrupeds. 


Although man never fails greatly to diminish, and is perhaps 
destined ultimately to exterminate, such of the larger wild 
quadrupeds as he cannot profitably domesticate, yet their num- 
bers often fluctuate, and even after they seem almost extinct, 
they sometimes suddenly increase, without any intentional steps 
to promote such a result on his part. During the wars which 
followed the French Revolution, the wolf multiplied in many 
parts of Europe, partly because the hunters were withdrawn 
from the woods to chase a nobler game, and partly because the 
8 ) J 

bodies of slain men and horses supplied this voracious quadru- 
PI 

ped with more abundant food.* The same animal became 


* During the late civil war in America, deer and other animals of the chase 
multiplied rapidly in the regions of the Southern States which were partly 
depopulated and deprived of their sportsmen by the military operations of the 
contest, and the bear is said to have reappeared in districts where he had not 
been scen in the memory of living men. 


92 EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS. 


again more numerous in Poland after the general disarming of 
the rural population by the Russian Government. On the 
other hand, when the hunters pursue the wolf, the graminivo- 
rous wild quadrupeds increase, and thus in turn promote the 
multiplication of their great four-footed destroyer by augment- 
ing the supply of his nourishment. So long as the fur of the 
beaver was extensively employed as a material for hats, it bore 
a very high price, and the chase of this quadruped was so keen 
that naturalists feared its speedy extinction. When a Parisian 
manufacturer invented the silk hat, which soon came into almost 
universal use, the demand for beavers’ fur fell off, and this 
animal—whose habits are an important agency in the forma- 
tion of bogs and other modifications of forest nature—im- 
mediately began to increase, reappeared in haunts which he 
had long abandoned, and can no longer be regarded as rare 
enough to be in immediate danger of extirpation. Thus the 
convenience or the caprice of Parisian fashion has unconsciously 
exercised an influence which may sensibly affect the physical 
geography of a distant continent. 

Since the invention of gunpowder, some quadrupeds have 
completely disappeared from many European and Asiatic 
countries where they were formerly numerous. The last wolf 
was killed in Great Britain two hundred years ago, and the 
bear was extirpated from that island still earlier. The lion is 
believed to have inhabited Asia Minor and Syria, and probably 
Greece and Sicily also, long after the commencement of the 
historical period, and he is even said to have been not yet ex- 
tinct in the first-named two of these countries at the time of 
the first Crusade.* 

The British wild ox is extinct except in a few English and 


* Tn maintaining the recent existence of the lion in the countries named in 
the text, naturalists have, perhaps, laid too much weight on the frequent 
oceurrence of representations of this animal in sculptures apparently of a his- 
torical character. It will not do to argue, twenty centuries hence, that the 
lion and the unicorn were common in Great Britain in Queen Victoria’s time, 
because they are often seen ‘ fighting for the crown”’ in the carvings and 
paintings of that period. Many palxontologists, however, identify the great 


EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS. 93 


Scottish parks, while in Irish bogs of no great apparent 
antiquity are found antlers which testify to the former exist- 
ence of a stag much larger than any extant European species. 
Two large graminivorous or browsing quadrupeds, the ur and 
the schelk, once common in Germany, have been utterly extir- 
pated, the eland and the auerochs nearly so. The Nibelungen- 
Lied, which, in the oldest form preserved to us, dates from 
about the year 1200, though its original composition no doubt 
belongs to an earlier period, thus sings: 


Chen slowe the dowghtic Sigfrid a wisent and an elk, 
sje smote four stonte nroxen and a grim and sturdie schelk.* 


Modern naturalists identify the elk with the eland, the wisent 
with the anerochs. The period when the ur and the schelk be- 
came extinct is not known. The auerochs survived in Prussia 
until the middle of the last century, but unless it is identical 
with a similar quadruped said to be found on the Caucasus, it 
now exists only in the Russian imperial forest of Bialowitz 
where about a thousand are still preserved, and in some great 
menageries, as for example that at Schdnbrunn, near Vienna, 
which, in 1852, had four specimens. The eland, which is 
closely allied to the American wapiti if not specifically the 
same animal, is still kept in the royal preserves of Prussia, to 
the number of four or five hundred individuals. The chamois 


cat-like animal, whose skeletons are frequently found in British bone-caves, 
with the lion of our times. 

The leopard (panthera), though already growing scarce, was found in Cilicia 
in Cicero’s time. See his letter to Ceelius, Hpist. ad Diversos, Lib. II., Ep. 11. 


*Mar nach sluoger schicre, cinen wisent unde elch. 


Starker ure viere, unt einen grimmen schelch. 
XVI. Aventiure. 


The testimony of the Wibelungen-Lied is not conclusive evidence that these 
quadrupeds existed in Germany at the time of the composition of that poem. 
Tt proves too much; for, a few lines above those just quoted, Sigfrid is said to 
have killed a lion, an animal which the most patriotic Teuton will hardly 
claim as a denizen of medieval Germany. 


94 EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS. 


is becoming rare, and the ibex or steinbock, once common in 
all the high Alps, is now believed to be confined to the Cogne 
mountains in Piedmont, between the valleys of the Dora 
Baltea and the Orco, though it is said that a few still linger 
about the Grandes Jorasses near Cormayeur. 

The chase, which in early stages of human life was a neces- 
sity, has become with advancing civilization not merely a 
passion but a dilettanteism, and the cruel records of this 
pastime are among the most discreditable pages in modern - 
literature. It is true that in India and other tropical countries, 
the number and ferocity of the wild beasts not only justify 
but command a war of extermination against them, but the 
indiscriminate slaughter of many quadrupeds which are 
favorite objects of the chase can urge no such apology. Late 
official reports from India state the number of human 
victims of the tiger, the leopard, the wolf and other beasts of 
prey, in ten “districts,” at more than twelve thousand within 
three years, and we are informed on like authority that within 
the last six years more than ten thousand men, women, and 
children -have perished in the same way in the Presidency of 
Bengal alone. One tiger, we are told, had killed more than a 
hundred people, and finally stopped the travel on an important 
road, and another had caused the desertion of thirteen villages 
and thrown 250 square miles out of cultivation. In such facts 
we find abundant justification of the slaying of seven thousand 
tigers, nearly six thousand leopards, and twenty-five hundred 
other ravenous beasts in the Bengal Presidency, in the space 
of half a dozen years. But the humane reader will not think 
the value of the flesh, the skin, and other less important 
products of inoffensive quadrupeds a satisfactory excuse for 
the ravages committed upon them by amateur sportsmen as 
well as by professional hunters. In 1861, it was computed that 
the supply of the English market with ivory cost the lives 
of 8,000 elephants. Others make the number much larger, 
and it is said that half as much ivory is consumed in the United 
States as in Great Britain. In Ceylon, where the elephants 


EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS. 95 


are numerous and destructive to the crops, as well as dangerous 
to travellers, while their tusks are small and of comparatively 
little value, the government pays a small reward for killing 
them. According to Sir Emerson Tennant,* in three years 
prior to 1848, the premium was paid for 3,500 elephants in a 
part of the northern district, and between 1851 and 1856 for 
2,000 in the southern district. Major Rogers, famous as an 
elephant shooter in Ceylon, ceased to count his victims after he 
had slain 1,300, and Cumming in South Africa sacrificed his 
hecatombs every month. 

In spite of the rarity of the chamois, his cautious shyness, and 
the comparative inaccessibility of his favorite haunts, Colani 
of Pontresina, who died in 1837, had killed not less than 2,000 
of these animals; Kiing, who is still living in the Upper Enga- 
dine, 1,500; Hitz, 1,300, and Zwichian equal number; Soldani 
shot 1,100 or 1,200 in the mountains which enclose the Val 
Bregaglia, and there are many living hunters who can boast of 
having killed from 500 to 800 of these interesting quadrupeds. t 

In America, the chase of the larger quadrupeds is not less 
destructive. In a late number of the American Naturalist, 
the present annual slaughter of the bison is calculated at the 
enormous number of 500,000, and the elk, the moose, the cari- 
bou, and the more familiar species of deer furnish, perhaps, as 
many victims. The most fortunate deer-hunter I have person- 
ally known in New England had killed but 960; but in the 
northern part of the State of New York, a single sportsman is 
said to have shot 1,500, and this number has been doubtless 
exceeded by zealous Nimrods of the West. 

But so far as numbers are concerned, the statistics of the fur- 
trade furnish the most surprising results. Russia sends annu- 


* Natural History of Ceylon, chap. iv. 

+ Although it is only in the severest cold of winter that the chamois descends 
to the vicinity of grounds occupied by man, its organization does not confine 
it to the mountains. In the royal park of Racconigi, on the plaina few miles 
from Turin, at a height of less than 1,000 feet, is kept a herd of thirty or 
forty chamois, which thrive and breed apparently as well as in the Alps. 


ite} 


6 MARINE ANIMALS UNIMPORTANT IN GEOGRAPHY. 


ally to foreign markets not less than 20,000,000 squirrel skins, 
Great Britain has sometimes imported from South America 
600,000 nutria skins in a year. The Leipzig market receives 
annually nearly 200,000 ermine, and the Hudson Bay Company 
is said to have occasionally burnt 20,000 ermine skins in order 
that the market might not be overstocked. 

Of course natural reproduction cannot keep pace with this 
enormous destruction, and many animals of much interest to 
natural science are in imminent danger of final extirpation.* 


Large Marine Animals relatively unimportant in Geography. 


Vast as is the bulk of some of the higher orders of aquatic 
animals, their remains are generally so perishable that, even 
where most abundant, they do not appear to be now forming 
permanent deposits of any considerable magnitude; but it is 
quite otherwise with shell-fish, and, as we shall see hereafter, 
with many of the minute limeworkers of the sea. There are, 
on the southern coast of the United States, beds of shells so 
extensive that they were formerly supposed to have been 
naturally accumulated, and were appealed to as proofs of an 
elevation of the coast by geological causes; but they are now 
ascertained to have been derived chiefly from oysters and other 
shell-fish, consumed in the course of long ages by the inhabitants 
of Indian towns. The planting of a bed of oysters in a new 
locality might very probably lead, in time, to the formation of 
a bank, which, in connection with other deposits, might per- 
ceptibly affect the line of a coast, or, by changing the course of 
marine currents, or the outlet of a river, produce geographical 
changes of no small importance. 


* Objectionable as game laws are, they have done something to prevent the 
extinction of many quadrupeds, which naturalists would be loth to lose, and, 
as in the case of the British ox, private parks and preserves have saved other 
species from destruction. Some few wild animals, such as the American mink, 
for example, have been protected and bred with profit, and in Pennsylvania 
an association of gentlemen has set apart, and is about enclosing, a park of 
16,000 acres for the breeding of indigenous quadrupeds and fowls. 


INTRODUCTION AND BREEDING OF FISH. 97 


Introduction and Breeding of Fish. 


The introduction and successful breeding of fish or roreign 
species appears to have been long practised in China, and was 
not unknown to the Greeks and Romans.* This art has been 
revived in modern times, but thus far without any important 
results, economical or physical, though there seems to be good 
reason to believe it may be employed with advantage on an 
extended scale. As in the case of plants, man has sometimes 
undesignedly introduced new species of aquatic animals into 
countries distant from their birthplace. The accidental escape 
of the Chinese goldfish from ponds where they were bred as a 
garden ornament, has peopled some European, and it is said 
American streams with this species. Canals of navigation and 
irrigation interchange the fish of lakes and rivers widely sepa- 
rated by natural barriers, as well as the plants which drop 
their seeds into the waters. The Erie Canal, as measured by 
its own channel, has a length of about three hundred and sixty 
miles, and it has ascending and descending locks in both diree- 
tions. By this route, the fresh-water fish of the Hudson and 
the Upper Lakes, and some of the indigenous vegetables of 
these respective basins, have intermixed, and the fauna and 
flora of the two regions have now more species common to both 
than before the canal was opened.t The opening of the Suez 
Canal will, no doubt, produce very interesting revolutions in 
the animal and vegetable population of both basins. The 
Mediterranean, with some local exceptions—such as the bays of 
Calabria, and the coast of Sicily so picturesquely described by 


* The observations of COLUMELLA, de Re Rustica, lib. viii., sixteenth aud 
following chapters, on fish-breeding, are interesting. The Romans not only 
stocked natural but constructed artificial ponds, of both fresh and salt water, 
and cut off bays of the sea for this purpose. They also naturalized various 
species of sea-fish in fresh water. 

+ The opening or rather the reconstruction of the Claudian emissary by 
Prince Torlonia, designed to drain the Lake Fucinus, or Celano, has introduced 
the fish of that lake into the Liri or Garigliano which receives the discharge 
from the lake.—DororEs, Sommurio storico del? Alieutica, p. 60. 


98 INTRODUCTION AND BREEDING OF FISH. 


Quatrefages *—is comparatively poor in marine vegetation, 
and in shell as well as in fin fish. The scarcity of fish in some 
of its gulfs is proverbial, and you may scrutinize long stretches 
of beach on its northern shores, after every south wind for a 
whole winter, without finding a dozen shelis to reward your 
search. But no one who has not looked down into tropical or 
subtropical seas can conceive the amazing wealth of the Red 
Sea in organic life. Its bottom is carpeted or paved with 
marine plants, with zodphytes and with shells, while its waters 
are teeming with infinitely varied forms of moving life. Most 
of its vegetables and its animals, no doubt, are confined by the 
laws of their organization to a warmer temperature than that of 
the Mediterranean, but among them there must be many whose 
habitat is of a wider range, many whose powers of accommo- 
dation would enable them to acclimate themselves in a colder 
ea. 

We may suppose the Jess numerous aquatic fauna and flora 
of the Mediterranean to be equally capable of climatic adapta- 
tion, and hence there will be a partial interchange of the 
organic population not already common to both seas. De- 
structive species, thus newly introduced, may diminish the 
numbers of their proper prey in either basin, and, on the other 
hand, the increased supply of appropriate food may greatly 
multiply the abundance of others, and at the same time add 
important contributions to the aliment of man in the countries 
bordering on the Mediterranean.+ 

Some accidental attraction not unfrequently induces fish to 
follow a vessel for days in succession, and they may thus be 
enticed into zones very distant from their native habitat. 
Several years ago, I was told at Constantinople, upon good 
authority, that a couple of fish, of a species wholly unknown to 


* Souvenirs Wun Naturaliste, i., pp. 204 et seqq. 

+ The dissolution of the salts in the bed of the Bitter Lakes impregnated the 
water admitted from the Red Sea so highly that for some time fish were not 
seen in that basin. The flow of the current through the canal has now re- 
duced the proportion of saline matter to five per cent., and late travellers 
speak of fish as abundant in its waters, 


ae 


INTRODUCTION AND BREEDING OF FISH. 99 


the natives, had just been taken in the Bosphorus. They were 
alleged to have followed an English ship from the Thames, and 
to have been frequently observed by the crew during the pas- 
sage ; but I was unable to learn their specific character.* 

Many of the fish which pass the greater part of the year in 
salt water spawn in fresh, and some fresh-water species, the 
common brook-trout of New England for instance, which under 
ordinary circumstances never visit the sea, will, if transferred 
to brooks emptying directly into the ocean, go down into the 
salt water after spawning-time, and return again the next 
season. Some sea fish have been naturalized in fresh water, 
and naturalists have argued from tle character of the fish of 
Lake Baikal, and especially from the existence of the seal in 
that locality, that all its inhabitants were originally marine 
species, and have changed their habits with the gradual con- 
version of the saline waters of the lake—once, as is assumed, 
a maritime bay—into fresh.t The presence of the seal is hardly 
conclusive on this point, for it is sometimes seen in Lake Cham- 
plain at the distance of some hundreds of miles from even brack- 
ish water. One of these animals was killed on the ice in that lake 
in February, 1810, another in February, 1846,{ and remains 
of the seal have been found at other times in the same waters. 

The intentional naturalization of foreign fish, as I have said, 
has not thus far yielded important fruits; but though this par- 


* Seven or eight years ago, the Italian government imported from France 
a dredging machine for use in the harbor of La Spezia. The dredge brought 
attached to its hull a shell-fish not known in Italian waters. The mollusk, 
finding the local circumstances favorable, established itself in this new habitat, 
multiplied rapidly, and is now found almost everywhere on the west coast of 
the Peninsula, 

+ BABINET, Ltudes et Lectures, ii., pp. 108, 110. 

{ TuHomrson, Natural History of Vermont, p. 38, and Appendix, p. 13. 
There is no reason to believe that the seal breeds in Lake Champlain, but the 
individual last taken there must have been some weeks, at least, in its waters. 
Tt was killed on the ice in the widest part of the lake, on the 23d of February, 
thirteen days after the surface was entirely frozen, except the usual small 
cracks, and a month or two after the ice closed at all points north of the place 
where the seal was found. 


100 INTRODUCTION AND BREEDING OF FISH. 


ticular branch of what is called, not very happily, pisctewlture, 
has not yet established its claims to the attention of the physi- 
cal geographer or the political economist, the artificial breed- 
ing of domestic fish, of the lobster and other crustacea, has 
already produced very valuable results, and is apparently des- 
tined to occupy an extremely conspicuous place in the history 
of man’s efforts to compensate his prodigal waste of the gifts of 
nature. The arrangements for breeding fish in the Venetian 
lagoon of Comacchio date far back in the Middle Ages, but the 
example does not seem to have been followed elsewhere in 
Europe at that period, except in small ponds where the pro- 
pagation of the fish was left to nature without much artificial 
aid. The transplantation of oysters to artificial ponds has 
long been common, and it appears to have recently succeeded 
well on a large scale in the open sea on the French coast. A 
great extension of this fishery is hoped for, and it is now pro- 
posed to introduce upon the same coast the American soft 
clam, which is so abundant in the tide-washed beach sands of 
Long Island Sound as to form an important article in the diet 
of the neighboring population. Experimental pisciculture has 
been highly successful in the United States, and will probably 
soon become a regular branch of rural industry, especially as 
Congress, at the session of 1871-2, made liberal provision for 
its promotion. 

The restoration of the primitive abundance of salt and fresh 
water fish, is perhaps the greatest material benefit that, with 
our present physical resources, governments can hope to confer 
upon their subjects. The rivers, lakes, and seacoasts once 
restocked, and protected by law from exhaustion by taking fish 
at improper seasons, by destructive methods, and in extravagant 
quantities, would continue indefinitely to furnish a very large 
supply of most healthful food, which, unlike all domestic 
and agricultural products, would spontaneously renew itself 
and cost nothing but the taking. There are many sterile or 
wornout soils in Europe so situated that they might, at no very 
formidable cost, be converted into permanent lakes, which 


DESTRUCTION OF FISH. 101 


would serve not only as reservoirs to retain the water of winter 
rains and snow, and give it out in the dry season for irrigation, 
but as breeding ponds for fish, and would thus, without further 
cost, yield a larger supply of human food than can at present 
be obtained from them even at a great expenditure of capital 
and labor in agricultural operations.* The additions which 
might be made to the nutriment of the civilized world by a 
judicious administration of the resources of the waters, would 
allow some restriction of the amount of soil at present em- 
ployed for agricultural purposes, and a corresponding extension 
of the area of the forest, and would thus facilitate a return to 
primitive geographical arrangements which it is important par- 
tially to restore. 


Destruction of ish. 


The inhabitants of the waters seem comparatively secure from 
human pursuit or interference by the inaccessibility of their 
retreats, and by our ignorance of their habits—a natural result 
of the difficulty of observing the ways of creatures living in a 
medium in which we cannot exist. Human agency has, never- 
theless, both directly and incidentally, produced great changes 
in the population of the sea, the lakes, and the rivers, and if 
the effects of such revolutions in aquatic life are apparently of 
small importance in general geography, they are still not wholly 
inappreciable. The great dimiuution in the abundance of the 
larger fish employed for food or pursued for products useful 
in the arts is familiar, and when we consider how the vegeta- 
ble and animal life on which they feed must be effected by the 
reduction of their numbers, it is easy to see that their destruc- 
tion may involve considerable modifications in many of the 
material arrangements of nature. The whale + does not appear 
to have been an object of pursuit by the ancients, for any pur- 


* See AckERHOF, Die Nutzung der Sciche und Gewiisser. Quedlinburg, 1869. 

+ I use whale not in a technical sense, but as a generic term for all the 
large inhabitants of the sea popularly grouped under that name. 

The Greek x«jros and the Latin Balena, though sometimes, especially in 


102 DESTRUCTION OF FISH. 


pose, nor do we know when the whale fishery first commenced. 
It was, however, very actively prosecuted in the Middle Ages, 
and the Discayans seem to haye been particularly successful 
in this as indeed in other branches of nautical industry.* Five 
hundred years ago, whales abounded in every sea. They long 
since became so rare in the Mediterranean as not to afford en- 
couragement for the fishery as a regular occupation; and the 
great demand for oil and whalebone for mechanical and manu- 
facturing purposes, in the present century, has stimulated the 
pursuit of the “ hugest of living creatures” to such activity, that 
he has now almost wholly disappeared from many favorite fish- 
ing grounds, and in others is greatly diminished in numbers. 


later classical writers, specifically applied to true cetaceans, were generally 
much more comprehensive in their signification than the modern word whale. 
This appears abundantly from the enumeration of the marine animals em- 
braced by Oppian under the name k77os, in the first book of the Halieutica. 

There is some confusion in Oppian’s account of the fishery of the kjros in 
the fifth book of the Halieutica. Part of it is probably to be understood of 
cetaceans which have grounded, as some species often do; but in general it 
evidently applies to the taking of large fish—sharks, for example, as appears 
by the description of the teeth—with hook and bait. 

* From the narrative of Ohther, introduced by King Alfred into his transla- 
tion of Orosius, it is clear that the Northmen pursued the whale fishery in the 
ninth century, and it appears, both from the poem called The Whale, in the 
Codex Exoniensis, and from the dialogue with the fisherman in the Colloquies 
of Aelfric, that the Anglo-Saxons followed this dangerous chase at a period 
not much later. Iam not aware of any evidence to show that any of the 
Latin nations engaged in this fishery until a century or two afterward, though 
it may not be easy to disprove their earlier participation in it. In medieval 
literature, Latin and Romance, very frequent mention is made of a species of 
vessel called in Latin baleneria, balenerium, balenerius, balaneria, ete.; in 
Catalan, balener ; in French, balenier ; all of which words occur in many 
other forms. The most obvious etymology of these words would suggest the 
meaning, whaler, baleinier ; but some have supposed that the name was de- 
scriptive of the great size of the ships, and others have referred it to a differ- 
ent root. From the fourteenth century, the word occurs oftener, perhaps, 
in old Catalan, than in any other language ; but Capmany does not notice the 
whale fishery as one of the maritime pursuits of the very enterprising Catalan 
people, nor do I find any of the products of the whale mentioned in the old 
Catalan tariffs. The whalebone of the medieval writers, which is described as 
very white, is doubtless the ivory of the walrus or of the narwhale. 


DESTRUCTION OF FISH. 103 


What special functions, besides his uses to man, are assigned 
to the whale in the economy of nature, we do not know; but 
some considerations, suggested by the character of the food upon 
which certain species subsist, deserve to be specially noticed. 
None of the great mammals grouped under the general name of 
whale are rapacious. They all live upon small organisms, and 
the most numerous species feed almost wholly upon the soft 
gelatinous mollusks in which the sea abounds in all latitudes. 
We cannot calculate even approximately the number of the 
whales, or the quantity of organic nutriment consumed by an 
individual, and of course we can form no estimate of the total 
amount of animal matter withdrawn by them, in a given period, 
from the waters of the sea. It is certain, however, that it must 
have been enormous when they were more abundant, and that 
it is still very considerable. In 1846 the United States had six 
hundred and seventy-eight whaling ships chiefly employed in 
the Pacific, and the product of the American whale fishery for 
the year ending June Ist, 1860, was seven millions and a half 
of dollars.* The mere bulk of the whales destroyed in a single 


* In consequence of the great scarcity of the whale, the use of coal-gas for 
illumination, the substitution of other fatty and oleaginous substances, such 
as lard, palm-oil, and petroleum for right-whaile oil and spermaceti, the whale 
fishery has rapidly fallen off within a few years. The great supply of petroleum, 
which is much used for lubricating machinery as well as for numerous other 
purposes, has produced a more perceptible effect on the whale fishery than 
any other single circumstance. According to Bigelow, Les Liats- Unis en 1863, 
p. 346, the American whaling fleet was diminished by 29 in 1858, 57 in 1860, 
94 in 1861, and 65 in 1862. The number of American ships employed in that 
fishery in 1862 was 353. In 1868, the American whaling fleet was reduced to 
223. The product of the whale fishery in that year was 1,485,000 gallons of 
sperm oil, 2,065,612 gallons of train oil, and 901,000 pounds of whalebone. The 
yield of the two species of whale is about the same, being estimated at from 
4,000 to 5,000 gallons for each fish. Taking the average at 4,500 gallons, the 
American whalers must have captured 789 whales, besides, doubtless, many 
which were killed or mortally wounded and not secured. The returns for the 
year are valued at about five million and a half dollars. Mr. Cutts, from a 
report by whom most of the above facts are taken, estimates the annual value 
of the ‘‘ products of the sea” at $90,000,000. 

According to the New Bedford Standard, the American whalers nnmbered 


104 DESTRUCTION OF FISH. 


year by the American and the European vessels engaged in 
this fishery would form an island of no inconsiderable dimen- 
sions, and each one of those taken must have consumed, in the 
course of his growth, many times his own weight of mollusks. 
The destruction of the whales must have been followed by a 
proportional increase of the organisms they feed upon, and if we 
had the means of comparing the statistics of these humble forms 
of life, for even so short a period as that between the years 
1760 and 1860, we should find a difference possibly sufficient 
to suggest an explanation of some phenomena at present unac- 
counted for. 

For instance, as I have observed in another work,* the phos- 
phorescence of the sea was unknown to ancient writers, or at 
least scarcely noticed by them, and even Homer—who, blind 
as tradition makes him when he composed his epics, had seen, 
and marked, in earlier life, all that the glorious nature of the 
Mediterranean and its coasts discloses to unscientific observa- 
tion—nowhere alludes to this most beautiful and striking of 
maritime wonders. In the passage just referred to, I have 
endeavored to explain the silence of ancient writers with re- 
spect to this as well as other remarkable phenomena on psycho- 
logical grounds; but is it not possible that, in modern times, 
the animalculze which produce it may have immensely multi- 
plied, from the destruction of their natural enemies by man, 
and hence that the gleam shot forth by their decomposition, or 
by their living processes, is both more frequent and more bril- 
liant than in the days of classic antiquity ? 


722, measuring 230,218 tons, in 1846. On the 31st December, 1872, the num- 
ber was reduced to 204, with a tonnage of 47,787 tons, and the importation 
of whale and sperm oil amounted in that year to 79,000 barrels. 

Svend Foyn, an energetic Norwegian, now carries on the whale fishery in 
the Arctic Ocean in a steamer of 20 horse-power, accompanied by freight- 
ships for the oil. The whales are killed by explosive shells fired from a small 
cannon, The number usually killed by Foéyn is from 35 to 45 per year. —The 
Commerce in the Products of the Sea, a report by Col. R. D. Cutts, communi- 
cated to the U. 8. Senate. Washington, 1872. 

* The Origin and History of the English Language, &c., pp. 423, 424. 


DESTRUCTION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. 105 


Although the whale does not prey upon smaller creatures 
resembling himself in form and habits, yet true fishes are 
extremely voracious, and almost every tribe devours unspar- 
ingly the feebler species, and even the spawn and young of its 
own.* The enormous destruction of the shark,t the pike, the 
trout family, and other ravenous fish, as well as of the fishing 
birds, the seal, and the otter, by man, would naturally have 
occasioned a great increase in the weaker and more defenceless 
fish on which they feed, had he not been as hostile to them also 
as to their persecutors. 


Destruction of Aquatic Animals. 


It does not seem probable that man, with all his rapacity 
and all his enginery, will succeed in totally extirpating any 
salt-water fish, but he has already exterminated at least one 
marine warm-blooded animal—Steller’s sea cow—and the 
walrus, the sea lion, and other large amphibia, as well as the 
principal fishing quadrupeds, are in imminent danger of ex- 
tinction. Steller’s sea cow, /?hytina Stelleri, was first seen by 
Europeans in the year 1741, on Bering’s Island. It was a 
huge amphibious mammal, weighing not less than eight thou- 
sand pounds, and appears to have been confined exclusively to 
the islands and coasts in the neighborhood of Bering’s Strait. 
Its flesh was very palatable, and the localities it frequented 
were easily accessible from the Russian establishments in 
Kamtschatka. As soon as its existence and character, and the 


* Two young pickerel, Gystes fasciatus, five inches long, ate 128 minnows, 
an inch long, the first day they were fed, 152 the second, and 150 the third. 
—Fifth Report of Commissioners of Massachusetts for Introduction of Fish. 
TST abry 

+ The shark is pursued in all the tropical and subtropical seas for its fins— 
for which there is a great demand in China as an article of diet—its oil and 
other products. About 40,000 are taken annually in the Indian Ocean and the 
contiguous seas. In the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean large numbers are 
annually caught. See MerK, Waarenlexikon—a work of great accuracy and 
value (Leipzig, 1870), article Huifisch. 


106 DESTRUCTION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. 


abundance of fur animals in the same waters, were made 
known to the occupants of those posts by the return of the 
survivors of Bering’s expedition, so active a chase was com- 
menced against the amphibia of that region, that, in the course 
of twenty-seven years, the sea cow, described by Steller as 
extremely numerous in 1741, is believed to have been com- 
pletely extirpated, not a single individual having been seen 
since the year 1768. The various tribes of seals* in the 
Northern and Southern Pacific, the walrus + and the sea otter, 
are already so reduced in numbers that they seem destined soon 
to follow the sea cow, unless protected by legislation stringent 
enough, and a police energetic enough, to repress the ardent 
cupidity of their pursuers. 

The seals, the otter tribe, and many other amphibia which 
feed almost exclusively upon fish, are extremely voracious, and 
of course their destruction or numerical reduction must have 
favored the multiplication of the species of fish principally 
preyed upon by them. I have been assured by the keeper of 
several young seals that, if supplied at frequent intervals, each 
seal would devour not less than fourteen pounds of fish, or 
about a quarter of his own weight, in a day. A very intelli- 
gent and observing hunter, who has passed a great part of his 
life in the forest, after carefully watching the habits of the 
fresh-water otter of the North American States, estimates their 
consumption of fish at about four pounds per day. 

Man has promoted the multiplication of fish by making war 

* The most valuable variety of fur seal, formerly abundant in all cold lati- 
tudes, is stated to have been completely exterminated in the Southern hemi- 
sphere, and to be now found only on one or two small islands of the Aleutian 
group. In 1867 more than 700,000 seal skins were imported into Great 
Britain, and at least 600,000 seals are estimated to have been taken in 1870. 
These numbers do not include the seals killed by the Esquimaux and other 
rude tribes. 

+ In 1868, a few American ships engaged in the North Pacifie whale fishery 
turned their attention to the walrus, and took from 200 to 600each. In 1869 
other whalers engaged in the same pursuit, and in 1870 the American fleet 


is believed to have destroyed not less than fifty thousand of these animals. 
They yield about twenty gallons of oil and four or five pounds of ivory each. 


DESTRUCTION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. 107 


on their brute enemies, but he has by no means thereby com- 
pensated his own greater destructiveness.* The bird and beast 
of prey, whether on land or in the water, hunt only as long as 
they feel the stimulus of hunger, their ravages are limited by 
the demands of present appetite, and they do not wastefully 
destroy what they cannot consume. Man, on the contrary, 
angles to-day that he may dine to-morrow ; he takes and dries 
millions of fish on the banks of Newfoundland and the coast of 
Norway, that the fervent Catholic of the shores of the Mediter- 
ranean may have wherewithal to satisfy the cravings of the 
stomach during next year’s Lent, without violating the disci- 
pline of the papal church ;}+ and all the arrangements of his 
fisheries are so organized as to involve the destruction of many 


* According to Hartwig, the United Provinces of Holland had, in 1618, 
three thousand herring busses, and nine thousand vessels engaged in the trans- 
port of these fish to market. The whole number of persons employed in the 
Dutch herring fishery was computed at 200,000. 

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this fishery was most success- 
fully prosecuted by the Swedes, and in 1781, the town of Gottenburg alone 
exported 136,649 barrels, each containing 1,200 herrings, making a total of 
about 164,000,000 ; but so rapid was the exhaustion of the fish, from this keen 
pursuit, that in 1799 it was found necessary to prohibit the exportation of 
them altogether—Das Leben des Meeres, p. 182. 

In 1855, the British fisheries produced 900,000 barrels, or almost enough to 
supply a fish to every human inhabitant of the globe. 

On the shores of Long Island Sound, the white fish, a species of herring too 
bony to be easily eaten, is used as manure in very great quantities. Ten 
thousand are employed as a dressing for an acre, and a single net has some- 
times taken 200,000 in a day.—Dwicut’s T7avels, ii., pp. 512, 515. 

The London Times of May 11, 1872, informs us that 1,100 tons of mackerel 
estimated to weigh one pound each had recently been taken in a single night 
at a fishing station on the British coast. 

About ten million eels are sold annually in Billingsgate market, but vastly 
greater numbers of the young fry, when but three or four inches long, are 
taken. So abundant are they at the mouths of many French and [nglish 
rivers, that they are carried into the country by cart-loads, and not only 
eaten, but given to swine or used as manure. 

+ The fisheries of Sicily alone are said to yield 20,000 tons of tunny a year, 
The tunny is principally consumed in Italy during Lent, and a large propor- 
tion of the twenty millions of codfish taken annually at the Lofoden fishery 
on the coast of Norway is exported to the Mediterranean, 


Sa 


108 DESTRUCTION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS, 


more fish than are secured for human use, and the loss of a 
large proportion of the annual harvest of the sea in the process 
of curing, or in transportation to the places of its consumption.* 

Fish are more affected than quadrupeds by slight and even 
imperceptible differences in their breeding places and feeding 
grounds. Every river, every brook, every lake stamps a special 
character upon its salmon, its shad, and its trout, which is at 
once recognized by those who deal in or consume them. No 
skill can give the fish fattened by food selected and prepared 
by man the flavor of those which are nourished at the table of 
nature, and the trout of the artificial ponds in Germany and 
Switzerland are so inferior to the brook-fish of the same species 
and climate, that it is hard to believe them identical. The 
superior sapidity of the American trout and other fresh-water 
fishes to the most nearly corresponding European species, which 
is familiar to every one acquainted with both continents, is 
probably due less to specific difference than to the fact that, 
even in the parts of the New World which have been longest 
cultivated, wild nature is not yet tamed down to the character 
it has assumed in the Old, and which it will acquire in America 
also when her civilization shall be as ancient as is now that of 
Europe. 

* According to Berthelot, in the Gulf of Lyons, between Marseilles and the 
easternmost spur of the Pyrenees, about 5,000,000 small fish are taken: an- 
nually with the drag-net, and not less than twice as many more, not to speak 
of spawn, are destroyed by the use of this net. 

Between 1861 and 1865 France imported from Norway, for use as bait in 
the sardine fishery, cod-roes to the value of three million francs,—CuTtTs, 
Report on Commerce in the Products of the Sca, 1872, p. 82. 

The most reckless waste of aquatic life I remember to have seen noticed, if 
we except the destruction of herring and other fish with spawn, is that of the 
eggs of the turtle in the Amazon for the sake of the oil extracted from them. 
Bates estimates the eggs thus annually sacrificed at 48,000,000.— Naturalist on 
the Amazon, 2d edition, 1864, p. 365. 

+ It is possible that time may modify the habits of the fresh-water fish of 
the North American States, and accommodate them to the new physical con- 
ditions of their native waters. Hence it may be hoped that nature, even un- 


aided by art, will do something towards restoring the ancient plenty of our 
lakes and rivers. The decrease of our fresh-water fish cannot be ascribed 


DESTRUCTION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. 109 


Man has hitherto hardly anywhere produced such climatic 
or other changes as would suffice of themselves totally to banish 
the wild inhabitants of the dry land, and the disappearance of 
the native birds and quadrupeds from particular localities is to 
be ascribed quite as much to his direct persecutions as to the 
want of forest shelter, of appropriate food, or of other condi- 
tions indispensable to their existence. But almost all the pro 
cesses of agriculture, and of mechanical and chemical industry, 
are fatally destructive to aquatic animals within reach of their 
influence. When, in consequence of clearing the woods, the 
changes already described as thereby produced in the beds and 
currents of rivers, are in progress, the spawning grounds of fish 
are exposed from year to year to a succession of mechanical dis- 
turbances; the temperature of the water is higher in summer, 
colder in winter, than when it was shaded and protected by 
wood ; the smaller organisms, which formed the sustenance of 
the young fry, disappear or are reduced in numbers, and new 
enemies are added to the old foes that preyed upon them; the 
increased turbidness of the water in the annual inundations 
chokes the fish; and, finally, the quickened velocity of its 
current sweeps them down into the larger rivers or into the 
sea, before they are yet strong enough to support so great a 
change of circumstances.* Industrial operations are not less 


alone to exhaustion by fishing, for in the waters of the valleys and flanks of 
the Alps, which have been inhabited and fished ten times as long by a denser 
population, fish are still very abundant, and they thrive and multiply under 
circumstances where no American species could live at all. On the southern 
slope of those mountains, trout are caught in great numbers, in the swift 
streams which rush from the glaciers, and where the water is of icy coldness, 
and so turbid with particles of fine-ground rock, that you cannot see an inch 
below the surface. The glacier streams of Switzerland, however, are less 
abundant in fish. 

* A fact mentioned by Schubert—and which in its causes and many of its 
results corresponds almost precisely with those connected with the escape of 
Barton Pond in Vermont, so well known to geological students—is important, 
as showing that the diminution of the fish in rivers exposed to inundations is 
chiefly to be ascribed to the mechanical action of the current, and not mainly, 
as some haye supposed, to changes of temperature occasioned by clearing. 


110 DESTRUCTION OF AQUATIC ANIMALS. 


destructive to fish which live or spawn in fresh water. Mill- 
dams impede their migrations, if they do not absolutely prevent 
them, the sawdust from lumber mills clogs their gills, and the 
thousand deleterious mineral substances, discharged into rivers 
from metallurgical, chemical, and manufacturing establish- 
ments, poison them by shoals.* 

We have little evidence that any fish employed as human 
food has naturally multiplied in modern times, while all the 
more valuable tribes have been immensely reduced in numbers. 
This reduction must have affected the more voracious species 
not used as food by man, and accordingly the shark, and other 
fish of similar habits, even when not objects of systematic 
pursuit, are now comparatively rare in many waters where 
they formerly abounded. The result is, that man has greatly 
reduced the numbers of all larger marine animals, and conse- 
quently indirectly favored the multiplication of the smaller 
aquatic organisms which entered into their nutriment. This 
change in the relations of the organic and inorganic matter of 
the sea must have exercised an influence on the latter. What 
that influence has been we cannot say, still less can we predict 
‘what it will be hereafter; but its action is not for that reason 
the less certain. 


Our author states that, in 1796, a terrible inundation was produced in the 
Indalself, which rises in the Storsj6 in Jemtland, by drawing off into it the 
waters of another lake near Ragunda. The flood destroyed houses and fields; 
much earth was swept into the channel, and the water made turbid and 
muddy; the salmon and the smaller fish forsook the river altogether, and 
never returned. The banks of the river have never regained their former 
solidity, and portions of their soil are still continually falling into the water and 
destroying its purity.—Resa genom Sverge, ii., p. 51. 

* The mineral water discharged from a colliery on the river Doon in Scot- 
land discolored the stones in the bed of the river, and killed the fish for 
twenty miles below. 

The fish of the streams in which hemp is macerated in Italy are often poi- 
soned by the juices thus extracted from the plant.—DoRroTEA, Sommario 
della storia del? Alieutiea, pp. 64, 65. 

+ Among the unexpected results of human action, the destruction or multi- 
plication of fish, as well as of other animals, is a not unfrequent occurrence. 


GEOGRAPHICAL IMPORTANCE OF BIRDS. wl Bal 


Geographical Importance of Birds. 


Wild birds form of themselves a very conspicuous and inter- 
esting feature in the staffage, as painters call it, of the natural 
landscape, and they are important elements in the view we are 
taking of geography, whether we consider their immediate or 
their incidental influence. Birds affect vegetation directly by 
sowing seeds and by consuming them; they affect it indirectly 
by destroying insects injurious, or, in some cases, beneficial to 
vegetable life. Hence, when we kill a seed-sowing bird, we 
check the dissemination of a plant ; when we kill a bird which 
digests the seed it swallows, we promote the increase of a vege- 
table. Nature protects the seeds of wild, much more effectually 
than those of domesticated plants. The cereal grains are com- 
pletely digested when consumed by birds, but the germ of the 
smaller stone fruits and of very many other wild vegetables is 
uninjured, perhaps even stimulated to more vigorous growth, 
by the natural chemistry of the bird’s stomach. The power of 
flight and the restless habits of the bird enable it to transport 
heavy seeds to far greater distances than they could be carried 
by the wind. A swift-winged bird may drop cherry stones a 
thousand miles from the tree they grow on; a hawk, in tearing 


Williams, in his History of Vermont, i., p. 149, records such a case of the in- 
crease of trout. In a pond formed by damming asmail stream to obtain 
water power for a sawmill, and covering one thousand acres of primitive 
forest, the increased supply of food brought within reach of the fish multi- 
plied them to that degree, that, at the head of the pond, where, in the spring, 
they crowded together in the brook which supplied it, they were taken by the 
hands at pleasure, and swine caught them without difficulty. A single sweep 
of a small scoopnet would bring up half a bushel, carts were filled with them 
as fast as if picked up on dry land, and in the fishing season they were com- 
monly sold at a shilling (eightpence halfpenny, or about seventeen cents) 
a bushel. The increase in the size of the trout was as remarkable as the 
multiplication of their numbers. 

The construction of dams and mills is destructive to many fish, but operates 
as a protection to their prey. The mills on Connecticut River greatly dimin- 
ished the number of the salmon, but the striped bass, on which the salmon 
feeds, multiplied in proportion.—Dr. Dwient, Zravels, vol. ii., p. 325. 


112 GEOGRAPHICAL IMPORTANCE OF BIRDS. 


a pigeon, may scatter from its crop the still fresh rice it had 
swallowed at a distance of ten degrees of latitude, and thus the 
occurrence of isolated plants in situations where their presence 
cannot otherwise well be explained, is easily accounted for.* 
There is a large class of seeds apparently specially fitted by 
nature for dissemination by animals. I refer to those which 
attach themselves, by means of hooks, or by viscous juices, to 
the coats of quadrupeds and the feathers of birds, and are thus 
transported wherever their living vehicles may chance to wan- 
der. Some birds, too, deliberately bury seeds in the earth, or in 
holes excavated by them in the bark of trees, not indeed with 
a foresight aiming directly at the propagation of the plant, but 
from apparently purposeless secretiveness, or as a mode of pre- 
serving food for future use. 

The tame fowls play a much less conspicuous part in rural 
life than the quadrupeds, and, in their relations to the economy 
of nature, they are of very much less moment than four-footed 
animals, or than the undomesticated birds. The domestic tur- 
key + is probably more numerous in the territory of the United 
States than the wild bird of the same species ever was, and the 
grouse cannot, at the period of their greatest abundance, have 
counted as many as we now number of the common hen. The 
dove, however, must fall greatly short of the wild pigeon in 
multitude, and it is hardly probable that the flocks of domestic 
geese and ducks are as numerous as once were those of their 


* Pigeons were shot near Albany, in New York, a few years ago, with green 
rice in their crops, which it was thought must have been growing, a very few 
hours before, at the distance of seven or eight hundred miles. The efforts of 
the Dutch to confine the cultivation of the nutmeg to the island of Banda are 
said to have been defeated by the birds, which transported this heavy fruit to 
other islands. 

+ The wild turkey takes readily to the water, and is able to cross rivers of 
very considerable width by swimming. By way of giving me an idea of the 
former abundance of this bird, an old and highly respectable gentleman who 
was among the early white settlers of the West, told me that he once counted, 
in walking down the northern bank of the Ohio River, within a distance of 
four miles, eighty-four turkeys as they landed singly, or at most in pairs, after 
swimming over from the Kentucky side 


INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. as 


wild congeners. The pigeon, indeed, seems to have multiplied 
immensely, for some years after the first clearings in the woods, 
because the settlers warred unsparingly upon the hawk, while 
the crops of grain and other vegetable growths increased the 
supply of food within the reach of the young birds, at the age 
when their power of flight is not yet great enough to enable 
them to seek it over a wide area.* The pigeon is not described 
by the earliest white inhabitants of the American States as 
filling the air with such clouds of winged life as astonished 
naturalists in the descriptions of Audubon, and, at the present 
day, the net and the gun have so reduced its abundanee, that its 
appearance in large numbers is recorded only at long intervals, 
and it is never seen in the great flocks remembered by many 
still living observers as formerly very common. 


Introduction of Birds. 


Man has undesignedly introduced into new districts perhaps 
fewer species of birds than of quadrupeds;+ but the distribu- 
tion of birds is very much influenced by the character of his 


* The wood-pigeon, as well as the domestic dove, has been observed to in- 
crease in numbers in Europe also, when pains have been taken to exterminate 
the hawk. The American pigeons, which migrated in flocks so numerous that 
they were whole days in passing a given point, were no doubt injurious to the 
grain, but probably less so than is generally supposed ; for they did not confine 
themselves exclusively to the harvests for their nourishment. 

+ The first mention Ihave found of the naturalization of a wild bird in mod- 
ern Europe is in the Menagiana, vol. iii., p. 174, edition of 1715, where it is 
stated that René, King of Sicily and Duke of Anjou, who died in 1480, intro- 
duced the red-legged partridge into the latter country. Attempts have been 
made, and I believe with success, to naturalize the European lark on Long 
Island, and the English sparrow has been introduced into various parts of the 
Northern States, where he is useful by destroying noxious insects and worms 
not preyed upon by native birds. 

The humming-bird has resisted all efforts to acclimate him in Europe, though 
they have not unfrequently survived the passage across the ocean. 

In Switzerland and some other parts of Europe the multiplication of insec- 
tivorous birds is encouraged by building nests for them, and it is alleged that 
both fruit and forest trees have been essentially benefited by the protection 
thus afforded on 


114 INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 


industry, and the transplantation of every object of agricultural 
production is, at a longer or shorter interval, followed by that 
of the birds which feed upon its seeds, or more frequently 
upon the insects it harbors. The vulture, the crow, and other 
winged scavengers, follow the march of armies as regularly as 
the wolf. Birds accompany ships on long voyages, for the sake 
of the offal which is thrown overboard, and, in such cases, it 
might often happen that they would breed and become natu- 
ralized in countries where they had been unknown before.* 
There is a familiar story of an English bird which built its nest 
in an unused block in the rigging of a ship, and made one or 
two short voyages with the vessel while hatching itseggs. Had 
the young become fledged while lying in a foreign harbor, they 
would of course have claimed the rights of citizenship in the 
country where they first took to the wing. +t 


* Gulls hover about ships in port, and often far out at sea, diligently watch- 
ing for the waste of the caboose. While the four great fleets, English, French, 
Turkish, and Egyptian, were lying in the Bosphorus, in the summer and autumn 
of 1855, a young lady of my family called my attention to the fact that the gulls 
were far more numerous about the ships of one of the fleets than about the 
others. This was verified by repeated observation, and the difference was 
owing no doubt to the greater abundance of the refuse from the cookrooms 
of the naval squadron most frequented by the birds. Persons acquainted with 
the economy of the navies of the states in question, will be able to conjecture 
which fleet was most favored with these delicate attentions. The American 
gull follows the steamers up the Mississippi, and has been shot 1,500 miles 
from the sea. 

+ Birds do not often voluntarily take passage on board ships bound for 
foreign countries, but I can testify to one such case. A stork, which had 
nested near one of the palaces on the Bosphorus, had, by some accident, injured 
a wing, and was unable to join his fellows when they commenced their winter 
migration to the banks of the Nile. Before he was able to fly again, he was 
caught, and the flag of the nation to which the palace belonged was tied to his 
leg, so that he was easily identified at a considerable distance. As his wing 
grew stronger, he made several unsatisfactory experiments at flight, and at 
last, by a vigorous effort, succeeded in reaching a passing ship bound south- 
ward, and perched himself ona topsail-yard. I happened to witness this move- 
ment, and observed him quietly maintaining his position as long as I could 
discern him with a spy-glass. I supposed he finished the voyage, for he cer- 
tainly did not return to the palace. 


INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 115 


An unfortunate popular error greatly magnifies the injury 
done to the crops of grain and leguminous vegetables by wild 
birds. Very many of those generally supposed to consume 
large quantities of the seeds of cultivated plants really feed 
almost exclusively upon insects, and frequent the wheatfields, 
not for the sake of the grain, but for the eggs, larvae, and fly 
of the multiplied tribes of insect life which are so destructive 
to the harvests. This fact has been so well established by the. 
examination of the stomachs of great numbers of birds in 
Europe and the United States, at different seasons of the year, 
that it is no longer open to doubt, and it appears highly prob- 
able that even the species which consume more or less grain 
generally make amends by destroying insects whose ravages 
would have been still more injurious.* On this subject, we 


* Even the common crow has found apologists, and it has been asserted that 
he pays for the Indian corn he consumes by destroying the worms and larvee 
which infest that plant. 

Professor Treadwell, of Massachusetts, found that a half-grown American 
robin in confinement ate in one day sixty-eight worms, weighing together 
nearly once anda half as much as the bird himself, and another had pre- 
viously starved upon a daily allowance of eight or ten worms, or about twenty 
per cent. of his own weight. The largest of these numbers appeared, so far as 
could be judged by watching parent birds of the same species, as they brought 
food to their young, to be much greater than that supplied to them when fed 
in the nest ; for the old birds did not return with worms or insects oftener than 
once in ten minutes on an average. If we suppose the parents to hunt for 
food twelve hours in a day, and a nest to contain four young, we should have 
seventy-two worms, or eighteen each, as the daily supply of the brood. It is 
probable enough that some of the food collected by the parents may be more 
nutritious than the earthworms, and consequently that a smaller quantity suf- 
ficed for the young in the nest than when reared under artificial conditions. 

The supply required by growing birds is not the measure of their wants 
after they have arrived at maturity, and it is not by any means certain that 
great muscular exertion always increases the demand for nourishment, either 
in the lower animals or inman. The members of the English Alpine Club 
are not distinguished for appetites which would make them unwelcome guests 
to Swiss landlords, and I think every man who has had the personal charge 
of field or railway hands, must have observed that laborers who spare their 
strength the least are not the most valiant trencher champions. During 
the period when imprisonment for debt was permitted in New England, per- 
sons confined in country jails had no specific allowance, and they were com- 


116 INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 


have much other evidence besides that derived from dissection. 
Direct observation has shown, in many instances, that the 
destruction of wild birds has been followed by a great multi- 
plication of noxious insects, and, on the other hand, that these 
latter have been much reduced in numbers by the protection 
and increase of the birds that devour them. Many interesting 
facts of this nature have been collected by professed natural- 
ists, but I shall content myself with a few taken from familiar 
and generally accessible sources. The following extract is 
from Michelet, LZ’ Otseau, pp. 169, 170: 

“The stingy farmer—an epithet justly and feelingly be- 
stowed by Virgil. Avaricious, blind, indeed, who proscribes 
the birds—those destroyers of insects, those defenders of his 
harvests. Nota grain for the creature which, during the rains 
of winter, hunts the future insect, finds out the nests of the 
larvee, examines, turns over every leaf, and destroys, every 
day, thousands of incipient caterpillars. Dut sacks of corn for 
the mature insect, whole fields for the grasshoppers, which the 
bird would have made war upon. With eyes fixed upon his 
furrow, upon the present moment only, without seeing and 
without foreseeing, blind to the great harmony which is never 
broken with impunity, he has everywhere demanded or ap- 
proved laws for the extermination of that necessary ally of his 
toil—the insectivorous bird. And the insect has well avenged 
the bird. It has become necessary to revoke in haste the pro- 
scription. In the Isle of Bourbon, for instance, a price was set 
on the head of the martin; it disappeared, and the grasshop- 
pers took possession of the island, devouring, withering, scorch- 
ing with a biting drought all. that they did not consume. In 
North America it has been the same with the starling, the 
protector of Indian corn.* Even the sparrow, which really 


monly fed without stint. Ihave often inquired concerning their diet, and 
been assured by the jailers that their prisoners, who were not provided with 
work or other means of exercise, consumed a considerably larger supply of 
food than common out-door laborers. 

*T hope Michelet has good authority for this statement, but I am unable to 
confirm it. 


INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 17 


does attack grain, but which protects it still more, the pilferer, 
the outlaw, loaded with abuse and smitten with curses—it has 
been found in Hungary that they were likely to perish without 
him, that he alone could sustain the mighty war against the 
beetles and the thousand winged enemies that swarm in the 
lowlands ; they have revoked the decree of banishment, re- 
called in haste this valiant militia, which, though deficient in 
discipline, is nevertheless the salvation of the country.* 

“Not long since, in the neighborhood of Rouen and in the 
valley of Monville, the blackbird was for some time proscribed. 
The beetles profited well by this proscription ; their larva, in- 
finitely multiplied, carried on their subterranean labors with 
such success, that a meadow was shown me, the surface of 
which was completely dried up, every herbaceous root was con- 
sumed, and the whole grassy mantle, easily loosened, might 
have been rolled up and carried away like a carpet.” 

The general hostility of the European populace to the smaller 
birds is, in part, the remote effect of the reaction created by 
the game laws. When the restrictions imposed upon the chase 
by those laws were suddenly removed in France, the whole 
people at once commenced a destructive campaign against every 
species of wild animal. Arthur Young, writing in Provence, 
on the 380th of August, 1759, soon after the National Assembly 
had declared the chase free, thus complains of the annoyance 
he experienced from the use made by the peasantry of their 
newly-won liberty. “One would think that every rusty fire- 
lock in all Provence was at work in the indiscriminate destruc- 
tion of all the birds. The wadding buzzed by my ears, or fell 


* Apropos of the sparrow—a single pair of which, according to Michelet, 
p- 315, carries to the nest four thousand and three hundred caterpillars or 
coleoptera in a week—I find in an English newspaper a report of a meeting of 
a ‘* Sparrow Club,” stating that the member who took the first prize had de- 
stroyed 1,467 of these birds within the year, and that the prowess of the 
other members had brought the total number up to 11,944 birds, besides 2,556 
eggs. Every one of the fourteen thousand hatched and unhatched birds, 
thus sacrificed to puerile vanity and ignorant prejudice, would have saved his 
bushel of wheat by preying upon insects that destroy the grain. 


118 INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 


into my carriage, five or six times in the course of the day.” 
* * The declaration of the Assembly that every man is 
free to hunt on his own land * * has filled all France with 
an intolerable cloud of sportsmen. * * The declaration 
speaks of compensations and indemnities [to the sedgneurs], 
but the ungovernable populace takes advantage of the abolition 
of the game laws and laughs at the obligation imposed by the 
decree.” 

The contagious influence of the French Revolution occa- 
sioned the removal of similar restrictions, with similar results, 
in other countries. The habits then formed have become here- 
ditary on the Continent, and though game laws still exist in 
England, there is little doubt that the blind prejudices of the 
ignorant and half-educated classes in that country against birds 
are, in some degree, at least, due to a legislation, which, by 
restricting the chase of game worth killing, drives the un- 
privileged sportsman to indemnify himself by slaughtering all 
wild life which is not reserved for the amusement of his betters. 
Hence the lord of the manor buys his partridges and his hares 
by sacrificing the bread of his tenants, and so long as the mem- 
bers of “ Sparrow Clubs” are forbidden to follow higher game, 
they will suicidally revenge themselves by destroying the birds 
which protect their wheatfields. 

On the Continent, and especially in Italy, the comparative 
scarcity and dearness of animal food combine with the feeling 
I have just mentioned to stimulate still further the destructive 
passions of the fowler. In the Tuscan province of Grosseto, 
containing less than 2,000 square miles, nearly 300,000 thrushes 
and other small birds are annually brought to market.* 


* SALVAGNOLI, Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane, p. 143. The country about 
Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen or twenty feet high, which are a 
standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the fowlers who watch 
from them the flocks of small birds and drive them down into the nets by 
throwing stones over them. 

In Northern and Central Italy, one often sees hillocks crowned with grove- 
like plantations of small trees, much resembling large arbors. These serve to 
collect birds, which are entrapped in nets in great numbers. These plan- 


INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 119 


Birds are less hardy in constitution, they possess less facility 
of accommodation,* and they are more severely affected by 


tations are called ragnaje, and the reader will find, in Bindi’s edition of Da- 
vanzati, a very pleasant description of a ragnaja, though its authorship is not 
now ascribed to that eminent writer. 

Tschudi has collected in his little work, Ueber die Landwirthschaftliche Be- 
deutung der Vogel, many interesting facts respecting the utility of birds, and 
the wanton destruction of them in Italy and elsewhere. Not only the owl, 
but many other birds more familiarly known as predacious in their habits, are 
useful by destroying great numbers of mice and moles. The importance of 
this last service becomes strikingly apparent when it is known that the 
burrows of the moles are among the most frequent causes of rupture in the 
dikes of the Po, and, consequently, of inundations which lay many square 
miles of land under water. See Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1847, 
1ere sémestre, p. 150; Voar, Wiitzliche und schddliche Thiere ; and particu- 
larly articles in the Giornale del Club Alpino, vol. iv., no. 15, and vol. v., no. 
16. 

See also in Aus der Natur, vol. 54, p. 797, an article entitled Nutzen der 
Voge fiir die Landwirthschaft, where it is affirmed that ‘‘ without birds no 
agriculture or even vegetation would be possible.” 

In an interesting memoir by Rondani, published in the Bollettino del Comizia 
agrario di Parma for December, 1868, it is maintained that birds are often 
injurious to the agriculturist, by preying not only on noxious insects, but 
sometimes exclusively, or at least by preference, on entomophagous tribes 
which would otherwise destroy those injurious to cultivated plants. See also 
articles by Prof. Sabbioni in the Giornale di Agricoltura di Bologna, Novem- 
ber and December, 1870, and other articles in the same journal of 15th and 
30th April, 1870. 

* Wild birds are very tenacious in their habits. The extension of particular 
branches of agriculture introduces new birds; but unless in the case of such 
changes in physical conditions, particular species seem indissolubly attached 
to particular localities. The migrating tribes follow almost undeviatingly 
the same precise line of flight in their annual journeys, and establish them- 
selves in the same breeding-places from year to year. The stork is astrong- 
winged bird and roves far for food, but very rarely establishes new colonies. 
He is common in Holland, but unknown in England. Not above five or six 
pairs of storks commonly breed in the suburbs of Constantinople along the 
European shore of the narrow Bosphorus, while—much to the satisfaction of 
the Moslems, who are justly proud of the marked partiality of so orthodox a 
bird—dozens of chimneys of the true believers on the Asiatic side are crowned 
with his nests, 

The appearance of the doye-like grouse, Tetrao paradoxus, or Syrrhaptes 
Pallasii, in various parts of Europe, in 1859 and the following years, is a 


120 INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 


climatic excess than quadrupeds. Besides, they generally want 
the special means of shelter against the inclemency of the 
weather and against pursuit by their enemies, which holes and 
dens afford to burrowing animals and to some larger beasts of 
prey. The egg is exposed to many dangers before hatching, 
and the young bird is especially tender, defenceless, and help- 
less. Every cold rain,every violent wind, every hailstorm dur- 
ing the breeding season, destroys hundreds of nestlings, and the 
parent often perishes with her progeny while brooding over it 
in the vain effort to protect it.* The great proportional num- 
bers of birds, their migratory habits, and the ease with which 
by their power of flight they may escape most dangers that 
beset them, would seem to secure them from extirpation, and 
even from very great numerical reduction. But experience 
shows that when not protected by law, by popular favor or 
superstition, or by other special circumstances, they yield 
very readily to the hostile influences of civilization, and, though 
the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase of 
many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical 


noticeable exception to the law of regularity which seems to govern the 
movements and determine the habitat of birds. The proper home of this bird 
is the steppes of Tartary, and it is not recorded to have been observed in 
Europe, or at least west of Russia, until the year above mentioned, when 
many flocks of twenty or thirty, and even a hundred individuals, were seen in 
Bohemia, Germany, Holland, Denmark, England, Ireland, and France. A 
considerable flock frequented the Frisian island of Borkum for more than five 
months. It was hoped they would breed and remain permanently in the 
island, but this expectation has been disappointed, and the steppe-grouse 
seems to have disappeared again altogether. 

* Tt is not the unfledged and the nursing bird alone that are exposed to 
destruction by severe weather. Whole flocks of adult and strong-winged 
tribes are killed by hail. Severe winters are usually followed by a sensible 
diminution in the numbers of the non-migrating birds, and a cold storm in 
summer often proves fatal to the more delicate species. On the 10th of June, 
184-, five or six inches of snow fell in Northern Vermont. The next morning 
I found a humming-bird killed by the cold, and hanging by its claws just be- 
low a loose clapboard on the wall of a small wooden building where it had 
sought shelter. 


INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 19 


industry is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not 
directly warred upon by man.* 

Nature sets bounds to the disproportionate increase of birds, 
while at the same time, by the multitude of their resources, she 
secures them from extinction through her own spontaneous 
agencies. Man both preys upon them and wantonly destroys 


* LYELL, Antiquity of Man, p. 409, observes: ‘‘Of birds it is estimated 
that the number of those which die every year equals the aggregate number 
by which the species to which they respectively belong is, on the average, 
permanently represented.” 

A remarkable instance of the influence of new circumstances upon birds was 
observed upon the establishment of a light-house on Cape Cod some years 
since. The morning after the lamps were lighted for the first time, more 
than a hundred dead birds of several different species, chiefly water-fowl, 
were found at the foot of the tower. They had been killed in the course of 
the night by flying against the thick glass or grating of the lantern. 

From an article by A. Esquiros, in the Revwe des Deux Mondes for Sept. 1, 
1864, entitled, La vie Anglaise, p. 119, it appears that such occurrences as 
that stated in the note have been not unfrequent on the British coast, Are 
the birds thus attracted by new lights, flocks in migration ? 

Migrating birds, whether for greater security from eagles, hawks, and other 
enemies, or for some unknown reason, perform a great part of their annual 
journeys by night; and it is observed in the Alps that they follow the high 
roads in their passage across the mountains, This is partly because the food 
in search of which they must sometimes descend is principally found near the 
roads. It is, however, not altogether for the sake of consorting with man, 
or of profiting by his labors, that their line of flight conforms to the paths he 
has traced, but rather because the great roads are carried through the natural 
depressions in the chain, and hence the birds can cross the summit by these 
routes without rising toa height where at the seasons of migration the cold 
would be excessive. 

The instinct which guides migratory birds in their course is not in all cases 
infallible, and it seems to be confounded by changes in the condition of the 
surface. Iam familiar with a village in New England, at the junction of two 
valleys, each drained by a mill-stream, where the flocks of wild geese which 
formerly passed, every spring and autumn, were very frequently lost, as it 

as popularly phrased, and I have often heard their screams in the night as 
they flew wildly about in perplexity as to the proper course. Perhaps the vil- 
lage lights embarrassed them, or perhaps the constant changes in the face of 
the country, from the clearings then going on, introduced into the landscape 
features not according with the ideal map handed down in the anserine family, 
and thus deranged its traditional geography. 


122 INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 


them. The delicious flavor of game-birds, and the skill im- 
plied in the various arts of the sportsman who devotes himself 
to fowling, make them favorite objects of the chase, while the 
beauty of their plumage, as a military and feminine decora- 
tion, threatens to involve the sacrifice of the last survivor of 
many once numerous species. Thus far, but few birds de- 
scribed by ancient or modern naturalists are known to have 
become absolutely extinct, though there are some cases in which 
they are ascertained to have utterly disappeared from the face 
of the earth in very recent times. The most familiar instances 
are those of the dodo, a large bird peculiar to the Mauritius or 
Isle of France, exterminated about the year 1690, and now 
known only by more or less fragmentary skeletons, and the 
solitary, which inhabited the islands of Bourbon and Rodriguez, 
but has not been seen for more than a century. A parrot and 
some other birds of the Norfolk Island group are said to have 
lately become extinct. The wingless auk, Alcea umpennis, a 
bird remarkable for its excessive fatness, was very abundant 
two or three hundred years ago in the Faroe Islands, and on 
the whole Scandinavian seaboard. The early voyagers found 
either the same or a closely allied species, in immense num- 
bers, on all the coasts and islands of Newfoundland. The 
value of its flesh and its oil made it one of the most important 
resources of the inhabitants of those sterile regions, and it was 
naturally an object of keen pursuit. It is supposed to be 
now completely extinct, and few museums can show even its 
skeleton. 

There seems to be strong reason to believe that modern 
civilization is guiltless of one or two sins of extermination 
which have been committed in recent ages. New Zealand 
formerly possessed several species of dinornis, one of which, 
called moa by the islanders, was larger than the ostrich. The 
condition in which the bones of these birds have been found 
and the traditions of the natives concur to prove that, though 
the aborigines had probably extirpated them before the dis- 
covery of New Zealand by the whites, they still existed ata 


INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 123 


comparatively late period. The same remarks apply to a 
winged giant the eggs of which have been brought from 
Madagascar. This bird must have much exceeded the dimen- 
sions of the moa, at least so far as we can judge from the egg, 
which is eight times as large as the average size of the ostrich 
ego, or about one hundred and fifty times that of the hen. 

But though we have no evidence that man has exterminated 
many species of birds, we know that his persecutions have 
caused their disappearance from many localities where they 
once were common, and greatly diminished their numbers in 
others. The cappereailzie, Tetrao urogallus, the finest of the 
grouse family, formerly abundant in Scotland, had become 
extinct in Great Britain, but has been reintroduced from 
Sweden.* The ostrich is mentioned, by many old travellers, as 
common on the Isthmus of Suez down to the middle of the 
seventeenth century. It appears to have frequented Palestine, 
_ Syria, and even Asia Minor at earlier periods, but is now rarely 

found except in the seclusion of remoter deserts. 


* The cappercailzie, or tjiider, as he is called in Sweden, is a bird of singu- 
lar habits, and seems to want some of the protective instincts which secure 
most other wild birds from destruction. The younger Lestadius frequently 
notices the tjider, in his very remarkable account of the Swedish Laplanders. 
The tjider, though not a bird of passage, is migratory, or rather wandering 
in domicile, and appears to undertake very purposeless and absurd journeys. 
‘* When he flits,” says Lestadius, ‘‘he follows a straight course, and some- 
times pursues it quite out of the country. It is said that, in foggy weather, 
he sometimes flies out to sea, and, when tired, falls into the water and is 
drowned. It is accordingly observed that, when he flies westwardly, towards 
the mountains, he soon comes back again; but when he takes an eastwardly 
course, he returns no more, and for a long time is very scarce in Lapland. 
From this it would seem that he turns back from the bald mountains, when 
he discovers that he has strayed from his proper home, the wood; but when 
he finds himself over the Baltic, where he cannot alight to rest and collect 
himself, he flies on until he is exhausted and falls into the sea.”—PETRUS 
LassTAbius, Journal af férsta aret, ete., p. 325 

+ Frescobaldi saw ostriches between Suez and Mt. Sinai. Viaggio in Terra 
Santa, p. 65. See also VANSLEB, Voyage d’ Egypte, p. 103, and an article in 
PETERMANN, Mitiheilungen, 1870, p. 380, entitled Die Verbreitung des Strausses 
in Asien, 


124 INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 


The modern increased facilities of transportation have 
brought distant markets within reach of the professional hunt- 
er, and thereby given a new impulse to his destructive propen- 
sities. Not only do all Great Britain and Ireland contribute to 
the supply of game for the British capital, but the canvas-back 
duck of the Potomac, and even the prairie hen from the basin 
of the Mississippi, may be found at the stalls of the London 
poulterer. Kohl* informs us that on the coasts of the North 
Sea, twenty thousand wild ducks are usually taken in the 
course of the season in a single decoy, and sent to the large 
maritime towns for sale. The statistics of the great European 
cities show a prodigious consumption of game-birds, but the 
official returns fall far below the truth, because they do not 
include the rural districts, and because neither the poacher nor 
his customers report the number of his victims. Reproduction, 
in cultivated countries, cannot keep pace with this excessive 
destruction, and there is no doubt that all the wild birds which 
are chased for their flesh or their plumage are diminishing 
with a rapidity which justifies the fear that the last of them 
will soon follow the dodo and the wingless auk. 

Fortunately the larger birds which are pursued for their flesh 
or for their feathers, and those the eggs of which are used as 
food, are, so far as we know the functions appointed to them 
by nature, not otherwise specially useful to man, and, there- 
fore, their wholesale destruction is an economical evil only in 
the same sense in which all waste of productive capital is an 
evil.t If it were possible to confine the consumption of game- 
fowl] to a number equal to the annual increase, the world would 
be a gainer, but not to the same extent as it would be by 


* Die Herzogthiimer Schleswig und Holstein, i., p. 203. 

+ The increased demand for animal oils for the use of the leather-dresser 
is now threatening the penguin with the fate of the wingless auk. According 
to the Report of the Agricultural Department of the U. 8. for August and 
September, 1871, p. 340, small vessels are fitted out for the chase of this bird, 
and return from a six weeks’ cruise with 25,000 or 30,000 gallons of oil. 
About eleven birds are required for a gallon, and consequently the vessels 
take upon an average 300,000 penguins each, 


UTILITY AND DESTRUCTION OF REPTILES. 125 


checking the wanton sacrifice of millions of the smaller birds, 
which are of no real value as food, but which, as we have seen, 
render a most important service by battling, in our behalf, as 
well as in their own, against the countless legions of humming 
and of creeping things, with which the prolific powers of insect 
life would otherwise cover the earth. 


Utility and Destruction of Reptiles. 


The disgust and fear with which the serpent is so universally 
regarded expose him to constant persecution by man, and per- 
haps no other animal is so relentlessly sacrificed by him. Never- 
theless, snakes as well as lizards and other reptiles are not wholly 
useless to their great enemy. The most formidable foes of the 
insect, and even of the small rodents, are the reptiles. The 
chameleon approaches the insect perched upon the twig of a 
tree, with an almost imperceptible slowness of motion, until, at 
the distance of a foot, he shoots out his long, slimy tongue, and 
rarely fails to secure the victim. Even the slow toad catches 
the swift and wary housefly in the same manner; and in the 
warm countries of Europe, the numerous lizards contribute very 
essentially to the reduction of the insect population, which they 
both surprise in the winged state upon walls and trees, and con- 
sume as egg, worm, and chrysalis, in their earlier metamor- 
phoses. The serpents feed much upon insects, as well as upon 
mice, moles, and small reptiles, including also other snakes. 

In temperate climates, snakes are consumed by scarcely any 
beast or bird of prey except the stork, and they have few dan- 
gerous enemies but man, though in the tropics other animals 
prey upon them.* It is doubtful whether any species of ser- 


* It is very questionable whether there is any foundation for the popular 
belief in the hostility of swine and of deer to the rattlesnake, and careful 
experiments as to the former quadruped seem to show that the supposed 
enmity is wholly imaginary. It is however affirmed in an article in Nature, 
June 11, 1872, p. 215, that the pigs have exterminated the rattlesnake in some 
parts of Oregon, and that swine are destructive to the cobra de capello in 
India. Observing that the starlings, stornelli, which bred in an old tower in 


126 UTILITY AND DESTRUCTION OF REPTILES. 


pent has been exterminated within the human period, and even 
the dense population of China has not been able completely to 
rid itself of the viper. They have, however, almost entirely 
disappeared from particular localities. The rattlesnake is now 
wholly unknown in many large districts where it was extremely 
common half a century ago, and Palestine has long been, if not 
absolutely free from venomous serpents, at least very nearly so.* 


Piedmont, carried something from their nests and dropped it upon the ground 
about as often as they brought food to their young, I watched their proceed- 
ings, and found every day lying near the tower numbers of dead or dying 
slowworms, and, in a few cases, small lizards, which had, in every instance, 
lost about two inches of the tail. This part I believe the starlings gave to 
their nestlings, and threw away the remainder. 

* Russell denies the existence of poisonous snakes in Northern Syria, and 
states that the last instance of death known to have occurred from the bite of 
a serpent near Aleppo took place a hundred years before histime. In Pales- 
tine, the climate, the thinness of population, the multitude of insects and of 
lizards, all circumstances, in fact, seem very favorable to the multiplication of 
serpents, but the venomous species, at least, are extremely rare, if at all 
known, in that country. Ihave, however, been assured by persons very fami- 
liar with Mount Lebanon, that cases of poisoning from the bite of snakes had 
occurred within a few years, near Hasbeiyeh, and at other places on the 
southern declivities of Lebanon and Hermon. In Egypt, on the other hand, 
the cobra, the asp, and the cerastes are as numerous as ever, and are much 
dreaded by all the natives except the professional snake charmers. 

The recent great multiplication of vipers in some parts of France is a sin- 
gular and startling fact. Tioussenel, quoting from official documents, states, 
that upon the offer of a reward of fifty centimes, or ten cents, a head, twelve 
thousand vipers were brought to the prefect of a single department, and that 
in 1859 fifteen hundred snakes and twenty quarts of snakes’ eggs were found 
under a farm-house hearthstone. The granary, the stables, the roof, the very 
beds swarmed with serpents, and the family were obliged to abandon its habi- 
tation. Dr. Viaugrandmarais, of Nantes, reported to the prefect of his depart- 
ment more than two hundred recent cases of viper bites, twenty-four of which 
proved fatal.—Tvistia, p. 176 et segg. According to the Journal des Débats 
for Oct. 1st, 1867, the Department of the Céte @’Or paid in the year 1866 
eighteen thousand francs for the destruction of vipers. The reward was thirty 
centimes a head, and consequently the number killed was about sixty thousand. 
A friend residing in that department informs me that it was strongly suspected 
that many of these snakes were imported from other departments for the sake 
of the premium. 

In Nature for 1870 and 1871 we are told that the number of deaths from the 


UTILITY AND DESTRUCTION OF REPTILES. 127 


The serpent does not appear to have any natural limit of 
growth, and we are therefore not authorized wholly to discredit 
the evidence of ancient naturalists in regard to the extraordi- 
nary dimensions which these reptiles are said by them to have 
sometimes attained. The use of firearms has enabled man to 
reduce the numbers of the larger serpents, and they do not often 
escape him long enough to arrive at the size ascribed to them by 
travellers a century or two ago. Captain Speke, however, shot 
a serpent in Africa which measured fifty-one and a half feet in 
length. 

Some enthusiastic entomologist will, perhaps, by and by dis- 
cover that insects and worms are as essential as the larger or- 
ganisms to the proper working of the great terraqueous machine, 
and we shall have as eloquent pleas in defence of the mosquito, 
and perhaps even of the tzetze-fly, as Toussenel and Michelet 
have framed in behalf of the bird. The silkworm, the lac in- 
sect, and the bee need no apologist; a gallnut produced by the 
puncture of a cynips on a Syrian oak is a necessary ingredient 
in the ink I am writing with, and from my windows I recog- 
nize the grain of the kermes and the cochineal in the gay habili- 
ments of the holiday groups beneath them. 

These humble forms of being are seldom conspicuous by mere 
mass, and though the winds and the waters sometimes sweep 
together large heaps of locusts and even of may-flies, their re- 
mains are speedily decomposed, their exuviee and their struc- 
tures form no strata, and still less does nature use them, as she 
does the calcareous and silicious cases and dwellings of animal- 
cular species, to build reefs and spread out submarine deposits, 
which subsequent geological action may convert into islands and 
even mountains.* 


bites of venomous serpents in the Bengal Presidency, in the year 1869, was 
11,416, and that in the whole of British India not less than 40,000 human lives 
are annually lost from this cause. In one small department, a reward of from 
three to six pence a head for poisonous serpents brought in 1,200 a day, and 
in two months the government paid £10,000 sterling for their destruction. 

* Although the remains of extant animals are rarely, if ever, gathered in 
sufficient quantities to possess any geographical importance by their mere 


128 UTILITY AND DESTRUCTION OF REPTILES. 


But the action of the creeping and swarming things of the 
earth, though often passed unnoticed, is not without important 
effects in the general economy of nature. The geographical 
importance of insects proper, as well as of worms, depends 
principally on their connection with vegetable life as agents of 
its fecundation, and of its destruction. We learn from Darwin, 
“On Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Or- 
chids are Fertilized by Insects,” that some six thousand species 
of orchids are absolutely dependent upon the agency of insects 
for their fertilization, and that consequently, were those plants 
unvisited by insects, they would all rapidly disappear. What 
is true of the orchids is more or less true of many other vegeta- 
ble families.* We do not know the limits of this agency, and 


mass, the decayed exuvie of even the smaller and humbler forms of life are 
sometimes abundant enough to exercise a perceptible influence on soil and 
atmosphere, ‘‘ The plain of Cumana,” says Humboldt, ‘‘ presents a remark- 
able phenomenon, after heavy rains. The moistened earth, when heated by the 
rays of the sun, diffuses the musky odor common in the torrid zone to animals 
of very different classes, to the jaguar, the small species of tiger-cat, the 
cabiai, the gallinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper, and the rattlesnake. 
The gaseous emanations, the vehicles of this aroma, appear to be disengaged 
in proportion as the soil, which contains the remains of an innumerable mul- 
titude of reptiles, worms, and insects, begins to be impregnated with water. 
Wherever we stir the earth, we are struck with the mass of organic sub- 
stances which in turn are developed and become transformed or decomposed, 
Nature in these climes seems more active, more prolific, and, so to speak, more 
prodigal of life.” 

* Later observations of Darwin and other naturalists have greatly raised 
former estimates of the importance of insect life in the fecundation of plants, 
and among other remarkable discoveries it has been found that, in many 
cases at least, insects are necessary even to moncecious vegetables, because 
the male flower does not impregnate the female growing on the same stem, 
and the latter can be fecundated only by pollen supplied to it by insects from 
another plant of the same species. 

‘* Who would ever have thought,” says Preyer, “that the abundance and 
beauty of the pansy and of the clover were dependent upon the number of 
catsand owls? Butsoitis. The clover and the pansy cannot exist without 
the humble-bee, which, in search of his vegetable nectar, transports uncon- 
sciously the pollen from the masculine to the feminine flower, a service which 
other insects perform only partially for these plants. Their existence there- 
fore depends upon that of the humble-bee. The mice make war upon this 


UTILITY AND DESTRUCTION OF REPTILES. 129 


many of the insects habitually regarded as unqualified pests, 
may directly or indirectly perform functions as important to 
the most valuable plants as the services rendered by certain 
tribes to the orchids. I say directly or indirectly, because, be- 
sides the other arrangements of nature for checking the undue 
multiplication of particular species, she has established a police 
among insects themselves, by which some of them keep down 
or promote the increase of others ; for there are insects, as. well 
as birds and beasts, of prey. The existence of an insect which 
fertilizes a useful vegetable may depend on that of another 
insect which constitutes his food in some stage of his life, and 
this other again may be as injurious to some plant as his de- 
stroyer is to a different species. 

The ancients, according to Pliny, were accustomed to hang 
branches of the wild fig upon the domestic tree, in order that 
the insects which frequented the former might hasten the ripen- 
ing of the cultivated fig by their punctures—or, as others sup- 
pose, might fructify it by transporting to it the pollen of the 
wild fruit—and this process, called caprification, is not yet en- 
tirely obsolete.* 

The perforations of the earthworms and of many insect 
larvee mechanically affect the texture of the soil and its perme- 
ability by water, and they therefore have a certain influence on 
the form and character of terrestrial surface. The earthworms 


bee. In their fondness for honey they destroy the nest and at the same time 
the bee. The principal enemies of mice are cats and owls, and therefore the 
finest clovers and the most beautiful pansies are found near villages where 
cats and owls abound.”—PREYER, Der Kampf um das Dasein, p. 22. See 
also DELPINO, Pensieri sulla bdiclogia vegetale, and other works of the same 
able observer on vegetable physiology. 

* The utility of caprification has been a good deal disputed, and it has, I 
believe, been generally abandoned in Italy, though still practised in Greece.. 
See Browne, The Trees of America, p. 475, and on caprification in Kabylia, 
N. Bivesco, Les Kabyles du Djurdjura, in Revue des Deux Mondes for April 
Ist, 1865, p. 589; also, Aus der Natur, vol. xxx., p. 684, and Putpson, 
Utilization of Minute Life, p. 59. In some parts of Sicily, sprigs of mint, 
mentha pulegium, are used instead of branches of the wild fig for caprification, 
PITRE, Ust ve Siciliant, 1871, p. 18. 


130 UTILITY AND DESTRUCTION OF REPTILES. 


long ago made good their title to the respect and gratitude of 
the farmer as well as of the angler. Their utility has been 
pointed out in many scientific as well as in many agricultural 
treatises. The following extract from an essay on this subject 
will answer my present purpose : 

“ Wornis are great assistants to the drainer, and valuable aids 
to the farmer in keeping up the fertility of the soil. They love 
moist, but not wet soils; they will bore down to, but not into 
water; they multiply rapidly on land after drainage, and prefer 
a deeply-dried soil. On examining part of a field which had 
been deeply drained, after long-previous shallow drainage, it 
was found that the worms had greatly increased in number, 
and that their bores descended quite to the level of the pipes. 
Many worm-bores were large enough to receive the little finger. 
A piece of land near the sea in Lincolnshire, over which the 
sea had broken and killed all the worms, remained sterile until 
the worms again inhabited it. A piece of pasture land, in 
which worms were in such numbers that it was thought their 
casts interfered too much with its produce, was rolled at night 
in order to destroy the worms. The result was, that the fertility 
of the field greatly declined, nor was it restored until they had 
recruited their numbers, which was aided by collecting and 
transporting multitudes of worms from the fields. 

“The great depth into which worms will bore, and from 
which they push up fine fertile soil, and cast it on the surface, 
have been well shown by the fact that in afew years they 
have actually elevated the surface of fields by a large layer of 
rich mould, several inches thick, thus affording nourishment, to 
the roots of grasses, and increasing the productiveness of the 
soil.” 

It should be added that the writer quoted, and all others who 
haye discussed the subject, have, so far as I know, overlooked 
one very important element in the fertilization produced by 
earthworms. I refer to the enrichment of the soil by their 
excreta during life, and by the decomposition of their remains 
when they die. The manure thus furnished is as valuable as 


UTILITY AND DESTRUCTION OF REPTILES. 13 


the like amount of similar animal products derived from 
higher organisms, and when we consider the prodigious num- 
bers of these worms found on a single square yard of some 
soils, we may easily see that they furnish no insignificant con- 
tribution to the nutritive material required for the growth of 
plants.* 

The carnivorous and often herbivorous insects render another 
important service to man by consuming dead and decaying 
animal and vegetable matter, the decomposition of which 
would otherwise fill the air with effluvia noxious to health. 
Some of them, the grave-digger beetle, for instance, bury the 
small animals in which they lay their eggs, and thereby pre- 
vent the escape of the gases disengaged by putrefaction. 
The prodigious rapidity of development in insect life, the 
great numbers of the individuals in many species, and the 
voracity of most of them while in the larva state, justify 
the appellation of nature’s scavengers which has been be- 
stowed upon them, and there is very little doubt that, in 
warm countries, they consume a larger quantity of putrescent 
organic matter than the quadrupeds and birds which feed upon 
such aliment. 


* T believe there is no foundation for the supposition that earthworms attack 
the tuber of the potato. Some of them, especially one or two species em- 
ployed by anglers as bait, if natives of the woods, are at least rare in shaded 
grounds, but multiply very rapidly after the soil is brought under cultivation. 
Forty or fifty years ago they were so scarce in the newer parts of New Eng- 
land, that the rustic fishermen of every village kept secret the few places 
where they were to be found in their neighborhood, as a professional mystery, 
but at present one can hardly turn over a shovelful of rich moist soil any- 
where, without unearthing several of them. A very intelligent lady, born in 
the woods of Northern New England, told me that, in her childhood, these 
worms were almost unknown in that region, though anxiously sought for by 
the anglers, but that they increased as the country was cleared, and at last 
became so numerous in some places, that the water of springs, and even of 
shallow wells, which had formerly been excellent, was rendered undrinkable 
by the quantity of dead worms that fell into them. The increase of the robin 
and other small birds which follow the settler when he has prepared a suit- 
able home for them, at last checked the excessive multiplication of the 
worms, and abated the nuisance. 


132 INJUBY TO THE FOREST BY INSECTS. 


Injury to the Forest by Insects. 


The action of the insect on vegetation, as we have thus far 
described it, is principally exerted on smaller and less con- 
spicuous plants, and it is therefore matter rather of agricul- 
tural than of geographical interest. But in the economy of 
the forest European writers ascribe to insect life an importance 
which it has not reached in America, where the spontaneous 
woods are protected by safeguards of nature’s own devising. 

The insects which damage primitive forests by feeding upon 
products of trees essential to their growth, are not numerous, 
nor is their appearance, in destructive numbers, frequent, and 
those which perforate the stems and branches, to deposit and 
hatch their eggs, more commonly select dead trees for that pur- 
pose, though, unhappily, there are important exceptions to this 
latter remark.* I do not know that we have any evidence 


* The locust insect, Clitus pictus, which deposits its eggsin the American 
locust, Robinia pseudacacia, is one of these, and its ravages have been and 
still are more destructive to that very valuable tree, so remarkable for combin- 
ing rapidity of growth with strength and durability of wocd. This insect, I 
believe, has not yet appeared in Europe, where, since the so general employ- 
ment of the Robinia to clothe and protect embankments and the scarps of 
deep cuts on railroads, it would do incalculable mischief. As a traveller, 
however, I should find some compensation for this evil in the destruction of 
these acacia hedges, which as completely obstruct the view on hundreds of 
miles of French and Italian railways, as do the garden walls of the same 
countries on the ordinary roads. 

The lignivorous insects that attack living trees almost uniformly confine 
their ravages to trees already unsound or diseased in growth from the depre- 
dations of leaf-eaters, such as caterpillars and the like, or from other causes. 
The decay of the tree, therefore, is the cause not the consequence of the in- 
vasions of the borer. This subject has been discussed by Perris in the 
Annales dela Société Entomologique dela France for 1852, and his conclusions 
are confirmed by the observations of Samanos, who quotes, at some length, 
the views of Perris. ‘‘ Having, for fifteen years,” says the latter author, 
‘‘incessantly studied the habits of lignivorous insects in one of the best 
wooded regions of France, I have observed facts enough to feel myself war- 
ranted in expressing my concluzions, which are: that insects in general-—I am 
not speaking of those which confine their voracity to the leaf—do not attack 


INJURY TO THE FOREST BY INSECTS. LS 


of the destruction or serious injury of American forests by in- 
sects, before or even soon after the period of colonization; but 
since the white man has laid bare a vast proportion of the 
earth’s surface, and thereby produced changes favorable, per- 
haps, to the multiplication of these pests, they have greatly 
increased in numbers, and, apparently, in voracity also. Not 
many years ago, the pines on thousands of acres of land in 
North Carolina were destroyed by insects not known to have 
ever done serious injury to that tree before. In such cases as 
this and others of the like sort, there is good reason to believe 
that man is the indirect cause of an evil for which he pays so 
heavy a penalty. Insects increase whenever the birds which 
feed upon them disappear. Hence, in the wanton destruction 
of the robin and other insectivorous birds, the bipes implumis, 
the featherless biped, man, is not only exchanging the vocal 
orchestra which greets the rising sun for the drowsy beetle’s 
evening drone, and depriving his groves and his fields of their 
fairest ornament, but he is waging a treacherous warfare on his 
natural allies.* 


trees in sound health, and they assail those only whose normal conditions and 
functions have been by some cause impaired.” 

See, more fully, Samanos, Traité dela Culture du Pin Maritime, Paris, 1864, 
pp. 140-145, and Sremont, Manuale dell’ Arte Forestale, 2d edition. Florence, 
1872. 

* In the artificial woods of Europe, insects are far more numerous and de- 
structive to trees than in the primitive forests of America, and the same re- 
mark may be made of the smaller rodents, such as moles, mice, and squirrels. 
In the dense native wood, the ground and the air are too humid, the depth of 
shade too great, for many tribes of these creatures, while near the natural 
meadows and other open grounds, where circumstances are otherwise more 
favorable for their existence and multiplication, their numbers are kept down 
by birds, serpents, foxes, and smaller predacious quadrupeds. In civilized 
countries these natural enemies of the worm, the beetle, and the mole, are 
persecuted, sometimes almost exterminated, by man, who also removes from 
his plantations the decayed or wind-fallen trees, the shrubs and underwood, 
which, in a state of nature, furnished food and shelter to the borer and the 
rodent, and often also to the animals that preyed upon them. Hence the in- 
sect and the gnawing quadruped are allowed to increase, from the expulsion of 
the police which, in the natural wood, prevent their excessive multiplication, 


134 INTRODUCTION OF INSECTS. 


Introduction of Insects. 


The general tendency of man’s encroachments upon spon- 
taneous nature has been to increase insect life at the expense 
of vegetation and of the smaller quadrupeds and _ birds. 
Doubtless there are insects in all woods, but in temperate 
climates they are comparatively few and harmless, and the 
most numerous tribes which breed in the forest, or rather in its 
waters, and indeed in all solitudes, are those which little injure 
vegetation, such as mosquitoes, gnats, and the like. With 
the cultivated plants of man come the myriad tribes which 
feed or breed upon them, and agriculture not only introduces 
new species, but so multiplies the number of individuals as to 
defy calculation. Newly introduced vegetables frequently es- 
cape for years the insect plagues which had infested them in 
their native habitat; but the importation of other varieties of 
the plant, the exchange of seed, or some mere accident, is sure 
in the long run to carry the egg, the larva, or the chrysalis to 
the most distant shores where the plant assigned to it by nature 
as its possession has preceded it. ‘or many years after the 
colonization of the United States, few or none of the insects 
which attack wheat in its different stages of growth, were 
known in America. During the Revolutionary war, the Hes- 


and they become destructive to the forest because they are driven to the 
living tree for nutriment and cover. The forest of Fontainebleau is almost 
wholly without birds, and their absence is ascribed by some writers to the 
want of water, which, in the thirsty sands of that wood, does not gather into 
running brooks; but the want of undergrowth is perhaps an equally good 
reason for their scarcity. 

On the other hand, the thinning out of the forest and the removal of under- 
wood and decayed timber, by which it is brought more nearly to the condition 
of an artificial wood, is often destructive to insect tribes which, though not 
injurious to trees, are noxious to man. ‘Thus the troublesome woodtick, 
formerly very abundant in the North Eastern, as it unhappily still is in native 
forests in the Southern and Western States, has become nearly or quite extinct 
in the former region since the woods have been reduced in extent and laid 
more open to the sun and air.—Asa Fire, in Report of New York Agricultural 
Society for 1870, pp. 863, 364. 


INTRODUCTION OF INSECTS. 135 


sian fly, Cecedomyia destructriz, made its appearance, and it 
was so called because it was first observed in the year when the 
Hessian troops were brought over, and was popularly supposed 
to have been accidentally imported by those unwelcome stran- 
gers. Other destroyers of cereal grains have since found their 
way across the Atlantic, and a noxious European aphis has first 
attacked the American wheatfields within the last fifteen years. 
Unhappily, in these cases of migration, the natural corrective 
of excessive multiplication, the parasitic or voracious enemy of 
the noxious insect, does not always accompany the wanderings 
of its prey, and the bane long precedes the antidote. Hence, 
in the United States, the ravages of imported insects injurious 
to cultivated crops, not being checked by the counteracting in- 
fluences which nature had provided to limit their devastations 
in the Old World, are more destructive than in Europe. It is 
not known that the wheat midge is preyed upon in America by 
any other insect, and in seasons favorable to it, it multiplies to 
a degree which would prove almost fatal to the entire harvest, 
were it not that, in the great territorial extent of the United 
States, there is room for such differences of soil and climate as, 
in a given year, to present in one State all the conditions favor- 
able to the increase of a particular insect, while in another, 
the natural influences are hostile to it. The only apparent 
remedy for this evil is, to balance the disproportionate develop- 
ment of noxious foreign species by bringing from their native 
country the tribes which prey upon them. This, it seems, has 
been attempted. The United States Census Report for 1860, 
p- 52, states that the New York Agricultural Society “has in- 
troduced into this country from abroad certain parasites which 
Providence has created to counteract the destructive powers of 
some of these depredators.” * 

This is, however, not the only purpose for which man has 
designedly introduced foreign forms of insect life. The eggs 
of the silkworm are known to have been brought from the far- 


* On parasitic and entomophagous insects, see a paper by Rondani referred 
to p. 119 ante. 


136 INTRODUCTION OF INSECTS. 


ther East to Europe in the sixth century, and new silk-spinners 
which feed on the castor-oil bean and the ailanthus, have recently 
been reared in France and in South America with promising 
success.* The cochineal, long regularly bred in aboriginal 
America, has been transplanted to Spain, and both the kermes 
insect and the cantharides have been transferred to other cli- 
mates than their own. The honey-bee must be ranked next to 
the silkworm in economical importance. This useful creature 
was carried to the United States by European colonists, in the 
latter part of the seventeenth century; it did not cross the Mis- 
sissippi till the close of the eighteenth, and it is only in 1853 
that it was transported to California, where it was previously 
unknown. The Italian bee, which seldom stings, has lately 
been introduced into the United States. 

The insects and worms intentionally transplanted by man 
bear but a small proportion to those accidentally introduced 
by him. Plants and animals often carry their parasites 
with them, and the traffic of commercial countries, which 
exchange their products with every zone and every stage 
of social existence, cannot fail to transfer in both directions 
the minute organisms that are, in one way or another, asso- 


* The silkworm which feeds on the ailanthus has naturalized itself in the 
United States, but the promises of its utility have not been realized. 

+ Bee husbandry, now very general in Switzerland and other Alpine regions, 
was formerly an important branch of industry in Italy. It has lately been 
revived and is now extensively prosecuted in that country. It is interesting 
to observe that many of the methods recently introduced into this art in Eng- 
land and the United States, such for example as the removable honey-boxes, 
are reinventions of Italian systems at least three hundred years old. See 
Gao, Le venti Giornate ddl Agriculiura, cap. xv. 

The temporary decline of this industry in Italy was doubtless in a great 
measure due tothe use of sugar which had taken the place of honey, but per- 
haps also in part to the decrease of the wild vegetation from which the bee 
draws more or less of his nutriment. 

A new wax-producing insect, a species of coccus, very abundant in China, 
where its annual produce is said to amount to the value of ten millions of 
francs, has recently attracted notice in France, The wax is white, resembling 
spermaceti, and is said to be superior to that of the bee. 


INTRODUCTION OF INSECTS. 137 


ciated with almost every object important to the material in- 
terests of man.* 

The tenacity of life possessed by many insects, their prodi- 
gious fecundity, the length of time they often remain in the 
different phases of their existence,t the security of the retreats 
into which their small dimensions enable them to retire, are 
all circumstances very favorable not only to the perpetuity of 
their species, but to their transportation to distant climates and 
their multiplication in theirnew homes. The teredo, so destruc- 
tive to shipping, has been carried by the vessels whose wooden 
walls it mines to almost every part of the globe. The termite, 
or white ant, is said to have been brought to Rochefort by the 
commerce of that port a hundred years ago.{ This creature is 
more injurious to wooden structures and implements than any 
other known insect. It eats out almost the entire substance of 


* A few years ago, a laborer, employed at a North American port in dis- 
charging a cargo of hides from the opposite extremity of the continent, was 
fatally poisoned by the bite or the sting of an unknown insect, which ran out 
from a hide he was handling. 

The Phyllozera vastatriz, the most destructive pest which has ever attacked 
European vineyards—for its ravages are fatal not merely to the fruit, but to 
the vine itself—is said by many entomologists to be of American origin, but I 
have seen no account of the mode of its introduction. 

{ In many insects, some of the stages of life regularly continue for several 
years, and they may, under peculiar circumstances, be almost indefinitely 
prolonged. Dr. Dwight mentions the following remarkable case of this sort: 
“J saw here an insect, about an inch in length, of a brown color tinged with 
orange, with two antenne, not unlike arosebug. This insect came out of a 
tea-table made of the boards of an apple-tree.” Dr. Dwight found the 
“¢ cavity whence the insect had emerged into the light,” to be ‘‘ about two 
inches in length. Between the hole, and the outside of the leaf of the table, 
there were forty grains of the wood.” It was supposed that the sawyer and 
the cabinet-maker must have removed at least thirteen grains more, and the 
table had been in the possession of its proprietor for twenty years. 

} It does not appear to be quite settled whether the termites of France are 
indigenous or imported. See QUATREFAGES, Souvenirs Wun Natwraliste, ii., 
pp. 400, 542, 543. 

The white ant has lately appeared at St. Helena and is in a high degree 
destructive, no wood but teak, and even that not always, resisting it.—a- 
ture for March 2d, 1871, p. 362. 


138 DESTRUCTION OF INSECTS. 


the wood, leaving only thin partitions between the gaileries it 
excavates in it; but as it never gnaws through the surface to 
the air, a stick of timber may be almost wholly consumed with- 
out showing any external sign of the damage it has sustained. 
The termite is found also in other parts of France, and particu- 
larly at Rochelle, where, thus far, its ravages are confined to a 
single quarter of the city. A borer, of similar habits, is not 
uncommon in Italy, and you may see in that country handsome 
chairs aud other furniture which have been reduced by this 
insect to a framework of powder of post, covered, and appa- 
rently held together, by nothing but the varnish. 


Destruction of Insects. 


It is well known to naturalists, but less familiarly to common 
observers, that the aquatic larvee of some insects which in other 
stages of their existence inhabit the land, constitute, at certain 
seasons, a large part of the food of fresh-water fish, while other 
larvee, in their turn, prey upon the spawn and even the young 
of their persecutors.* The larvae of the mosquito and the gnat 
are the favorite food of the trout in the wooded regions where 
those insects abound.t Larlier in the year the trout feeds on 


* T have seen the larva of the dragon-fly in an aquarium bite off the head 
of a young fish as long as itself. 

+ Insects and fish—which prey upon and feed each other—are the only forms 
of animal life that are numerous in the native woods, and their range is, of 
course, limited by the extent of the waters. The great abundance of the 
trout, and of other more or less allied genera in the lakes of Lapland, seems to 
be due to the supply of food provided for them by the swarms of insects which 
in the larva state inhabit the waters, or, in other stages of their life, are ac- 
cidentally swept intothem. All travellers in the north of Europe speak of the 
gnat and the mosquito as very serious drawbacks upon the enjoyments of the 
summer tourist, who visits the head of the Gulf of Bothnia to see the mid- 
night sun, and the brothers Lzestadius regard them as one of the great plagues 
of sub-arctic life. ‘‘ The persecutions of these insects,” says Lars Levi Les- 
tadius [Culex pipiens, Culex reptans, and Culex pulicaris], ‘leave not a mo- 
ment’s peace, by day or night, to any living creature. Not only man, but 
cattle, and even birds and wild beasts, suffer intolerably from their bite.” He 
adds in a note, ‘‘I will not affirm that they have ever devoured a living man, 


DESTRUCTION OF INSECTS. 139 


the larvee of the May fly, which is itself very destructive to the 
spawn of the salmon, and hence, by a sort of house-that-Jack- 
built, the destruction of the mosquito, that feeds the trout that 
preys on the May fly that destroys the eggs that hatch the sal- 
mon that pampers the epicure, may occasion a scarcity of this 
latter fish in waters where he would otherwise be abundant. 
Thus all nature is linked together by invisible bonds, and every 
organic creature, however low, however feeble, however de- 
pendent, is necessary to the well-being of some other among the 
myriad forms of life with which the Creator has peopled the 
earth. 

I have said that man has promoted the increase of the insect 
and the worm, by destroying the bird and the fish which feed 
upon them. Many insects, in the four different stages of their 
growth, inhabit in succession the earth, the water, and the air. 
In each of these elements they have their special enemies, and, 
deep and dark as are the minute recesses in which they hide 
themselves, they are pursued to the remotest, obscurest corners 
by the executioners that nature has appointed to punish their 
delinquencies, and furnished with cunning contrivances for fer- 
reting out the offenders and dragging them into the light of day. 
One tribe of birds, the woodpeckers, seems to depend for sub- 
sistence almost wholly on those insects which breed in dead or 
dying trees, and it is, perhaps, needless to say that the injury 
these birds do the forest is imaginary. They do not cut holes 
in the trunk of the tree to prepare a lodgment for a future 
colony of boring larvee, but to extract the worm which has 
already begun his mining labors. Hence these birds are not 
found where the forester removes trees as fast as they become 
fit habitations for such insects. In clearing new lands in the 


but many young cattle, such as lambs and calves, have been worried out of 
their lives by them. All the people of Lapland declare that young birds are 
killed by them, and this is not improbable, for birds are scarce after seasons 
when the midge, the gnat, and the mosquito are numerous.”— Om Uppodling- 
ari Lappmarken, p. 50. 

Petrus Lestadius makes similar statements in his Journal for forsta dret, 
p. 285. 


140 MINUTE ORGANISMS. 


United States, dead trees, especially of the spike-leaved kinds, 
too much decayed to serve for timber, and which, in that state, 
are worth little for fuel, are often allowed to stand until they 
fall of themselves. Such stubs, as they are popularly called, are 
filled with borers, and often deeply cut by the woodpeckers, 
whose strong bills enable them to penetrate to the very heart of 
the tree and drag out the lurking larvee. After a few years, 
the stubs fall, or, as wood becomes valuable, are cut and carried 
off for firewood, and, at the same time, the farmer selects for 
felling, in the forest he has reserved as a permanent source of 
supply of fuel and timber, the decaying trees which, like the 
dead stems in the fields, serve as a home for both the worm and 
his pursuer. We thus gradually extirpate this tribe of insects, 
and, with them, the species of birds which subsist principally 
upon them. Thus the fine, large, red-headed woodpecker, 
Picus erythrocephalus, formerly very common in New England, 
has almost entirely disappeared from those States, since the 
dead trees are gone, and the apples, his favorite vegetable food, 
are less abundant. 

There are even large quadrupeds which feed almost exclu- 
sively upon insects. The ant-bear is strong enough to pull 
down the clay houses built by the species of termites that con- 
stitute his ordinary diet, and the curious ai-ai, a climbing quad- 
ruped of Madagascar, is provided with a very slender, hook- 
nailed finger, long enough to reach far into a hole in the trunk 
of a tree, and extract the worm which bored it.* 


Minute Organisms. 


Besides the larger inhabitants of the land and of the sea, the 
quadrupeds, the reptiles, the birds, the amphibia, the crustacea, 
the fish, the insects, and the worms, there are other countless 
forms of vital being. Earth, water, the ducts and fluids of 
vegetable and of animal life, the very air we breathe, are peo- 
pled by minute organisms which perform most important fune- 


* On the destruction of insects by reptiles, see page 125 ate. 


MINUTE ORGANISMS. 141 


tions in both the living and the inanimate kingdoms of nature. 
Of the offices assigned to these creatures, the most familiar to 
common observation is the extraction of lime, and, more rarely, 
of silex, from the waters inhabited by them, and the deposit of 
these minerals in a solid form, either as the material of their 
habitations or as the exuvize of their bodies. The microscope 
and other means of scientific observation assure us that the 
chalk-beds of England and of France, the coral reefs of marine 
waters in warm climates, vast calcareous and silicious deposits 
in the sea and in many fresh-water ponds, the common polish- 
ing earths and slates, and many species of apparently dense and 
solid rock, are the work of the humble organisms of which I 
speak, often, indeed, of animalculze so small as to become visi- 
ble only by the aid of lenses magnifying thousands of times the 
linear measures. It is popularly supposed that animaleule, or 
what are commonly embraced under the vague name of infuso- 
ria, inhabit the water alone, but naturalists have long known 
that the atmospheric dust transported by every wind and depos- 
ited by every calm is full of microscopic life or of its relics. 
The soil on which the city of Berlin stands, contains, at the 
depth of ten or fifteen feet below the surface, living elaborators 
of silex;* and a microscopic examination of a handful of earth 
connected with the material evidences of guilt has enabled the 
naturalist to point out the very spot where a crime was com- 
mitted. It has been computed that one-sixth part of the solid 
inatter let fall by great rivers at their outlets consists of still 
recognizable infusory shells and shields, and, as the friction of 
rolling water must reduce many of these fragile structures to a 
state of comminution which even the microscope cannot resolve 
into distinet particles and identify as relics of animal or 
of vegetable life, we must conclude that a considerably larger 
proportion of river deposits is really the product of animal- 
cules.t 


* WirttweR, Physikalische Geographic, p. 142. 
+ To vary the phrase, I make occasional use of antmaleule, which, as a popu- 
lar designation, embraces all microscopic organisms, The name is founded 


142 MINUTE ORGANISMS. 


It is evident that the chemical, and in many cases the 
mechanical, character of a great number of the objects impor- 
tant in the material economy of human life, must be affected 
by the presence of so large an organic element in their sub- 
stance, and it is equally obvious that all agricultural and all 
industrial operations tend to disturb the natural arrangements 
of this element, to increase or to diminish the special adaptation 
of every medium in which it lives to the particular orders of 
being inhabited by it. The conversion of woodland into pas- 
turage, of pasture into plough land, of swamp or of shallow sea 
into dry ground, the rotations of cultivated crops, must prove 
fatal to millions of living things upon every rood of surface 
thus deranged by man, and must, at the same time, more or 
less fully compensate this destruction of life by promoting the 
growth and multiplication of other tribes equally minute in 
dimensions. 

I do not know that man has yet endeavored to avail himself, 
by artificial contrivances, of the agency of these wonderful 
architects and manufacturers. We are hardly well enough ac- 
quainted with their natural economy to devise means to turn 
their industry to profitable account, and they are in very many 
cases too slow in producing visible results for an age so impatient 
as ours. The over-civilization of the nineteenth century cannot 
wait for wealth to be amassed by infinitesimal gains, and we 
are in haste to speculate upon the powers of nature, as we do 
upon objects of bargain and sale in our trafficking one with an- 
other. But there are still some cases where the little we know 
of a life, whose workings are invisible to the naked eye, sug- 
gests the possibility of advantageously directing the efforts of 


on the now exploded supposition that all of them are animated, which was the 
general belief of naturalists when attention was first drawn to them. It was 
soon discovered that many of them were unquestionably vegetable, and there 
are numerous genera the true classification of which is matter of dispute among 
the ablest observers. There are cases in which objects formerly taken for liv- 
ing animalcules turn out to be products of the decomposition of matter once 
animated, and it is admitted that neither spontaneous motion nor even appa- 
rent irritability are sure signs of animal life. 


MINUTE ORGANISMS. 143 


troops of artisans that we cannot see. Upon coasts occupied by 
the corallines, the reef-building animalcule does not work near 
the mouth of rivers. Hence the change of the outlet of a stream, 
often a very easy matter, may promote the construction of a 
barrier to coast navigation at one point, and check the forma- 
tion of a reef at another, by diverting a current of fresh water 
from the former and pouring it into the sea at the latter. Cases 
may probably be found, in tropical seas, where rivers have pre- 
vented the working of the coral animalcules in straits separating 
islands from each other or from the mainland. The diversion 
of such streams might remove this obstacle, and reefs conse- 
quently be formed which should convert an archipelago into a 
single large island, and finally joi that to the neighboring con- 
tinent. 

Quatrefages proposed to destroy the teredo in harbors by im- 
pregnating the water with a mineral solution fatal to them. 
Perhaps the labors of the coralline animals might be arrested 
over a considerable extent of sea-coast by similar means. The 
reef-builders are leisurely architects, but the precious coral 
is formed so rapidly that the beds may be refished advantage- 
ously as often as once in ten years.* It does not seem impossi- 
ble that branches of this coral might be attached to the keel of 
a ship and transplanted to the American coast, where the Gulf 
stream would furnish a suitable temperature beyond the clima- 
tic limits that otherwise confine its growth; and thus a new 
source of profit might perhaps be added to the scanty returns 
of the hardy fisherman. 

In certain geological formations, the diatomacese deposit, at 
the bottom of fresh-water ponds, beds of silicious shields, valu- 
able asa material for a species of very light firebrick, in the 
manufacture of water-glass and of hydraulic cement, and ulti- 


* The smallest twig of the precious coral thrown back into the sea attaches 
{tself to the bottom or a rock, and grows as well as on its native stem. 

See an interesting report on the coral fishery, by Sant’ Agabio, Italian Con- 
sul-General at Algiers, in the Bollettino Consolare, published by the Depart- 
ment of Foreign Affairs, 1862, pp. 139, 151, and in the Annali di Agricoliura 
Industria e Commercio, No. ii., pp. 360, 373. 


144 DISTURBANCE OF NATURAL BALANCES. 


mately, doubtless, in many yet undiscovered industrial processes. 
An attentive study of the conditions favorable to the propaga- 
tion of the diatomaceze might perhaps help us to profit directly 
by the productivity of this organism, and, at the same time, dis- 
close secrets of nature capable of being turned to valuable ac- 
count in dealing with silicious rocks, and the metal which is the 
base of them. 

Our acquaintance with the obscure and infinitesimal life of 
which I have now been treating is very recent, and still very 
imperfect. We know that it is of vast importance in geol- 
ogy, but we are so ambitious to grasp the great, so little accus- 
tomed to occupy ourselves with the minute, that we are not 
yet prepared to enter seriously upon the question how far we 
can control and utilize the operations, not of unembodied phy- 
sical forces merely, but of beings, in’ popular apprehension, 
almost as immaterial as they. 


Disturbance of Natural Balances. 


It is highly probable that the reef-builders and other yet un- 
studied minute forms of vital existence have other functions in 
the economy of nature besides aiding in the architecture of the 
globe, and stand in important relations not only to man but to 
the plants and the larger sentient creatures over which he has 
dominion. The diminution or multiplication of these unseen 
friends or foes may be attended with the gravest consequences to 
all his material interests, and he is dealing with dangerous wea- 
pons whenever he interferes with arrangements pre-established 
by a power higher than his own. The equation of animal and 
vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelli- 
gence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of 
disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we 
throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic being. 

This much, however, the facts I have hitherto presented au- 
thorize us to conclude: as often as we destroy the balance by 
deranging the original proportions between different orders of 


ANIMALCULAR LIFE. 145 
spontaneous life, the law of self-preservation requires us to re- 
store the equilibrium, by either directly returning the weight 
abstracted from one scale, or removing a corresponding quan- 
tity from the other. In other words, destruction must be either 
repaired by reproduction, or compensated by new destruction 
in an opposite quarter. 

The parlor aquarium has taught even those to whom it is but 
an amusing toy, that the balance of animal and vegetable life 
must be preserved, and that the excess of either is fatal to the 
other, in the artificial tank as well as in natural waters. A few 
years ago, the water of the Cochituate aqueduct at Boston be- 
came so offensive in smell and taste as to be quite unfit for use. 
Scientific investigation found the cause in the too scrupulous 
care with which aquatic vegetation had been excluded from the 
reservoir, and the consequent death and decay of the animal- 
cule, which could not be shut out, nor live in the water with- 
out the vegetable element.* 


Animalcular Life. 


Nature has no unit of magnitude by which she measures her 
works. Man takes his standards of dimension from himself. 
The hair’s breadth was his minimum until the microscope told 
him that there are animated creatures to which one of the hairs 
of his head is a larger cylinder than is the trunk of the giant Cali- 


* It isremarkable that Palissy, to whose great merits as an acute observer 
I am happy to have frequent occasion to bear testimony, had noticed that 
vegetation was necessary to maintain the purity of water in artificial reser- 
voirs, though he mistook the rationale of its influence, which he ascribed to 
the elemental ‘‘ salt” supposed by him to play an important part in all the ope- 
rations of nature. In his treatise upon Waters and Fountains, p. 174, of the 
reprint of 1844, he says: ‘‘ And in special, thou shalt note one point, the 
which is understood of few: that is to say, that the leaves of the trees which 
fall upon the parterre, and the herbs growing beneath, and singularly the 
fruits, if any there be upon the trees, being decayed, the waters of the par- 
terre shall draw unto them the salt of the said fruits, leaves, and herbs, the 
which shall greatly better the water of thy fountains, and hinder the putrefac- 
tion thereof.” 

10 


146 ANIMALCULAR LIFE. 


fornia sequoia to him. He borrows his inch from the breadth 
of his thumb, his palm and span from the width of his hand and 
the spread of his fingers, his foot from the length of the organ 
so named; his cubit is the distance from the tip of his middle 
finger to his elbow, and his fathom is the space he can measure 
with his outstretched arms.* To a being who instinctively 
finds the standard of all magnitudes in his own material frame, 
all objects exceeding his own dimensions are absolutely great, 
all falling short of them absolutely small. Hence we habitu- 
ally regard the whale and the elephant as essentially large and 
therefore important creatures, the animalcule as an essentially 
small and therefore unimportant organism. Dut no geological 
formation owes its origin to the labors or the remains of the huge 
mammal, while the animalcule composes, or has furnished, the 
substance of strata thousands of feet in thickness, and extend- 
ing, in unbroken beds, over many degrees of terrestrial surface. 
If man is destined to inhabit the earth much longer, and to ad- 
vance in natural knowledge with the rapidity which has marked 
his progress in physical science for the last two or three centu- 


* The French metrical system seems destined to be adopted throughout the 
civilized world. It is indeed recommended by great advantages, but it is very 
doubtful whether they are not more than counterbalanced by the selection of 
too large a unit of measure, and by the inherent intractability of all decimal 
systems with reference to fractional divisions. The experience of the whole 
world has established the superior convenience of a smaller unit, such as the 
braccio, the cubit, the foot, and the palm or span, and in practical life every 
man finds that he has much more frequent occasion to use a fraction than a 
multiple of the metre. Of course, he must constantly employ numbers ex- 
pressive of several centimetres or millimetres instead of the name of a single 
smaller unit than the metre. Besides, the metre is not divisible into twelfths, 
eighths, sixths, or thirds, or the multiples of any of these proportions, two of 
which at ieast—the eighth and the third—are of as frequent use as any other 
fractions. The adoption of a fourth of the earth’s circumference as a base 
for the new measures was itself a departure from the decimal system. Had 
the Commissioners taken the entire circumference as a base, and divided it 
into 100,000,000 instead of 10,000,000 parts, we should have had a unit of 
about sixteen inches, which, as a compromise between the foot and the eubit, 
would haye been much better adapted to universal use than so large a unit as 
the metre. 


ANIMALCULAR LIFE. 147 


ries, he will learn to put a wiser estimate on the works of crea- 
tion, and will derive not only great instruction from studying 
the ways of nature in her obscurest, humblest walks, but great 
material advantage from stimulating her productive energies in 
provinces of her empire hitherto regarded as forever inaccess- 
ible, utterly barren.* 


* The fermentation of liquids, and in many cases the decomposition of 
semi-solids, formerly supposed to be owing purely to chemical action, are now 
ascribed by many chemists to vital processes of living minute organisms, 
both vegetable and animal, and consequently to physiological as well as to 
chemical forces. . Even alcohol is stated to be an animal product. The whole 
subject of animalcular, or rather minute organic, life, has assumed a new and 
startling importance from the recent researches of naturalists and physiolo- 
gists, in the agency of such life, vegetable or animal, in exciting and commu- 
nicating contagious diseases, and it is extremely probable that what are 
vaguely called germs, to whichever of the organic kingdoms they may be as- 
signed, creatures inhabiting various media, and capable of propagating their 
kind and rapidly multiplying, are the true seeds of infection and death in the 
maladies now called zymotic, as well perhaps as in many others. 

The literature of this subject is now very voluminous. For observations 
with high microscopic power on this subject, see BEALE, Disease Germs, their 
supposed Nature, and Disease Germs, their real Nature, both published in Lon- 
don in 1870. 

The increased frequency of typhoidal, zymotic, and malarious diseases in 
some parts of the United States, and the now common occurrence of some of 
them in districts where they were unknown forty years ago, are startling facts, 
and it is a very interesting question how far man’s acts or neglects may have 
occasioned the change. See ZVhird Annual Report of Massachusetts State 
Board of Health for 1872. The causes and remedies of the insalubrity of 
Rome and its environs have been for some time the object of careful investi- 
gation, and many valuable reports have been published on the subject. 
Among the most recent of these are: Relazgione sulle condizioni agrarie ed 
igieniche ddla Campagna di Roma, per RAFFAELE PARETO; Cenni Storict 
sulla questione del? Agro Romano di G. GUERZONI ; Cenni sulle condiziont Pisico- 
economiche di Roma per F. GIORDANO ; and a very important paper in the 
journal Lo Sperimentale for 1870, by Dr. D. PANTALEONI. 

There are climates, parts of California, for instance, where the flesh of 
dead animals, freely exposed, shows no tendency to putrefaction but dries up 
and may be almost indefinitely preserved in this condition. Is this owing to 
the absence of destructive animalcular life in such localities, and has man any 
agency in the introduction and naturalization of these organisms in regions 
previously not infested by them ? 


CHAPTER III. 


THE WOODS. 


The habitable earth originally wooded—General meteorological influence of 
the forest—Electrical action of trees—Chemical influence of woods— 
Trees as protection against malaria—Trees as shelter to ground to the 
leeward—Influence of the forest as inorganic on temperature—Thermo- 
metrical action of trees as organic—Total influence of the forest on 
temperature—Influence of forests as inorganic on humidity of air and 
earth—Influence as organic—Balance of conflicting influences—Influence 
of woods on precipitation—Total climatic action of the forest—Influence 
of the forest on humidity of soil—The forest in winter—Summer rain, 
importance of—Influence of the forest on the flow of springs—Influence 
of the forest on inundations and torrents—Destructive action of torrents 
—Floods of the Ardéche—Excavation by torrents—Extinction of torrents— 
Crushing force of torrents—Transporting power of water—The Po and 
its deposits—Mountain slides—Forest as protection against avalanches— 
Minor uses of the forest—Small forest plants and vitality of seeds— 
Locusts do not breed in forests—General functions of forest—Goneral 
consequences of destruction ef—Due proportion of woodland—Propor- 
tion of woodland in European countries—Forests of Great Britain— 
Forests of France—Forests of Italy—Forests of Germany—Forests of 
United States—American forest trees—Huropean and American forest 
trees compared—The forest does not furnish food for man—First re- 
moval of the forest—Principal causes of destruction of forest—Destruc- 
tion and protection of forests by governments—Royal forests and game- 
laws—Effects of the French revolution—Increased demand for lumber— 
Effects of burning forest—Floating of timber—Restoration of the forest 
—Economy of the forest—Forest legislation—Plantation of forests in 
America—Financial results of forest plantations—Instability of American 
life. 


The Habitable Harth originally Wooded. 


TueEre is good reason to believe that the surface of the habi- 
table earth, in all the climates and regions which have been 
the abodes of dense and civilized populations, was, with few 
exceptions, already covered with a forest growth when it first 


THE HABITABLE EARTH ORIGINALLY WOODED. 149 


became the home of man. This we infer from the extensive 
vegetable remains—trunks, branches, roots, fruits, seeds, and 
leaves of trees—so often found in conjunction with works of 
primitive art, in the bogey soil of districts where no forests ap- 
pear to have existed within the eras through which written 
annals reach; from ancient historical records, which prove 
that large provinces, where the earth has long been wholly bare 
of trees, were clothed with vast and almost unbroken woods 
when first made known to Greek and Roman civilization ; * 
and from the state of much of North and of South America, 
as well as of many islands, when they were discovered and 
colonized by the European race.t 

These evidences are strengthened by observation of the na- 
tural economy of our own time; for, whenever a tract of 
country, once inhabited and cultivated by man, is abandoned by 
him and by domestic animals, and surrendered to the undis- 
turbed influences of spontaneous nature, its soil sooner or later 
clothes itself with herbaceous and arborescent plants, and, at 
no long interval, with a dense forest growth. Indeed, upon 
surfaces of a certain stability and not absolutely precipitous 
inclination, the special conditions required for the spontaneous 
propagation of trees may all be negatively expressed and re- 
duced to these three: exemption from defect or excess of 


* The recorded evidence in support of the proposition in the text has been 
collected by L. F. Alfred Maury, in his Histoire des grandes Foréis de la 
Gaule et de Vancienne France, and by Becquerel, in his important work, 
Des climats et de VInfluence quwexercent tes Sols boisés et non boisés, livre ii, 
chap. i. to iy. 

We may rank among historical evidences on this point, if not technically 
among historical records, old geographical names and terminations etymo- 
logically indicating forest or grove, which are so common in many parts of 
the Hastern Continent now entirely stripped of woods—such as, in Southern 
Europe, Breuil, Broglio, Brolio, Brolo; in Northern, Briihl, and the endings 
-dean, -den, -don, -ham, -holt, -horst, -hurst, -lund, -shaw, -shot, -skog, -skov, 
-wald, -weald, -wold, -wood. 

+ The island of Madeira, whose noble forests were devastated by fire not 
long after its colonization by European settlers, takes its name from the 
Portuguese word for wood. 


150 THE HABITABLE EARTH ORIGINALLY WOODED. 


moisture, from perpetual frost, and from the depredations 
of man and browsing quadrupeds. Where these requisites are 
secured, the hardest rock is as certain to be overgrown with 
wood as the most fertile plain, though, for obvious reasons, the 
process is slower in the former than in the latter case. Lichens 
and mosses first prepare the way for a more highly organized 
vegetation. They retain the moisture of rains and dews, and 
bring it to act, in combination with the gases evolved by their 
organic processes, in decomposing the surface of the rocks they 
cover; they arrest and confine the dust which the wind scatters 
over them, and their final decay adds new material to the soil 
already half formed beneath and upon them. A very thin 
stratum of mould is sufficient forthe germination of seeds of 
the hardy evergreens and birches, the roots of which are often 
found in immediate contact with the rock, supplying their trees 
with nourishment from a soil deepened and enriched by the 
decomposition of their own foliage, or sending out long root- 
lets into the surrounding earth in search of juices to feed them. 

The eruptive matter of volcanoes, forbidding as is its aspect, 
does not refuse nutriment to the woods. The refractory lava 
of Etna, it is true, remains long barren, and that of the great 
eruption of 1669 is still almost wholly devoid of vegetation.* 
But the cactus is making inroads even here, while the volcanic 
sand and molten rock thrown out by Vesuvius soon become 
productive. Before the great eruption of 1631 even the in- 


* Biven the volcanic dust of Etna remains very long unproductive. Near 
Nicolosi is a great extent of coarse black sand, thrown out in 1669, which, 
for almost two centuries, lay entirely bare, and can be made to grow plants 
only by artificial mixtures and much labor. 

The increase in the price of wines, in consequence of the diminution of the 
product from the grape disease, however, has brought even these ashes under 
cultivation. ‘‘ I found,” says Waltershausen, referring to the years 1861-62, 
*‘ plains of voleanic sand and half-subdued lava streams, which twenty years 
ago lay utterly waste, now covered with fine vineyards. The ashfield of ten 
square miles above Nicolosi, created by the eruption of 1669, which was en- 
tirely barren in 1835. is now planted with vines almost to the summits of 
Monte Rosso, at a height of three thousand feet.’’—Ueber den Sivilianischen 
Ackerbau, p. 19. 


THE HABITABLE EARTH ORIGINALLY WOODED. fk 


terior of the crater was covered with vegetation. George 
Sandys, who visited Vesuvius in 1611, after it had reposed for 
several centuries, found the throat of the voleano at the bot- 
tom of the crater “ almost choked with broken rocks and frees 
that are falne therein.’ ‘ Next to this,” he continues, “the 
matter thrown up is ruddy, light, and soft: more removed, 
blacke and ponderous: the uttermost brow, that declineth like 
the seates in a theater, flourishing with trees and excellent pas- 
turage. The midst of the hill is shaded with chestnut trees, 
and others bearing sundry fruits.” * 

IT am convinced that forests would soon cover many parts of 
the Arabian and African deserts, if man and domestic animals, 
especially the goat and the camel, were banished from them. 
The hard palate and tongue and strong teeth and jaws of this 
latter quadruped enable him to break off and masticate tough 
and thorny branches as large as the finger. He is particularly 
fond of the smaller twigs, leaves, and seed-pods of the sont and 
other acacias, which, like the American Robinia, thrive well 
on dry and sandy soils, and he spares no tree the branches of 
which are within his reach, except, if I remember right, the 
tamarisk that produces manna. Young trees sprout plenti- 
fully around the springs and along the winter water-courses 
of the desert, and these are just the halting stations of the 
caravans and their routes of travel. In the shade of these 
trees, annual grasses and perennial shrubs shoot up, but are 
mown down by the hungry cattle of the Bedonin, as fast as 
they grow. A few years of undisturbed vegetation would 
suffice to cover such points with groves, and these would grad- 


* A Relation of a Journey Begun An. Dom. 1610, lib. 4, p. 260, edition of 
1615. The testimony of Sandys on this point is confirmed by that of Pighio, 
Braccini, Magliocco, Salimbeni, and Nicola di Rubeo, all cited by Rorn, Der 
Vesuv., p. 9. There is some uncertainty about the date of the last eruption 
previous to the great one of 1631. Ashes, though not lava, appear to have 
been thrown out about the year 1509, and some chroniclers have recorded an 
eruption in the year 1305; but this seems to be an error for 1036, when a 
great quantity of lava was ejected. In 1159, ashes were thrown out for many 
days. Itake these dates from the work of Roth just cited. 


152 METEOROLOGICAL INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST. 


ually extend themselves over soils where now scarcely any 
green thing but the bitter colocynth and the poisonous fox- 
glove is ever seen. 


General Meteorological Influence of the forest. 


The physico-geographical influence of forests may be divided 
into two great classes, each having an important influence on 
vegetable and on animal life in all their manifestations, as 
well as on every branch of rural economy and productive 
industry, and, therefore, on all the material interests of 
man. The first respects the meteorology of the countries ex- 
posed to the action of these influences ; the second, their super- 
ficial geography, or, in other words, the configuration, con- 
sistence, and clothing of their surface. 

For reasons assigned in the first chapter, and for others that 
will appear hereafter, the meteorological or climatic branch of 
the subject is the most obscure, and the conclusions of physicists 
respecting it are, in a great degree, inferential only, not founded 
on experiment or direct observation. They are, as might be 
expected, somewhat discordant, though one general result is 
almost universally accepted, and seems indeed too well sup- 
ported to admit of serious question, and it may be considered 
as established that forests tend to mitigate, at least within 
their own precincts, extremes of temperature, humidity, and 
drought. By what precise agencies the meteorological effects 
of the forest are produced we cannot say, becanse elements of 
totally unknown value enter into its action, and because the 
relative intensity of better understood causes cannot be meas- 
ured or compared. I shall not occupy much space in discuss- 
ing questions which at present admit of no solution, but I 
propose to notice all the known forces whose concurrent or 
conflicting energies contribute to the general result, and to 
point out, in some detail, the value of those influences whose 
mode of action has been ascertained. 


ELECFRICAL INFLUENCE OF TREES. 153 


Electrical Influence of Trees. 


The properties of trees, singly and in groups, as exciters or 
conductors of electricity, and their consequent influence upon 
the electrical state of the atmosphere, do not appear to have 
been much investigated ; and the conditions of the forest itself 
are so variable and so complicated, that the solution of any 
general problem respecting its electrical influence would be a 
matter of extreme difficulty. It is, indeed, impossible to sup- 
pose that a dense cloud, a sea of vapor, can pass over miles of 
surface bristling with good conductors, without undergoing 
and producing some change of electrical condition. Hypo- 
thetical cases may be put in which the character of the change 
could be deduced from the known laws of electrical action. 
But in actual nature, the elements are too numerous for us to 
seize. The true electrical condition of neither cloud nor forest 
could be known, and it could seldom be predicted whether the 
vapors would be dissolved as they floated over the wood, or 
discharged upon it in adeluge of rain. With regard to possible 
electrical influences of the forest, wider still in their range of 
action, the uncertainty is even greater. The data which 
alone could lead to positive, or even probable, conclusions are 
wanting, and we should, therefore, only embarrass our argument 
by any attempt to discuss this meteorological element, impor- 
tant as it may be, in its relations of cause and effect to more 
familiar and better understood meteoric phenomena. It may, 
however, be observed that hail-storms—which were once 
generally supposed, and are still held by many, to be pro- 
duced by a specitic electrical action, and which, at least, appear 
to be always accompanied by electrical disturbances—are be- 
lieved, in all countries particularly exposed to that scourge, 
to have become more frequent and destructive in proportion as 
the forests have been cleared. Caimi observes: “When the 
chains of the Alps and the Apennines had not yet been stripped 
of their magnificent crown of woods, the May hail, which now 


154 ELECTRICAL INFLUENCE OF TREES, 


’ 


desolates the fertile plains of Lombardy, was much less fre- 
quent; but since the general prostration of the forest, these 
tempests are laying waste even the mountain-soils whose older 
inhabitants scarcely knew this plague.* The paragrandini,+ 
which the learned curate of Rivolta advised to erect, with 
sheaves of straw set up vertically, over a great extent of culti- 
vated country, are but a Liliputian image of the vast para- 
grandini, pines, larches, and firs, which nature had planted by 
millions on the crests and ridges of the Alps and the Apen- 
nines.” ¢ “ Hiectrical action being diminished,” says Meguscher, 
“and the rapid congelation of vapors by the abstraction of heat 
being impeded by the influence of the woods, it is rare that 
hail or waterspouts are produced within the precincts of a large 
forest when it is assailed by the tempest.Ӥ Arthur Young 
was told that since the forests which covered the mountains 
between the Riviera and the county of Montferrat had dis- 
appeared, hail had become more destructive in the district of 
Acqui,| and a similar increase in the frequency and violence 


* There are, in Northern Italy and in Switzerland, joint-stock companies 
which insure against damage by hail, as well as by fire and lightning. Be- 
tween the years 1854 and 1861, a single one of these companies, La Riunione 
Adriatica, paid, for damage by hail in Piedmont, Venetian Lombardy, and the 
Duchy of Parma, above 6,500,000 francs, or nearly $290,000 per year. 

+ The paragrandine, or, as it is called in French, the paragréle, is a species 
of conductor by which it has been hoped to protect the harvests in countries 
particularly exposed to damage by hail. It was at first proposed to employ for 
this purpose poles supporting sheaves of straw connected with the ground by 
the same material ; but the experiment was afterwards tried in Lombardy on a 
large scale, with more perfect electrical conductors, consisting of poles secured 
to the top of tall trees and provided with a pointed wire entering the ground 
and reaching above the top of the pole. It was at first thought that this ap- 
paratus, erected at numerous points over an extent of several miles, was of 
some service as a protection against hail, but this opinion was svon disputed, 
and does not appear to be supported by well-ascertained facts. The question 
of a repetition of the experiment over a wide area has been again agitated 
within a very few years in Lombardy ; but the doubts expressed by very able 
physicists as to its efficacy, and as to the point whether hail is an electrical 
phenomenon, have discouraged its advocates from attempting it. 

t Cenni sulla Importanza e Coltura dei Boschi, p. 6. 

§ Memoria sui Boschi, ete., p. 44. | Zvavels in Italy, chap. iii, 


CHEMICAL INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST. 1S) 


of hail-storms in the neighborhood of Saluzzo and Mondovi, 
the lower part of the Valtelline, and the territory of Verona 
and Vicenza, is probably to be ascribed to a similar cause.* 


Chemical Influence of the Forest. 


We know that the air in a close apartment is appreciably 
affected through the inspiration and expiration of gases by 
plants growing in it. The same operations are performed on 
a gigantic scale by the forest, and it has even been supposed 
that the absorption of carbon, by the rank vegetation of earlier 
geological periods, occasioned a permanent change in the con- 
stitution of the terrestrial atmosphere.t To the effects thus 
produced are to be added those of the ultimate gaseous decom- 
position of the vast vegetable mass annually shed by trees, and 
of their trunks and branches when they fall a prey to time. 
But the quantity of gases thus abstracted from and restored 
to the atmosphere is inconsiderable—infinitesimal, one might 


* Le Alpi che cingono (Italia, i., p. 877. See ‘‘On the Influence of the 
Forest in Preventing Hail-storms,” a paper by Becquerel, in the J/émuoitres de 
v Académie des Sciences, vol. xxxv. The conclusion of this eminent physicist 
is, that woods do exercise, both within their own limits and in their vicinity, 
the influence popularly ascribed to them in this respect, and that the effect is 
probably produced partly by mechanical and partly by electrical action. 

+ ‘‘ Long before the appearance of man, . . . . they [the forests] had 
robbed the atmosphere of the enormous quantity of carbonic acid it contained, 
and thereby transformed it into respirable air. Trees heaped upon trees had 
already filled up the ponds and marshes, and buried with them in the bowels 
of the earth—to restore it to us, after thousands of ages, in the form of bi- 
tuminous coal and of anthracite—the carbon which was destined to become, 
by this wonderful condensation, a precious store of future wealth.”—CLAvs, 
Etudes sur V Economie Forestizre, p. 13. 

This opinion of the modification of the atmosphere by vegetation is con- 
tested. 

Mossman ascribes the great luxuriance and special character of the Austra- 
lian and New Zealand forests, as well as other peculiarities of the vegetation 
of the Southern hemisphere, to a supposed larger proportion of carbon in the 
atmosphere of that hemisphere, though the fact of such excess does not 
appear to have been established by chemical analysis.—MossMAn, Origin of 
the Seasons, Edinburgh, 1869. Chaps. xvi. and xvii, 


156 TREES AS A PROTECTION AGAINST MALARIA. 


almost say—in comparison with the ocean of air from which they 
are drawn and to which they return; and though the exhala- 
tions from bogs, and other low grounds covered with decaying 
vegetable matter, are highly deleterious to human health, yet, 
in general, the air of the forest is hardly chemically distin- 
guishable from that of the sand plains, and we can as little 
trace the influence of the woods in the analysis of the atmos- 
phere, as we can prove that the mineral ingredients of land- 
springs sensibly affect the chemistry of the sea. I may, then, 
properly dismiss the chemical, as I have done the electrical, 
influences of the forest, and treat them both alike, if not as un- 
important agencies, at least as quantities of unknown value in 
our meteorological equation.* Our inquiries upon this branch 
of the subject will accordingly be limited to the thermometrical 
and hygrometrical influences of the woods. There is, however, 
a special protective function of the forest, perhaps, in part, of 
a chemical nature, which may be noticed here. 


Trees as a Protection against Malaria. 


The influence of forests in preventing the diffusion of mias- 
matic vapors is not a matter of familiar observation, and per- 


* Schacht ascribes to the forest:a specific, if not a measurable, influence 
upon the constitution of the atmosphere. ‘‘ Plants imbibe from the air car- 
bonic acid and other gaseous or volatile products exhaled by animals or de- 
veloped by the natural phenomena of decomposition. On the other hand, the 
vegetable pours into the atmosphere oxygen, which is taken up by animals 
and appropriated by them. The tree, by means of its leaves and its young 
herbaceous twigs, presents a considerable surface for absorption and evapora- 
tion; it abstracts the carbon of carbonic acid, and solidifies it in wood, fecula, 
and a multitude of other compounds. ‘The result is that a forest withdraws 
from the air, by its great absorbent surface, much more gas than meadows or 
cultivated fields, and exhales proportionally a considerably greater quantity 
of oxygen. The influence of the forests on the chemical composition of the 
atmosphere is, in a word, of the highest importance.’’—Les Arbres, p. 111. 

See on this subject a paper by J. Jamin, in the Pevue des Deux Mondes for 
Sept. 15, 1864; and, on the effects of human industry on the atmosphere, an 
article in Aus der Natur, vol. 29, 1864, pp. 443, 449, 465, e¢ seg. See also 
ALFRED Maury, Les Moréts de la Gaule, p. 107. 


TREES AS A PROTECTION AGAINST MALARIA. 1H 


haps it does not come strictly within the sphere of the present 
inguiry, but its importance will justify me in devoting some space 
to the subject. “It has been observed” (I quote from Bec- 
querel) “that humid air, charged with miasmata, is deprived 
of them in passing through the forest. Rigaud de Lille ob- 
served localities in Italy where the interposition of a screen of 
trees preserved everything beyond it, while the unprotected 
grounds were subject to fevers.” * Few European countries 
present better opportunities for observation on this point than 
Italy, because in that kingdom the localities exposed to mias- 
matic exhalations are numerous, and belts of trees, if not for- 
ests, are of so frequent occurrence that their efticacy in this 
respect can be easily tested. The belief that rows of trees 
afford an important protection against malarious influences is 
very general among Italians best qualified by intelligence and 
professional experience to judge upon the subject. The com- 
missioners, appointed to report on the measures to be adopted 
for the improvement of the Tuscan Maremme, advised the 
planting of three or four rows of poplars, Populus alba, in such 
directions as to obstruct the currents of air from malarious lo- 
ealities, and thus intercept a great proportion of the pernicious 
exhalations.” + Maury believed that a few rows of sunflowers, 
planted between the Washington Observatory and the marshy 
banks of the Potomac, had saved the inmates of that establish- 
ment from the intermittent fevers to which they had been for- 
merly liable. Maury’s experiments have been repeated in 
Italy. Large plantations of sunflowers have been made upon 
the alluvial deposits of the Oglio, above its entrance into the 
Lake of Iseo, near Pisogne, and it is said with favorable results 
to the health of the neighborhood.t In fact, the generally 
beneficial effects of a forest wall or other vegetable screen, as 
a protection against noxious exhalations from marshes or other 


* BECQUEREL, Des Climats, etc., p. 9. 

¢ SALVAGNOLI, Rapporto sul Bonijicamento delle Maremme Toscane, pp. xli., 
124. 

¢ Jl Politecnico, Milano, Aprile e Maggio, 1863, p. 35. 


158 TREES AS A PROTECTION AGAINST MALARIA. 


sources of disease, situated to the windward of them, are very 
commonly admitted. 

It is argued that, in these cases, the foliage of trees and of 
other vegetables exercises a chemical as well as a mechanical 
effect upon the atmosphere, and some, who allow that forests 
may intercept the circulation of the miasmatic effluvia of 
swampy soils, or even render them harmless by decomposing 
them, contend, nevertheless, that they are themselves active 
causes of the production of malaria. The subject has been a 
good deal discussed in Italy, and there is some reason to think 
that under special circumstances the influence of the forest in 
this respect may be prejudicial rather than salutary, though 
this does not appear to be generally the case.* It is, at all 


* SanvaGnoui, Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane, pp. 213, 214. The sani- 
tary action of the forest has been lately matter of much attention in Italy. 
See Rendieonti del Congresso Medico del 1869 a Firenze, and especially the im- 
portant observations of Setmi1, J? Miasma Palustre, Padua, 1870, pp. 109 e 
seg. This action is held by this able writer to be almost wholly chemical, and 
he earnestly recommends the plantation of groves, at least of belts of trees, 
as an effectual protection against the miasmatic influence of marshes. Very 
interesting observations on this point will be found in EBERMAYER, Die 
Physikatischen Hinwirkungen des Waldes, Aschaffenburg, 1873, B. I., pp. 237 
et seq., where great importance is ascribed to the development of ozone by the 
chemical action of the forest. The beneficial influence of the ozone of the 
forest atmosphere on the human system is, however, questioned by some 
observers. See also the able memoir: Del Miasma vegetale e delle Malattie 
Miasmatiche of Dr. D. PANTALEONI in Lo Sperimentale, vol, xxii., 1870. 

The necessity of such hygienic improvements as shall render the new 
capital of Italy a salubrious residence gives great present importance to this 
question, and it is much to be hoped that the Agro Romano, as well as more 
distant parts of the Campagna, will soon be dotted with groves and traversed 
by files of rapidly growing trees. Many forest trees grow with great luxu- 
riance in Italy, and a moderate expense in plantation would in a very few 
years determine whether any amelioration of the sanitary condition of Rome 
can be expected from this measure. 

It is said by recent writers that in India the villages of the natives and the 
encampments of European troops, situated in the midst or in the neighbor- 
hood of groves and of forests, are exempt from cholera. Similar observations 
were also made in 1854 in Germany when this terrible disease was raging 
there. It is hence inferred that forests prevent the spreading of this malady, 
or rather the development of those unknown influences of which cholera is 


TREES AS SHELTER TO GROUND TO THE LEEWARD. 159 


events, well known that the great swamps of Virginia and the 
Carolinas, in climates nearly similar to that of Italy, are healthy 
even to the white man, so long as the forests in and around 
them remain, but become very insalubrious when the woods 
are felled.* 


Trees as Shelter to Ground to the Leeward. 


As a mechanical obstruction, trees impede the -passage of 
air-currents over the ground, which, as is well known, is one 
of the most efficient agents in promoting evaporation and the 
refrigeration resulting from it.+ In the forest, the air is almost 


the result. These influences, if we may believe certain able writers on medi- 
cal subjects, are telluric rather than meteoric ; and they regard it as probable 
that the uniform moisture of soil in forests may be the immediate cause of 
the immunity enjoyed by such localities. See an article by PETTENKOFER 
in the Siid-Deutsche Presse, August, 1869; and the observations of EBuR- 
MAYER in the work above quoted, pp. 246 et seg. 

In Australia and New Zealand, as well as generally in the Southern Hemis- 
phere, the indigenous trees are all evergreens, and even deciduous trees intro- 
duced from the other side of the equator become evergreen. In those 
regions, even in the most swampy localities, malarious diseases are nearly, if 
not altogether, unknown. Is this most important fact due to the persistence 
of the foliage ? 

Mossman, Origin of Climates, pp. 874, 393, 410, 425, ef seq. 

* Except in the seething marshes of northern tropical and subtropical 
regions, where vegetable decay is extremely rapid, the uniformity of tempera- 
ture and of atmospheric humidity renders all forests eminently healthful. 
See HOmENSTEIN’s observations on this subject, Der Wald, p. 41; also A. 
Maury, Les Foréts dela Gaule, p. 7. 

The flat and marshy district of the Sologne in France was salubrious until 
its woods were felled. It then became pestilential, but within the last few 
years its healthfulness has been restored by forest plantations. JULES CLAVE 
in Revue des Deux Mondes for 1st March, 1866, p. 209. 

There is no question that open squares and parks conduce to the salubrity 
of cities, and many observers are of opinion that the trees and other vegeta- 
bles with which such grounds are planted contribute essentially to their bene- 
ficial influence. See an article in Aws der Natur, xxii., p. 813. 

{+ It is perhaps tco much to say that the influence of trees upon the 
wind is strictly limited to the mechanical resistance of their trunks, branches, 
and foliage. So far as the forest, by dead or by living action, raises or 


x=) 


160 TREES AS SHELTER TO GROUND TO THE LEEWARD. 


quieseent, and moves only as local changes of temperature 
affect the specific gravity of its particles. Hence there is often 
a dead calm in the woods when a furious blast is raging in the 
open country at a few yards’ distance. The denser the forest 
—as, for example, where it consists of spike-leaved trees, or is 
thickly intermixed with them—the more obyious is its effect, 
and no one can have passed from the field to the wood in cold, 
windy weather, without having remarked it.* 


lowers the temperature of the air within it, so far it creates upward or down- 
ward currents in the atmosphere above it, and, consequently, a flow of air 
towards or from itself. These air-streams have a certain, though doubt- 
less a very small, influence on the force and direction of greater atmospheria 
movements. 

* As a familiar illustration of the influence of the forest in checking the 
movement of winds, I may mention the well-known fact, that the sensible 
cold is never extreme in thick woods, where the motion of the air is little 
felt. The lumbermen in Canada and the Northern United States labor in the 
woods, without inconvenience, when the mercury stands many degrees below 
the zero of Fahrenheit, while in the open grounds, with only a moderate 
breeze, the same temperature is almost insupportable. The engineers and 
firemen of locomotives, employed on railways running through forests of any 
considerable extent, observe that, in very cold weather, it is much easier to 
keep up the steam while the engine is passing through the woods than in 
the open ground. As soon as the train emerges from the shelter of the trees 
the steam-gauge falls, and the stoker is obliged to throw in a liberal supply 
of fuel to bring it up again. 

Another less frequently noticed fact, due, no doubt, in a great measure 
to the immobility of the air, is, that sounds are transmitted to incredible 
distances in the unbroken forest. Many instances of this have fallen under 
my own observation, and others, yet more striking, have been related to 
me by credible and competent witnesses familiar with a more primitive 
condition of the Anglo-American world. An acute observer of natural 
phenomena, whose childhood and youth were spent in the interior of one 
of the newer New England States, has often told me that when he estab. 
lished his home in the forest, he always distinctly heard, in still weather, 
the plash of horses’ feet, when they forded a small brook nearly seyen- 
eighths of a mile from his house, though a portion of the wood that inter- 
vened consisted of a ridge seventy or eighty feet higher than either the house 
or the ford. 

Ihave no doubt that, in such cases, the stillness of the air is the most 
important element in the extraordinary transmissibility of sound; but it 
must be 2dmitted that the absence of the multiplied and confused noises, 


TREES AS SHELTER TO GROUND TO THE LEEWARD. 161 


The action of the forest, considered merely as a mechanical 
shelter to grounds lying to the leeward of it, might seem to be 
an influence of too restricted a character to deserve much 
notice; but many facts concur to show that it is a most import- 
ant element in local climate. 


which accompany human industry in countries thickly peopled by man, 
contributes to the same result. We become, by habit, almost insensible to 
the familiar and never-resting voices of civilization in cities and towns; 
but the indistinguishable drone, which sometimes escapes even the ear of 
him who listens for it, deadens and often quite obstructs the transmission 
of sounds which would otherwise be clearly audible. An observer, who 
wishes to appreciate that hum of civic life which he cannot analyze, will 
find an excellent opportunity by placing himself on the hill of Capo di Monte 
at Naples, in the line of prolongation of the street called Spaccanapoli. 

It is probably to the stillness of which I have spoken that we are to 
ascribe the transmission of sound to great distances at sea in calm weather. 
In June, 1853, I and my family were passengers on board a ship-of-war 
bound up the Algean. On the evening of the 27th of that month, as we 
were discussing, at the tea-table, some observations of Humboldt on this 
subject, the captain of the ship told us that he had once heard a single gun 
at sea at the distance of ninety nautical miles, The next morning, though 
a light breeze had sprung up from the north, the sea was of glassy smooth- 
ness when we went on deck. As we came up, an officer told us that he 
had heard a gun at sunrise, and the conversation of the previous evening 
suggested the inquiry whether it could have been fired from the combined 
French and English fleet then lying at Beshika Bay. Upon examination 
of our position we were found to have been, at sunrise, ninety sea miles 
from that point. We continued beating up northwards, and between sun- 
rise and twelve o’clock meridian of the 28th, we had made twelve miles 
northing, reducing our distance from Beshika Bay to seventy-eight sea 
miles. At noon we heard several guns so distinctly that we were able to 
count the number. On the 29th we came up with the fleet, and learned 
from an officer who came on board that a royal salute had been fired at 
noon on the 28th, in honor of the day as the anniversary of the Queen of 
England’s coronation. The report at sunrise was evidently the morning gun, 
those at noon the salute. 

Such cases are rare, because the sea is seldom still, and the xvudrov 
avijpiSpov yéAacue. rarely silent, over so great aspace as ninety or even seyenty- 
eight nautical miles. I apply the epithet silent to yéAacua advisedly. I am 
convinced that Aischylus meant the audible laugh of the waves, which is in- 
deed of countless multiplicity, not the visible smile of the sea, which, belong- 
ing to the great expanse as one impersonation, is single, though, like the 
human smile, ae of the play of many features. 


162 TREES AS SHELTER TO GROUND TO THE LEEWARD. 


It is evident that the effect of the forest, as a mechanical 
impediment to the passage of the wind, would extend to a very 
considerable distance above its own height, and hence protect 
while standing, or lay open when felled, a much larger surface 
than might at first thought be supposed. The atmosphere, 
movable as are its particles, and light and elastic as are its 
masses, is nevertheless held together as a continuous whole by 
the gravitation of its atoms and their consequent pressure on 
each other, if not by attraction between them, and, therefore, 
an obstruction which mechanically impedes the movement of a 
given stratum of air will retard the passage of the strata above 
and below it. To this effect may often be added that of an 
ascending current from the forest itself, which must always 
exist when the atmosphere within the wood is warmer than the 
stratum of air above it, and must be of almost constant occur- 
rence in the case of cold winds, from whatever quarter, because 
the still air in the forest is slow in taking up the temperature 
of the moving columns and currents around and above it. Ex- 
perience, in fact, has shown that mere rows of trees, and even 
much lower obstructions, are of essential service in defending 
vegetation against the action of the wind. Hardy proposes 
planting, in Algeria, belts of trees at the distance of one hun- 
dred metres from each other, as a shelter which experience had 
proved to be useful in France.* “In the valley of the Rhone,” 
says Becquerel, “a simple hedge, two metres in height, is a suf- 
ficient protection for‘a distance of twenty-two métres.”+ The 
mechanical shelter acts, no doubt, chiefly as a defence against 


* BECQUEREL, Des Climats, etc., p. 179. + Ibid., p. 116. 

Becquerel’s views have been amply confirmed by recent extensive experiments 
on the bleak, stony, and desolate plain of the Crau in the Department of the 
Bouches-du-Rhone, which had remained a naked waste from the earliest 
ages of history. Belts of trees prove a secure protection even against the 
furious and chilly blasts of the Mistral, and in this shelter plantations of fruit- 
trees and vegetables, fertilized by the waters and the slime of the Durance, 
which are conducted and distributed over the Crau, thrive with the greatest 
luxuriance. 

SURELL, Etude sur les Torrents, 2d edition, 1872, ii., p, 35. 


TREES AS SHELTER TO GROUND TO THE LEEWARD. 163 


the mechanical force of the wind, but its uses are by no means 
limited to this effect. If the current of air which it resists 
moyes horizontally, it would prevent the access of cold or parch- 
ing blasts to the ground for a great distance; and did the wind 
even descend at a large angle with the surface, still a consider- 
able extent of ground would be protected by a forest to the 
windward of it. 

In the report of a committee appointed in 1836 to examine 
an article of the forest code of France, Arago observes: “If a 
curtain of forest on the coasts of Normandy and of Brittany 
were destroyed, these two provinces would become accessible to 
the winds from the west, tothe mild breezes of the sea. Hence 
a decrease of the cold of winter. If a similar forest were to 
be cleared on the eastern border of France, the glacial east 
wind would prevail with greater strength, and the winters’ 
would become more severe. Thus the removal of a belt of 
wood would produce opposite effects in the two regions.” * 

This opinion receives confirmation from an observation of 
Dr. Dwight, who remarks, in reference to the woods of New 
England: “ Another effect of removing the forest will be the 
free passage of the winds, and among them of the southern 
winds, over the surface. This, I think, has been an increasing 
fact within my own remembrance. As the cultivation of the 
country has extended farther to the north, the winds from the 
south have reached distances more remote from the ocean, and 
imparted their warmth frequently, and in such degrees as, 
forty years since, were in the same places very little known. 
This fact, also, contributes to lengthen the summer and to 
shorten the winter half of the year.” + 

It is thought in Italy that the clearing of the Apennines 
has very materially affected the climate of the valley of the 
Po. It is asserted in Le Alpz che cingono 0 Italia that: “In 
consequence of the felling of the woods on the Apennines, the 
sirocco prevails greatly on the right bank of the Po, in the 


* BECQUEREL, Des Climats, etc., Discours Prélim., vi. 
t Travels, i., p. 61. 


164 ‘TREES AS SHELTER TO GROUND TO THE LEEWARD. 


Parmesan territory, and in a part of Lombardy; it injures the 
harvests and the vineyards, and sometimes ruins the crops of the 
season. To the same cause many ascribe the meteorological 
changes in the precincts of Modena ‘and of Reggio. In the 
communes of these districts, where formerly straw roofs resisted 
the force of the winds, tiles are now hardly sufficient; in others, 
where tiles answered for roofs, large slabs of stone are now 
ineffectual ; and in many neighboring communes the grapes 
and the grain are swept off by the blasts of the south and 
south-west winds.” 

According to the same authority, the pinery of Porto, near 
Ravenna—which is twenty miles long, and is one of the oldest 
pine woods in Italy—having been replanted with resinous trees 
after it was unfortunately cut, has relieved the city from the 
sirocco to which it had become exposed, and in a great degree 
restored its ancient climate.* 

The felling of the woods on the Atlantic coast of Jutland 
has exposed the soil not only to drifting sands, but to sharp sea- 
winds, that have exerted a sensible deteriorating effect on the 
climate of that peninsula, which has no mountains to serve at 
once asa barrier to the force of the winds, and as a storehouse of 
moisture received by precipitation or condensed from atmos- 
pheric vapors. 

* Le Alpi che cingono Italia, pp. 370, 371. 

+ BERGSOE, Reventlovs Virksomhed, ii., p. 125. 

The following well-attested instance of a local change of climate is probably 
to be referred to the influence of the forest as a shelter against cold winds. To 
supply the extraordinary demand for Italian iron occasioned by the exclusion of 
English iron in the time of Napoleon I., the furnaces of the valleys of Bergamo 
were stimulated to great activity. ‘‘ The ordinary productiou of charcoal not 
sufficing to feed the furnaces and the forges, the woods were felled, the copses 
cut before their time, and the whole economy of the forest was deranged. At 
Piazzatorre there was such a devastation of the woods, and consequently such 
an increased severity of climate, that maize no longer ripened. An associa- 
tion, formed for the purpose, effected the restoration of the forest, and maize 
flourishes again in the fields of Piazzatorre.”—Report by G. Rosa, in Jl Politec- 
nico, Dicembre, 1861, p. 614. 

Similar ameliorations have been produced by plantations in Belgium. In 
an interesting series of articles by Baude, entitled, ‘‘ Les Cotes de la Manche,” 


TREES AS SHELTER TO GROUND TO THE LEEWARD. 165 


The local retardation of spring, so much complained of in 
Italy, France, and Switzerland, and the increased frequency of 
late frosts at that season, appear to be ascribable to the admmis- 
sion of cold blasts to the surface, by the felling of the forests 
which formerly both screened it as by a wall, and communi- 
cated the warmth of their soil to the air and earth to the leeward. 
Caimi states that since the cutting down of the woods of the 
Apennines, the cold winds destroy or stunt the vegetation, 
and that, in consequence of “the usurpation of winter on the 
domain of spring,” the district of Mugello has lost all its mul- 
berries, except the few which find in the lee of buildings a pro- 
tection like that once furnished by the forest.* 

The department of Ardéche, which now contains not a single 
considerable wood, has experienced within thirty years a climatic 
disturbance, of which the late frosts, formerly unknown in the 
country, are one of the most melancholy effects. Similar results 
have been observed in the plain of Alsace, in consequence of 
the denudation of several of the crests of the Vosges. 

Dussard, as quoted by Ribbe,t maintains that even the 


in the Revue des Deux Mondes, I find this statement: ‘‘ A spectator, placed on 
the famous bell-tower of the cathedral of Auiwerp, saw, not long since, on the 
opposite side of the Schelde, only a vast desert plain; now he sees a forest, 
the limits of which are confounded with the horizon. Let him enter within 
its shade. The supposed forest is but a system of regular rows of trees, the 
oldest of which is not forty years of age. These plantations have ameliorated 
the climate which had doomed to sterility the soil where they are planted. 
While the tempest is violently agitating their tops, the air a little below is 
still, and sands far more barren than the plateau of La Hague have been trans- 
formed, under their protection, into fertile fields.”—Revue des Deua Mondes, 
January, 1859, p. 277. 

* Cenni sulla Importanza é Coltura dei Boschi, p. 31. 

+ CLAVE, Etudes, p. 44. 

Tt has been observed in Sweden that the spring, in many districts where the 
forests have been cleared off, now comes on a fortnight later than in the last 
century.—ASBJORNSEN, Om Skovene t Norge, p. 101. 

¢ La Provence au point de vue des Torrents et des Inondations, p. 19. 

Dussard is doubtless historically inaccurate in making the origin of the 
mistral so late as the time of Augustus. Diodorus Siculus, who was a con- 
temporary of Julius Cesar, describes the north-west winds in Gaul ag 


166 ‘TREES AS SHELTER TO GROUND TO TUE LEEWARD. 


mistral, or north-west wind, whose chilling Lbiasts are so fatal 
to tender vegetation in the spring, “is the child of man, the 
result of his devastations.” “Under the reign of Augustus,” 
continues he, “the forests which protected the Cévennes were 
felled, or destroyed by fire, in mass. A vast country, before 
covered with impenetrable woods-—powerful obstacles to the 
movement and even to the formation of hurricanes—was sud- 
denly denuded, swept bare, stripped, and soon after, a scourge 
hitherto unknown, struck terror over the land from Avignon 
to the Bouches-du-Rhone, thence to Marseilles, and then ex- 
tended its ravages, diminished indeed by a long career which 
had partially exhausted its force, over the whole maritime 
frontier. The people thought this wind a curse sent of God. 
They raised altars to it and offered sacrifices to appease its 
rage.” It seems, however, that this plague was less destruc- 
tive than at present, until the close of the sixteenth century, 
when further clearings had removed most of the remaining 
barriers to its course. Up to that time, the north-west wind 
appears not to have attained to the maximum of specific effect 
which now characterizes it as a local phenomenon. Extensive 
districts, from which the rigor of the seasons has now banished 
valuable crops, were not then exposed to the loss of their har- 
vests by tempests, cold, or drought. ‘The deterioration was 
rapid in its progress. Under the Consulate, the clearings had 
exerted so injurious an effect upon the climate, that the culti- 
vation of the olive had retreated several leagues, and since the 
winters and springs of 1820 and 1886, this branch of rural 
industry has been abandoned ina great number of localities 
where it was advantageously pursued before. The orange 
now flourishes only at a few sheltered points of the coast, and 
it is threatened even at Hlyeéres, where the clearing of the 


violent enough to hurl along stones as large as the fist with clouds of sand 
and gravel, to strip travellers of their arms and clothing, and to throw mounted 
men from their horses. Bibliotheca Historica, lib. v., ec. xxvi. Diodorus, it 
is true, is speaking of the climate of Gaul in general, but his description can 
hardly refer to anything but the mistral of South-eastern France. 


ABSORBING AND EMITTING SURFACE. 167 


hills near the town has proved very prejudicial to this valu- 
able tree. 

Marchand informs us that, since the felling of the woods, 
late spring frosts are more frequent in many localities north 
of the Alps; that fruit-trees thrive no longer, and that it is 
difficult even to raise young fruit-trees.* 


Influence of the Forest, considered as Inorganic Matter, on 
Temperature. 


The evaporation of fluids, and the condensation and expan- 
sion of vapors and gases, are attended with changes of temper- 
ature; and the quantity of moisture which the air is capable of 
containing, and of course, other things being equal, the evapo- 
ration, rise and fall with the thermometer. The hygroscopical 
and the thermoscopical conditions of the atmosphere are, there- 
fore, inseparably connected as reciprocally dependent quantities, 
and neither can be fully discussed without taking notice of 
the other. The leaves of living trees exhale enormous quan- 
tities of gas and of aqueous vapor, and they largely absorb 
gases, and, under certain conditions, probably also water. 
Hence they affect more or less powerfully the temperature as 
well as the humidity of the air. But the forest, regarded 
purely as inorganic matter, and without reference to its living 
processes of absorption and exhalation of gases and of water, 
has, as an absorbent, a radiator and a conductor of heat, and as 
a mere covering of the ground, an influence on the temperature 
of the air and the earth, which may be considered by itself. 


Absorbing and Emitting Surface. 


A given area of ground, as estimated by the every-day rule 
of measurement in yards or acres, presents always the same 


* Ueber die Entwaldung der Gebirge, p. 28. 

Interesting facts and observations on this point will be found in the valuable 
Report on the Effects of the Destruction of the Forests in Wisconsin, by LAPHAM 
and others, pp. 6, 18, 20. 


168 ABSORBING AND EMITTING SURFACE. 


apparent quantity of absorbing, radiating, and reflecting sur- 
face; but the real extent of that surface is very variable, 
depending, as it does, upon its configuration, and the bulk and 
form of the adventitious objects it bears upen it; and, besides, 
the true superficies remaining the same, its power of absorp- 
tion, radiation, reflection, and conduction of heat will be much 
affected by its consistence, its greater or less humidity, and its 
color, as well as by its inclination of plane and exposure. An 
acre of clay, rolled hard and smooth, would have great reflect- 
ing power, but its radiation would be much increased by break- 
ing it up into clods, because the actually exposed surface would 
be greater, though the outline of the field remained the same. 
The inequalities, natural or artificial, which always occur in the 
surface of ordinary earth, affect in the same way its quantity of 
superficies acting upon the temperature of the atmosphere, 
and acted on by it, though the amount of this action and reac- 
tion is not susceptible of measurement. 

Analogous effects are produced by other objects, of whatever 
form or character, standing or lying upon the earth, and no 
solid can be placed upon a flat piece of ground, without itself 
exposing a greater surface than it covers. This applies, of 
course, to forest trees and their leaves, and indeed to all vegeta- 
bles, as well as to other prominent bodies. If we suppose 
forty trees to be planted on an acre, one being situated in the 
centre of every square of two rods the side, and to grow until 
their branches and leaves everywhere meet, it is evident that, 
when in full foliage, the trunks, branches, and leaves would 
present an amount of thermoscopic surface much greater than 
that of an acre of bare earth; and besides this, the fallen leaves 
lying scattered on the ground, would somewhat augment the 
suin-total.* On the other hand, the growing leaves of trees 
generally form a succession of stages, or, loosely speaking, 


* “(he Washington elm at Cambridge—a tree of no extraordinary size—was 
some years ago estimated to produce a crop of seven millions of leaves, ex- 
posing a surface of two hundred thousand square feet, or about five acres of 
foliage.” —Gray, First Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physvology. 


ABSORBING AND EMITTING SURFACE. 169 


layers, corresponding to the annual growth of the branches, 
and more or less overlying each other. This disposition of 
the foliage interferes with that free communication between 
sun and sky above, and leaf-surface below, on which the 
amount of radiation and absorption of heat depends. From all 
these considerations, it appears that though the effective ther- 
moscopic surface of a forest in full leaf does not exceed that of 
bare ground in the same proportion as does its measured super- 
ficies, yet the actual quantity of area capable of receiving and 
emitting heat must be greater in the former than in the latter 
case.* 

It must further be remembered that the form and texture of 
a given surface are important elements in determining its 
thermoscopic character. Leaves are porous, and admit air and 
light more or less freely into their substance ; they are gener- 
ally smooth and even glazed on one surface ; they are usually 
covered on one or both sides with spicula, and they very com- 
monly present one or more acuminated points in their outline 
—all circumstances which tend to augment their power of 
emitting heat by reflection or radiation. Direct experiment on 
growing trees is very difficult, nor is it in any case practicable 
to distinguish how far a reduction of temperature produced by 
vegetation is due to radiation, and how far to exhalation of the 
gaseous and watery fluids of the plant; for both processes 
usually go on together. But the frigorific effect of leafy strue- 
ture is well observed in the deposit of dew and the occurrence 
of hoarfrost on the foliage of grasses and other small vegetables, 
and on other objects of similar form and consistence, when the 
temperature of the air a few feet above has not been brought 
down to the dew-point, still less to 32°, the degree of cold re- 
quired to congeal dew to frost. 


* See, on this particular point, and on the general influence of the forest on 
temperature, HUMBOLDT, Ansichten der Natur, i., 158. 

+ The leaves and twigs of plants may be reduced by radiation to a tempera- 
ture lower than that of the ambient atmosphere, and even be frozen when the 
air in contact with them is above 32°. Their temperature may be communicated 


170 ABSORBING AND EMITTING SURFACE. 


We are also to take into account the action of the forest as a 
conductor of heat between the atmosphere and the earth. In 
the most important countries of America and Europe, and es- 
pecially in those which have suffered most from the destruction 
of the woods, the superficial strata of the earth are colder in 
winter, and warmer in summer, than those a few inches lower, 
and their shifting temperature approximates to the atmospheric 
mean of the respective seasons. The roots of large trees pene- 
trate beneath the superficial strata, and reach earth of a nearly 
constant temperature, corresponding to the mean for the entire 
year. As conductors, they convey the heat of the atmosphere to 
the earth when the earth is colder than the air, and transmit it 
in the contrary direction when the temperature of the earth is 
higher than that of the atmosphere. Of course, then, as con- 
ductors, they tend to equalize the temperature of the earth and 
the air. 

In countries where the questions I am considering have the 
greatest practical importance, a very large proportion, if not 
a majority, of the trees are of deciduous foliage, and their radi- 
ating as well as their shading surface is very much greater in 
summer than in winter. In the latter season, they little obstruct 
the reception of heat by the ground or the radiation from it ; 


to the dew deposited on them and thus this dew be converted into frost when 
globules of watery fluid floating in the atmosphere near them, in the condition 
of fog or vapor, do not become congealed. 

It has long been known that vegetables can be protected against frost by 
diffusing smoke through the atmosphere above them. This method has been 
lately practised in France on a large scale: vineyards of forty or fifty acres have 
been protected by placing one or two rows of pots of burning coal-tar, or of 
naphtha, along the north side of the vineyard, and thus keeping up a cloud of 
smoke for two or three hours before and after sunrise. The expense is said 
to be small, and probably it might be reduced by mixing some less combusti- 
ble substance, as earth, with the fluid, and thus checking its too rapid burning. 

The radiating and refrigerating power of objects by no means depends on 
their form alone. Melloni cut sheets of metal into the shape of leaves and 
grasses, and found that they produced little cooling effect, and were not mois- 
tened under atmospheric conditions which determined a plentiful deposit of 
dew on the leaves of vegetables. 


DEAD PRODUCTS OF TREES. 171 


whereas, in the former, they often interpose a complete canopy 
between the ground and the sky, and materially interfere with 
both processes. 


Dead Products of Trees. 


Besides this various action of standing trees, considered as in- 
organic matter, the forest exercises, by the annual moulting of 
its foliage, still another influence on the temperature of the 
earth, and, consequently, of the atmosphere which rests upon it. 
If we examine the constitution of the superficial soil in a primi- 
tive or an old and undisturbed artificially planted wood, we 
find, first, a deposit of undecayed leaves, twigs, and seeds, lying 
in loose layers on the surface ; then, more compact beds of the 
same materials in incipient, and,as we descend, more and more 
advanced, stages of decomposition ; then, a mass of black mould, 
in which traces of organic structure are hardly discoverable 
except by microscopic examination ; then, a stratum of mmeral 
soil, more or less mixed with vegetable matter carried down 
into it by water, or resulting from the decay of roots; and, 
finally, the inorganic earth or rock itself. Without this deposit 
of the dead products of trees, this latter would be the superfi- 
cial stratum, and as its powers of absorption, radiation, and con- 
duction of heat would differ essentiaily from those of the layers 
with which it has been covered by the droppings of the forest, 
it would act upon the temperature of the atmosphere, and be 
acted on by it, in a very different way from the leaves and 
mould which rest upon it. Dead leaves, still entire, or partially 
decayed, are very indifferent conductors of heat, and, therefore, 
though they diminish the warming infiuence of the summer 
sun on the soil below them, they, on the other hand, prevent the 
escape of heat from that soil in winter, and, consequently, in 
cold climates, even when the ground is not covered by a pro- 
tecting mantle of snow, the earth does not freeze to as great a 
depth in the wood as in the open field. 


172 SPECIFIC HEAT. 


Specific Heat. 


Trees, considered as organisms, produce in themselves, or in 
the air, a certain amount of heat, by absorbing and condensing 
atmospheric gases, and they exert an opposite influence by 
absorbing water and exhaling it in the form of vapor; but 
there is still another mode by which their living processes may 
warm the air around them, independently of the thermometrice 
effects of condensation and evaporation. The vital heat of a 
dozen persons raises the temperature of a room. If trees pos- 
sess a specific temperature of their own, an organic power of 
generating heat like that with which the warm-blooded ani- 
mals are gifted, though by a different process, a certain amount 
of weight is to be ascribed to this element in estimating the 
action of the forest upon atmospheric temperature. 

Boussingault remarks: “In many flowers there has been 
observed a very considerable evolution of heat, at the approach 
of fecundation. In certain arwms the temperature rises to 40° 
or 50° Cent. [= 104° or 122° Fahr.] It is very probable that 
this phenomenon is general, and varies only in the intensity 
with which it is manifested.” * 

If we suppose the fecundation of the flowers of forest trees 
to be attended with a tenth only of this calorific power, they 
could not fail to exert an important influence on the warmth 
of the atmospheric strata in contact with them. 

Experiments by Meguscher, in Lombardy, led that observer 
to conclude “ that the wood of a living tree maintains a tem- 
perature of + 12° or 13° Cent. [= 54°, 56° Fahr.] when the 
temperature of the air stands at 3°, 7°, and 8° [= 87°, 46°, 
47° F.] above zero, and that the internal warmth of the tree 
does not rise and fall in proportion to that of the atmosphere. 
So long as the latter is below 18° [= 67° Fahr.], that of the 
tree is always the highest ; but if the temperature of the air 
rises to 18°, that of the vegetable growth is the lowest. Since, 


* Leonomic Rurdle,i., p. 22. 


SPECIFIC HEAT. Lis 


then, trees maintain at all seasons a constant mean tempera- 
ture of 12° [= 54° Fahr.], it is easy to see why the air in con- 
tact with the forest must be warmer in winter, cooler in sum- 
mer, than in situations where it is deprived of that influence.”* 

Professor Henry says: “As a general deduction from chemi- 
eal and mechanical principles, we think no change of tempera- 
ture is ever produced where the actions belonging to one or 
both of these principles are not present. Hence, in midwinter, 
when all vegetable functions are dormant, we do not believe 
that any heat is developed by a tree, or that its interior differs 
in temperature from its exterior further than it is protected 
from the external air. The experiments which have been 
made on this point, we think, have been directed by a false 
analogy. During the active circulation of the sap and the pro- 
duction of new tissue, variations of temperature belonging ex- 
clusively to the plane may be observed; but it is inconsistent 
with general principles that heat should be generated where 
no change is taking place.” + 

There can be no doubt that moisture is given out by trees 
and evaporated in extremely cold winter weather, and unless 
new fluid were supplied from the roots by the exercise of 
some vital function, the tree would be exhausted of its juices 
before winter was over. But this is not observed to be the 


* Memoria sur Boschi della Lombardia, p. 45. 

The results of recent experiments by Becquerel do not accord with those 
obtained by Meguscher, and the former eminent physicist holds that ‘‘a tree 
is warmed in the air like any inert body.” At the same time he asserts, as a 
fact well ascertained by experiment, that ‘‘ vegetables possess in themselves 
the power of resisting extreme cold for a certain length of time, C 
and hence it is jelieved that there may exist in the organism of plants a Picios 
independent of the conduction of caloric, which resists a degree of cold above 
the freezing-point.” In a following page he cites observations made by 
Bugeaud, under the parallel of 58° N. L., between the months of November 
and June, during most of which time, of course, vegetable life was in its 
deepest lethargy. Bugeaud found that when the temperature of the air was 

—34°.60, that of a poplar was only at —29°.70, which certainly confirms 
the doctrine that trees exercise a certain internal resistance against cold. 

+ United States Patent Office Report for 1857, p. 504. 


174 SPECIFIC HEAT. 


fact, and, though the point is disputed, respectable authorities 
declare that “wood felled in the depth of winter is the heaviest 
and fullest of sap.”* Warm weather in winter, of too short 
continuance to affect the temperature of the ground sensibly, 
stimulates a free flow of sap in the maple. Thus, in the last 
week of December, 1862, and the first week of January, 1863, 
sugar was made from that tree in various parts of New Eng- 
land. “A single branch of a tree, admitted into a warm room 
in winter through an aperture in a window, opened its buds 
and developed its leaves, while the rest of the tree in the exter- 
nal air remained in its winter sleep.”+ Like facts are matter 
of every-day observation in graperies where the vine is often 
planted outside the wall, the stem passing through an aperture 
into the warm interior. The roots, of course, stand in ground 
of the ordinary winter temperature, but vegetation is developed 
in the branches at the pleasure of the gardener. The roots of 
forest trees in temperate climates remain, for the most part, 
in a moist soil, of a temperature not much below the annual 
mean, through the whole winter; and we cannot account for 
the uninterrupted moisture of the tree, unless we suppose that 
the roots furnish a constant supply of water. 

Atkinson describes a ravine in a valley in Siberia, which was 
filled with ice to the depth of twenty-five feet. Poplars were 
growing in this ice, which was thawed to the distance of some 
inches from the stem. But the surface of the soil beneath it 
must have remained still frozen, for the holes around the trees 
were full of water resulting from its melting, and this would 
have escaped below if the ground had been thawed. In this 
case, although the roots had not thawed the thick covering of 
earth above them, the trunks must have melted the ice in con- 
tact with them. The trees, when observed by Atkinson, were 
in full leaf, but it does not appear at what period the ice around 
their stems had melted. 

From these facts, and others of the like sort, it would 
seem that “all vegetable functions are” not absolutely “ dor- 


* RossMissLer, Der Wald, p. 158. } Ibid., p. 160. 


SPECIFIC HEAT. Ve 


mant” in winter, and, therefore, that trees may give out some 
heat even at that season.” 

It does not appear that observations have been made on the 
special point of the development of heat in forest trees during 
florification, or at any other period of intense vital action; and 
hence an important element in the argument remains undeter- 
mined. The “circulation of the sap” commences at a very 
early period in the spring, and the temperature of the air in 
contact with trees may then be suficiently affected by heat 


* All evergreens, even the broad-leaved trees, resist frosts of extraordinary 
severity better than the deciduous trees of the same climates. Is not this 
because the vital processes of trees of persistent foliage are less interrupted 
during winter than those of trees which annually shed their leaves, and that 
therefore more organic heat is developed ? 

In crossing Mont Cenis in October, 1869, when the leaves of the larches on 
the northern slope and near the top of the mountain were entirely dead and 
turned brown, I observed that these trees were completcly white with hoar- 
frost. It was a wonderful sight to see how every leaf was covered with a 
delicate deposit of frozen aqueous vapor, which gave the effect of the most 
brilliant silver. On the other hand, the evergreen coniferze, which were grow- 
ing among the larches, and therefore in the same conditions of exposure, were 
almost entirely free from frost. The contrast between the verdure of the 
leaves of the evergreens and the crystalline splendor of those of the larches 
was strikingly beautiful. Was this fact due to a difference in the color and 
structure of the leaves, or rather is it a proof of a vital force of resistance to 
cold in the living foliage of the evergreen tree ? 

The low temperature of air and soil at which, in the frigid zone, as well as 
in warmer latitudes under special circumstances, the processes of vegetution go 
on, seems to necessitate the supposition that all the manifestations of vegeta- 
ble life are attended with an evolution of heat. In the United States it is 
common to protect ice, in ice-houses, by a covering of straw, which naturally 
sometimes contains kernels of grain. These often sprout, and even throw out 
roots and leaves to a considerable length, in a temperature very little above 
the freezing-point. Three or four years since I saw a lump of very clear and 
apparently solid ice, about eight inches long by six thick, on which a kernel of 
grain had sprouted in an ice-house, and sent half a dozen or more very slender 
roots into the pores of the ice and through the whole length of the lump. The 
young plant must have thrown out aconsiderable quantity of heat; for though 
the ice was, as I haye said, otherwise solid, the pores through which the roots 
passed were enlarged to perhaps double the diameter of the fibres, but still 
not so much as to prevent the retention of water in them by capillary attrac- 
tion. 


176 SPECIFIC HEAT. 


evolved in the vital processes of vegetation, to raise the thermo- 
metric mean of wooded countries for that season, and, of course, 
for the year. The determination of this point is of much greater 
importance to vegetable physiology than the question of the 
winter temperature of trees, because a slight increment of heat 
in the trees of a forest might so affect the atmosphere in con- 
tact with them as to make possible the growing of many plants 
in or near the wood which could not otherwise be reared in 
that climate. 

The evaporation of the juices of trees and other plants is 
doubtless their most important thermoscopic function, and as 
recent observations lead to the conclusion that the quantity of 
moisture exhaled by vegetables has been hitherto underrated, 
we must ascribe to this element a higher value than has been 
usually assigned to it as a meteorological influence. 

The exhalation and evaporation of the juices of trees, by 
whatever process effected, take up atmospheric heat and _pro- 
duce a proportional refrigeration. This effect is not less real, 
though to common observation less sensible, in the forest tha 
in meadow or pasture land, and it cannot be doubted that the 
local temperature is considerably affected by it. But the 
evaporation that cools the air diffuses through it, at the same 
time, a medium which powerfully resists the escape of heat 
from the earth by radiation. Visible vapors, fogs and clouds, 
it is well known, prevent frosts by obstructing radiation, or 
rather by reflecting back again the heat radiated by the earth, 
just as any mechanical screen would do. On the other hand, 
fogs and clouds intercept the rays of the sun also, and hinder 
its heat from reaching the earth. The invisible vapors given 
out by leaves impede the passage of heat reflected and radiated 
by the earth and by all terrestrial objects, but oppose much 
less resistance to the transmission of direct solar heat, and 
indeed the beams of the sun seem more scorching when received 
through clear air charged with uncondensed moisture than 
after passing through a dry atmosphere. Hence the reduction 
of temperature by the evaporation of moisture from vegetation, 


TOTAL INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON TEMPERATURE. 177 


though sensible, is less than it would be if water in the gaseous 
state were as impervious to heat given out by the sun as to that 
emitted by terrestrial objects. 


Total Influence of the Forest on Temperature. 


It has not yet been found practicable to measure, sum up, 
and equate the total influence of the forest, its processes and 
its products, dead and living, upon temperature, and investiga- 
tors differ much in their conclusions on this subject. It seems 
probable that in every particular case the result is, if not deter- 
mined, at least so much modified by local conditions which are 
infinitely varied, that no general formula is applicable to the 
question. 

In the report to which I referred on page 163, Gay-Lussac 
says: “In my opinion we have not yet any positive proof that 
the forest has, in itself, any real influence on the climate of a 
great country, or of a particular locality. By closely examin- 
ing the effects of clearing off the woods, we should perhaps 
find that, far from being an evil, it is an advantage; but these 
questions are so complicated when they are examined in a 
climatological point of view, that the solution of them is very 
difficult, not to say impossible.” 

Becquerel, on the other hand, considers it certain that in 
tropical climates the destruction of the forests is accompanied 
with an elevation of the mean temperature, and he thinks it 
highly probable that it has the same effect in the temperate 
zones. ‘The following is the substance of his remarks on this 
subject: 

“ Forests act as frigorific causes in three ways : 

“1. They shelter the ground against solar irradiation and 
maintain a greater humidity. 

“2. They produce a cutaneous transpiration by the leayes. 

“3, They multiply, by the expansion of their branches, the 
surfaces which are cooled by radiation. 


“These three causes acting with greater or less force, we 
12 


17S TOTAL INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON TEMPERATURE. 


must, in the study of the climatology of a country, take into 
account the proportion between the area of the forests and the 
surface which is bared of trees and covered with herbs and 
orasses. 

“We should be inclined to believe, @ priort, according to the 
foregoing considerations, that the clearing of the woods, by 
raising the temperature and increasing the dryness of the air, 
ought to react on climate. There is no doubt that, if the 
vast desert of the Sahara were to become wooded in the 
course of ages, the sands would cease to be heated as muchas at 
the present epoch, when the mean temperature is twenty-nine 
degrees [Centigrade, = 85° Fahr.]. In that case, the ascend- 
ing currents of warm air would cease, or be less warm, and 
would not contribute, by descending in our latitudes, to 
soften the climate of Western Europe. Thus the clearing of 
a great country may react on the climates of regions more or 
less remote from it. 

“The observations by Boussingault leave no doubt on 
this point. This writer determined the mean temperature of 
wooded and of cleared points, under the same latitude, and at 
the same elevation above the sea, in localities comprised be- 
tween the eleventh degree of north and the fifth degree of 
south latitude, that is to say, in the portion of the tropics near- 
est to the equator, and where radiation tends powerfully during 
the night to lower the temperature under a sky without 
clouds.” * 

The result of these observations, which has been pretty 
generally adopted by physicists, is that the mean temperature 
of cleared land in the tropics appears to be about one degree 
Centigrade, or a little less than two degrees of Fahrenheit, 
above that of the forest. On page 147 of the volume just 
cited, Becquerel argues that, inasmuch as the same and some- 
times a greater difference is found in favor of the open 
ground, at points within the tropics so elevated as to have a 
temperate or even a polar climate, we must conclude that the 


> BECQUEREL, Des Climats, etc., pp. 139-141. 


TOTAL INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON TEMPERATURE. 179 


forests in Northern America exert a refrigerating influence 
equally powerful. But the conditions of the soil are so differ- 
ent in the two regions compared, that I think we cannot, 
with entire confidence, reason from the one to the other, and 
it is much to be desired that observations be made on the 
summer and winter temperature of both the air and the ground 
in the depths of the North American forests, before it is too 
late. 

Recent inquiries have introduced a new element into the 
problem of the influence of the forest on temperature, or 
rather into the question of the thermometrical effects of its 
destruction. I refer to the composition of the soil in respect 
to its hygroscopicity or aptitude to absorb humidity, whether 
in a liquid or a gaseous form, and to the conducting power of 
the particles of which it is composed. * 


* Composition, texture, and color of soil are important elements to be con- 
sidered in estimating the effects of the removal of the forest upon its thermo- 
scopic action. ‘‘Hxperience has proved,” says Becquerel, ‘‘ that when the soil 
is hared, it becomes more or less heated [by the rays of the sun] according to 
the nature and the color of the particles which compose it, and according to 
its humidity, and that, in the refrigeration resulting from radiation, we 
must take into the account the conducting power of those particles also. 
Other things being equal, siliceous and calcareous sands, compared in equal 
volumes with different argillaceous earths, with calcareous powder or dust, 
with humus, with arable and with garden earth, are the soils which least 
conduct heat. It is for this reason that sandy ground, in summer, maintains 
a high temperature even during the night. We may hence conclude that 
when a sandy soil is stripped of wood, the local temperature will be raised. 
After the sands follow successively argillaceous, arable, and garden ground, 
then humus, which occupies the lowest rank. 

‘“ The retentive power of humus is but half as great as that of calcareous 
sand. We will add that the power of retaining heat is proportional to the 
density. It has also a relation to the magnitude of the particles. It is for 
this reason that ground covered with siliceous pebbles cools more slowly than 
siliceous sand, and that pebbly soils are best suited to the cultivation of the 
vine, because they advance the ripening of the grape more rapidly than chalky 
and clayey earths, which cool quickly. Hence we see that in examining the 
calorific effects of clearing forests, it is important to take into account the 
properties of the soil laid bare.”—BECQUEREL, Des Climats et des Sols boisés, 
p. 187. 


180 INFLUENCE OF FOREST ON HUMIDITY. 


The hygroscopicity of humus or vegetable earth is much 
ereater than that of any mineral soil, and consequently forest 
ground, where humus abounds, absorbs the moisture of the 
atmosphere more rapidly and in larger proportion than common 
earth. The condensation of vapor by absorption develops 
heat, and consequently elevates the temperature of the soil 
which absorbs it, together with that of air in contact with the 
surface. Von Babo found the temperature of sandy ground 
thus raised from 68° to 80° F., that of soil rich in humus from 
68° to 88°. 

The question of the influence of the woods on temperature 
does not, in the present state of our knowledge, admit of precise 
solution, and, unhappily, the primitive forests are disappear- 
ing so rapidly before the axe of the woodman, that we shall 
never be able to estimate with accuracy the climatological 
action of the natural wood, though all the physical functions of 
artificial plantations will, doubtless, one day be approximately 
known. 

But the value of trees as a mechanical screen to the soil they 
cover, and often to ground far to the leeward of them, is most 
abundantly established, and this agency alone is important 
enough to justify extensive plantation in all countries which 
do not enjoy this indispensable protection. 


Influence of Forests as Inorganic on the Humidity of the 
Air and the Earth. 


The most important hygroscopic as well as thermoscopic in- 
fluence of the forest is, no doubt, that which it exercises on the 
humidity of the air and the earth, and this climatic action it 
exerts partly as dead, partly as living matter. By its interposi- 
tion as acurtain between the sky and the ground it both checks 
evaporation from the earth, and mechanically intercepts a certain 
proportion of the dew and the lighter showers, which would 
otherwise moisten the surface of the soil, and restores it to the 


INFLUENCE OF FOREST ON HUMIDITY. 181 


atmosphere by exhalation ;* while in heavier rains, the large 
drops which fall upon the leaves and branches are broken into 
smaller ones, and consequently strike the ground with less 
mechanical force, or are perhaps even dispersed into vapor 
without reaching it.t 


* Mangotti had observed and described, in his usual picturesque way, the 
retention of rain-water by the foliage and bark of trees, but I do not know 
that any attempts were made to measure the quantity thus intercepted before 
the experiments of Becquerel, communicated to the Academy of Sciences in 
1866. These experiments embraced three series of observations continued 
respectively for periods of a year, a month, and two days. According to 
Becquerel’s measurements, the quantity falling on bare and on wooded soil re- 
spectively was as 1 to 0.67; 1 to 0.5; and 1 to 0.6, or, in other words, he 
found that only from five-tenths to sixty-seven hundredths of the precipitation 
reached the ground. —Comptes Rendus de? Académie des Sciences, 1866. 

It seemed, indeed, improbable that in rain-storms which last not hours but 
whole days in succession, so large a proportion of the downfall should continue 
to be intercepted by forest vegetation after the leaves, the bark, and the whole 
framework of the trees were thoroughly wet, but the conclusions of this 
eminent physicist appear to have been generally accepted until the very careful 
experiments of Mathieu at the Forest-School of Nancy were made known. The 
observations of Mathieu were made in a plantation of deciduous trees forty- 
two years old, and were continued through the entire years 1866, 1867, and 
1868. The result was that the precipitation in the wood was to that in an 
open glade of several acres near the forest station as 943 to 1,000, and the 
proportion in each of the three years was nearly identical. According to 
Mathieu, then, only 57 thousandths or 5.7 per cent. of the precipitation is in- 
tercepted by trees.—SuRELL, Etude sur les Torrents, 2d ed., ii., p. 98. 

By order of the Direction of the Forests of the Canton of Berne, a series of 
experiments on this subject was commenced at the beginning of the year 
1869. During the first seven months of the year (the reports for which alone 
I have seen), including, of course, the season when the foliage is most 
abundant, as well as that when it is thinnest, the pluviometers in the woods 
received only fifteen per cent. less than those in the open grounds in the 
vicinity.—RISLER, in Revue des Haux et Foréts, of 10th January, 1870. 

+ We are not, indeed, to suppose that the condensation of vapor and the 
evaporation of water are going on in the same stratum of air at the same time, 
or, in other words, that vapor is condensed into rain-drops, and rain-drops 
evaporated, under the same conditions; but rain formed in one stratum may 
fall through another, where vapor would not be condensed. Two saturated 
strata of different temperatures may be brought into contact in the hicher 
regions, and discharge large rain-drops, which, if not divided by some obstruc- 


182 THE FOREST AS ORGANIC. 


The vegetable mould, resulting from the decomposition of 
leaves and of wood, serves as a perpetual mzlch to forest-soil by 
carpeting the ground with a spongy covering which obstructs 
the evaporation from the mineral earth below,* drinks up the 
rains and melting snows that would otherwise flow rapidly 
over the surface and perhaps be conveyed to the distant sea, 
and then slowly gives out, by evaporation, infiltration, and per- 
colation, the moisture thus imbibed. The roots, too, penetrate 
far below the superficial soil, conduct water along their surface 
to the lower depths to which they reach, and thus by partially 
draining the superior strata, remove a certain quantity of mois- 
ture out of the reach of evaporation. 


The Forest as Organic. 


These are the principal modes in which the humidity of the 
atmosphere is affected by the forest regarded as lifeless matter. 
Let us inquire how its organic processes act upon this meteoro- 
logical element. 

The commonest observation shows that the wood and bark of 
living trees are always more or less pervaded with watery and 
other fluids, one of which, the sap, is very abundant in trees of 
deciduous foliage when the buds begin to swell and the leaves 
to develop themselves in the spring. This fluid is drawn prin- 
cipally, if not entirely, from the ground by the absorbent action 
of the roots, for though Schacht and some other eminent botan- 
ical physiologists have maintained that water is absorbed by the 
leaves and bark of trees, yet most experiments lead to the con- 


tion, will reach the ground, though passing through strata which would vapor- 
ize them if they were in a state of more minute division. 

* The only direct experiments known to me on the evaporation from the 
surface of the forest are those of Mathieu.—SurRELL, Ltude sur les Torrents, 
2d ed., ii., p. 99. 

These experiments were continued from March to December, inclusive, of 
the year 1868. It was found that during those months the evaporation from 
a recipient placed on the ground in a plantation of deciduous trees sixty-two 
years old, was less than one-fifth of that from a recipient of like form and 
dimensions placed in the open country. 


THE FOREST AS ORGANIC. 183 


trary result, and it is now generally held that no water is taken 
in by the pores of vegetables. Late observations by Cailletet 
in France, howeyer, tend to the establishment of a new doctrine 
on this subject which solves many difficulties and will probably 
be accepted by botanists as definitive. Cailletet finds that 
under normal conditions, that is, when the soil is humid enough 
to supply sufficient moisture through the roots, no water is 
absorbed by the leaves, buds, or bark of plants, but when the 
roots are unable to draw from the earth the requisite quantity 
of this fluid, the vegetable pores in contact with the atmosphere 
absorb it from that source. 

Popular opinion, indeed, supposes that all the vegetable fluids, 
during the entire period of growth, are drawn from the bosom 
of the earth, and that the wood and other products of the tree 
are wholly formed from matter held in solution in the water 
abstracted by the roots from the ground. This is an error, for 
the solid matter of the tree, in a certain proportion nct impor- 
tant to our present inquiry, is received from the atmosphere in 
a gaseous form, through the pores of the leaves and of the 
young shoots, and, as we have just seen, moisture is sometimes 
supplied to trees by the atmosphere. The amount of water 
taken up by the roots, however, is vastly greater than that im- 
bibed through the leaves and bark, especially at the season 
when the sap is most abundant, and when the leaves are yet in 
embryo. The quantity of water thus received from the air and 
the earth, ina single year, even by a wood of only a hundred acres, 
is very great, though experiments are wanting to furnish the 
data for even an approximate estimate of its measure; for only 
the vaguest conclusions can be drawn from the observations 
which have been made on the imbibition and exhalation of 
water by trees and other plants reared in artificial conditions 
diverse from those of the natural forest.* 
vegetables are of high physiological interest ; but observations on sunflowers, 
cabbages, hops, and single branches of isolated trees, growing in artificially 


prepared soils and under artificial conditions, furnish no trustworthy « ata for 
computing the quantity of water received and given off by the natural wood. 


184 SAP OF SUGAR MAPLE. 


Flow of Sap. 


The amount of sap which can be withdrawn from living trees 
furnishes, not indeed a measure of the quantity of water sucked 
up by their roots from the ground—for we cannot extract from 
a tree its whole moisture—but numerical data which may aid 
the imagination to form a general notion of the powerful action 
of the forest as an absorbent of humidity from the earth. 

The only forest-tree known to Europe and North America, 
the sap of which is largely enough applied to economical uses 
to have made the amount of its flow a matter of practical impor- 
tance and popular observation, is the sugar maple, Acer saccha- 
rinum, of the Anglo-American Provinces and States. In the 
course of a single “sugar season,” which lasts ordinarily from 
twenty-five to thirty days, a sugar maple two feet in diameter 
will yield not less than twenty gallons of sap, and sometimes 
much more.* This, however, is but a trifling proportion of the 


* Emerson (Z7’rees of Massachusetts, p. 493) mentions a maple six feet in 
diameter, as having yielded a barrel, or thirty-one and a half gallons, of sap in 
twenty-four hours, and another, the dimensions of which are not stated, as 
having yielded one hundred and seventy-five gallons in the course of the sea- 
son. The Cultivator, an American agricultural journal, for June, 1842, states 
that twenty gallons of sap were drawn in eighteen hours from a single maple, 
two and a half feet in diameter, in the town of Warner, New Hampshire, and 
the truth of this account has been verified by personal inquiry made in my 
behalf. Thistree was of the original forest growth. and had been left standing 
when the ground around it was cleared. It was tapped only every other year, 
and then with six or eight incisions.- Dr. Williams ([istory of Vermont, i., p. 
91) says: ‘‘A man much employed m making maple sugar, found that, for 
twenty-one days together, a maple-tree discharged seven anda half gallons 
per day.” 

An intelligent correspondent, of much experience in the manufacture of 
maple sugar, writes me that a second-growth maple, of about two feet in 
diameter, standing in open ground, tapped with four incisions, has, for several 
seasons, generally run eight gallons per day in fair weather. He speaks of a 
very large tree, from which sixty gallons were drawn in the course of a sea- 
son, and of another, something more than three feet through, which made 
forty-two pounds of wet sugar, and must have yielded not less than one hun- 
dred and fifty gallons, 


SAP OF SUGAR MAPLE. 185 


water abstracted from the earth by the roots during this season ; 
for all this fluid runs from two or three incisions or auger-holes, 
so narrow as to intercept the current of comparatively few sap 
vessels, and besides, experience shows that large as is the quan- 
tity withdrawn from the circulation, it is relatively too small 
to affect very sensibly the growth of the tree.* The number 
of large maple-trees on an acre is frequently not less than 
fifty, and of course the quantity of moisture abstracted from 
the soil by this tree alone is measured by thousands of gallons 
to the acre. The sugar orchards, as they are called, contain also 
many young maples too small for tapping, and numerous other 
trees—two of which, at least, the black birch, Betula lenta, 
and yellow birch, Betula excelsa, both very common in the same 
climate, are far more abundant in sap than the maple {—are 
scattered among the sugar-trees; for the North American na- 
tive forests are remarkable for the mixture of their crops. 


* Tapping does not check the growth, but does injure the quality of the 
wood of maples. The wood of trees often tapped is lighter and less dense 
than that of trees which have not been tapped, and gives less heat in burning. 
No difference has been observed in the bursting of the buds of tapped and un- 
tapped trees. 

+ Dr. Rush, in a letter to Jefferson, states the number of maples fit for tap- 
ping on an acre at from thirty to fifty. ‘‘ This,” observes my correspondent, 
‘‘is correct with regard to the original growth, which is always more or less 
intermixed with other trees ; but in second growth, composed of maples alone, 
the number greatly exceeds this. J have had the maples on a quarter of an 
acre, which I thought about an average of second-growth ‘maple orchards,’ 
counted. The number was found to be fifty-two, of which thirty-two were 
ten inches or more in diameter, and, of course, large enough to tap. This 
gives two hundred and eight trees to the acre, one hundred and twenty-eight 
of which were of proper size for tapping.” 

{ The correspondent already referred to informs me thata black birch, 
tapped about noon with two incisions, was found the next morning to have 
yielded sixteen gallons. Dr. Williams (History of Vermont, i., p. 91) says: 
‘*A large birch, tapped in the spring, ran at the rate of five gallons an hour 
when first tapped. Hight or nine days after, it was found to run at the rate of 
about two and a half gallons an hour, and at the end of fifteen days the dis- 
charge continued in nearly the same quantity. The sap continued to flow for 
four or five weeks, and it was the opinion of the observers that it must have 
yielded as much as sixty barrels [1,890 gallons].” 


186 ABSORPTION BY FOLIAGE. 


The sap of the maple, and of other trees with deciduous leaves 
which grow in the same climate, flows most freely in the early 
spring, and especially in clear weather, when the nights are 
frosty and the days warm; for itis then that the melting 
snows supply the earth with moisture in the justest proportion, 
and that the absorbent power of the roots is stimulated to its 
highest activity. 

When the buds are ready to burst, and the green leaves begin 
to show themselves beneath their scaly covering, the ground 
has become drier, the absorption by the roots is diminished, and 
the sap, being immediately employed in the formation of the 
foliage, can be extracted from the stem in only small quan- 
tities. 


Absorption and Exhalation by Foliage. 


The leaves now commence the process of absorption, and im- 
bibe both uncombined gases and an unascertained but probably 
inconsiderable quantity of aqueous vapor from the humid atmos- 
phere of spring which bathes them. 

The organic action of the tree, as thus far described, tends to 
the desiccation of air and earth; but when we consider what 
volumes of water are daily absorbed by a large tree, and how 
small a proportion of the weight of this fluid consists of matter 
which, at the period when the flow of sap is freest, enters intonew 
combinations, and becomes a part of the solid framework of the 
vegetable,or a component of its deciduous products, it becomes 
evident that the superfluous moisture must somehow be carried 
back again almost as rapidly as it flows into the tree. At the 
very commencement of vegetation in spring, some of this fluid 
certainly escapes through the buds, the nascent foliage, and the 
pores of the bark, and vegetable physiology tells us that there 
is a current of sap towards the roots as well as from them.* I 
bark, * * * and a part of what descends finds its way even to the ends of the 


roots, and is all along diffused laterally into the stem, where it meets and min- 
gles with the ascending crude sap or raw material, So there is no separate cir- 


EXHALATION OF VAPOR BY TREES. LST 


do not know that the exudation of water into the earth, through 
the bark or at the extremities of these latter organs, has been 
proved, but the other known modes of carrying off the surplus 
do not seem adequate to dispose of it at the almost leafless 
period when it is most abundantly received, and it is possible 
that the roots may, to some extent, drain as well as flood the 
water-courses of their stem. Later in the season the roots 
absorb less, and the now developed leaves exhale an increased 
quantity of moisture into the air. In any event, all the water 
derived by the growing tree from the atmosphere and the 
ground is parted with by transpiration or exudation, after 
having surrendered to the plant the small proportion of matter 
required for vegetable growth which it held in solution or 
suspension.* The hygrometrical equilibrium is then restored, 
so far as this: the tree yields up again the moisture it had 
drawn from the earth and the air, though it does not return it 


culation of the two kinds of sap; and no crude sap exists separately in any 
part of the plant. Evenin the root, where it enters, this mingles at once 
with some elaborated sap already there.”—Gray, How Plants Grow, § 273. 

* Ward’s tight glazed cases for raising and especially for transporting plauts, 
go far to prove that water only circulates through vegetables, and is again 
and again absorbed and transpired by organs appropriated to these functions. 
Seeds, growing grasses, shrubs, or trees planted in proper earth, moderately 
watered and covered with a glass bell or close frame of glass, live for months, 
and eyen years, with only the original store of air and water. In one of 
Ward's early experiments, a spire of grass and a fern, which sprang up in a 
corked bottle containing a little moist earth introduced as a bed for a snail, 
lived and flourished for eighteen years without a new supply of either fluid. 
In these boxes the plants grow till the enclosed air is exhausted of the gascous 
constituents of vegetation, and till the water has yielded up the assimilable 
matter it held in solution, and dissolved and supplied to the roots the nutvri- 
ment contained in the earth in which they are planted. After this, they con- 
tinue for a long time in a state of vegetable sleep, but if fresh air and water be 
introduced into the cases, or the plants be transplanted into open ground, 
they rouse themselves to renewed life, and grow vigorously, without appear- 
ing to have suffered from their long imprisonment, The water transpired by 
the leaves is partly absorbed by the earth directly from the air, partly con- 
densed on the glass, along which it trickles down to the earth, enters the roots 
again, and thus continually repeats the circuit. See Aus der Natur, 21, B. 
8. 557. 


188 EXHALATION OF VAPOR BY TREES. 


each to each; for the vapor carried off by transpiration greatly 
exceeds the quantity of water absorbed by the foliage from 
the atmosphere, and the amount, if any, carried back to the 
ground by the roots. 

The present estimates of some eminent vegetable physiologists 
in regard to the quantity of aqueous vapor exhaled by trees and 
taken up by the atmosphere are much greater than those of 
former inquirers. Direct and satisfactory experiments on this 
point are wanting, and it is not easy to imagine how they could 
be made on a sufficiently extensive and comprehensive scale. 
Our conclusions must therefore be drawn from observations on 
small plants, or separate branches of trees, and of course are 
subject to much uncertainty. Nevertheless, Schleiden, arguing 
from such analogies, comes to the surprising result, that a wood 
evaporates ten times as much water as it receives from atmos- 
pherie precipitation.* In the Northern and Eastern States of 
the Union, the mean precipitation during the period of forest 
growth, that is from the swelling of the buds in the spring to 
the ripening of the fruit, the hardening of the young shoots, 
and the full perfection of the other annual products of the tree, 
exceeds on the average twenty-four inches. Taking this esti- 
mate, the evaporation from the forest would be equal to a pre- 
cipitation of two hundred and forty inches, or very nearly one 
hundred and fifty standard gallons to the square foot of sur- 
face. 

The first questions which suggest themselves upon this state- 
ment are: what becomes of this immense quantity of water and 
from what source does the tree derive it? We are told in reply 
that it is absorbed from the air by the humus and mineral soil of 
the wood, and supplied again to the tree through its roots, by a 
circulation analogous to that observed in Ward’s air-tight cases. 


* Fiir Baum und Wald, pp. 46, 47, notes. Pfaff, too, experimenting on 
branches of a living oak, weighed immediately after being cut from the tree, 
and again after an exposure to the air for three minutes, and computing the 
superficial measure of all the leaves of the tree, concludes that an oak-tree 
evaporates, during the season of growth, eight and a half times the mean 
amount of rain-fall on an area equal to that shaded by the tree. 


EXHALATION OF VAPOR BY TREES. 189 


When we recall the effect produced on the soil even of 
a thick wood by a rain-fall of one inch, we find it hard to believe 
that two hundred and forty times that quantity, received by the 
ground between early spring and autumn, would not keep it in 
a state of perpetual saturation, and speedily convert the forest 
into a bog. 

No such power of absorption of moisture by the earth from 
the atmosphere, or anything approaching it, has ever been 
shown by experiment, and all scientific observation contradicts 
the supposition. Schiibler found that in seventy-two hours 
thoroughly dried humus, which is capable of taking up twice 
its own weight of water in the liquid state, absorbed from the 
atmosphere only twelve per cent. of its weight of humidity ; 
garden-earth five and one-fifth per cent. and ordinary cultiva- 
ted soil two and one-third per cent. After seventy-two hours, 
and, in most of his experiments with thirteen different earths, 
after forty-eight hours, no further absorption took place. Wil- 
helm, experimenting with air-dried field-earth, exposed to air 
in contact with water and protected by a bell-glass, found that 
the absorption amounted in seventy-two hours to two per cent. 
and a very small fraction, nearly the whole of which was taken 
up in the first forty-eight hours. In other experiments with 
carefully heat-dried field-soil, the absorption was five per cent. 
in eighty-four hours, and when the water was first warmed to 
secure the complete saturation of the air, air-dried garden- 
earth absorbed five and one-tenth per cent. in seventy-two 
hours. 

In nature, the conditions are never so favorable to the absorp- 
tion of vapor as in these experiments. The ground is more 
compact and of course offers less surface to the air, and, espe- 
cially in the wood, it is already in astate approaching saturation. 
Hence, both these physicists conclude that the quantity of aque- 
ous vapor absorbed by the earth from the air is so inconsider- 
able “that we can ascribe to it no important influence on vege- 
tation.” * 


* WILHELM, Der Boden und das Wasser, pp. 14, 20. 


190 EXHALATION OF VAPOR BY TREES. 


Besides this, trees often grow luxuriantly on narrow ridges, 
on steep declivities, on partially decayed stumps many feet above 
the ground, on walls of high buildings, and on rocks, in situa- 
tions where the earth within reach of their roots could not possi- 
bly contain the tenth part of the water which, according to 
Schleiden and Pfaff, they evaporate ina day. There are, too, for- 
ests of great extent on high bluffs and well-drained table-lands, 
where there can exist, neither in the subsoil nor in infiltration 
from neighboring regions, an adequate source of supply for 
such consumption. It must be remembered, also, that in the 
wood the leaves of the trees shade each other, and only the 
highest stratum of foliage receives the full influence of heat 
and light ; and besides, the air in the forest is almost stagnant, 
while in the experiments of Unger, Marshal, Vaillant, Pfaff 
and others, the branches were freely exposed to light, sun, and 
atmospheric currents. Such observations can authorize no con- 
clusions respecting the quantitative action of leaves of forest 
trees in normal conditions. 

Further, allowing two hundred days for the period of forest 
vital action, the wood must, according to Schleiden’s position, 
exhale a quantity of moisture equal to an inch and one-fifth of 
precipitation per day, and it is hardly conceivable that so large 
a volume of aqueous vapor, in addition to the supply from other 
sources, could be diffused through the ambient atmosphere 
without manifesting its presence by ordinary hygrometrical tests 
much more energetically than it has been proved to do, and in 
fact, the observations recorded by Ebermayer show that though 
the relative humidity of the atmosphere is considerably greater 
in the cooler temperature of the wood, its absolute humidity 
does not sensibly differ from that of the air in open ground.* 


* EBeRMAyYER, Die Physikalischen Hinwirkungen des Waldes, i., pp. 150 
et seg. It may be well here to guard my readers against the common error 
which supposes that a humid condition of the air is necessarily indicated by 
the presence of fog or visible vapor. The air is rendered humid by containing 
invisible vapor, and it becomes drier by the condensation of such vapor into 
fog, composed of solid globules or of holiow vesicles of water—for it is a dis- 
puted point whether the particles of fog are solid or*vesicular. Hence, 


CONFLICTING INFLUENCES. 191 


The daily discharge of a quantity of aqueous vapor correspond- 
ing to a rain-fall of one inch and a fifth into the cool air of the 
forest would produce a perpetual shower, or at least drizzle, un- 
less, indeed, we suppose a rapidity of absorption and condensa- 
tion by the ground, and of transmission through the soil to the 
roots and through them and the vessels of the tree to the leaves, 
much greater than has been shown by direct observation. Not- 
withstanding the high authority of Schleiden, therefore, it seems 
impossible to reconcile his estimates with facts commonly ob- 
served and well established by competent investigators. Ience 
the important question of the supply, demand, and expenditure 
of water by forest vegetation must remain undecided, until it 
can be determined by something approaching to satisfactory 
direct experiment.* 


Balance of Conflicting Influences of Forest on Atmospheric 
Lleat and umidity. 


We have shown that the forest, considered as dead matter, 
tends to diminish the moisture of the air, by preventing the 
sun’s rays from reaching the ground and evaporating the water 
that falls upon the surface, and also by spreading over the earth 
a spongy mantle which sucks up and retains the humidity it 
receives from the atmosphere, while, at the same time, this coy- 
ering actsin the contrary direction by accumulating, in a reser- 
voir not wholly inaccessible to vaporizing influences, the water 
of precipitation which might otherwise suddenly sink deep into 
the bowels of the earth, or flow by superficial channels to other 
climatic regions. We now see that, as a living organism, it 


though the ambient atmosphere may hold in suspension, in the form of fog, 
water enough to obscure its transparency, and to produce the sensation of 
moisture on the skin, the air, in which the finely divided water floats, may 
be charged with even less than an average proportion of humidity. 

* According to Cezanne, SURELL, Etude sur les Torrents, 2° édition, ii., p. 
100, experiments reported in the Revue des Eaux et Foréts for August, 1868, 
showed the evaporation from a living tree to be ‘‘ almost insignificant.’? De- 
tails are not given. 


192 CONFLICTING INFLUENCES. 


tends, on the one hand, to diminish the humidity of the air by 
sometimes absorbing moisture from it, and, on the other, to in- 
crease that humidity by pouring out into the atmosphere, in a 
vaporous form, the water it draws up through its roots This 
last operation, at the same time, lowers the temperature of the 
air in contact with or proximity to the wood, by the same law 
as in other cases of the conversion of water into vapor. 

As I have repeatedly said, we cannot measure the value of 
any one of these elements of climatic disturbance, raising or 
lowering of temperature, increase or diminution of humidity, 
nor can we say that in any one season, any one year, or any one 
fixed cycle, however long or short, they balance and compen- 
sate each other. They are sometimes, but certainly not always, 
contemporaneous in their action, whether their tendency is in 
the same or in opposite directions, and, therefore, their influ- 
ence is sometimes cumulative, sometimes conflicting ; but, wpon 
the whole, their general effect is to mitigate extremes of atmos- 
pheric heat and cold, moisture and drought. They serve as 
equalizers of temperature and humidity, and it is highly prob- 
able that, in analogy with most other works and workings of 
nature, they, at certain or uncertain periods, restore the equi- 
librium which, whether as lifeless masses or as living organ- 
isms, they may have temporarily disturbed.* 


* There is one fact which I have nowhere seen noticed, but which seems to 
me to have an important bearing on the question whether forests tend to 
maintain an equilibrium between the various causes of hygroscopic action, 
and consequently to keep the air within their precincts in an approximately 
constant condition, so far as this meteorological element is concerned. I 
refer to the absence of fog or visible vapor in thick woods in full leaf, even 
when the air of the neighboring open grounds is so heavily charged with con- 
densed vapor as completely to obscure the sun. The temperature of the at- 
mosphere in the forest is not subject to so sudden and extreme variations as 
that of cleared ground, but at the same time it is far from constant, and so 
large a supply of vapor as is poured out by the foliage of the trees could not 
fail to be sometimes condensed into fog by the same causes as in the case of 
the adjacent meadows, which are often covered with a dense mist while the 
forest-air remains clear, were there not some potent counteracting influence 
always in action. This influence. I believe, is to be found partly in the 
equalization of the temperature of the forest, and partly in the balance be- 


INFLUENCE OF PRECIPITATION. 193 


When, therefore, man destroys these natural harmonizers of 
climatic discords, he sacrifices an important conservative power, 
though it is far from certain that he has thereby affected the 
mean, however much he may have exaggerated the extremes of 
atmospheric temperature and humidity, or, in other words, may 
have increased the range and lengthened the scale of thermo- 
metric and hygrometric variation. 


Special Influence of Woods on Precipitation. 


With the question of the action of forests upon temperature 
and upon atmospheric humidity is intimately connected that 
of their influence upon precipitation, which they may affect 
by increasing or diminishing the warmth of the air and by 
absorbing or exhaling uncombined gas and aqueous vapor. 
The forest being a natural arrangement, the presumption is: 
that it exercises a conservative action, or at least a compen- 
sating one, and consequently that its destruction must tend to 
produce pluviometrical disturbances as well as thermometrical 
variations. And this is the opinion of perhaps the greatest 
number of observers. Indeed, it is almost impossible to sup- 
pose that, under certain conditions of time and place, the 
quantity and the periods of rain should not depend, more or 
less, upon the presence or absence of forests; and without in- 
sisting that the removal of the forest has diminished the sum- 
total of snow and rain, we may well admit that it has lessened. 
the quantity which annually falls within particular limits. 
Various theoretical considerations make this probable, the 
most obvious argument, perhaps, being that drawn from the 
generally admitted fact, that the summer and even the mean 
temperature of the forest is below that of the open country in 
the same latitude. If the air in a wood is cooler than that 
around it, it must reduce the temperature of the atmospheric 
stratum immediately above it, and, of course, whenever a satu- 


tween the humidity exhaled by the trees and that absorbed and condensed 
invisibly by the earth, 
13 


194 INUNDATIONS. 


rated current sweeps over it, it must produce precipitation 
which would fall upon it, or at a greater or less distance from it. 
We must here take into the account a very important consid- 
eration. It is not universally or even generally true, that the 
atmosphere returns its condensed humidity to the local source 
from which it receives it. The air is constantly in motion, 


howling tempests scour amain 
From sea to land, from land to sea ; * 


and, therefore, it is always probable that the evaporation drawn 
up by the atmosphere from a given river, or sea, or forest, or 
meadow, will be discharged by precipitation, not at or near the 
point where it rose, but at a distance of miles, leagues, or even 
degrees. The currents of the upper air are invisible, and they 
leave behind them no landmark to record their track. We 
know not whence they come, or whither they go. We have a 
certain rapidly increasing acquaintance with the laws of gene- 
ral atmospheric motion, but of the origin and limits, the begin- 
ning and end of that motion, as it manifests itself at any par- 
ticular time and place, we know nothing. We cannot say 
where or when the vapor, exhaled to-day from the lake on 
which we float, will be condensed and fall; whether it will 
waste itself on a barren desert, refresh upland pastures, de- 
scend in snow on Alpine heights, or contribute to swell a 
distant torrent which shall lay waste square miles of fertile 
corn-land ; nor do we know whether the rain which feeds our 
brooklets is due to the transpiration from a neighboring forest, 
or to the evaporation from a far-off sea. If, therefore, it were 
proved that the annual quantity of rain and dew is now as 
great on the plains of Castile, for example, as it was when they 
were covered with the native forest, it would by no means 
follow that those woods did not augment the amount of precipi- 
tation elsewhere. 


*Und Stiirme brausen um die Wette 
Vom Meer aufs Land, vom Land aufs Meer. 
GoreTHE, Faust, Song of the Archangels. 


INUNDATIONS. 195 


The whole problem of the pluviometrical influence of the 
forest, general or local, is so exceedingly complex and difficult 
that it cannot, with our present means of knowledge, be de- 
cided upon @ priori grounds. It must now be regarded as a 
question of fact which would probably admit of scientific ex- 
planation if it were once established what the actual fact is. 
Unfortunately, the evidence is conflicting in tendency, and 
sometimes equivocal in interpretation, but I believe that a 
majority of the foresters and physicists who have studied the 
question are of opinion that in many, if not in all cases, the 
destruction of the woods has been followed by a diminution in 
the annual quantity of rain and dew. Indeed, it has long been 
a popularly settled belief that vegetation and the condensation 
and fall of atmospheric moisture are reciprocally necessary to 
each other, and even the poets sing of 


Afric’s barren sand, 
Where nought can grow, because it raineth not, 
And where no rain can fall to bless the land, 
Because nought grows there. * 


Before going further with the discussion, however, it is well 
to remark that the comparative rarity or frequency of inunda- 
tions in earlier or later centuries is not necessarily, in most 
eases not probably, entitled to any weight whatever, as a proof 
that more or less rain fell formerly than now; because the ac- 
cumulation of water in the channel of a river depends far less 
upon the quantity of precipitation in its valley, than upon the 
rapidity with which it is conducted, on or under the surface of 
the ground, to the central artery that drains the basin. But 
this point will be more fully discussed in a subsequent chapter. 

In writers on the subject we are discussing, we find many 


= Det golde Strég i Afrika, 
Der Intet voxe kan, da ei det regner, 
Og, omvyendt, ingen Regn kan falde, da 
Der Intet voxer. 
PALUDAN-MULLER, Adam Homo, ii., 408, 


196 INFLUENCE OF PRECIPITATION. 


positive assertions about the diminution of rain in countries 
which have been stripped of wood within the historic period, 
but these assertions very rarely rest upon any other proof than 
the doubtful recollection of unscientific observers, and I am 
unable to refer to a single instance where the records of the 
rain-gauge, for a considerable period before and after the fell- 
ing or planting of extensive woods, can be appealed to in sup- 
port of either side of the question. The scientific reputation 
of many writers who have maintained that precipitation has 
been diminished in particular localities by the destruction of 
forests, or augmented by planting them, has led the public to 
suppose that their assertions rested on sufficient proof. We 
cannot affirm that in none of these cases did such proof exist, 
but I am not aware that it has ever been produced. * 

The effect of the forest on precipitation, then, is by no means 
free from doubt, and we cannot positively affirm that the total 
annual quantity of rain is even locally diminished or increased 


* Among recent writers, Clavé, Schacht, Sir John F. W. Herschel, Hohen- 
stein, Barth, Asbjérnsen, Boussingault, and others, maintain that forests tend 
to produce rain and clearings to diminish it, and they refer to numerous 
facts of observation in support of this doctrine; but in none of these does it 
appear that these observations are supported by actual pluviometrical measure. 
So far as I know, the earliest expression of the opinion that forests promote 
precipitation is that attributed to Christopher Columbus, in the Historie dd 
S. D. Fernando Colombo, Venetia, 1571, cap. lviii., where it is said that the 
Admiral ascribed the daily showers which fell in the West Indies about vespers 
to ‘‘ the great forests and trees of those countries,” and remarked that the same 
effect was formerly produced by the same cause in the Canary and Madeira 
islands and in the Azores, but that ‘‘ now that the many woods and trees that 
covered them have been felled, there are not produced so many clouds and 
rains as before.” 

Mr. H. Harrisse, in his very learned and able critical essay, Fernand 
Colomb, sa Vie et ses Cfuvres, Paris, 1872, has made it at least extremely 
probable that the Historie is a spurious work. The compiler may have found 
this observation in some of the writings of Columbus now lost, but however 
that may be, the fact, which Humboldt mentions in Cosmos with much in- 
terest, still remains, that the doctrine in question was held, if not by the great 
discoverer himself, at least by one of his pretended biographers, as early as 
the year 1571. 


INFLUENCE OF PRECIPITATION. 197 


by the destruction of the woods, though both theoretical con- 
siderations and the balance of testimony strongly favor the 
opinion that more rain falls in wooded than in open countries. 
One important conclusion, at least, upon the meteorological 
influence of forests is certain and undisputed: the proposition, 
namely, that, within their own limits, and near their own bor- 
ders, they maintain a more uniform degree of humidity in the 
atmosphere than is observed in cleared grounds. Scarcely less 
can it be questioned that they tend to promote the frequency 
of showers, and, if they do not augment the amount of precipi- 
tation, they probably equalize its distribution through the dif 
ferent seasons.* 


* The strongest direct evidence which I am able to refer to in support of the 
proposition that the woods produce even a local augmentation of precipitation 
is furnished by the observations of Mathieu, sub-director of the Forest-School 
at Nancy. His pluviometrical measurements, continued for three years, 1866- 
1868, show that during that period the annual mean of rain-fall in the centre 
of the wooded district of Cing-Tranchées, at Belle Fontaine on the borders of 
the forest, and at Amance, in an open cultivated territory in the same vicinity, 
was respectively as the numbers 1,000, 957, and 853. 

The alleged augmentation of rain-fall in Lower Egypt, in consequence of 
large plantations by Mehemet Ali, is very frequently appealed to as a proof of 
this influence of the forest, and this case has become a regular common-place 
in all discussions of the question. It is, however, open to the same objection 
as the alleged instances of the diminuticn of precipitation in consequence of 
the felling of the forest. 

This supposed increase in the frequency and quantity of rain in Lower 
Egypt is, I think, an error, or at least not an established fact. I have heard 
it disputed on the spot by intelligent Franks, whose residence in that country 
began before the plantations of Mehemet Ali and Ibrahim Pacha, and I have 
been assured by them that meteorological observations, made at Alexandria 
about the beginning of this century, show an annual fall of rain as great as is 
usual at this day. The mere fact that it did not rain during the French 
occupation is not conclusive. Having experienced a gentle shower of nearly 
twenty-four hours’ duration in Upper Egypt, I inquired of the local governor 
in relation to the frequency of this phenomenon, and was told by him that not 
a drop of rain had fallen at that point for more than two years previous. 

The belief in the increase of rain in Dgypt rests almost entirely on the 
observations of Marshal Marmont, and the evidence collected by him in 1830, 
His conclusions have been disputed, if not confuted, by Jomard and others, 


198 INFLUENCE OF PRECIPITATION. 


Total Climatic Influence of the Forest. 


Aside from the question of local disturbances and their 
compensations, it does not seem probable that the forests sensi- 
bly affect the general mean of atmospheric temperature of the 
globe, or the total quantity of precipitation, or eyen that they 
had this influence when their extent was vastly greater than at 
present. The waters cover about three-fourths of the face of 
the earth, and if we deduct the frozen zones, the peaks and 
crests of lofty mountains and their craggy slopes, the Sahara 
and other great African and Asiatic deserts, and all such other 
portions of the solid surface as are permanently unfit for the 
growth of weod, we shall find that probably not one-tenth of 
the total superficies of our planet was ever, at any one time in 


and are probably erroneous. See Forssac, Météorologie, German translation, 
pp. 634-639. 

It certainly sometimes rains briskly at Cairo, but evaporation is exceedingly 
rapid in Egypt—as any one who ever saw a Fellah woman wash a napkin in 
the Nile, and dry it by shaking it a few moments in the air, can testify ; and a 
heap of grain, wet a few inches below the surface, would probably dry again 
without injury. At any rate, the Egyptian Government often has vast quan- 
tities of wheat stored at Boulak in uncovered yards through the winter, though 
it must be admitted that the slovenliness and want of foresight in Oriental 
life, public and private, are such that we cannot infer the safety of any practice 
followed in the East merely from its long continuance. 

Grain, however, may be long kept in the open air in climates much less dry 
than that of Egypt, without injury, except to the superficial layers ; for mois- 
ture does not penetrate to a great depth in a heap of grain once well dried and 
kept well aired. When Louis IX. was making his preparations for his cam- 
paign in the Hast, he had large quantities of wine and grain purchased in the 
Island of Cyprus, and stored up for two years to await his arrival. ‘ When 
we were come to Cyprus,” says Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, $$ 72. 73, 
““ we found there greate foison of the Kynge’s purveyance. . . The wheate 
and the barley they had piled up in greate heapes in the feeldes, and to looke 
vpon, they were like ynto mountaynes; for the raine, the whyche hadde 
beaten vpon the wheate now a longe whyle, had made it to sproute on the 
toppe, so that it seemed as greene grasse. And whanne they were mynded to 
carrie it to Hgypte, they brake that sod of greene herbe. and dyd finde under 
the same the wheate and the barley, as freshe as yf menne hadde but nowe 
thrashed it,” 


INFLUENCE OF PRECIPITATION.—GENERAL RESULTS. 199 


the present geological period, covered with forests. Besides 
this, the distribution of forest land, of desert, and of water, is 
such as to reduce the possible influence of the woods to a low 
expression ; for the forests are, in large proportion, situated in 
cold or temperate climates, where the action of the sun is com- 
paratively feeble both in elevating temperature and in promoting 
evaporation ; while, in the torrid zone, the desert and the sea—the 
latter of which always presents an evaporable surface—enormous- 
ly preponderate. Itis, upon the whole, not probable that so small 
an extent of forest, so situated, could produce a sensible influ- 
ence on the general climate of the globe, though it might appre- 
ciably affect the /ocal action of all climatic elements. The 
total annual amount of solar heat absorbed and radiated by the 
earth, and the sum of terrestrial evaporation and atmospheric 
precipitation, must be supposed constant ; but the distribution 
of heat and of humidity is exposed to disturbance in both time 
and place by a multitude of local causes, among which the 
presence or absence of the forest is doubtless one. 

So far as we are able to sum up the results, it would appear 
that, in countries in the temperate zone still chiefly covered 

rith wood, the summers would be cooler, moister, shorter, the 
winters milder, drier, longer, than in the same regions after the 
removal of the forest, and that the condensation and precipita- 
tion of atmospheric moisture would be, if not greater in total 
quantity, more frequent and less violent in discharge. The 
slender historical evidence we possess seems to point to the same 
conclusion, though there is some conflict of testimony and of 
opinion on this point. 

Among the many causes which, as we have seen, tend to 
influence the general result, the mechanical action of the forest, 
if not more important, is certainly more obvious and direct than 
the immediate effects of its organic processes. The felling of 
the woods involves the sacrifice of a valuable protection against 
the violence of chilling winds and the loss of the shelter afforded 
to the ground by the thick coating of leaves which the forest 
sheds upon it and by the snow which the woods prevent from 


200 INFLUENCE OF PRECIPITATION.—GENERAL RESULTS. 


blowing away, or from melting in the brief thaws of winter. I 
have already remarked that bare ground freezes much deeper 
than that which is covered by beds of leaves, and when the 
earth is thickly coated with snow, the strata frozen before it 
fell begin to thaw. It is not uncommon to find the ground in 
the woods, where the snow lies two or three feet deep, entirely 
free from frost, when the atmospheric temperature has been 
for several weeks below the freezing-point, and for some days 
even below the zero of Fahrenheit. When the ground is 
cleared and brought under cultivation, the leaves are ploughed 
into the soil and decomposed, and the snow, especially upon 
knolls and eminences, is blown off, or perhaps half thawed, 
several times during the winter. The water from the melting 
snow runs into the depressions, and when, after a day or two 
of warm sunshine or tepid rain, the cold returns, it is consoli- 
dated to ice, and the bared ridges and swells of earth are deeply 
frozen.* It requires many days of mild weather to raise the 
temperature of soil in this condition, and of the air in contact 
with it, to that of the earth in the forests of the same climatic 
region. Flora is already plaiting her sylvan wreath before the 
corn-flowers which are to deck the garland of Ceres have waked 
from their winter’s sleep; and it is probably not a popular 
error to believe that, where man has substituted his artificial 
crops for the spontaneous harvest of nature, spring delays her 
coming. 


* T have seen, in Northern New England, the surface of the open ground 
frozen to the depth of twenty-two inches, in the month of November, when in 
the forest-earth no frost was discoverable; and later in the winter, I have 
known an exposed sand-knoll to remain frozen six feet deep, after the ground 
in the woods was completely thawed. 

+ The conclusion arrived at by Noah Webster, in his very learned and able 
paper on the supposed change in the temperature of winter, read before the 
Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1799, was as follows: ‘‘ irom a 
careful comparison of these facts, it appears that the weather, in modern win- 
ters, in the United States, is more inconstant than when the earth was covered 
with woods, at the first settlement of Europeans in the country; that the 
warm weather of autumn extends further into the winter months, and the 
cold weather of winter and spring encroaches upon the summer}; that, the 


INFLUENCE OF PRECIPITATION.—GENERAL RESULTS. 901 


There are, in the constitution and action of the forest, many 
forces, organic and inorganic, which unquestionably tend pow- 
erfully to produce meteorological effects, and it may, therefore, 
be assumed as certain that they must and do produce such 
effects, wnless they compensate and balance each other, and 
herein lies the difficulty of solving the question. To some of 
these elements late observations give a new importance. For 
example, the exhalation of aqueous vapor by plants is now be- 
lieved to be-much greater, and the absorption of aqueous vapor 
by them much less, than was formerly supposed, and Tyndall’s 
views on the relations of vapor to atmospheric heat give im- 
mense value to this factor in the problem. In like manner the 
low temperature of the surface of snow and the comparatively 
high temperature of its lower strata, and its consequent action 
on the soil beneath, and the great condensation of moisture by 
snow, are facts which seem to show that the forest, by protect- 
ing great surfaces of snow from melting, must inevitably exer- 
cise a great climatic influence. If to these influences we add 
the mechanical action of the woods in obstructing currents of 
wind, and diminishing the evaporation and refrigeration which 
such currents produce, we have an accumulation of forces 
which must manifest great climatic effects, unless—which is 
not proved and cannot be presumed—they neutralize each 
other. These are points hitherto little considered in the discus- 
sion, and it seems difficult to deny that as a question of argu- 
ment, the probabilities are strongly in favor of the meteorologi- 
eal influence of the woods. The ez¢dence, indeed, is not satis- 
factory, or, to speak more accurately, it is non-existent, for there 
really is next to no trustworthy proof on the subject, but it 
appears to me a case where the burden of proof must be taken 


wind being more variable, snow is less permanent, and perhaps the same 
remark may be applicable to. the ice of the rivers. These effects seem to 
result necessarily from the greater quantity of heat accumulated in the earth 
in summer since the ground has been cleared of wood and exposed to the rays 
of the sun, and to the greater depth of frost in the earth in winter by the 
xposure of its uncovered surface to the cold atmosphere.”— Collection of 
Papers by NoAu WEBSTER, p. 162, 


902 TOTAL CLIMATIC INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST. 


by those who maintain that, as a meteorological agent, the 
forest is inert. 

The question of a change in the climate of the Northern 
American States is examined in the able Meteorological Report 
of Mr. Draper, Director of the New York Central Park Obser- 
vatory, for 1871. The result arrived at by Mr. Draper is, that 
there is no satisfactory evidence of a diminution in the rain- 
fall, or of any other climatic change in the winter season, in 
consequence of clearing of the forests or other human action. 
The proof from meteorological registers is certainly insufficient 
to establish the fact of a change of climate, but, on the other 
hand, it is equally insufficient to establish the contrary. Mete- 
orological stations are too few, their observations, in many cases, 
extend over a very short period, and, for reasons I have already 
given, the great majority of their records are entitled to little 
or no confidence.* 


* Since these pages were written, the subject of forest meteorology has 
received the most important contribution ever made to it, in several series of 
observations at numerous stations in Bavaria, from the year 1866 to 1871, 
published by Ebermayer, at Aschaffenburg, in 1873, under the title: Die 
Physikalischen Hinwirkungen des Waldes auf Luft und Boden, und seine Kit- 
matologische und Hygienische Bedeutung. I. Band. So far as observations of - 
only five years’ duration can prove anything, the following propositions, not 
to speak of many collateral and subsidiary conclusions, seem to be established, 
at least for the localities where the observations were made: 

1. The yearly mean temperature of wooded soils, at all depths, is lower than 
that of open grounds, p. 39. 

This conclusion, it may be remarked, is of doubtful applicability in regions 
of excessive climate like the Northern United States and Canada, where the 
snow keeps the temperature of the soil in the forest above the freezing-point, 
for a large part and sometimes the whole of the winter, while in unwooded 
ground the earth remains deeply frozen. 

2. The yearly mean atmospheric temperature, other things being equal, is 
lower in the forest than in cleared grounds, p. 84. 

3. Climates become excessive in consequence of extensive clearings, p, 117. 

4, The absolute humidity of the air in the forest is about the same as in 
open ground, while the relative humidity is greater in the former than in the 
latter case, on account of the lower temperature of the atmosphere in the 
wood, p. 150. 

5. The evaporation from an exposed surface of water in the forest is sixty- 
four per cent. less than in unwooded grounds, pp. 159, 161, 


INFLUENCE OF FOREST ON HUMIDITY OF SOIL. 203 


Influence of the Forest on the Humidity of the Soil. 


I have hitherto confined myself to the influence of the forest 
on meteorological conditions, a subject, as has been seen, full of 
difficulty and uncertainty. Its comparative effects on the tem- 
perature, the humidity, the texture and consistence, the con- 
figuration and distribution of the mould or arable soil, and, very 
often, of the mineral strata below, and on the permanence and 
regularity of springs and greater superficial water-courses, are 
much less disputable as well as more easily estimated and more 
important, than its possible value as a cause of strictly climatic 
equilibrium or disturbance. 

The action of the forest on the earth is chiefly mechanical, 
but the organic process of absorption of moisture by its roots 
affects the quantity of water contained in the vegetable mould 
and in the mineral strata near the surface, and, consequently, 
the consistency of the soil. In treating of the effects of trees 
on the moisture of the atmosphere, I have said that the forest, 
by interposing a canopy between the sky and the ground, and 
by covering the surface with a thick mantle of fallen leaves, at 
once obstructed insulation and prevented the radiation of heat 
from the earth. These influences go far to balance each other ; 
but familiar observation shows that, in summer, the forest-soil 
is not raised to so high a temperature as open grounds exposed 
to irradiation. For this reason, and in consequence of the me- 
chanical resistance opposed by the bed of dead leaves to the 
escape of moisture, we should expect that, except after recent 
rains, the superficial strata of woodland-soil would be more 


6. About twenty-six per cent. of the precipitation is intercepted and pre- 
vented from reaching the ground by the foliage and branches of forest trees, 
p. 194. 

7. In the interior of thick woods, the evaporation from water and from 
earth is much less than the precipitation, p. 210. 

8. The loss of the water of precipitation intercepted by the trees in the 
forest is compensated by the smaller evaporation from the ground, p. 219. 

9. In elevated regions and during the summer half of the year, woods tend 
to increase the precipitation, p. 202. 


204 DRAINAGE BY ROOTS OF TREES. 


humid than that of cleared land. This agrees with experience. 
The soil of the natural forest is always moist, except in the ex- 
tremest droughts, and it is exceedingly rare that a primitive 
wood suffers from want of humidity. How far this accumula- 
tion of water affects the condition of neighboring grounds by 
lateral infiltration, we do not know, but we shall see, in a 
subsequent chapter, that water is conveyed to great distances 
by this process, and we may hence infer that the influence in 
question is an important one. 
It is undoubtedly true that loose soils, stripped of vegetation 
ud broken up by the plough or other processes of cultivation, 
may, until again carpeted by grasses or other plants, absorb 
more rain and snow-water than when they were covered by a 
natural growth; but it is also true that the evaporation from 
such soils is augmented in a still greater proportion. Rain 
scarcely penetrates beneath the sod of grass-ground, but runs 
off over the surface ; and after the heaviest showers a ploughed 
field will often be dried by evaporation before the water can 
be carried off by infiltration, while the soil of a neighboring 
grove will remain half saturated for weeks together. Sandy 
soils frequently rest on a tenacious subsoil, at a moderate depth, 
as is usually seen in the pine plains of the United States, where 
pools of rain-water collect in slight depressions on the surface 
of earth the upper stratum of which is as porous as a sponge. 
In the open grounds such pools are very soon dried up by the 
sun and wind; in the woods they remain unevaporated long 
enough for the water to diffuse itself laterally until it finds, in 
the subsoil, crevices through which it may escape, or slopes 
which it may follow to their outcrop or descend along them to 
lower strata. 


Drainage by Roots of Trees. 


Becquerel notices a special function of the forest to which I 
have already alluded, but to which sufficient importance has 
not, until very recently, been generally ascribed. Lrefer to the 


DRAINAGE BY ROOTS OF TREES. 9205 


mechanical action of the roots as conductors of the superfluous 
humidity of the superficial earth to lower strata. The roots of 
trees often penetrate through subsoil almost impervious to 
water, and in such cases the moisture, which would otherwise 
remain above the subsoil and convert the surface-earth into a 
bog, follows the roots downwards and escapes into more porous 
strata or is received by subterranean canals or reservoirs.” 
When the forest is felled, the roots perish and decay, the orifices 
opened by them are soon obstructed, and the water, after having 
saturated the vegetable earth, stagnates on the surface and 
transforms it into ponds and morasses. Thus in La Brenne, a 
tract of 200,000 acres resting on an impermeable subsoil of 
argillaceous earth, which ten centuries ago was covered with 
forests interspersed with fertile and salubrious meadows and 
pastures, has been converted, by the destruction of the woods, 
into a vast expanse of pestilential pools and marshes. In 
Sologne the same cause has withdrawn from cultivation and 
human inhabitation not less than 1,100,000 acres of ground 
once well wooded, well drained, and productive. 

Tt is an important observation that the desiccating action of 
trees, by way of drainage or external conduction by the roots, 
is greater in the artificial than in the natural wood, and hence 
that the surface of the ground in the former is not characterized 
by that approach to a state of saturation which it so generally 
manifests in the latter. In the spontaneous wood, the leaves, 
fruits, bark, branches, and dead trunks, by their decayed 
material and by the conversion of rock into loose earth through 
the solvent power of the gases they develop in decomposition, 
cover the ground with an easily penetrable stratum of mixed 
vegetable aud mineral matter extremely favorable to the 


* “The roots of vegetables,” says d’Héricourt, ‘‘perform the office of 
draining in a manner analogous to that artificially practised in parts of Hol- 
land and the British islands. This method consists in driving deeply down 
into the soil several hundred stakes to the acre; the water filters down along 
the stakes, and in some cases as favorable results have been obtained by this 
means as by horizontal drains.” —Annales Forestiéres, 1857, p. 312. 


206 DRAINAGE BY ROOTS OF TREES, 


growth of trees, and at the same time too retentive of moisture 
to part with it readily to the capillary attraction of the roots. 
The trees, finding abundant nutriment near the surface, and so 
sheltered against the action of the wind by each other as not 
to need the support of deep and firmly fixed stays, send their 
roots but a moderate distance downwards, and indeed often 
spread them out likea horizontal network almost on the surface 
of the ground. In the artificial wood, on the contrary, the 
spaces between the trees are greater; they are obliged to send 
their roots deeper both for mechanical support and in search 
of nutriment, and they consequently serve much more effectually 
as conduits for perpendicular drainage. 

It is only under special circumstances, however, that this 
function of the forest is so essential a conservative agent as in 
the two cases just cited. In a champaign region insufficiently 
provided with natural channels for the discharge of the waters, 
and with a subsoil which, though penetrable by the roots of 
trees, is otherwise impervious to water, it is of cardinal im- 
portance; but though trees everywhere tend to carry off the 
moisture of the superficial strata by this mode of conduction, 
yet the precise condition of soil which I have described is not 
of sufficiently frequent occurrence to have drawn much attention 
to this office of the wood. In fact, in most soils, there are coun- 
teracting influences which neutralize, more or less effectually, 
the desiccative action of roots, and in general it is as true as 
it was in Seneca’s time, that “the shadiest grounds are the 
moistest.” * 

It is always observed in the American States, that clearing 
the ground not only causes running springs to disappear, but 
dries up the stagnant pools and the spongy soils of the low 
grounds. The first roads in those States ran along the ridges, 
when practicable, because there only was the earth dry enough 
to allow of their construction, and, for the same reason, the 
cabins of the first settlers were perched upon the hills. As the 
forests have been from time to time removed, and the face of 


* SENECA, Questiones Naturales, iii, 11, 2. 


DRAINAGE BY ROOTS OF TREES. 207 


the earth laid open to the air and sun, the moisture has been 
evaporated, and the removal of the highways and of human 
habitations from the bleak hills to the sheltered valleys, is one 
of the most agreeable among the many improvements which 
later generations have witnessed in the interior of the Northern 
States.* 

Recent observers in France affirm that evergreen trees exer- 
cise a special desiccating action on the soil, and cases are cited 
where large tracts of land lately planted with pines have been 
almost completely drained of moisture by some unknown action 
of the trees. It is argued that the alleged drainage is not due 
to the conducting power of the roots, inasmuch as the roots 
of the pine do not descend lower than those of the oak and 
other deciduous trees which produce no such effect, and it 
is suggested that the foliage of the pine continues to exhale 
through the winter a sufficient quantity of moisture to ac- 
count for the drying up of the soil. This explanation is 
improbable, and I know nothing in American experience of 
the forest which accords with the alleged facts. It is true 
that the pines, the firs, the hemlock, and all the spike-leaved 
evergreens prefer a dry soil, but it has not been observed 
that such soils become less dry after the felling of their trees. 
The cedars and other trees of allied families grow naturally in 
moist ground, and the white cedar of the Northern States, 
Thuya occidentalis, is chiefly found in swamps. The roots of 
this tree do not penetrate deeply into the earth, but are spread 
out near the surface, and of course do not carry off the waters 
of the swamp by perpendicular conduction. On the contrary, 
by their shade, the trees prevent the evaporation of the super- 


* The Tuscan poet Giusti, who had certainly had little opportunity of observ- 
ing primitive conditions of nature and of man, was aware that such must have 
been the course of things in new countries. ‘‘ You know,” says he in a let- 
ter to a friend, ‘‘ that the hills were first occupied by man, because stagnant 
waters, and afterwards continual wars, excluded men from the plains. But 
when tranquillity was established and means provided for the discharge of the 
waters, the low grounds were soon covered with human habitations.” —Lettere, 
Firenze, 1864, p. 98. 


208 THE FOREST IN WINTER. 


ficial water; but when the cedars are felled, the swamp—which 
sometimes rather resembles a pool filled with aquatic trees than 
a grove upon solid ground—often dries up so completely as to 
be fit for cultivation without any other artificial drainage than, 
in the ordinary course of cultivation, is given to other new 
soils.* 


The Forest tr Winter. 


The influence of the woods on the flow of springs, and con- 
sequently on the supply for the larger water-courses, naturally 
connects itself with the general question of the action of the 
forest on the humidity of the ground. But the special condi- 
tion of the woodlands, as affected by snow and frost in the winter 
of excessive climates, like that of the United States, has not 
been so much studied as it deserves; and as it has a most impor- 
tant bearing on the superficial hydrology of the earth, I shall 
make some observations upon it before I proceed to the direct 
discussion of the influence of the forest on the flow of springs. 

To estimate rightly the importance of the forest in our cli- 


* A special desiccative influence has long been ascribed to the maritime 
pine, which has been extensively planted on the dunes and sand-plains of west- 
ern France, and it is well established that, under certain conditions, all trees, 
whether evergreen or deciduous, exercise this function, but there is no con- 
vincing proof that in the cases now referred to there is any difference in the 
mode of action of the two classes of trees. An article by D’Arbois de Jubain- 
ville in the Revue des Haux et Foréts for April, 1869, ascribing the same action 
to the Pinus sylvestris, has excited much attention in Europe, and the facts 
stated by this writer constitute the strongest evidence known to me in support 
of the alleged influence of evergreen trees, as distinguished from the draining 
by downward conduction, which is a function exercised by all trees, under 
ordinary circumstances, in proportion to their penetration of a bibulous sub- 
soil by tap or other descending roots. The question has been ably discussed by 
Béraud in the Revue des Deux Mondes for April, 1870, the result being that 
the drying of the soil by pines is due simply to conduction by the roots, whatever 
may be the foliage of the tree. See post: Influence of the Forest on Flow of 
Springs. 

It is however certain, I believe, that evergreens exhale more moisture in 
winter than leafless deciduous trees, and consequently some weight is to be as- 
cribed to this element, 


IMPORTANCE OF SNOW. 209 


mate as a natural apparatus for accumulating the water that 
falls upon ‘the surface and transmitting it to the subjacent 
strata, we must compare the condition and properties of its soil 
with those of cleared and cultivated earth, and examine the 
consequently different action of these soils at different seasons 
of the year. The disparity between them is greatest in climates 
where, as in the Northern American States and in the extreme 
North of Europe, the open ground freezes and remains imper- 
vious to water during a considerable part of the winter ; though, 
even in climates where the earth does not freeze at all, the 
woods have still an important influence of the same character. 
The difference is yet greater in countries which have regular 
wet and dry seasons, rain being very frequent in the former 
period, while, in the latter, it scarcely occurs at all. These 
countries lie chiefly in or near the tropics, but they are not 
wanting in higher latitudes; for a large part of Asiatic and 
even of European Turkey is almost wholly deprived of summer 
rains. In the principal regions occupied by European cultiva- 
tion, and where alone the questions discussed in this volume 
are recognized as having, at present, any practical importance, 
more or less rain falls at all seasons, and it is to these regions 
that, on this point as well as others, I chiefly confine my atten- 
tion. 


Importance of Snow. 


Recent observations in Switzerland give a new importance 
to the hygrometrical functions of snow, and of course to the 
forest as its accumulator and protector. I refer to statements 
of the condensation of atmospheric vapor by the snows and 
glaciers of the Rhone basin, where it is estimated to be nearly 
equal to the entire precipitation of the valley. Whenever the 
humidity of the atmosphere in contact with snow is above the 
point of saturation at the temperature to which the air is cooled 
by such contact, the superfluous moisture is absorbed by the 


snow or condensed and frozen upon its surface, and of course 
14 


210 IMPORTANCE OF SNOW. 


adds so much to the winter supply of water received from the 
snow by the ground. This quantity, in all probability, much 
exceeds the loss by evaporation, for during the period when 
the ground is covered with snow, the proportion of clear dry 
weather favorable to evaporation is less than that of humid 
days with an atmosphere in a condition to yield up its moisture 
to any bibulous substance cold enough to condense it.* 

In our Northern States, irregular as is the climate, the first 
autumnal snows pretty constantly fall before the ground is 
frozen at all, or when the frost extends at most to the depth 
of only a few inches.t| In the woods, especially those situated 
upon the elevated ridges which supply the natural irrigation 
of the soil and feed the perennial fountains and streams, the 
ground remains covered with snow during the winter; for the 
trees protect the snow from blowing from the general surface 
into the depressions, and new accessions are received before the 
covering deposited by the first fall is melted. Snow is ofa 
color unfavorable for radiation, but, even when it is of con- 
siderable thickness, it is not wholly impervious to the rays of 
the sun, and for this reason, as well as from the warmth of 
lower strata, the frozen crust of the soil, if one has been formed, 
is soon thawed, and does not again fall below the freezing- 
point during the winter. | 


* The hard snow-crust, which in the early spring is a source of such keen 
enjoyment to the children and youth of the North—and to many older persons 
in whom the love of nature has kept awake a relish for the simple pleasures 
of rural life—is doubtless due to the congelation of the vapor condensed by 
the snow rather than to the thawing and freezing of the superficial stratum ; 
for when the surface is melted by the sun, the water is taken up by the ab- 
sorbent mass beneath before the temperature falls low enough to freeze it. 

+ The hard autumnal frosts are usually preceded by heavy rains which 
thoroughly moisten the soil, and it is a common saying in the North that ‘‘ the 
ground will not freeze till the swamps are full.” 

{ Dr. Williams, of Vermont, made some observations on the comparative 
temperature of the soil in open and in wooded ground in the years 1789 and 
1791, but they generally belonged to the warmer months, and I do not know 
that any extensive series of comparisons between the temperature of the 
ground in the woods and in the fields has been attempted in America. Dr, 


IMPORTANCE OF SNOW. 911 


The snow in contact with the earth now begins to melt, with 
greater or less rapidity, according to the relative temperature 
of the earth and the air, while the water resulting from its dis- 
solution is imbibed by the vegetable mould, and carried off by 
infiltration so fast that both the snow and the layers of leaves 
in contact with it often seem comparatively dry, when, in fact, 
the under-surface of the former is in a state of perpetual thaw. 
No doubt a certain proportion of the snow is given off to the 
atmosphere by direct evaporation, but in the woods, the pro- 
tection against the sun by even leafless trees prevents much 
loss in this way, and besides, the snow receives much moisture 
from the air by absorption and condensation. Very little 


Williams’s thermometer was sunk to the depth of ten inches, and gave the fol- 
lowing results: 


Temperature Temperature 


TIME, of ground in of ground in Difference, 
pasture, woods. 
Lay, Pee Mla te Veni Nts as 52 4G 6 
ARO fele ts -isiaveteiaycl at ctl hofar's 57 48 9 
SIRES ee Oe cen Genicsene cs qeeeer 64 51 13 
Soe (elic lOvE SSR eer eee pone 62 51 if 
Sleeper. Pets MONE a 62 51 11 
te ad ISIA ATS: Se oS cote oo arelenre olere 654 553 10 
Negotiate «to dss icmia dna ackes 68 58 10 
NSIS SORES SEE oo neh an 594 55 4} 
SETTLE OSE aE BR GOBEAECSHebsMone 593 55 4} 
6 ally UREA ERM n rine Sia aint 59S 55 4} 
MeN Lele Mi eps 52 -a ef mtanatonteloaeiae oat 49 49 0 
TIN OMe ibis Gara 8 «codes te tt atoiarstartys 43 43 0 
BEE EOS cab cin synysscha arid wiasaieinie oi sharers 435 43% 0 


On the 14th of January, 1791, in a winter remarkable for its extreme 
severity, he found the ground, on a plain open field where the snow had been 
blown away, frozen to the depth of three feet and five inches; in the woods 
where the snow was three feet deep, and where the soil had frozen to the 
depth of six inches before the snow fell, the thermometer, at six inches 
below the surface of the ground, stood at 39°. In consequence of the cover- 
ing of the snow, therefore, the previously frozen ground had been thawed 
and raised to seven degrees above the freezing-point.—WILLIAMs’s Vermont, 
de opi de 

Boussingault’s observations are important, Employing three thermometers, 


212 IMPORTANCE OF SNOW. 


water runs off in the winter by superficial water-courses, except 
in rare cases of sudden thaw, and there can be no question that 
much the greater part of the snow deposited in the forest is 
slowly melted and absorbed by the earth. 

The immense importance of the forest, as a reservoir of this 
stock of moisture, becomes apparent, when we consider that a 
large proportion of the summer rain either flows into the valleys 
and the rivers, because it falls faster than the ground can im- 
bibe it; or, if absorbed by the warm superficial strata, is evapo- 
rated from them without sinking deep enough to reach wells 
and springs, which, of course, depend much on winter rains 
and snows for their entire supply. This observation, though 
specially true of cleared and cultivated grounds, is not wholly 
inapplicable to the forest, particularly when, as is too often 
the case in Europe, the underwood and the decaying leaves are 
removed. 


one with the bulb an inch below the surface of powdery snow; one on the 
surface of the ground beneath the snow, then four inches deep; and one in 
the open air, forty feet above the ground, on the north side of a building, he 
found, at 5 P.M., the first thermometer at —1.5° Centigrade, the second at 0°, 
and the third at +2.5°; at 7 A.M. the next morning, the first stood at —12°, 
the second at —3.5°, and the third at —3°; at 5.30 the same evening No. 1 
stood at —1.4°, No. 2 at 0°, and No. 3 at + 3°. Other experiments were 
tried, and though the temperature was affected by the radiation, which varied 
with the hour of the day and the state of the sky, the upper surface of the 
snow was uniformly colder than the lower, or than the open air. 

According to the Report of the Department of Agriculture for May and June, 
1872, Mr. C. G. Prindle, of Vermont, in the preceding winter, found, for four 
successive days, the temperature immediately above the snow at 138° below 
zero ; beneath the snow, which was but four inches deep, at 19° above zero ; 
and under a drift two feet deep, at 27° above. 

On the borders and in the glades of the American forest, violets and other 
small plants begin to vegetate as soon as the snow has thawed the soil around 
their roots, and they are not unfrequently found in full flower under two or 
three feet of snow.—American Naturalist, May, 1869, pp. 155, 156. 

In very cold weather, when the ground is covered with light snow, flocks 
of the grouse of the Eastern States’ often plunge into the snow about sunset, 
and pass the night in this warm shelter. If the weather moderates before 
morning, a frozen crust is sometimes formed on the surface too strong to be 
broken by the birds, which consequently perish. 


IMPORTANCE OF SNOW. OTS 


The quantity of snow that falls in extensive forests, far from 
the open country, has seldom been ascertained by direct obser- 
vation, because there are few meteorological stations in or 
near the forest. According to Thompson,* the proportion of 
water which falls in snow in the Northern States does not ex- 
ceed one-fifth of the total precipitation, but the moisture de- 
rived from it is doubtless considerably increased by the atmos- 
pheric vapor absorbed by it, or condensed and frozen on its 
surface. I think I can say from experience—and I am con- 
firmed in this opinion by the testimony of competent observers 
whose attention has been directed specially to the point—that 
though much snow is intercepted by the trees, and the quantity 
on the ground in the woods is consequently less than in open 
land in the first part of the winter, yet most of what reaches 
the ground at that season remains under the protection of the 
wood until melted, and as it occasionally receives new supplies 
the depth of snow in the forest in the latter half of winter is 
considerably greater than in the cleared fields. Careful meas- 
urements in a snowy region in New England, in the month of 
February, gave a mean of 38 inches in the open ground and 
44 inches in the woods.t 

The general effect of the forest in cold climates is to assim- 


* THompson’s Vermont, Appendix, p. 8. 

+ As the loss of snow by evaporation has been probably exaggerated by 
popular opinion, an observation or two on the subject may not be amiss in 
this place. Itis true that in the open grounds, in clear weather and with 
a dry atmosphere, snow and ice are evaporated with great rapidity even when 
the thermometer is much below the freezing-point ; and Darwin informs us 
that the snow on the summit of Aconcagua, 23,000 feet high, and of course 
in a temperature of perpetual frost, is sometimes carried off by evaporation. 
The surface of the snow in our woods, however, does not indicate much loss 
in this way. Very small deposits of snow-flakes remain unevaporated in the 
forest, for many days after snow which fell at the same time in the cleared 
field has disappeared without either a thaw to melt it or a wind powerful 
enough to drift itaway. Even when bared of their leaves, the trees of a wood 
obstruct, in an important degree, both the direct action of the sun’s rays on 
the snow and the movement of drying and thawing winds. 

Dr. Piper (Trees of America, p. 48) records the following observations: ‘‘ A 
body of snow, one foot in depth and sixteen feet square, was protected from 


214 IMPORTANCE OF SNOW. 


ilate the winter state of the ground to that of wooded regions 
under softer skies; and it is a circumstance well worth noting, 
that in Southern Europe, where Nature has denied to the earth 
a warm winter-garment of flocculent snow, she has, by one of 
those compensations in which her empire is so rich, clothed the 
hillsides with umbrella and other pines, ilexes, cork-oaks, bays, 
and other trees of persistent foliage, whose evergreen leaves 
afford to the soil a protection analogous to that which it derives 
from snow in more northern climates. 

The water imbibed by the soil in winter sinks until it meets 
a more or less impermeable or a saturated stratum, and then, 
by unseen conduits, slowly finds its way to the channels of 
springs, or oozes out of the ground in drops which unite in 
rills, and so all is conveyed to the larger streams, and by them 
finally to the sea. The water, in percolating through the vege- 
table and mineral layers, acquires their temperature, and is 
chemically affected by their action, but it carries very little 
matter in mechanical suspension. 

The process I have described is a slow one, and the supply 
of moisture derived from the snow, augmented by the rains of 
the following seasons, keeps the forest-ground, where the sur- 
face is level or but moderately inclined, in a state of approxi- 
mate saturation throughout almost the whole year. * 


the wind by a tight board fence about five feet high, while another body of 
snow, much more sheltered from the sun than the first, six feet in depth, and 
about sixteen feet square, was fully exposed to the wind. When the thaw 
came on, which lasted about a fortnight, the larger body of snow was entirely 
dissolved in less than a week, while the smaller body was not wholly gone at 
the end of the second week. 

“ Hqual quantities of snow were placed in vessels of the same kind and 
capacity, the temperature of the air being seventy degrees. In the one case, 
a coustant current of air was kept passing over the open vessel, while the other 
was proteectd by a cover. The snow ‘in the first was dissolved in sixteen 
minutes, while the latter had a small unthawed proportion remaining at the 
end of eighty-five minutes.” 

The snow in the woods is protected in the same way, though not literally to 
the same extent, as by the fence in one of these cases and the cover in the other. 

* The statements I have made, here and elsewhere, respecting the humidity 


IMPORTANCE OF SUMMER RAINS. 915 


It may be proper to observe here that in Italy, and in many 
parts of Spain and France, the Alps, the Apennines, and the 
Pyrenees, not to speak of less important mountains, perform 
the functions which provident nature has in other regions assign- 
ed to the forest, that is, they act as reservoirs wherein is accu- 
mulated in winter a supply of moisture to nourish the parched 
plains during the droughts of summer. Hence, however enor- 
mous may be the evils which have accrued to the above-men- 
tioned countries from the destruction of the woods, the absolute 
desolation which would otherwise have smitten them through the 
folly of man, has been partially prevented by those natural 
dispositions, by means of which there are stored up in the 
glaciers, in the snow-fields, and in the basins of mountains and 
valleys, vast deposits of condensed moisture which are after- 
wards distributed in a liquid form during the season in which 
the atmosphere furnishes a slender supply of the beneficent 
fluid so indispensable to vegetable and animal life.* 


Summer Lains, Importance of. 


Babinet quotes a French proverb: “Summer rain wets 
nothing,” and explains it by saying that at that season the rain- 


of the soil in natural forests, have been, I understand, denied by Mr. T. Mee- 
han, a distinguished American naturalist, in a paper which I have not seen. 
He is quoted as maintaining, among other highly questionable propositions, 
that no ground is ‘‘ so dry in its subsoil as that which sustains a forest on its 
surface.” In open, artificially planted woods, with a smooth and regular sur- 
face, and especially in forests where the fallen leaves and branches are annu- 
ally burnt or carried off, both the superficial and the subjacent strata may, 
under certain circumstances, become dry, but this rarely, if ever, happensin a 
wood of spontaneous growth, undeprived of the protection afforded by its own 
droppings, and of the natural accidents of surface which tend to the retention 
of water. See, on this point, a very able article by Mr. Henry Stewart, in 
the New York Tribune of November 25, 1873. 

* The accumulation of snow and ice upon the Alps and other mountains— 
which often fills up valleys to the height of hundreds of feet—is due not 
only to the fall of congealed and crystallized vapor in the form of snow, to the 
condensation of atmospheric vapor on the surface of snow-fields and glaciers, 
and to a temperature which prevents the rapid melting of snow, but also to 


916 IMPORTANCE OF SUMMER RAINS. 


water is “almost entirely carried off by evaporation.” “The 
rains of summer,” he adds, “however abundant they may be, 
do not penetrate the soil beyond the depth of six or eight 
inches. In summer the evaporating power of the heat is five 
or six times greater than in winter, and this force is exerted by 
an atmosphere capable of containing five or six times as much 
vapor as in winter.” “A stratum of snow which prevents 
evaporation [from the ground], causes almost all the water 
that composes it to filter into the earth, and forms a provision 
for fountains, wells, and streams which could not be furnished 
by any quantity whatever of summer rain. This latter, useful 
to vegetation like the dew, neither penetrates the soil nor 
accumulates a store to supply the springs and to be given out 
again into the open air.” * 


the well-known fact that, at least up to the height of 10,000 feet, rain and snow 
are more abundant on the mountains than at lower levels. 

But another reason may be suggested for the increase of atmospheric hu- 
midity, and consequently of the precipitation of aqueous vapor on mountain 
chains. In discussing the influence of mountains on precipitation, meteorologists 
have generally treated the popular belief, that mountains “ attract” to them 
clouds floating within a certain distance from them, as an ignorant prejudice, 
and they ascribe the appearance of clouds about high peaks solely to the cou- 
densation of the humidity of the air carried by atmospheric currents up the 
slopes of the mountain to a colder temperature. But if mountains do not 
really draw clouds and invisible vapors to them, they are an exception to the 
universal law of attraction. The attraction of the small Mount Shehallien was 
found sufficient to deflect from the perpendicular, by a measurable quantity, 
a plummet weighing but a few ounces. Why, then,'should not greater masses 
attract to them volumes of vapor weighing many tons, and floating freely in 
the atmosphere within moderate distances of the mountains ? 

* Etudes et Lectures, vol. vi., p. 118. The experiments of Johnstrup in 
the vicinity of Copenhagen, where the mean annual precipitation is 234 
inches, and where the evaporation must be less than in the warmer and drier 
atmosphere of France, form the most careful series of observations on this 
subject which I have met with. Johnstrup found that at the depth of a 
metre and a half (59 inches) the effects of rain and evaporation were almost 
imperceptible, and became completely so at a depth of from two to three 
metres (64 to 10 feet). During the summer half of the year the evaporation 
rather exceeded the rainfall ; during the winter half the entire precipitation 
was absorbed by the soil and transmitted to lower strata by infiltration, The 


IMPORTANCE OF SUMMER RAINS. 2 


This conclusion, however applicable to the climate and to the 
soil of France, is too broadly stated to be received as a general 
truth; and in countries like the United States, where rain is 
comparatively rare during the winter and abundant during the 
summer half of the year, common observation shows that the 
quantity of water furnished by deep wells and by natural springs 
depends almost as much upon the rains of summer as upon those 
of the rest of the year, and consequently that a large portion of 
the rain of that season must find its way into strata too deep for 
the water to be wasted by evaporation.* 


stratum between one metre and a half (59 inches) and three metres (10 feet) 
from the surface was then permanently in the condition of a saturated 
sponge, neither receiving nor losing humidity during the summer half of the 
year, but receiving from superior, and giving off to lower, strata an equal 
amount of moisture during the winter half.—JounstruP, Om Hugtighedens 
DBevegeise t den naturtige Jordbund. Kjibenhayn, 1866. 

Dalton’s experiments in the years 1796, 1797, and 1798 appeared to show 
that the mean absorption of the downfall by the earth in those years was 
twenty-nine per cent. 

Dickinson, employing the same apparatus for eight years, found the absorp- 
tion to vary widely in different years, the mean being forty-seven per cent. 

Charnock’s experiments in two years show an absorption of from seventeen 
to twenty-seven per cent. 

* According to observations at one hundred military stations in the United 
States, the precipitation ranges from three and a quarter inches at Fort Yuma 
in California to about seventy-two inches at Fort Pike, Louisiana, the mean 
for the entire territory, not including Aliaska, being thirty-six inches. In the 
different sections of the Union it is as follows: 


North-easterm States: .2... 2. cases ccce oc .- 41 inches. 
ING W VOUS rraerinte ahi ain « caaete tia cinecmen 36 ee 
Middle S tateshs ce Gene tee. eek Chat eee etd 
OAM eR Ny ATL Pee tas St ee a ee Wim te 40 6 
PE NeRn Spatedinia. | sah .w Rieu eld, oxic dis tc 51 se 
S. W. States and Indian Territories........ 394 SS 
Western States and Territories............ 30 ee 
Texas anduNew. Mexico's .é.<.< seu, eesecsce «24 86 
Califormeareetican an. SES AIS PCE tsp he a) C0 
Oregon and Washington Territory......... 50 ce 


The mountainous regions, it appears, do not receive the greatest amount of 
precipitation. The average downfall of the Southern States bordering on the 


218 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


Besides, even admitting that the water from summer rains is 
so completely evaporated as to contribute nothing directly to 
the supply of springs, it at least tends indirectly to maintain their 
flow, because it saturates in part the atmosphere, and at the 
same time it prevents the heat of the sun from drying the earth 
to still greater depths, and bringing within the reach of evapo- 
ration the moisture of strata which ordinarily do not feel the 
effects of solar irradiation. 


Influence of the Forest on the Flow of Springs. 


It isan almost universal and, I believe, well-founded opinion, 
that the protection afforded by the forest against the escape of 
moisture from its soil by superficial flow and evaporation insures 
the permanence and regularity of natural springs, not only 
within the limits of the wood, but at some distance beyond its 
borders, and thus contributes to the supply of an element essen- 
tial to both vegetable and animal life. As the forests are 
destroyed, the springs which flowed from the woods, and, conse- 
quently, the greater water-courses fed by them, diminish both 
in number and in volume. This fact is so familiar throughout 
the American States and the British Provinces, that there are 
few old residents of the interior of those districts who are not 
able to testify to its truth as a matter of personal observation. 
My own recollection suggests to me many instances of this sort, 
and I remember one case where a small mountain spring, which 
disappeared soon after the clearing of the ground where it rose, 
was recovered about twenty years ago, by simply allowing the 
bushes and young trees to grow up on a rocky knoll, not more 


Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico exceeds the mean of the whole United States, 
being no less than fifty-one inches, while on the Pacific coast it ranges from 
fifty to fifty-six inches. 

As a general rule, it may be stated that at the stations on or near the sea- 
coast the precipitation is greatest in the spring months, though there are sey- 
eral exceptions to this remark, and ata large majority of the stations the 
downfall is considerably greater in the summer months than at any other 
season. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 219 


than half an acre in extent, immediately above the spring. The 
ground was hardly shaded before the water reappeared, and it 
has ever since continued to flow without interruption. The hills 
in the Atlantic States formerly abounded in springs and brooks, 
but in many parts of these States which were cleared a genera- 
tion or two ago, the hill-pastures now suffer severely from 
drought, and in dry seasons furnish to cattle neither grass nor 
water. 

Almost every treatise on the economy of the forest adduces 
facts in support of the doctrine that the clearing of the woods 
tends to diminish the flow of springs and the humidity of the 
soil, and it might seem unnecessary to bring forward further 
evidence on this point.* But the subject is of too much practi- 
cal importance and of too great philosophical interest to be 
summarily disposed of ; and it ought to be noticed that there is 
at least one case—that of some loose sandy soils which, as ob- 
served by Valleés,t when bared of wood very rapidly absorb 
and transmit to lower strata the water they receive from the at- 
mosphere—where the removal of the forest may increase the 
flow of springs at levels below it, by exposing to the rain and 
melted snow a surface more bibulous, and at the same time less 
retentive, than its original covering. Under such circumstances, 
the water of precipitation, which had formerly been absorbed 
by the vegetable mould and retained until it was evaporated, 
might descend through porous earth until it meets an imperme- 


* “ Why go so far for the proof of a phenomenon that is repeated every day 
under our own eyes, and of which every Parisian may convince himself, with- 
out venturing beyond the Bois de Boulogne or the forest of Meudon? Let him, 
after a few rainy days, pass along the Chevreuse road, which is bordered on 
the right by the wood, on the left by cultivated fields. The fall of water 
and the continuance of the rain have been the same on both sides; but the 
ditch on the side of the forest will remain filled with water proceeding from 
the infiltration through the wooded soil, long after the other, contiguous to 
the open ground, has performed its office of drainage and become dry. The 
ditch on the left will have discharged in a few hours a quantity of water, 
which the ditch on the right requires several days to receive and carry down 
to the valley.”—CLAv#, Etudes, etc., pp. 53, 54. 

¢ VaLuis, Etudes sur les Inondations, p. 472. 


220 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


able stratum, and then be conducted along it, until, finally, at the 
outcropping of this stratum, it bursts from a hillside as a run- 
ning spring. But such instances are doubtless too rare to form 
a frequent or an important exception to the general law, because 
it is very seldom the case that such a soil as has just been sup- 
posed is covered by a layer of vegetable earth thick enough to 
retain, until it is evaporated, all the rain that falls upon it, with- 
out imparting any water to the strata below it. 

If we look at the point under discussion as purely a question 
of fact, to be determined by positive evidence and not by argu- 
ment, the observations of Boussingault are, both in the circum- 
stances they detail and in the weight to be attached to the 
testimony, among the most important yet recorded. The interest 
of the question will justify me in giving, nearly in Boussin- 
gault’s own words, the facts and some of the remarks with which 
he accompanies the detail of them. “ In many localities,” he 
observes,* “it has been thought that, within a certain number 
of years, a sensible diminution has been perceived in the volume 
of water of streams utilized as a motive-power ; at other points, 
there are grounds for believing that rivers have become shal- 
lower, and the increasing breadth of the belt of pebbles along 
their banks seems to prove the loss of a part of their water ; and, 
finally, abundant springs have almost dried up. These obser- 
vations have been principally made in valleys bounded by high 
mountains, and it has been noticed that this diminution of the 
waters has immediately followed the epoch when the inhabitants 
have begun to destroy, unsparingly, the woods which were 
spread over the face of the land. 

“ And here lies the practical point of the question; for if it 
is once established that clearing diminishes the volume of 
streams, it is less important to know to what special cause this 
effect is due. The rivers which rise within the valley of Ara- 
gua, having no outlet to the ocean, form, by their union, the 
Lake of Tacarigua or Valencia, having a length of about two 
leagues and a half [= 7 English miles]. 


* Economie Rurale, t. ii., p. 730. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 291 


“ At the time of Humboldt’s visit to the valley of Aragua, 
the inhabitants were struck by the gradual diminution which 
the lake had been undergoing for thirty years. In fact, by 
comparing the descriptions given by historians with its actual 
condition, even making large allowance for exaggeration, it 
was easy to see that the level was considerably depressed. The 
facts spoke for themselves. Oviedo, who, toward the close of 
the sixteenth century, had often traversed the valley of Ara- 
gua, says positively that New Valencia was founded, in 1555, 
at half a league from the Lake of Tacarigua; in 1800, Hum- 
boldt found this city 5,260 metres [= 34 English miles] from 
the shore. 

“The aspect of the soil furnished new proofs. Many hil- 
locks on the plain retain the name of islands, which they more 
justly bore when they were surrounded by water. The ground 
laid bare by the retreat of the lake was converted into admi- 
rable plantations ; and buildings erected near the lake showed 
the sinking of the water from year to year. In 1796, new 
islands made their appearance. <A fortress built in 1740 on 
the island of Cabrera, was now on a peninsula; and, finally, 
on two granitic islands, those of Cura and Cabo Blanco, Hum- 
boldt observed among the shrubs, some metres above the 
water, fine sand filled with helicites. 

“These clear and positive facts suggested numerous expla- 
nations, all assuming a subterranean outlet, which permitted 
the discharge of the water to the ocean. Humboldt disposed 
of these hypotheses, and did not hesitate to ascribe the dimi- 
nution of the waters of the lake to the numerous clearings 
which had been made in the valley of Aragua within half a 
century.” 

Twenty-two years later, Boussingault explored the valley 
of Aragua. For some years previous, the inhabitants had ob- 
served that the waters of the lake were no longer retiring, but, 
on the contrary, were sensibly rising. Grounds, not long 
before occupied by plantations, were submerged. The islands 
of Nuevas Aparecidas, which appeared above the surface in 


222 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


1796, had again become shoals dangerous to navigation. Ca- 
brera, a tongue of land on the north side of the valley, was so 
narrow that the least rise of the water completely inundated 
it. A protracted north wind sufficed to flood the road between 
Maracay and New Valencia. The fears which the inhabitants 
of the shores had so long entertained were reversed. Those 
who had explained the diminution of the lake by the suppo- 
sition of subterranean channels were suspected of blocking 
them up, to prove themselves in the right. 

During the twenty-two years which had elapsed, the valley 
of Aragua had been the theatre of bloody struggles, and war 
had desolated these smiling lands and decimated their popula- 
tion. At the first cry of independence a great number of 
slaves found their liberty by enlisting under the banners of 
the new republic; the great plantations were abandoned, and 
the forest, which in the tropics so rapidly encroaches, had soon 
recovered a large proportion of the soil which man had 
wrested from it by more than a century of constant and pain- 
ful labor. 

Boussingault proceeds to state that two lakes near Ubate, 
in New Granada, had formed but one, a century before his 
visit; that the waters were gradually retiring, and the plan- 
tations extending over the abandoned bed; that, by inquiry of 
old hunters and by examination of parish records, he found that 
extensive clearings had been made and were still going on. 

He found, also, that the length of the Lake of Fuquené, in 
the same valley, had, within two centuries, been reduced from 
ten leagues to one and a half, its breadth from three leagues to 
one. At the former period, the neighboring mountains were 
well wooded, but at the time of his visit the mountains had 
been almost entirely stripped of their wood. Our author adds 
that other cases, similar to those already detailed, might be 
cited, and he proceeds to show, by several examples, that the 
waters of other lakes in the same regions, where the valleys 
had always been bare of wood, or where the forests had not 
been disturbed, had undergone no change of level. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 293 


Boussingault further states that the lakes of Switzerland 
have sustained a depression of level since the too prevalent 
destruction of the woods, and arrives at the general conclusion 
that, “in countries where great clearings have been made, 
there has most probably been a diminution in the living waters 
which flow upon the surface of the ground.” This conclusion 
he further supports by two examples: one, where a fine spring, 
at the foot of a wooded mountain in the Island of Ascension, 
dried up when the mountain was cleared, but reappeared when 
the wood was replanted; the other at Marmato, in the province 
of Popayan, where the streams employed to drive machinery 
were much diminished in volume, within two years after the 
clearing of the heights from which they derived their supplies. 
This latter is an interesting case, because, although the rain- 
gauges, established as soon as the decrease of water began to 
excite alarm, showed a greater fall of rain for the second 
year of observation than the first, yet there was no appre- 
eiable increase in the flow of the mill-streams. From these 
cases, the distinguished physicist infers that very restricted 
local clearings may diminish and even suppress springs 
and brooks, without any reduction in the total quantity of 
rain. 

It will have been noticed that these observations, with the 
exception of the last two cases, do not bear directly upon the 
question of the diminution of springs by clearings, but they 
logically infer it from the subsidence of the natural reservoirs 
which springs once filled. There is, however, no want of posi- 
tive evidence on this subject. 

Marchand cites the following instances: “ Before the felling 
of the woods, within the last few years, in the valley of the 
Soulce, the Combe-és-Mounin and the Little Valley, the Sorne 
furnished a regular and sufficient supply of water for the iron- 
works of Unterwyl, which was almost unaffected by drought or 
by heavy rains. The Sorne has now become a torrent, every 
shower occasions a flood, and after a few days of fine weather, 
the current falls so low that it has been necessary to change 


994 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


the water-wheels, because those of the old construction are no 
longer able to drive the machinery, and at last to introduce a 
steam-engine to prevent the stoppage of the works for want of 
water. 

“When the factory of St. Ursanne was established, the 
river that furnished its power was abundant, and had, from 
time immemorial, sufficed for the machinery of a previous 
factory. Afterwards, the woods near its sources were cut. 
The supply of water fell off in consequence, the factory 
wanted water for half the year, and was at last obliged to stop 
altogether. 

“ The spring of Combefoulat, in the commune of Seleate, was 
well known as one of the best in the country; it was remark- 
ably abundant, and sufficient, in the severest droughts, to 
supply all the fountains of the town; but as soon as consider- 
able forests were felled in Combe-de-pré Martin and in the 
valley of Combefoulat, the famous. spring, which lies below 
these woods, has become a mere thread of water, and disappears 
altogether in times of drought. 

“The spring of Varieux, which formerly supplied the castle 
of Pruntrut, lost more than half its water after the clearing of 
Varieux and Rougeoles. These woods have been replanted, 
the young trees are growing well, and, with the woods, the 
waters of the spring are increasing. 

“The Dog Spring between Pruntrut and Bressancourt has 
entirely vanished since the surrounding forest-grounds were 
brought under cultivation. , 

“The Wolf Spring, in the commune of Soubey, furnishes a 
remarkable example of the influence of the woods upon foun- 
tains. A few years ago this spring did not exist. At the place 
where it now rises, a small thread of water was observed after 
very long rains, but the stream disappeared with the rain. The 
spot is in the middle of a very steep pasture inclining to the 
south. Eighty years ago, the owner of the land, perceiving 
that young firs were shooting up in the upper part of it, de- 
termined to let them grow, and they soon formed a flourishing 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 225 


grove. As soon as they were well grown, a fine spring ap- 
peared in place of the occasional rill, and furnished abundant 
water in the longest droughts. For forty or fifty years this 
spring was considered the best in the Clos du Doubs. A few 
years since, the grove was felled, and the ground turned again 
toa pasture. The spring disappeared with the wood, and is 
now as dry as it was ninety years ago.” * 

Siemoni gives the following remarkable facts from his own 
personal observation : 

“In a rocky nook near the crest of a mountain in the Tuscan 
Apennines, there flowed a clear, cool, and perennial fountain, 
uniting three distinct springs in a single current. The ancient 
beeches around and particularly above the springs were felled. 
On the disappearance of the wood, the springs ceased to flow, 
except in a thread of water in rainy weather, greatly inferior 
in quality to that of the old fountain. The beeches were 
succeeded by firs, and as soon as they had grown sufficiently 
to shade the soil, the springs began again to flow, and they 
gradually returned to their former abundance and quality. 

This and the next preceding case are of great importance 
both as to the action of the wood in maintaining springs, and 
particularly as tending to prove that evergreens do not exercise 
the desiccative influence ascribed to them in France. The latter 
instance shows, too, that the protective influence of the wood 
extends far below the surface, for the quality of the water was 
determined, no doubt, by the depth from which it was drawn. 
The slender occasional supply after the beeches were cut was 
rain-water which soaked through the superficial humus and 
oozed out at the old orifices, carrying the taste and temperature 
of the vegetable soil with it; the more abundant and grateful 
water which flowed before the beeches were cut, and after the 
firs were well grown, came from a deeper source and had been 
purified, and cooled to the mean temperature of the locality, 
by filtering through strata of mineral earth. 


* Ueber die Entwaldung der Gebirge, pp. 20 et seqq. 
+ Manuale @ Arte Forestale. 2%* edizione, p. 492. 
15 


2°96 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


“The influence of the forest on springs,” says Hummel, “ is 
strikingly shown by an instance at Heilbronn. The woods on 
the hills surrounding the town are cut in regular succession 
every twentieth year. As the annual cuttings approach a cer- 
tain point, the springs yield less water, some of them none at 
all; but as the young growth shoots up, they flow more and 
more freely, and at length bubble up again in all their original 
abundance.” * 

Dr. Piper states the following case: “ Within about half a 
nile of my residence there is a pond upon which mills have been 
standing for a long time, dating back, I believe, to the first 
settlement of the town. These have been kept in constant 
operation until within some twenty or thirty years, when the 
supply of water began to fail. The pond owes its existence to 
a stream that has its source in the hills which stretch some 
miles to the south. Within the time mentioned, these hills, 
which were clothed with a dense forest, have been almost en- 
tirely stripped of trees; and to the wonder and loss of the mill- 
owners, the water in the pond has failed, except in the season 
of freshets; and, what was never heard of before, the stream 
itself has been entirely dry. Within the last ten years a new 
growth of wood has sprung up on most of the land formerly 
oceupied by the old forest; and now the water runs through 
the year, notwithstanding the great droughts of the last few 
years, going back from 1856.” 

Dr. Piper quotes from a letter of William C. Bryant the 
following remarks: “ It is a common observation that our sum- 
mers are becoming drier and our streams smaller. Take the 
Cuyahoga asan illustration. Iifty years ago large barges loaded 
with goods went up and down that river, and one of the vessels 
engaged in the battle of Lake Erie, in which the gallant 
Perry was victorious, was built at Old Portage, six miles north 
of Albion, and floated down to the lake. Now, in an ordinary 
stage of the water, a canoe or skiff can hardly pass down the 
stream. Many a boat of fifty tons burden has been built and 


* Physische Geographie, p. 32. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 927 


loaded in the Tuscarawas, at New Portage, and sailed to New 
Orleans without breaking bulk. Now, the river hardly affords 
a supply of water at New Portage for the canal. The same 
may be said of other streams—they are drying up. And from 
the same cause—the destruction of our forests—our summers 
are growing drier and our winters colder.” * 

No observer has more carefully studied the influence of the 
forest upon the flow of the waters, or reasoned more ably on 
the ascertained phenomena, than Cantegril. The facts presented 
in the following case, communicated by him to the Amd des 
Sciences for December, 1859, are as nearly conelusive as any 
single instance well can be: 

“Tn the territory of the commune of Labruguiére there is 
a forest of 1,834 hectares [4,530 acres], known by the name of 
the Forest of Montaut, and belonging to that commune. It 
extends along the northern slope of the Black Mountains. The 
soil is granitic, the maximum altitude 1,248 métres [4,140 feet], 
and the inclination ranges between 15 and 60 to 100. 

“A small current of water, the brook of Caunan, takes its 
rise in this forest, and receives the waters of two-thirds of its 
surface. At the lower extremity of the wood and on the 
stream are several fulleries, each requiring a force of eight 
horse-power to drive the water-wheels which work the stamp- 
ers. The commune of Labruguiére had been fora long time 
famous for its opposition to forest laws. Trespasses and abuses 
of the right of pasturage had converted the wood into an im- 
mense waste, so that this vast property now scarcely sufficed to 
pay the expense of protecting it, and to furnish the inhabitants 
with a meagre supply of fuel. While the forest was thus ruined, 
and the soil thus bared, the water, after every abundant rain, 
made an eruption into the valley, bringing down a great quantity 
of pebbles which still clog the current of the Caunan. The 
violence of the floods was sometimes such that they were 
obliged to stop the machinery for some time. During the sum- 
mer another inconvenience was felt. If the dry weather con- 


* The Trees of America, pp. 50, 51. 


228 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


tinued a little longer than usual, the delivery of water became 
insignificant. Each fullery could for the most part only em- 
ploy a single set of stampers, and it was not unusual to see the 
work entirely suspended. 

“* After 1840, the municipal authority succeeded in enlight- 
ening the population as to their true interests. Protected by a 
more watchful supervision, aided by well-managed replantation, 
the forest has continued to improve to the present day. In 
proportion to the restoration of the forest, the condition of 
the manufactories has become less and less precarious, and the 
action of the water is completely modified. For example, sud- 
den and violent floods, which formerly made it necessary to 
stop the machinery, no longer occur. There is no increase in 
the delivery until six or eight hours after the beginning of the 
rain; the floods follow a regular progression till they reach 
their maximum, and decrease in the same manner. Finally, 
the fulleries are no longer forced to suspend work in summer ; 
the water is always sufficiently abundant to allow the employ- 
ment of two sets of stampers at least, and often even of three. 

‘“« This example is remarkable in this respect, that, all other 
circumstances having remained the same, the changes in the 
action of the stream can be attributed only to the restoration 
of the forest—changes which may be thus sammed up: dimi- 
nution of flood-water during rains—increase of delivery at 
other seasons.” 

Becquerel and other European writers adduce numerous 
other cases where the destruction of forests has caused the dis- 
appearance of springs, a diminution in the volume of rivers, 
and a lowering of the level of lakes, and in fact, the evidence 
in support of the doctrine I have been maintaining on this 
subject seems to be as conclusive as the nature of the case ad- 
mits.* We cannot, it is true, arrive at the same certainty and 
precision of result in these inquiries as in those branches of 


* See, in the Revue des Haux et Foréts for April, 1867, an article entitled 
De Vinfluence des Foréts sur le Régime des Hawa, and the papers in previous 
numbers of the same journal therein referred to. 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 229 


physical research where exact quantitative appreciation is pos- 
sible, and we must content ourselves with probabilities and 
approximations. We cannot positively affirm that the precipi- 
tation in a given locality is increased by the presence, or 
lessened by the destruction, of the forest, and from our igno- 
rance of the subterranean circulation of the waters, we cannot 
predict, with certainty, the drying up of a particular spring as 
a consequence of the felling of the wood which shelters it ; 
but the general truth, that the flow of springs and the normal 
volume of rivers rise and fall with the extension and the diminu- 
tion of the woods where they originate and through which they 
run, is as well established as any proposition in the science of 
physical geography.* 


* Some years ago it was popularly believed that the volume of the Missis- 
sippi, like that of the Volga and other rivers of the Eastern Hemisphere, was 
diminished by the increased evaporation from its basin and the drying up of 
the springs in consequence of the felling of the forests in the vicinity of the 
sources of its eastern affluents. The boatmen of this great river and other 
intelligent observers now assure us, however, that the mean and normal level 
of the Mississippi has risen within a few years, and that in consequence the 
river is navigable at low water for boats of greater draught and at higher 
points in its course than was the case twenty-five years ago. 

This supposed increase of volume has been attributed by some to the recent 
re-wooding of the prairies, but the plantations thus far made are not yet 
sufficiently extensive to produce an appreciable effect of this nature; and 
besides, while young trees have covered some of the prairies, the destruction of 
the forest has been continued perhaps in a greater proportion in other parts of 
the basin of the river. A more plausible opinion is that the substitution of 
ground that is cultivated, and consequently spongy and absorbent, for the 
natural soil of the prairies, has furnished a reservoir for the rains which are 
absorbed by the earth and carried gradually to the river by subterranean flow, 
instead of running off rapidly from the surface, or, as is more probable, instead 
of evaporating or being taken up by the vigorous herbaceous vegetation which 
covers the natural prairie. 

A phenomenon so contrary to common experience, as would be a permanent 
increase in the waters of a great river, will not be accepted without the most 
convintviing proofs. The present greater facility of navigation may be attrib- 
uted to improvements in the model of the boats, to the removing of sand- 
banks and other impediments to the flow of the waters, or to the confining of 
these waters in a narrower channel, by extending the embankments of the 
river, or to yet other causes. 


230 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON SPRINGS. 


Of the converse proposition, namely, that the planting of 
new forests gives rise to new springs and restores the regular 
flow of rivers, I find less of positive proof, however probable it 
may be that such effects would follow.* A reason for the 
want of evidence on the subject may be, that, under ordinary 
circumstances, the process of conversion of bare ground to soil 
with a well-wooded surface is so gradual and slow, and the 
time required for a fair experiment is consequently so long, 
that many changes produced by the action of the new geo- 
graphical element escape the notice and the memory of ordi- 


So remarkable a change could not have escaped the notice of Humphreys 
and Abbot, whose most able labors comprise the years 1850-1861, had it 
occurred during that period or at any former time within the knowledge of 
the many observers they consulted; but no such fact is noticed in their ex- 
haustive report. However, even if an increase in the volume of the Mississippi, 
for a period of ten or twenty years, were certain, it would still be premature to 
consider this increase as normal and constant, since it might very well be 
produced by causes yet unknown and analogous to those which influence the 
mysterious advance and retreat of those Alpine ice-rivers, the glaciers, Among 
such causes we may suppose a long series of rainy seasons in regions where 
important tributaries have their far-off and almost unknown sources; and 
with no less probability, we may conceive of the opening of communications 
with great subterranean reservoirs, which may from year to year empty large 
quantities of water into the bed of the stream ; or the closing up of orifices 
through which a considerable portion of the water of the river once made its 
way for the supply of such reservoirs.—See upon this point, Chap. IV., Of 
Subterranean Waters ; post. 

* According to the Report of the Department of Agriculture for February, 
1872, it is thought in the Far West that the young plantations have already 
influenced the water-courses in that region, and it is alleged that ancient 
river-beds, never known to contain water since the settlement of the country, 
have begun to flow since these plantations were commenced. See also Hay- 
DEN, Report on Geological Survey of Wyoming, 1870, p. 104, and Bryant, 
Forest Trees, 1871, chap. iv. 

In the Voyage autour du Monde of the Comte de Beauvoir, chap. x., this 
passage occurs: Dr. Miiller, Director of the Botanic Garden at Melbourne, 
‘‘has distributed through the interior of Australia millions of seedling trees 
from his nurseries. Small rivulets are soon formed under the young wood; 
the results are superb, and the observation of every successive year confirms 
them. On bare soils he has created, at more than a hundred points, forests 
and water-courses.”’ 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON FLOODS. 231 


nary observers. The growth of a forest, including the formation 
of a thick stratum of vegetable mould beneath it, is the work of 
a generation, its destruction may be accomplished in a day ; and 
hence, while the results of the one process may, for a consider- 
able time, be doubtful if not imperceptible, those of the other 
are immediate and readily appreciable. Fortunately, the plan- 
tation of a wood produces other beneficial consequences which 
are both sooner realized and more easily estimated; and though 
he who drops the seed is sowing for a future generation as well 
as for his own, the planter of a grove may hope himself to reap 
a fair return for his expenditure and his labor. 


Influence of the Forest on Inundations and Torrents. 


Inasmuch as it is not yet proved that the forests augment or 
diminish the precipitation in the regions they principally cover, 
we cannot positively affirm that their presence or absence in- 
creases or lessens the total volume of the water annually de- 
livered by great rivers or by mountain torrents. It is never- 
theless certain that they exercise an action on the discharge of 
the water of rain and snow into the valleys, ravines, and other 
depressions of the surface, where it is gathered into brooks and 
finally larger currents, and consequently influence the char- 
acter of floods, both in rivers and in torrents. or this reason, 
river inundations and the devastations of torrents, and the 
geographical effects resulting from them, so far as they are 
occasioned or modified by the action of forests or of the destruc- 
tion of the woods, may properly be discussed in this chapter, 
though they might seem otherwise to belong more appropri- 
ately to another division of this work. 

Besides the climatic question, which I have already suffici- 
ently discussed, and the obvious inconveniences of a scanty 
supply of charcoal, of fuel, and of timber for architectural and 
naval construction and for the thousand other uses to which 
wood is applied in rural and domestic economy, and in the 
various industrial processes of civilized life, the attention of 


239 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON FLOODS. 


European foresters and public economists has been specially 
drawn to three points, namely: the influence of the forests on 
the permanence and regular flow of springs or natural foun- 
tains; on inundations by the overflow of rivers; and on the 
abrasion of soil and the transportation of earth, gravel, pebbles, 
and even of considerable masses of rock, from higher to lower 
levels, by torrents. There are, however, connected with this 
general subject, several other topics of minor or strictly local 
iuterest, or of more uncertain character, which I shall have 
occasion more fully to speak of hereafter. 

The first of these three principal subjects—the influence of 
the woods on springs and other living waters—has been 
already considered ; and if the facts stated in that discussion are 
well established, and the conclusions I have drawn from them 
are logically sound, it would seem to follow, as a necessary 
corollary, that the action of the forest is as important in dimin- 
ishing the frequency and violence of river-floods as in securing 
the permanence and equability of natural fountains; for any 
cause which promotes the absorption and accumulation of the 
water of precipitation by the superficial strata of the soil, to be 
slowly given out by infiltration and percolation, must, by pre- 
venting the rapid flow of surface-water into the natural channels 
of drainage, tend to check the sudden rise of rivers, and, con- 
sequently, the overflow of their banks, which constitutes what 
is called inundation. 

The surface of a forest, in its natural condition, can never 
pour forth such deluges of water as flow from cultivated soil. 
Humus, or vegetable mould, is capable of absorbing almost 
twice its own weight of water. The soil in a forest of decid- 
uous foliage is composed of humus, more or less unmixed, to 
the depth of several inches, sometimes even of feet, and this 
stratum is usually able to imbibe all the water possibly result- 
ing from the snow which at any one time covers, or the rain 
which in any one shower falls upon, it. But the vegetable 
mould does not cease to absorb water when it becomes satu- 
rated, for it then gives off a portion of its moisture to the min- 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON FLOODS. 233 


eral earth below, and thus is ready to receive a new supply; 
and, besides, the bed of leaves not yet converted to mould takes 
up and retains a very considerable proportion of snow-water, as 
well as of rain. 

The stems of trees, too, and of underwood, the trunks and 
stumps and roots of fallen timber, the mosses and fungi and the 
numerous inequalities of the ground observed in all forests, 
oppose a mechanical resistance to the flow of water over the 
surface, which sensibly retards the rapidity of its descent down 
declivities, and diverts and divides streams which may have 
already accumulated from smaller threads of water.* 


* Tn a letter addressed to the Minister of Public Works, after the terrible 
inundations of 1857, the late Emperor of France thus happily expressed him- 
self: ‘‘Before we seek the remedy for an evil, we inquire into its catse. 
Whence come the sudden floods of our rivers? From the water which falls 
on the mountains, not from that which falls on the plains. The waters which 
fall on our fields produce but few rivulets, but those which fall on our roofs 
and are collected in the gutters, form small streams at once. Now, the roofs 
are mountains—the gutters are valleys.” 

‘¢To continue the comparison,” observes D’Héricourt, ‘‘ roofs are smooth 
and impermeable, and the rain-water pours rapidly off from their surfaces ; 
but this rapidity of flow would be greatly diminished if the roofs were carpeted 
with mosses and grasses; more still, if they were covered with dry leaves, 
little shrubs, strewn branches, and other impediments—in short, if they were 
wooded.”—Annales Forestiéres, Dec, 1857, p. 311. 

The mosses and fungi play a more important part in regulating the humid- 
ity of the air and of the soil than writers on the forest have usually assigned 
to them. They perish with the trees they grow on; but, in many situations, 
nature provides a compensation for the tree-mosses and fungi in ground 
species, which, on cold soils, especially those with a northern exposure, spring 
up abundantly both before the woods are felled, and when the land is cleared 
and employed for pasturage, or deserted. These humble plants discharge a 
portion of the functions appropriated to the wood, and while they render the 
soil of improved lands much less fit for agricultural use, they, at the same time, 
prepare it for the growth of a new harvest of trees, when the infertility they 
produce shall have driven man to abandon it and suffer it to relapse into the 
hands of nature. 

In primitive forests, when the ground is not too moist to admit of a dense 
erowth of trees, the soil is generally so thickly covered with leaves that there 
is little room for ground mosses and mushrooms. In the more open artificial 
woods of Hurope these forms of vegetation, as well as many more attractive 


934 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON FLOODS. 


The value of the forest as a mechanical check to a too rapid 
discharge of rain-water was exemplified in numerous instances 
in the great floods of 1866 and 1868, in France and Switzerland, 
and I refer to the observations made on those occasions as of 
special importance because no previous inundations in those 
countries had been so carefully watched and so well described 
by competent investigators. In the French Department of 
Lozére, which was among those most severely injured by the 
inundation of 1866—an inundation caused by diluvial rains, 
not by melted snow—it was everywhere remarked that “ grounds 
covered with wood sustained no damage even on the steepest 
slopes, while in cleared and cultivated fields the very soil 
was washed away and the rocks laid bare by the pouring 
rains 

The Italian journals of the day state that the province of 
Brescia and a part of that of Bergamo, which have heretofore 
been exposed to enormous injury, after every heavy rain, from 
floods of the four principal streams which traverse them, in a 
great degree escaped damage in the terrible inundation of Oc- 
tober, 1872, and their immunity is ascribed to the forestal im- 
provements executed by the former province, within ten or 
twelve years, in the Val Camonica and in the upper basins of 
the other rivers which drain that territory. Similar facts were 
noticed in the extraordinary floods of September and October, 
1868, in the valley of the Upper Rhine, and Coaz makes the 
interesting observation that not even dense greensward was 
so efficient a protection to the earth as trees, because the 


plants, are more frequent than in the native groves of America. See, on eryp- 
togamic and other wood plants, RossMAssLER, Der Wald, pp. 82 et segg., and 
on the importance of such vegetables in checking the flow of water, MENGOTT?, 
Idraulica Fisica e Sperimentale, chapters xvi. and xvii. No writer known to 
me has so well illustrated this function of forest vegetation as Mengotti, though 
both he and Rossmissler ascribe to plants a power of absorbing water from 
the atmosphere which they do not possess, or rather can only rarely exer- 
cise. 

* See, for other like observations, an article entitled Le Reboisement et les 
Inondations, in the Revue des Laux et Foréts of September, 1868, 


INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON FLOODS. 2935 


water soaked through the sod and burst it up by hydrostatic 
pressure.* 

The importance of the mechanical resistance of the wood to 
the flow of water over the surface has, however, been exagge- 
rated by some writers. Rain-water is generally absorbed by 
the forest-soil as fast as it falls, and it is only in extreme cases 
that it gathers itself into a superficial sheet or current overflow- 
ing the ground. There is, nevertheless, besides the absorbent 
power of the soil, a very considerable mechanical resistance to 
the transmission of water beneath the surface through and 
along the superior strata of the ground. This resistance is 
exerted by the roots, which both convey the water along their 
surface downwards, and oppose a closely wattled barrier to its 
descent along the slope of the permeable strata which have 
absorbed it.+ 


* Die Hochwasser in 1868 im Biindnerischen Rheingebiet, pp. 12, 68. 

Observations of Forster, cited by Cézanne from the Annales Horestiéres for 
1859, p. 358, are not less important than those adduced in the text. The 
field of these observations was a slope of 45° divided into three sections, one 
luxuriantly wooded from summit to base with oak and beech, one completely 
cleared through its whole extent, and one cleared in its upper portion, but re- 
taining a wooded belt for a quarter of the height of the slope, which was from 
1,300 to 1,800 feet above the brook at its foot. 

In the first section, comprising six-sevenths of the whole surface, the rains 
had not produced a single ravine ; in the second, occupying about a tenth of the 
ground, were three ravines, increasing in width from the summit to the 
valley beneath, where they had, all together, a cross-section of 600 square feet ; 
in the third section, of about the same extent as the second, four ravines had 
been formed, widening from the crest of the slope to-the belt of wood, where 
they gradually narrowed and finally disappeared. 

For important observations to the same purpose, see Marcuanp, Les Tor- 
rents des Alpes, in Revue des Haux et Foréts for September, 1871. 

+ In a valuable report on a bill for compelling the sale of waste communal 
lands, now pending in the Parliament of Italy, Senator Torelli, an eminent 
man of science, calculates that four-fifths of the precipitation in the forest are 
absorbed by the soil, or detained by the obstructions of the surface, only one- 
fifth being delivered to the rivers rapidly enough to create danger of floods, 
while in open grounds, im heavy rains, the proportions are reversed. Suppos- 
ing a rain-fall of four inches, an area measuring 100,000 acres, or a little more 


936 CAUSES OF INUNDATIONS. 


Rivers fed by springs and shaded by woods are comparatively 
uniform in volume, in temperature, and in chemical compo- 
sition.* Their banks are little abraded, nor are their courses 
much obstructed by fallen timber, or by earth and gravel 
washed down from the highlands. Their channels are subject 
only to slow and gradual changes, and they carry down to the 
lakes and the sea no accumulation of sand or silt to fill up their 
outlets, and, by raising their beds, to force them to spread over 
the low grounds near their mouth. 


Causes of Inundations. 


The immediate cause of river inundations is the flow of 
superficial and subterranean waters into the beds of rivers fas- 
ter than those channels can discharge them. The insufticiency 
of the channels is occasioned partly by their narrowness and 
partly by obstructions to their currents, the most frequent of 


than four American townships, would receive 53,777,777 cubic yards of water. 
Of this quantity it would retain, or rather detain, if wooded, 41,000,000 yards; 
if bare, only 11,000,000. The difference of discharge from wooded and un- 
wooded soils is perhaps exaggerated in Col. Torelli’s report, but there is no 
doubt that in very many cases it is great enough to prevent, or to cause, de- 
structive inundations. 

* Dumont gives an interesting extract from the Misopogon of the Emperor 
Julian, showing that, in the fourth century, the Seine—the level of which 
now varies to the extent of thirty feet between extreme high and extreme low 
water mark—was almost wholly exempt from inundations, and flowed with a 
uniform current through the whole year. ‘‘Ego olim eram in hibernis apud 
caram Lutetiam, [sic] enim Galli Parisiorum oppidum appellant, qua insula 
est non magna, in fluvio sita, qui eam omni ex parte cingit. Pontes sublicii 
utrinque ad eam ferunt, rardque fluvius minuitur ac crescit; sed qualis estate, 
talis esse solet hyeme.”—Des Travaux Publics dans leur Rapports avec 0 Agri- 
culture, p. 361, note. 

As Julian was six years in Gaul, and his principal residence was at Paris, 
his testimony as to the habitual condition of the Seine, at a period when the 
provinces where its sources originate were well wooded, is very valuable. 

+ Forest rivers seldom if ever form large sedimentary deposits at their 
points of discharge into lakes or larger streams, such accumulations beginning, 
or at least advancing far more rapidly, after the valleys are cleared. 


CAUSES OF INUNDATIONS. Pat 


which is the deposit of sand, gravel, and pebbles in their beds 
by torrential tributaries during the floods.* 

In accordance with the usual economy of nature, we should 
presume that she had everywhere provided the means of dis- 
charging, without disturbance of her general arrangements or 
abnormal destruction of her products, the precipitation which 
she sheds upon the face of the earth. Observation confirms this 
presumption, at least in the countries to which I confine my 
inquiries ; for,so far as we know the primitive conditions of 
the regions brought under human occupation within the histori- 
eal period, it appears that the overflow of river-banks was much 
less frequent and destructive than at the present day, or, at 
least, that rivers rose and fell less suddenly, before man had re- 
moved the natural checks to the too rapid drainage of the basins 
in which their tributaries originate. The afiluents of rivers 
draining wooded basins generally transport, and of course let 
fall, little or no sediment, and hence in such regions the 
special obstruction to the currents of water-courses to which I 


* The extent of the overflow and the violence of the current in river-floods 
are much affected by the amount of sedimentary matter let fall in their chan- 
nels by their affuents, which have usually a swifter flow than the main stream, 
and consequently deposit more or less of their transported material when they 
join its more slowly-moving waters. Such deposits constitute barriers which 
at first check the current and raise its level, and of course its violence at 
lower points is augmented, both by increased volume and by the solid material 
it carries with it, when it acquires force enough to sweep away the obstruc- 
tion.—RIsLeR, Sur VInfluence des Foréts sur les cours @eau, in Revue des 
Eaux et Foréts, 10th January, 1870. 

In the flood of 1868 the torrent Illgraben, which had formerly spread its 
water and its sediment over the surface of a vast cone of dejection, having 
been forced, by the injudicious confinement of its current to a single channel, 
to discharge itself more directly into the Rhone, carried down a quantity of 
gravel, sand, and mud, sufficient to dam that river for a whole hour, and in 
the same great inundation the flow of the Rhine at Thusis was completely 
arrested for twenty minutes by a similar discharge from the Nolla. Of course, 
when the dam yielded to the pressure of the accumulated water, the damage 
to the country below was far greater than it would have been had the currents 
of the rivers not been thus obstructed.—Marcuanp, Les Torrents des Alpes, 
in Revue des Hauz et Foréts, Sept., 1871. 


238 CAUSES OF INUNDATIONS. 


have just alluded does not occur. The banks of the rivers and 
smaller streams in the North American colonies were formerly 
little abraded by the currents.* Even now the trees come down 
almost to the water’s edge along the rivers, in the larger forests 
of the United States, and the surface of the streams seems 
liable to no great change in level or in rapidity of current. 


* In primitive countries, running streams are very generally fringed by 
groves, for almost every river is, as Pliny, Wat. Hist., v. 10, says of the 
Upper Nile, an opifex silvuarwm, or, to use the quaint and picturesque language 
of Holland’s translation, ‘‘ makes shade of woods as he goeth.”’ 

+ A valuable memoir by G. Doni, in the Rivista Forestale for October, 1865, 
p. 438, is one of the best illustrations I can cite of the influence of forests in 
regulating and equalizing the flow of running water, and of the comparative 
action of water-courses which drain wooded vaileys and valleys bared of 
trees, with regard to the erosion of their banks and the transportation of 
sediment. 

‘“¢ The Sestajone,” remarks this writer, ‘‘and the Lima, are two considerable 
torrents which collect the waters of two great valleys of the Tuscan Apennines, 
and empty them into the Serchio. At the junction of these two torrents, 
from which point the combined current takes the name of Lima, a cnri- 
ous phenomenon is observed, which is in part easily explained. In rainy 
weather the waters of the Sestajone are in volume only about one-half those 
of the Lima, and while the current of the Lima is turbid and muddy, that of 
the Sestajone appears limpid and I might almost say drinkable. In clear 
weather, on the contrary, the waters of the Sestajone are abundant and about 
double those of the Lima. Now the extent of the two valleys is nearly equal, 
but the Sestajone winds down between banks clothed with firs and beeches, 
while the Lima flows through a valley that has been stripped of trees, and in 
great part brought under cultivation.” 

The Sestajone and the Lima are neither of them what is technically termed 
atorrent—a name strictly applicable only to streams whose current is not 
derived from springs and perennial, but is the temporary effect of a sudden 
accumulation of water from heavy rains or from a rapid melting of the snows, 
while their beds are dry, or nearly so, at other times. The Lima, however, ina 
large proportion of its course, has the erosive character of a torrent, for the 
amount of sediment which it carries down, even when it is only moderately 
swollen by rains, surpasses almost everything of the kind which I have obsery- 
ed, under analogous circumstances, in Italy. 

Still more striking is the contrast in the régime of the Saint-Phalez and the 
Combe-d’Yeuse in the Department of Vancluse, the latter of which became 
subject to the most violent torrential floods after the destruction of the woods 
of its basin between 1823 and 1833, but has now been completely subdued, and 


INUNDATIONS IN WINTER. 239 


Inundations in Winter. 


In the Northern United States, although inundations are not 
very unfrequently produced by heavy rains in the height of sum- 
mer, it will be found generally true that the most rapid rise of 
the waters, and, of course, the most destructive “ freshets,” as they 
are called in America, are occasioned by the sudden dissolution 
of the snow before the open ground is thawed in the spring. 
It frequently happens that a powerful thaw sets in after a long 
period of frost, and the snow which had been months in accu- 
mulating is dissolved and carried off in a few hours. When 
the snow is deep, it, to use a popular expression, “takes the 
frost out of the ground” in the woods, and, if it lies long 
enough, in the fields also. But the heaviest snows usually fall 
after midwinter, and are succeeded by warm rains or sunshine, 
which dissolve the snow on the cleared land before it has had 
time to act upon the frost-bound soil beneath it. In this case, 
the snow in the woods is absorbed as fast as it melts, by the 
soil it has protected from freezing, and does not materially con- 
tribute to swell the current of the rivers. If the mild weather, 
in which great snow-storms usually occur, does not continue 
and become a regular thaw, it is almost sure to be followed by 
drifting winds, and tne inequality with which they distribute 
the snow over the cleared ground leaves the ridges of the surface- 
soil comparatively bare, while the depressions are often filled 
with drifts to the height of many feet. The knolls become 
frozen to a great depth; succeeding partial thaws melt the sur- 
face-snow, and the water runs down into the furrows of 
ploughed fields, and other artificial and natural hollows, and 
then often freezes to solid ice. In this state of things, almost 
the entire surface of the cleared land is impervious to water, 
and from the absence of trees and the general smoothness of 


its waters brought to a peaceful flow, by replanting its valley. See LABus- 
stmre, Revue Agric. et Forestiére de Provence, 1866, and Revue des aux et 
Foréts, 1866. 


240 INUNDATIONS IN WINTER. 


the ground, it offers little mechanical resistance to superficial 
currents. If, under these circumstances, warm weather accom- 
panied by rain occurs, the rain and melted snow are swiftly 
hurried to the bottom of the valleys and gathered to raging 
torrents. 

It ought further to be considered that, though the lighter 
ploughed soils readily imbibe a great deal of water, yet grass- 
lands, and all the heavy and tenacious earths, absorb it in 
much smaller quantities, and less rapidly than the vegetable 
mould of the forest. Pasture, meadow, and clayey soils, 
taken together, greatly predominate over sandy ploughed fields, 
in all large agricultural districts, and hence, even if, in the case 
we are supposing, the open ground chance to have been thawed 
before the melting of the snow which covers it, it is already 
saturated with moisture, or very soon becomes so, and, of course, 
cannot relieve the pressure by absorbing more water. ‘The con- 
sequence is that the face of the country is suddenly flooded 
with a quantity of melted snow and rain equivalent to a fall of 
six or eight inches of the latter, or even more. This runs un- 
obstructed to rivers often still-bound with thick ice, and thus 
inundations of a fearfully devastating character are produced. 
The ice bursts, from the hydrostatic pressure from below, or is 
violently torn up by the current, and is swept by the impetu- 
ous stream, in large masses and with resistless fury, against 
banks, bridges, dams, and mills erected near them. The bark 
of the trees along the rivers is often abraded, at a height 
of many feet above the ordinary water-level, by cakes of float- 
ing ice, which are at last stranded by the receding flood on 
meadow or ploughland, to delay, by their chilling influence, the 
advent of the tardy spring. 

Another important effect of the removal of the forest shelter 
in cold climates may be noticed here. We have observed that 
the ground in the woods either does not freeze at all, or that if 
frozen it is thawed by the first considerable snow-fall. On the 
contrary, the open ground is usually frozen when the first 
spring freshet occurs, but is soon thawed by the warm rain 


DRAINAGE OF FOREST-SOIL. 241 


and melting snow. Nothing more effectually disintegrates a 
cohesive soil than freezing and thawing, and the surface of 
earth which has just undergone those processes is more subject 
to erosion by running water than under any other circumstances. 
Hence more vegetable mould is washed away from cultivated 
grounds in such climates by the spring floods than by the heaviest 
rain at other seasons. 

In the warm climates of Southern Europe, as I have already 
said, the functions of the forest, so far as the disposal of the 
water of precipitation is concerned, are essentially the same at 
all seasons, and are analogous to those which it performs in the 
Northern United States in summer. Hence, in the former 
countries, the winter floods have not the characteristics which 
mark them in the latter, nor is the conservative influence of 
the woods in winter relatively so important, though it is equally 
unquestionable. 

Tf the summer floods in the United States are attended with 
less pecuniary damage than those of the Loire and other rivers 
of France, the Po and its tributaries in Italy, the Emme and 
her sister torrents which devastate the valleys of Switzerland, 
it is partly because the banks of American rivers are not yet 
lined with towns, their shores and the bottoms which skirt them 
not yet covered with improvements whose cost is counted by 
millions, and, consequently, a smaller amount of property is ex- 
posed to injury by inundation. But the comparative exemp- 
tion of the American people from the terrible calamities which 
the overflow of rivers has brought on some of the fairest por- 
tions of the Old World, is, in a still greater degree, to be 
ascribed to the fact that, with all our thoughtless improvidence, 
we have not yet bared all the sources of our streams, not yet 
overthrown all the barriers which nature has erected to restrain 
her own destructive energies. Let us be wise in time, and 
profit by the errors of our older brethren! 

The influence of the forest in preventing inundations has 
been very generally recognized, both as a theoretical inference 
and as a fact of observation ; but the eminent engineer Belgrand 


949, DRAINAGE OF FOREST-SOIL. 


and his commentator Valles have deduced an opposite result 
from various facts of experience and from scientific consider- 
ations. They contend that the superficial drainage is more reg- 
ular from cleared than from wooded ground, and that clearing 
diminishes rather than augments the intensity of inundations. 
Neither of these conclusions appears to be warranted by their 
data or their reasoning, and they rest partly upon facts, which, 
truly interpreted, are not inconsistent with the received opinions 
on these subjects, partly upon assumptions which are contra- 
dicted by experience. Two of these latter are, first, that the fallen 
leaves in the forest constitute an impermeable covering of the 
soil over, not through, which the water of rains and of melting 
snows flows off, and secondly, that the roots of trees penetrate 
and choke up the fissures in the rocks, so as to impede the pas- 
sage of water through channels which nature has provided for 
its descent to lower strata. 

As to the first of these, we may appeal to familiar facts within 
the personal knowledge of every man acquainted with the 
operations of sylvan nature. Rain-water never, except in very 
trifling quantities, flows over the leaves in the woods in summer 
or autumn. Water runs over them only in the spring, in the 
rare cases when they have been pressed down smoothly and 
compactly by the weight of the snow—a state in which they re- 
main only until they are dry, when shrinkage and the action of 
the wind soon roughen the surface so as effectually to stop, by 
absorption, all flow of water. I have observed that when a sud- 
den frost succeeds a thaw at the close of the winter, after the 
snow has principally disappeared, the water in and between 
the layers of leaves sometimes freezes into a solid crust, which 
allows the flow of water over it. But this occurs only in de- 
pressions and on a very small scale ; and the ice thus formed is 
so soon dissolved that no sensible effect is produced on the 
escape of water from the general surface. 

As to the influence of roots upon drainage, we have seen that 
there is no doubt that they, independently of their action as ab- 
sorbents, mechanically promote it. Not only does the water of 


INUNDATIONS IN FRANCE. 243 


the soil follow them downwards, but their swelling growth 
powerfully tends to enlarge, not to obstruct, the crevices of 
rock into which they enter; and as the fissures in rocks are 
longitudinal, not mere circular orifices, every line of additional 
width gained by the growth of roots within them increases the 
area of the crevice in proportion to its length. Consequently, 
the widening of a fissure to the extent of one inch might give 
an additional drainage equal to a square foot of open tubing. 

The cbservations and reasonings of Belgrand and Valles, 
though their conclusions have not been accepted by many, are 
very important in one point of view. These writers insist much 
on the necessity of taking into account, in estimating the rela- 
tions between precipitation and evaporation, the abstraction of 
water from the surface and surface-currents, by absorption and in- 
filtration—an element unquestionably of great value, but hitherto 
much neglected by meteorological inquirers, who have very often 
reasoned as if the surface-earth were either impermeable to 
water or already saturated with it; whereas, in fact, it is a 
sponge, always imbibing humidity and always giving it off, not 
by evaporation only, but by infiltration and percolation. 

The remarkable historical notices of inundations in France 
in the Middle Ages collected by Champion® are considered by 
many as furnishing proof, that when that country was much 
more generally covered with wood than it now is, destructive 
inundations of the French rivers were not less frequent than 
they are in modern days. But this evidence is subject to this 
among other objections: we know, it is true, that the forests 
of certain departments of France were anciently much more 
extensive than at the present day; but we know also that in 
many portions of that country the soil has been bared of its 
forests, and then, in consequence of the depopulation of great 
provinces, left to reclothe itself spontaneously with trees, many 


* Les Inondations en France depuis le Vie siécle jusqwa nos jours. 6 vols. 
8vo. Paris, 1858-64. See a very able review of this learned and important 
work by Prof. Messedaglia, read before the Academy of Agriculture at Verona 
in 1864, 


944 DAMAGE BY INUNDATION. 


times during the historic period; and our acquaintance with 
the forest topography of ancient Gaul or of medizeval France is 
neither sufficiently extensive nor sufficiently minute to permit 
us to say, with certainty, that the sources of this or that partic- 
ular river were more or less sheltered by wood at any given 
time, ancient or medizeval, than at present.* I say the sources 
of the rivers, because the floods of great rivers are occasioned 
by heavy rains and snows which fall in the more elevated re- 
gions around the primal springs, and not by precipitation in the 
main valleys or on the plains bordering on the lower course. 
The destructive effects of inundations, considered simply as a 
mechanical power by which life is endangered, crops destroyed, 
and the artificial constructions of man overthrown, are very 
terrible. Thus far, however, the flood is a temporary and by 
no means an irreparable evil, for if its ravages end here, the 
prolific powers of nature and the industry of man soon restore 
what had been lost, and the face of the earth no longer shows 
traces of the deluge that had overwhelmed it. Inundations 
have even their compensations. The structures they destroy 
are replaced by better and more secure erections, and if they 
sweep off a crop of corn, they not unfrequently leave behind 
them, as they subside, a fertilizing deposit which enriches the 
exhausted field for a succession of seasons.t If, then, the too 


* Alfred Maury has, nevertheless, collected, in his erudite and able work, 
Les Foréts de la Gaule et de Vancienne France, Paris, 1867, an immense 
amount of statistical detail on the extent, the distribution, and the destruction 
of the forests of France, but it still remains true that we can very seldom 
pronounce on the forestal condition of the upper valley of a particular river at 
the time of a given inundation in the ancient or the medizval period., 

+ The productiveness of Egypt has been attributed too exclusively to the 
fertilizing effects of the slime deposited by the inundations of the Nile; for 
in that climate a liberal supply of water would produce good crops on almost 
any ordinary sand, while, without water, the richest soil would yield nothing. 
The sediment deposited annually is but a very small fraction of an inch in 
thickness. It is alleged that in quantity it would be hardly sufficient for a 
good top-dressing, and that in quality it is not chemically distinguishable 
from the soil inches or feet below the surface. But to deny, as some writers 
have done, that the slime has any fertilizing properties at all, isas great an 


DESTRUCTIVE ACTION OF TORRENTS. 945 


rapid flow of the surface-waters occasioned no other evil than 
to produce, once in ten years upon the average, an inundation 
which should destroy the harvest of the low grounds along the 
rivers, the damage would be too inconsiderable, and of too 
transitory a character, to warrant the inconveniences and the 
expense involved in the measures which the most competent 
judges in many parts of Europe believe the respective govern- 
ments ought to take to obviate it. 


Destructive Action of Torrents. 


But the great, the irreparable, the appalling mischiefs which 
have already resulted, and which threaten to ensue on a still 
more extensive scale hereafter, from too rapid superficial drain- 
age, are of a properly geographical, we may almost say geologi- 
cal, character, and consist primarily in erosion, displacement, and 
transportation of the superticial strata, vegetable and mineral 
of the integuments, so to speak, with which nature has clothed 


error as the opposite one of ascribing all the agricultural wealth of Egypt to 
that single cause of productiveness. Fine soils deposited by water are almost 
uniformly rich in all climates; those brought down by rivers, carried out into 
salt-water, and then returned again by the tide, seem to be more permanently 
fertile than any others. The polders of the Netherland coast are of this char- 
acter, and the meadows in Lincolnshire, which have been covered with slime 
by warping, as it is called, or admitting water over them at high tide, are 
remarkably productive. 

Recent analysis is said to have detected in the water of the Nile a quantity 
of organic matter—derived mainly, no doubt, from the decayed vegetation it 
bears down from its tropical course—sufiiciently large to furnish an impor- 
tant supply of fertilizing ingredients to the soil. 

It is computed that the Durance—a river fed chiefly by torrents, of great 
erosive power—carries down annually solid material enough to cover 272,000 
acres of soil with a deposit of two-fifths of an inch in thickness, and that this 
deposit contains, in the combination most favorable to vegetation, more azote 
than 110,009 tons of guano, and more carbon than 121,000 acres of woodland 
would assimilate in a year. HEuiste Recius, La Terre, vol. i., p. 467. On 
the chemical composition, quantity, and value of the solid matter transported 
by river, see HERVE MANGon, Sur? Himploi des Laux dans les Irrigations, 8vo. 
Paris, 1869, pp. 182 ef s-qgg. DuroNncuHEL, Traité @ Hydraulique et de Géo- 
logie Agricoles, Paris, 1868, chap, i., xii., and xiii. 


9AG TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


the skeleton frame-work of the globe. It is difficult to convey 
by description an idea of the desolation of the regions most ex- 
posed to the ravages of torrent and of flood; and the thou- 
sands who, in these days of swift travel, are whirled by steam 
near or even through the theatres of these calamities, have but 
rare and imperfect opportunities of observing the destructive 
causes in action. Still more rarely can they compare the past 
with the actual condition of the provinces in question, and trace 
the progress of their conversion from forest-crowned hills, 
luxuriant pasture grounds, and abundant cornfields and vine- 
yards well watered by springs and fertilizing rivulets, to bald 
mountain ridges, rocky declivities, and steep earth-banks fur- 
rowed by deep ravines with beds now dry, now filled by tor- 
rents of fluid mud and gravel hurrying down to spread them- 
selves over the plain, and dooming to everlasting barrenness the 
once productive fields. In surveying such scenes, it is difficult 
to resist the impression that nature pronounced a primal curse 
of perpetual sterility and desolation upon these sublime but 
fearful wastes, difficult to believe that they were once, and but 
for the folly of man might still be, blessed with all the natural 
advantages which Providence has bestowed upon the most 
favored climes. But the historical evidence is conclusive as to 
the destructive changes occasioned by the agency of man upon 
the flanks of the Alps, the Apennines, the Pyrenees, and other 
mountain ranges in Central and Southern Europe, and the pro- 
gress of physical deterioration has been so rapid that, in some 
localities, a single generation has witnessed the beginning and 
the end of the melancholy revolution. 

I have stated, in a general way, the nature of the evils in 
question, and of the processes by which they are produced ; but 
I shall make their precise character and magnitude better un- 
derstood by presenting some descriptive and statistical details 
of facts of actual occurrence. I select for this purpose the 
south-eastern portion of France, not because that territory has 
suffered more severely than some others, but because its de- 
terioration is comparatively recent, and has been watched and 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 947 


described by very competent and trustworthy observers, whose 
reports are more easily accessible than those published in other 
countries.* 

The provinces of Dauphiny and Provence comprise a territory 
of fourteen or fifteen thousand square miles, bounded north-west 
by the Isere, north-east and east by the Alps, south by the Medi- 
terranean, west by the Rhone, and extending from 42° to about 
45° of north latitude. The surface is generally hilly and even 
mountainous, and several of the peaks in Dauphiny rise above 
the limit of perpetual snow. Except upon the mountain ridges, 
the climate, as compared with that of the United States in the 
same latitude, is extremely mild. Little snow falls, except 
upon the higher mountains, the frosts are light, and the sum- 
mers long, as might, indeed, be inferred from the vegetation ; 
for in the cultivated districts, the vine and the fig everywhere 
flourish ; the olive thrives as far north as 433°, and upon the 
coast grow the orange, the lemon, and the date-palm. The forest 
trees, too, are of southern type, umbrella pines, various species 
of evergreen oaks, and many other trees and shrubs of per- 
sistent broad-leaved foliage, characterizing the landscape. 

The rapid slope of the mountains naturally exposed these 
provinces to damage by torrents, and the Romans diminished 
their injurious effects by erecting, in the beds of ravines, bar- 
riers of rocks loosely piled up, which permitted a slow escape 
of the water, but compelled it to deposit above the dikes the 
earth and gravel with which it was charged.t At a later 


* Streflleur (Ueber die Natur und die Wirkungen der Wildbdche, p. 38) 
maintains that all the observations and speculations of French authors on the 
nature of torrents had been anticipated by Austrian writers. In proof of this 
assertion he refers to the works of Franz von Zallinger, 1778, Von Arretin, 
1808, Franz Duile, 1826, all published at Innsbruck, and HAGEN’s Beschret- 
bung neuerer Wasserbauwerke, Konigsberg, 1826, none of which works are 
known to me. It is evident, however, that the conclusions of Surell and 
other French writers whom I cite, are original results of personal investiga- 
tion, and not borrowed opinions. 

+ Whether Palissy was acquainted with this ancient practice, or whether it 
was one of those original suggestions of which his works are so full, I know 


948 TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


period the Crusaders brought home from Palestine, with much 
other knowledge gathered from the wiser Moslems, the art of 
securing the hillsides and making them productive by terracing 
and irrigation. The forests which covered the mountains se- 
cured an abundant flow of springs, and the process of clearing 
the soil went on so slowly that, for centuries, neither the want of 
timber and fuel, nor the other evils about to be depicted, were 
seriously felt. Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, these pro- 
vinces were well wooded, and famous for the fertility and 
abundance, not only of the low grounds, but of the hills. 

Such was the state of things at the close of the fifteenth cen- 
tury. The statistics of the seventeenth show that while there 
had been an increase of prosperity and population in Lower 
Provence, as well as in the correspondingly situated parts of 
the other two provinces I have mentioned, there was an alarming 
decrease both in the wealth and in the population of Upper Pro- 
vence and Dauphiny, although, by the clearing of the forests, a 
great extent of plough-land and pasturage had been added to 
the soil before reduced to cultivation. It was found, in fact, 
that the augmented violence of the torrents had swept away, or 
buried in sand and gravel, more land than had been reclaimed 
by clearing ; and the taxes computed by fires or habitations 
underwent several successive reductions in consequence of the 
gradual abandonment of the wasted soil by its starving occu- 
pants. The growth of the large towns on and near the Rhone 
and the coast, their advance in commerce and industry, and the 


not, but in his treatise, Des Haux et Fontaines, he thus recommends it, by 
way of reply to the objections of ‘‘ Théorique,” who had expressed the fear 
that ‘‘the waters which rush violently down from the heights of the moun- 
tain would bring with them much earth, sand, and other things,” and thus spoil 
the artificial fountain that ‘‘ Practique” was teaching him to make: ‘‘ And 
for hindrance of the mischiefs of great waters which may be gathered in 
few hours by great storms, when thou shalt have made ready thy parterre to 
receive the water, thou must lay great stones athwart the deep channels 
which lead to thy parterre. And so the force of the rushing currents shall be 
deadened, and thy water shall flow peacefully into his cisterns.”— Huvres 
Completes, p. 173. 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 949 


consequently enlarged demand for agricultural products, ought 
naturally to have increased the rural population and the value 
of their lands ; but the physical decay of the uplands was such 
that considerable tracts were deserted altogether, and in Upper 
Provence, the fires which in 1471 counted 897, were reduced 
to 747 in 1699, to 728 in 1733, and to 685 in 1776.* 

Surell—whose admirable work, Z¢ude sur les Torrents des 
Hautes Alpes, first published in 1841,+ presents a most appall- 
ing picture of the desolations of the torrent, and, at the same 
time, the most careful studies of the history and essential char- 
acter of this great evil—in speaking of the valley of Dévoluy, 
on page 152, says: “ Everything concurs to show that it was 
anciently wooded. In its peat-bogs are found buried trunks of 
trees, monuments of its former vegetation. In the framework 
of old houses, one sees enormous timber, which is no longer to 
be found in the district. Many localities, now completely bare, 
still retain the name of ‘ wood, and one of them is called, in 
old deeds, Comba nigra | Black forest or dell], on account of its 
dense woods. These and many other proofs confirm the local 
traditions which are unanimous on this point. 

“There, as everywhere in the Upper Alps, the clearings be- 
gan on the flanks of the mountains, and were gradually ex- 
tended into the valleys and then to the highest accessible peaks. 
Then followed the Revolution, and caused the destruction of 
the remainder of the trees which had thus far escaped the 
woodman’s axe.” ; 

In a note to this passage the writer says: “Several persons 
have told me that they had lost flocks of sheep, by straying, in 
the forests of Mont Auroux, which covered the flanks of the 
mountain from La Cluse to Agnéres. These declivities are 
now as bare as the palm of the hand.” 


* These facts I take from the La Provence au point de vue des Bois, des 
Torrents et des Inondations, of Charles de Ribbe, one of the highest author- 
ities. 

+ A second edition of this work, with an additional volume of great value by 
Ernest Cézanne, was published at Paris, in two 8vo volumes, in 1871-72. 


950 TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


The ground upon the steep mountains being once bared of 
trees, and the underwood killed by the grazing of horned eat- 
tle, sheep, and goats, every depression becomes a water-cowrse. 
“Every storm,” says Surell, page 153, “ gives rise to a new 
torrent.* Examples of such are shown, which, though not yet 
three years old, have laid waste the finest fields of their valleys, 
and whole villages have narrowly escaped being swept into 
ravines formed in the course of a few hours. Sometimes the 
flood pours in a sheet over the surface, without ravine or even 
bed, and ruins extensive grounds, which are abandoned for- 
ever.” 

I cannot follow Surell in his description and classification of 
torrents, and I must refer the reader to his instructive work 
for a full exposition of the theory of the subject. In order, 
however, to show what a concentration of destructive energies 
may be effected by felling the woods that clothe and support 
the sides of mountain abysses, I cite his description of a valley 
descending from the Col Isoard, which he calls “a complete 
type of a basin of reception,” that is, a gorge which serves as a 
common point of accumulation and discharge for the waters 
of several lateral torrents. “The aspect of the monstrous chan- 
nel,” says he, “is frightful. Within a distance of less than 
two English miles, more than sixty torrents hurl into the depths 
of the gorge the débris torn from its two flanks. The smallest 
of these secondary torrents, if transferred to a fertile valley, 
would be enough to ruin it.” 

The eminent political economist Blanqui, in a memoir read 
before the Academy of Moral and Political Science on the 25th 
of November, 1843, thus expresses himself: “Important as 
are the causes of impoverishment already described, they are 
not to be compared to the consequences which have followed 


* No attentive observer can frequent the southern flank of the Piedmon- 
tese Alps or the French province of Dauphiny, for half a dozen years, with- 
out witnessing with his own eyes the formation and increase of new torrents. 
I can bear personal testimony to the conversion of more than one grassy slope 
into the bed of a furious torrent by baring the hills above of their woods. 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 951 


from the two inveterate evils of the Alpine provinces of 
France, the extension of clearing and the ravages of torrents. 
. .. The most important result of this destruction is this: 
that the agricultural capital, or rather the ground itself— 
which, in a rapidly increasing degree, is daily swept away by 
the waters—is totally lost. Signs of unparalleled destitution 
are visible in all the mountain zone, and the solitudes of those 
districts are assuming an indescribable character of sterility 
and desolation. The gradual destruction of the woods has, in 
a thousand localities, annihilated at once the springs and the 
fuel. Between Grenoble and Briangon, in the valley of the 
Romanche, many villages are so destitute of wood that they are 
reduced to the necessity of baking their bread with sun-dried 
cow-dung, and even this they can afford to do but once a year. 

“ Whoever has visited the valley of Barcelonette, those of 
Embrun, and of Verdun, and that Arabia Petreea of the de- 
partment of the Upper Alps, called Dévoluy, knows that there 
is no time to lose—that in fifty years from this date France 
will be separated from Savoy, as Egypt from Syria, by a 
desert.”’ * 

It deserves to be specially noticed that the district here 
referred to, though now among the most hopelessly waste in 
France, was very productive even down to so late a period as 
the commencement of the French Revolution. Arthur Young, 
writing in 1789, says: “About Barcelonette and in the high- 
est parts of the mountains, the hill-pastures feed a million of 
sheep, besides large herds of other cattle;” and he adds: 
“With such a soil and in such a climate, we are not to sup- 
pose a country barren because it is mountainous. The valleys 
I have visited are, in general, beautiful.”+ He ascribes the 


* Ladoucette says the peasant of Dévoluy ‘‘ often goes a distance of five 
hours over rocks and precipices for a single [man’s] load of wood ;” and he re- 
marks on another page, that ‘‘ the justice of peace of that canton had, in 
the course of forty-three years, but once heard the voice of the nightingale.” — 
Histoire, ete., des Hautes Alpes, pp. 220, 434. 

{ The valley of Embrun, now almost completely devastated, was once re- 

urkable for its fertility. In 1806, Héricart de Thury said of it: ‘‘In this 


952, TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


same character 1o the provinces of Dauphiny, Provence, and 
Auvergne, and, though he visited, with the eye of an attentive 
and practised observer, many of the scenes since blasted with 
the wild desolation described by Blanqui, the Durance and a 
part of the course of the Loire are the only streams he men- 
tions as inflicting serious injury by their floods. The ravages 
of the torrents had, indeed, as we have seen, commenced earlier 
in some other localities, but we are authorized to infer that they 
were, in Young’s time, too limited in range, and relatively too 
insignificant, to require notice in a general view of the pro- 
vinces where they have now ruined so large a proportion of 
the soil. 

But I resume my citations. 

“T do not exaggerate,” says Blanqui. “ When I shall have 
finished my description and designated localities by their 
names, there will rise, I am sure, more than one voice from the 
spots themselves, to attest the rigorous exactness of this picture 
of their wretchedness. I have never seen its equal even in the 
Kabyle villages of the province of Constantine ; for there you 
can travel on horseback, and you find grass in the spring, 
whereas in more than fifty communes in the Alps there is abso- 
lutely nothing. 

“The clear, brilliant, Alpine sky of Embrun, of Gap, of 
Barcelonette, and of Digne, which for months is without a 
cloud, produces droughts interrupted only by diluvial rains 
like those of the tropics. The abuse of the right of pasturage 
and the felling of the woods have stripped the soil of all its 
grass and all its trees, and the scorching sun bakes it to the 
consistence of porphyry. When moistened by the rain, as it 
has neither support nor cohesion, it rolls down to the valleys, 
sometimes in floods resembling black, yellow, or reddish lava, 
sometimes in streams of pebbles, and even huge blocks of 
stone, which pour down with a frightful roar, and in their 


magnificent valley nature had been prodigal of her gifts. Its inhabitants have 
blindly revelled in her favors, and fallen asleep in the midst of her profusion,” 
—BECQUEREL, .Des Climats, etc., p. 514. 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. O58 


swift course exhibit the most convulsive movements. If you 
overlook from an eminence one of these landscapes furrowed 
with so many ravines, it presents only images of desolation 
and of death. Vast deposits of flinty pebbles, many feet in 
thickness, which have rolled down and spread far over the 
plain, surround large trees, bury even their tops, and rise 
above them, leaving to the husbandman no longer a ray of 
hope. One can imagine no sadder spectacle than the deep 
fissures in the flanks of the mountains, which seem to have 
burst forth in eruption to cover the plains with their ruins. 
These gorges, under the influence of the sun which cracks and 
shivers to fragments the very rocks, and of the rain which 
sweeps them down, penetrate deeper and deeper into the heart 
of the mountain, while the beds of the torrents issuing from 
them are sometimes raised several feet in a single year, by 
the débris, so that they reach the level of the bridges, which, 
of course, are then carried off. The torrent-beds are recog- 
nized at a great distance, as they issue from the mountains, 
and they spread themselves over the low grounds, in fan- 
shaped expansions, like a mantle of stone, sometimes ten thou- 
sand feet wide, rising high at the centre, and curving towards 
the circumference till their lower edges meet the plain. 

“Such is their aspect in dry weather. But no tongue can 
give an adequate description of their devastations in one of 
those sudden floods which resemble, in almost none of their 
phenomena, the action of ordinary river-water. They are now 
no longer overflowing brooks, but real seas, tumbling down in 
cataracts, and rolling before them blocks of stone, which are 
hurled forwards by the shock of the waves like balls shot out 
by the explosion of gunpowder. Sometimes ridges of peb- 
bles are driven down when the transporting torrent does not 
rise high enough to show itself, and then the movement is 
accompanied with a roar louder than the crash of thunder. 
A furious wind precedes the rushing water and announces 
its approach. Then comes a violent eruption, followed by a 
flow of muddy waves, and after a few hours all returns to the 


954 TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 


dreary silence which at periods of rest marks these abodes of 
desolation.* 

“The elements of destruction are increasing in violence. 
The devastation advances in geometrical progression as the 
higher slopes are bared of their wood, and ‘the ruin from 
above,’ to use the words of a peasant, ‘helps to hasten the deso- 
lation below.’ 

“The Alps of Provence present a terrible aspect. In the 
more equable climate of Northern France, one can form no 
conception of those parched mountain gorges where not even 
a bush can be found to shelter a bird, where, at most, the 
wanderer sees in summer here and there a withered lavender, 
where all the springs are dried up, and where a dead silence, 
hardly broken by even the hum of an insect, prevails. But if 
a storm bursts forth, masses of water suddenly shoot from the 
mountain heights into the shattered gulfs, waste without irri- 
gating, deluge without refreshing the soil they overflow in 
their swift descent, and leave it even more seared than it was 
from want of moisture. Man at last retires from the fearful 
desert, and I have, the present season, found not a living soul 
in districts where I remember to have enjoyed hospitality thirty 
years ago.” 

In 1853, ten years after the date of Blanqui’s memoir, M. de 
Bonville, prefect of the Lower Alps, addressed to the Govern- 
ment a report in which the following passages occur: 

“Tt is certain that the productive mould of the Alps, swept 


* These explosive gushes of mud and rock appear to be occasioned by the 
caying-in of large masses of earth from the banks of the torrent, which dam 
up the stream and check its flow until it has acquired volume enough to burst 
the barrier and carry all before it. In 1827, such a sudden eruption of a 
torrent, after the current had appeared to have ceased, swept off forty-two 
houses and drowned twenty-eight persons in the village of Goncelin, near 
Grenoble, and buried with rubbish a great part of the remainder of the 
village. 

The French traveller, D’Abbadie, relates precisely similar occurrences as not 
unfrequent in the mountains of Abyssinia. —SuRELL, tudes, etc., 2d edition, 
pp. 224, 295. 


TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 955 


off by the increasing violence of that curse of the mountains, 
the torrents, is daily diminishing with fearful rapidity. All 
our Alps are wholly, or in large proportion, bared of wocd. 
Their soil, scorched by the sun of Provence, cut up by the 
hoofs of the sheep, which, not finding on the surface the grass 
they require for their sustenance, gnaw and scratch the ground 
in search of roots to satisfy their hunger, is periodically washed 
and carried off by melting snows and summer storms. 

“T will not dwell on the effects of the torrents. Jor sixty 
years they have been too often depicted to require to be 
further discussed, but it is important to show that their ravages 
are daily extending the range of devastation. The bed of the 
Durance, which now in some places exceeds a mile and a 
quarter in width, and, at ordinary times, has a current of water 
less than eleven yards wide, shows something of the extent of 
the damage.* Where, ten years ago, there were still woods and 
cultivated grounds to be seen, there is now but a vast torrent ; 
there is not one of our mountains which has not at least one 
torrent, and new ones are daily forming. 

“ An indirect proof of the diminution of the soil is to be 
found in the depopulation of the country. In 1852 I reported 
to the General Council that, according to the census of that 
year, the population of the department of the Lower Alps 
had fallen off no less than 5,000 souls in the five years between 
1846 and 1851. 

“Unless prompt and energetic measures are taken, it is easy 
to fix the epoch when the French Alps will be but a desert. 
The interval between 1851 and 1856 will show a further de- 
crease of population. In 1862 the ministry will announce a 


* In the days of the Roman Empire the Durance was a navigable, or at least 
a boatable, river, with a commerce so important that the boatmen upon it 
formed a distinct corporation.—LADOUCETTE, Histoire, etc., des Hautes Alpes, 
p. 304. 

Even as early as 1789 the Durance was computed to have already covered 
with gravel and pebbles not less than 130,000 acres, ‘‘ which, but for its inun- 
dations, would have been the finest land in the province.”—ARTHUR YOUNG, 
Travels in France, vol. i., ch. i. 


256 FLOODS OF THE ARDECHE. 


continued and progressive reduction in the number of acres 
devoted to agriculture; every year will aggravate the evil, 
and in half a century France will count more ruins, and a de- 
partment the less.” 

Time has verified the predictions of De Bonville. The later 
census returns show a progressive diminution in the population 
of the departments of the Lower Alps, the Isére, Drome, 
Ariége, the Upper and the Lower Pyrenees, Lozere, the Ar- 
dennes, Doubs, the Vosges, and, in short, in all the provinces 
formerly remarkable for their forests. This diminution is not 
to be ascribed to a passion for foreign emigration, as in Ireland, 
and in parts of Germany and of Italy; it is simply a transfer 
of population from one part of the empire to another, from 
soils which human foily has rendered uninhabitable, by ruth- 
lessly depriving them of their natural advantages and securi- 
ties, to provinces where the face of the earth was so formed by 
nature as to need no such safeguards, and where, consequently, 
she preserves her outlines in spite of the wasteful improvidence 
of man.* 


Floods of the Ardéche. 


The River Ardéche, in the French department of that name, 
has a perennial current in a considerable part of its course, and 
therefore is not, technically speaking, a torrent; but the peculiar 
character and violence of its floods is due to the action of the 
torrents which discharge themselves into it in its upper valley, 
and to the rapidity of the flow of the water of precipitation 


* Between 1851 and 1856 the population of Languedoc and Provence had 
increased by 101,000 souls. The augmentation, however, was wholly in the 
provinces of the plains, where all the principal cities are found. In these 
provinces the increase was 204,000, while in the mountain provinces there was 
a diminution of 103,000. The reduction of the area of arable land is perhaps 
even more striking. In 1842 the department of the Lower Alps possessed 
99,000 hectares, or nearly 245,000 acres, of cultivated soil. In 1852 it had 
but 74,000 hectares. In other words, in ten years 25,000 hectares, or 61,000 
acres, had been washed away, or rendered worthless for cultivation, by torrents 
and the abuses of pasturage.—CLav, “tudes, pp. 66, 67. 


FLOODS OF THE ARDECHE. : 257 


from the surface of a basin now almost bared of its once luxu- 
riant woods.* A notice of these floods may therefore not inap- 
propriately be introduced in this place. 

The floods of the Ardeche and other mountain streams are 
attended with greater immediate danger to life and property 
than those of rivers of less rapid flow, because their currents are 
more impetuous, and they rise more suddenly and with less pre- 
vious warning. At the same time, their ravages are contined 
within narrower limits, the waters retire sooner to their accus- 
tomed channel, and the danger is more quickly over, than in 
the case of inundations of larger rivers. The Ardéche drains 
a basin of 600,238 acres, or a little less than nine hundred and 
thirty-eight square miles. Its remotest source is about seventy- 
five miles, in a straight line, from its junction with the Rhone, 
and springs at an elevation of four thousand feet above that 
point. At the lowest stage of the river, the bed of the Chassezac, 
its largest and longest tributary, is in many places completely 
dry on the surface—the water being sufficient only to supply 
the subterranean channels of infiltration—and the Ardeéche it- 
self is almost everywhere fordable, even below the mouth of 
the Chassezac. But in floods, the river has sometimes risen 
more than sixty feet at the Pont d’Arc, a natural arch of two 
hundred feet chord, which spans the stream below its junction 
with all its important affluents. At the height of the inunda- 
tion of 1857, the quantity of water passing this point—after 
deducting thirty per cent. for material transported with the 
eurrent and for irregularity of flow—was estimated at 8,545 


* The original forests in which the basin of the Ardéche was rich have been 
rapidly disappearing for many years, and the terrific violence of the inunda- 
tions which are now laying it waste is ascribed, by the ablest investigators, to 
that cause. In an article inserted in the Annales Forestiéres for 1845, quoted 
by Hohenstein, Der Wald, p. 177, it is said that about one-third of the area 
of the department had already become absolutely barren, in consequence of 
clearing, and that the destruction of the woods was still going on with great 
rapidity. New torrents were constantly forming, and they were estimated to 
have covered more than 70,000 acres of good land, or one-eighth of the sur- 
face of the department, with sand and gravel. 


if 


958 FI.OODS OF THE ARDECHE. 


cubic yards to the second, and between twelve o’clock at noon 
on the 10th of September of that year and ten o’clock the next 
morning, the water discharged through the passage in question 
amounted to more than 450,000,000 cubic yards. This quan- 
tity, distributed equally through the basin of the river, would 
cover its entire area to a depth of more than five inches. 

The Ardéche rises so suddenly that, in the inundation of 
1846, the women who were washing in the bed of the river had 
not time to save their linen, and barely escaped with their 
lives, though they instantly fled upon hearing the roar of the 
approaching flood. Its waters and those of its affluents fall 
almost as rapidly, for in less than twenty-four hours after the 
rain has ceased in the Cévennes, where it rises, the Ardeche 
returns within its ordinary channel, even at its junction with 
the Rhone. In the flood of 1772, the water at La Geaume de 
Ruoms, on the Beaume, a tributary of the Ardeche, rose thirty- 
five feet above low water, but the stream was again fordable 
on the evening of the same day. The inundation of 1827 was, 
in this respect, exceptional, for it continued three days, during 
which period the Ardéche poured into the Rhone 1,805,000,000 
cubic yards of water. 

The Nile delivers into the sea 101,000 cubic feet or 3,741 
cubic yards per second, on an average of the whole year.* 
This is equal to 323,222,400 cubic yards per day. In a single 
day of fiood, then, the Ardéche, a river too insignificant to be 


* Sir Jonn F. W. HeRscuen, citing Talabot as his authority, Physical 
Geography (24). 

In an elaborate paper on “Irrigation,” printed in the United States Patent 
Report for 1860, p. 169, it is stated that the volume of water poured into the 
Mediterranean by the Nile in twenty-four hours, at low water, is 150,566,- 
392,368 cubic métres; at high water, 705,514,667,440 cubic métres. Taking 
the mean of these two numbers, the average daily delivery of the Nile would 
be 428,081,059,808 cubic métres, or more than 550,000,000,000 cubic yards. 
There is some enormous mistake, probably a typographical error, in this state- 
ment, which makes the delivery of the Nile seventeen hundred times as great 
as computed by Talabot, and more than physical geographers haye estimated 
the quantity supplied by all the rivers on the face of the globe. 


FLOODS OF THE ARDECHE. 959 


known except in the local topography of France, contributed 
to the Rhone once and a half, and for three consecutive days 
once and one third, as much as the average delivery of the Nile 
during the same periods, though the basin of the latter river 
probably contains 1,000,000 square miles of surface, or more 
than one thousand times as much as that of the former. 

The average annual precipitation in the basin of the Ar- 
déche is not greater than in many other parts of Europe, but 
excessive quantities of rain frequently fall in that valley in the 
autumn. On the 9th of October, 1827, there fell at Joyeuse, 
on the Beaume, no less than thirty-one inches between three 
o’clock in the morning and midnight. Such facts as this ex- 
plain the extraordinary suddenness and violence of the floods 
of the Ardéche, and the basins of many other tributaries of the 
Rhone exhibit méteorological phenomena not less remarkable.* 


* The Drac, a torrent emptying into the Isére a little below Grenoble, has 
discharged 5,200, the Isére, which receives it, 7,800 cubic yards, and the 
Durance, above its junction with the Isére, an equal quantity, per second.— 
Montuvisant, Note sur les Desséchements, etc., Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 
1853, 2me sémestre, p. 288. 

The Upper Rhone, which drains a basin of about 1,900 square miles, includ- 
ing seventy-one glaciers, receives many torrential affluents, and rain-storms 
and thaws are sometimes extensive enough to affect the whole tributary 
system of its narrow valley. In such cases its current swells to a great 
volume, but previously to the floods of the autumn of 1868 it was never known 
to reach a discharge of 2,600 cubic yards to the second. On the 28th of Sep- 
tember in that year, however, its delivery amounted to 3,700 cubic yards to 
the second, which is about equal to the mean discharge of the Nile.—Berichte 
der Huperten-Commission tiber die Ueberschwemmungen im Jahr 1868, pp. 
174, 175. 

The floods of some other French rivers, which have a more or less torren- 
tial character, scarcely fall behind those of the Rhone. The Loire, above | 
Roanne, has a basin of 2,471 square miles, or about twice and a half the area 
of that of the Ardéche. In some of its inundations it has delivered above 
9,500 cubic yards per second, or 400 times its low-water discharge. —BELGRAND, 
De V Influence des Foréts, ete., Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1854, ler sémes- 
tre, p. 15, note. 

The ordinary low-water discharge of the Seine at Paris is nearly 100 cubic 
yards per second. Belgrand gives a list of eight floods of that river within 
the last two centuries, in which it has delivered thirty times that quantity. 


260 FLOODS OF THE ARDECHE. 


The Rhone, therefore, is naturally subject to great and sudden 
inundations, and the same remark may be applied to most of 
the principal rivers of France, because the geographical char- 
acter of all of them is approximately the same. 

The volume of water in the floods of most great rivers is de- 
termined by the degree in which the inundations of the differ- 
ent tributaries are coincident in time. Were all the afiluents 
of the Lower Rhone to pour their highest annual floods into its 
channel at once—as the smaller tributaries of the Upper Rhone 
sometimes do—were a dozen Niles to empty themselves into its 
bed at the same moment, its water would rise to a height and 
rush with an impetus that would sweep into the Mediterranean 
the entire population of its banks, and all the works that 
man has erected upon the plains which border it. But such a 
coincidence can never happen. The tributaries of this river 
run in very different directions, and some of them are swollen 
principally by the melting of the snows about their sources, 
others almost exclusively by heavy rains. When a damp south- 
east wind blows up the valley of the Ardeéche, its moisture is con- 
densed, and precipitated in a deluge upon the mountains which 
embosom the headwaters of that stream, thus producing a flood, 
while a neighboring basin, the axis of which ties transversely 
or obliquely to that of the Ardeéche, is not at all affected.* 


* “There is no example of a coincidence between great floods of the 
Ardéche and of the Rhone, all the known inundations of the former having 
taken place when the latter was very low.” —Marpieny, Mémoire sur les Inon- 
dations des Riviéres de V Ardéche, p. 26. 

The same observation may be applied to the tributaries of the Po, their 
floods being generally successive, not contemporaneous. The swelling of the 
affluents of the Amazon, and indeed of most large rivers, is regulated by a 
similar law. See MrEssEDAGLIA, Analisi del? opera di Champion, ete., p. 103. 

The floods of the affluents of the Tiber form an exception to this law, being 
generally coincident, and this is one of the explanations of the frequency of 
destructive inundations in that river.—LOMBARDINI, Guida allo Studio del? 
Idrologia, ff. 68; same author, Hsame degli studi sul Tevere. 

I take this occasion to acknowledge myself indebted to Mardigny’s interest- 
ing memoir just quoted for all the statements I make respecting the floods of 
the Ardéche, except the comparison of the volume of its waters with that of 
the Nile. 


FLOODS OF THE ARDECHE. 261 


It is easy to see that the damage occasioned by such floods as 
I have described must be almost incalculable, and it is by no 
means confined to the effects produced by overflow and the 
mechanical force of the superficial currents. In treating of 
the devastations of torrents, I have hitherto confined myself 
principally to the erosion of surface and the transportation of 
mineral matter to lower grounds by them. The general action 
of torrents, as thus far shown, tends to the ultimate elevation of 
their beds by the deposit of the earth, gravel, and stone conveyed 
by them; but until they have thus raised their outlets so as sen- 
sibly to diminish the inclination of their channels—and some- 
times when extraordinary floods give the torrents momentum 
enough to sweep away the accumulations which they have 
themselves heaped up—the swift flow of their currents, aided 
by the abrasion of the rolling rocks and gravel, scoops their 
beds constantly deeper, and they consequently not only under- 
mine their banks, but frequently sap the most solid foundations 
which the art of man can build for the support of bridges and 
hydraule structures.* 

In the inundation of 1857, the Ardéche destroyed a stone 


* In some cases where the bed of rapid Alpine streams is composed of very 
hard rock—as is the case in many of the valleys once filled by ancient glaciers 
—and especially where they are fed by glaciers not overhung by crumbling 
cliffs, the channel may remain almost unchanged for centuries. This is observ- 
able in many of the tributaries of the Dora Baltea, which drains the valley of 
Aosta. Several of these small rivers are spanned by more or less perfect 
Roman bridges—one of which, that over the Lys at Pont St. Martin, is still in 
good repair and in constant use. An examination of the rocks on which the 
abutments of this and some other similar structures are founded, and of the 
channels of the rivers they cross, shows that the beds of the streams cannot 
have been much elevated or depressed since the bridges were built. In other 
cases, as at the outlet of the Val Tournanche at Chatillon, where a single rib 
of a Roman bridge still remains, there is nothing to forbid the supposition 
that the deep excavation of the channel may have been parily effected at a 
much later period. 

The Roman aqueduct known as the Pont du Gard, near Nismes, was built, 
in all probability, nineteen centuries ago. The bed of the river Gardon, a 
rather swift stream, which flows beneath it, can have suffered but a slight 
depression since the piers of the aqueduct were founded, 


262 SCOOPING OUT OF RIVER-BEDS. 


bridge near La Beaume, which had been built about eighty years 
before. The resistance of the piers, which were erected on piles, 
the channel at that point being of gravel, produced an eddying 
current that washed away the bed of the river above them, and 
the foundation, thus deprived of lateral support, yielded to the 
weight of the bridge, and the piles and piers fell up-stream. 

By a curious law of compensation, the stream which, at flood, 
scoops out cavities in its bed, often fills them up again as soon as 
the diminished velocity of the current allows it to let fall the 
sand and gravel with which it is charged, so that when the 
waters return to their usual channel, the bottom shows no sign 
of having been disturbed. In a flood of the Escontay, a tribu- 
tary of the Rhone, in 1846, piles driven sixteen feet into its 
gravelly bed for the foundation of a pier were torn up and e¢ar- 
ried off, and yet, when the river had fallen to low-water mark, the 
bottom at that point appeared to have been raised higher than 
it was before the flood, by new deposits of sand and gravel, 
while the cut stones of the half-built pier were found buried to 
a creat depth in the excavation which the water had first washed 
out. The gravel with which rivers thus restore the level of their 
beds is principally derived from the crushing of the rocks brought 
down by the mountain torrents, and the destructive effects of 
inundations are immensely diminished by this reduction of large 
stones to minute fragments. If the blocks hurled down from 
the cliffs were transported unbroken to the channels of large 
rivers, the mechanical force of their movement would be irresist- 
ible. They would overthrow the strongest barriers, spread 
themselves over a surface as wide as the flow of the waters, 
and convert the most smiling valleys into scenes of the wildest 
desolation. 

As I have before remarked, I have taken my illustrations of 
the action of torrents and mountain streams principally from 
French authorities, because the facts recorded by them are 
chiefly of recent occurrence, and as they have been collected 
with much care and described with great fulness of detail, the 
information furnished by them is not only more trustworthy, but 


TORRENTS IN EUROPE. * 963 


both more complete and more accessible than that which can 
be gathered from any other source. It is not to be supposed, 
however, that the countries adjacent to France have escaped the 
consequences of a like improvidence. The southern flanks of 
the Alps, and, in a less degree, the northern slope of these 
mountains and the whole chain of the Pyrenees, afford equally 
striking examples of the evils resulting from the wanton sacrifice 
of nature’s safeguards. But I can afford space for few details, 
and as an illustration of the extent of these evils in Italy, I shall 
barely observe that it was calculated ten years ago that four- 
tenths of the area of the Ligurian provinces had been washed 
away or rendered incapable of cultivation in consequence of the 
felling of the woods.* 

Highly colored as these pictures seem, they are not exagge- 
rated, although the hasty tourist through Southern Irance, 
Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Northern Italy, finding little in his 
high-road experiences to justify them, might suppose them so. 
The lines of communication by locomotive-train and diligence 
lead generally over safer ground, and it is only when they ascend 
the Alpine passes aud traverse the mountain chains, that scenes 
somewhat resembling those just described fall under the eye of 
the ordinary traveller. But the extension of the sphere of de- 
vastation, by the degradation of the mountains and the trans- 
portation of their débris, is producing analogous effects upon 
the lower ridges of the Alps and the plains which skirt them ; 
and even now one needs but an hour’s departure from some 
great thoroughfares to reach sites where the genius of destruc- 
tion revels as wildly as in the most frightful of the abysses 
which Blanqui has painted.t+ 


* Annali di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, vol. i., p. 77. Similar in- 
stances of the erosive power of running water might be collected by hundreds 
from the narratives of travellers in warm countries. The energy of the tor- 
rents of the Himalayas is such that the brothers Schlagintweit believe that 
they will cut gorges through that lofty chain wide enough to admit the pas- 
sage of currents of warm wind from the south, and thereby modify the cli- 
mate of the countries lying to the north of the mountains. 

+ The Skalira-Tobel, for instance, near Coire. See the description of this 


264 ACTION OF TORRENTS. 


There is one effect of the action of torrents which few tray- 
ellers on the Continent ave heedless enough to pass without 
notice. I refer to the elevation of the beds of mountain streams 
in consequence of the deposit of the débris with which they 
are charged. To prevent the spread of sand and gravel over 


and other like scenes in BERLEPSCH, Die Alpen, pp. 169 et segg., or in Stephen’s 
English translation, 

About an hour from Thusis, on the Spliigen road, ‘‘ opens the awful chasm 
of the Nolla which a hundred years ago poured its peaceful waters through 
smiling meadows protected by the wooded slopes of the mountains. But the 
woods were cut down and with them departed the rich pastures, the pride of« 
the valley, now covered with piles of rock and rubbish swept down from the 
mountains. This result is the more to be lamented as it was entirely com- 
passed by the improvidence of man in thinning the forests.”—MOoRELL, Seéen- 
tific Guide to Switzerland, p. 100.” 

The recent change in the character of the Mella—a river anciently so re- 
markable for the gentleness of its current that it was specially noticed by 
Catullus as flowing molli flumine--deserves more than a passing remark. This 
river rises in the mountain-chain east of Lake Iseo, and traversing the district 
of Brescia, empties into the Oglio after a course of about seventy miles. The 
iron-works in the upper valley of the Mella had long created a considerable 
demand for wood, but their operations were not so extensive as to occasion 
any very sudden or general destruction of the forests, and the only evil expe- 
rienced from the clearings was the gradual diminution of the volume of the 
river. Within the last thirty years, the superior quality of the arms mauu- 
factured at Brescia has greatly enlarged the sale of them, and very naturally 
stimula‘ed the activity of both the forges and of the colliers who supply them, 
and the hillsides have been rapidly stripped of their timber. Up to 1850, no 
destructive inundation of the Mella had been recorded. Buildings in great 
numbers had been erected upon its margin, and its valley was conspicuous for 
its rural beauty and its fertility. But when the denudation of the mountains 
had reached a certain point, avenging nature began the work of retribution. 
In the spring and summer of 1850 several new torrents were suddenly formed 
in the upper tributary valleys, and on the 14th and 15th of August in that 
year a fall of rain, not heavier than had been often experienced, produced a 
flood which not only inundated much ground never before overflowed, but 
destroyed a great number of bridges, dams, factories, and other valuable 
structures, and, whet was a far more serious evil, swept off from the rocks an 
incredible extent of soil, and converted one of the most beautiful valleys of 
the Italian Alps into a ravine almost as bare and as barren as the savagest 
gorge of Southern France. The pecuniary damage was estimated at many 
toillions of francs, and the violence of the catastrophe was deemed so extraor- 


ACTION OF TORRENTS. 265 


the fields and the deluging overflow of the raging waters, the 
streams are confined by walls and embankments, which are 
gradually built higher and higher as the bed of the torrent is 
raised, so that, to reach a river, you ascend from the fields be- 
side it; and sometimes the ordinary level of the stream is 
above the streets and even the roofs of the towns through 
which it passes.* 

The traveller who visits the depths of an Alpine ravine, 
observes the length and width of the gorge and the great 
height and apparent solidity of the precipitous walls which 
bound it, and calculates the mass of rock required to fill the 
vacancy, can hardly believe that the humble brooklet which 
purls at his feet has been the principal agent in accomplishing 
this tremendous erosion. Closer observation will often teach 
him, that the seemingly unbroken rock which overhangs the 
valley is full of cracks and fissures, and really in such a state 


dinary, even in a country subject to similar visitations, that the sympathy 
excited for the sufferers produced, in five months, voluntary contributions for 
their relief to the amount of nearly $200,000.—Delle Inondazionié del Mella, 
etc., nella notte del 14 al 15 Agosto, 1850. 

The author of this pamphlet has chosen as a motto a passage from the Vul- 
gate translation of Job, which is interesting as showing accurate observation 
of the action of the torrent: ‘Mons cadens definit, et saxum transfertur de 
loco suo; lapides excavant aque et alluvione pauliatim terra consumitur.”— 
Job xiv. 18, 19. 

The English version is much less striking, and gives a different sense. 

The recent date of the change in the character of the Mella is contested, 
and it is possible that, though the extent of the revolution is not exaggerated, 
the rapidity with which it has taken place may have been. 

* Strefleur quotes from Duile the following observations: ‘‘ The channel 
of the Tyrolese brooks is often raised much above the valleys through which 
they flow. The bed of the Fersina is elevated high above the city of Trent, 
which lies near it. The Villerbach flows at a much more elevated level than 
that of the market-place of Neumarkt and Vill, and threatens to overwhelm 
both of them with its waters. The Talfer at Botzen is at least even with the 
roofs of the adjacent town, if not above them. The tower-steeples of the 
villages of Schlanders, Kortsch, and Laas, are lower than the surface of the 
Gaazibach. The Saldurbach at Schluderns menaces the far lower village with 
destruction, and the chief town, Schwaz, is in similar danger from the Lahn- 
bach.” —STREFFLEUR, Ueber die Wildbdche, etc., p. 7. 


266 ACTION OF TORRENTS. 


of disintegration that every frost must bring down tons of it. 
If he compute the area of the basin which finds here its only 
discharge, he will perceive that a sudden thaw of the winter’s 
deposit of snow, or one of those terrible discharges of rain so 
common in the Alps, must send forth a deluge mighty enough 
to sweep down the largest masses of gravel and of rock. The 
simple measurement of the cubical contents of the semicircular 
hillock which he climbed before he entered the gorge, the 
structure and composition of which conclusively show that it 
must have been washed out of this latter by torrential action, 
will often account satisfactorily for the disposal of most of the 
matter which once filled the ravine. 

When a torrent escapes from the lateral confinement of its 
mountain walls and pours out of the gorge, it spreads and 
divides itself into numerous smaller streams which shoot out 
from the mouth of the ravine as from a centre, in different 
directions, like the ribs of a fan from the pivot, each carrying 
with it its quota of stones and gravel. The plain below the 
point of issue from the mountain is rapidly raised by newly- 
formed torrents, the elevation depending on the inclination of 
the bed and the form and weight of the matter transported. 
Every flood both increases the height of this central point and 
extends the entire circumference of the deposit. 

Other things being equal, the transporting power of the 
water is greatest where its flow is most rapid. This is usually 
in the direction of the axis of the ravine. The stream retain- 
ing most nearly this direction moves with the greatest momen- 
tum, and consequently transports the solid matter with which 
it is charged to the greatest distance. 

The untrayvelled reader will comprehend this the better when 
he is informed that the southern slope of the Alps generally 
rises suddenly out of the plain, with no intervening hill to 
break the abruptness of the transition, except those consisting of 
comparatively small heaps of its own débris brought down by 
ancient glaciers or recent torrents. The torrents do not wind 
down valleys gradually widening to the rivers or the sea, but 


ACTION OF TORRENTS. 267 


leap at once from the flanks of the mountains upon the plains 
below. This arrangement of surfaces naturally facilitates the 
formation of vast deposits at their points of emergence, and the 
centre of the accumulation in the case of very small torrents is 
not unfrequently a hundred feet high, and sometimes very 
much more. 

The deposits of the torrent which has scooped out the Nant- 
zen Thal, a couple of miles below Brieg in the Valais, have 
built up a semicircular hillock, which most travellers by the 
Simplon route pass over without even noticing it, though it is 
little inferior in dimensions to the great cones of dejection 
described by Blanqui. The principal course of the torrent hay- 
ing been—I know not whether spontaneously or artificially— 
diverted towards the west, the eastern part of the hill has been 
gradually brought under cultivation, and there are many trees, 
fields, and houses upon it; but the larger western part is furrow- 
ed with channels diverging from the summit of the deposit at 
the outlet of the Nantzen Thal, which serve as the beds of the 
water-courses into which the torrent has divided itself. All 
this portion of the hillock is subject to inundation after long 
and heavy rain, and as I saw it in the great flood of October, 
1866, almost its whole surface seemed covered with an unbroken 
sheet of rushing water. 

The semi-conical deposit of detritus at the mouth of the 
Litznerthal, a lateral branch of the valley of the Adige, at the 
point where the torrent pours out of the gorge, is a thousand 
feet high and, measuring along the axis of the principal current, 
two and a half miles long.* The solid material of this hillock— 
which it is hardly an exaggeration to call a mountain, the work 
of a single insignificant torrent and its tributaries—including 
what the river which washes its base has carried off in a com- 
paratively few years, probably surpasses the mass of the stu- 
pendous pyramid of the Matterhorn. 

In valleys of ancient geological formation, which extend 


* SONKLAR, Die Octzthaler Gebdirgsgruppe, 1861, p. 231. 


268 TORRENTS EXTINGUISHED. 


into the very heart of the mountains, the streams, though 
rapid, have often lost the true torrential character, if, indeed, 
they ever possessed it. Their beds have become approximate- 
ly constant, and their walls no longer crumble and fall into the 
waters that wash their bases. The torrent-worn ravines, of 
which I have spoken, are of later date, and belong more prop- 
erly to what may be called the crust of the Alps, consisting of 
loose rocks, of gravel, and of earth, strewed along the surface 
of the great declivities of the central ridge, and accumulated 
thickly between their solid buttresses. But it is on this crust 
that the mountaineer dwells. Here are his forests, here his 
pastures, and the ravages of the torrent both destroy his world, 
and convert it into a source of overwhelming desolation to the 
plains below. 

I do not mean to assert that all the rocky valleys of the Alps 
have been produced by the action of torrents resulting from 
the destruction of the forests. The greater, and many of the 
smaller channels, by which that chain is drained, owe their 
origin to higher causes. They are primitive fissures, ascribable 
to disruption in upheaval or other geological convulsion, 
widened and scarped, and often even polished, so to speak, by 
the action of glaciers during the ice period, and but little 
changed in form by running water in later eras. 

It has been contended that all rivers which take their rise in 
mountains originated in torrents. These, it is said, have 
lowered the summits by gradual erosion, and, with the material 
thus derived, have formed shoals in the sea which once beat 
against the cliffs ; then, by successive deposits, gradually raised 
them above the surface, and finally expanded them into broad 
plains traversed by gently flowing streams. If we could go 
back to earlier geological periods, we should find this theory 
often verified, and we cannot fail to see that the torrents go on 
at the present hour, depressing still lower the ridges of the 
Alps and the Apennines, raising still higher the plains of Lom- 
bardy and Provence, extending the coast still farther into the 
Adriatic and the Mediterranean, reducing the inclination of 


TORRENTS EXTINGUISHED. 269 


their own beds and the rapidity of their flow, and thus tending 
to become river-like in character. 

We cannot measure the share which human action has had 
in augmenting the intensity of causes of mountain degradation, 
and of the formation of plains and marshes below, but we know 
that the clearing of the woods has, in some cases, produced, 
within two or three generations, effects as blasting as those 
generally ascribed to geological convulsions, and has laid waste 
the face of the earth more hopelessly than if it had been buried 
by a current of lava or a shower of volcanic sand. New tor- 
rents are forming every year in the Alps. Tradition, written 
records, and analogy concur to establish the belief that the 
ruin of most of the now desolate valleys in those mountains 
is to be ascribed to the same cause, and authentic descrip- 
tions of the irresistible force of the torrent show that, aided by 
frost and heat, it is adequate to level Mont Blane and Monte 
Rosa themselves, unless new upheavals shall maintain their 
elevation. 

There are cases where torrents cease their ravages of them- 
selves, in consequence of some change in the condition of the 
basin where they originate, or of the face of the mountain at a 
higher level, while the plain or the sea below remains in sub- 
stantially the same state as before. If a torrent rises in a small 
valley containing no great amount of earth and of disintegrated 
or loose rock, it may, in the course of a certain period, wash 
out all the transportable material, and if the valley is then left 
with solid walls, it will cease to furnish débris to be carried 
down by floods. If, in this state of things, a new channel be 
formed at an elevation above the head of the valley, it may 
divert a part or even the whole of the rain-water and melted 
snow which would otherwise have flowed into it, and the once 
furious torrent now sinks to the rank of a humble and harmless 
brooklet. “In traversing this department,” says Surell, “ one 
often sees, at the outlet of a gorge, a flattened hillock, with a 
fan-shaped outline and regular slopes; it is the bed of dejec- 
tion of an ancient torrent. It sometimes requires long and 


270 TORRENTS EXTINGUISHED. 


careful study to detect the primitive form, masked as it is by 
groves of trees, by cultivated fields, and often by houses, but, 
“when examined closely, and from different points of view, its 
characteristic figure manifestly appears, and its true history 
cannot be mistaken. Along the hillock flows a streamlet, issu- 
ing from the ravine, and quietly watering the fields. This was 
originally a torrent, and in the background may be discovered 
its mountain basin. Such extinguished torrents, if I may use 
the expression, are numerous.” * 

But for the intervention of man and domestic animals, these 
latter beneficent revolutions would occur more frequently, pro- 
ceed more rapidly. The new scarped mountains, the hillocks 
of débris, the plains elevated by sand and gravel spread over 
them, the shores freshly formed by fluviatile deposits, would 
clothe themselves with shrubs and trees, the intensity of the 
causes of degradation would be diminished, and nature would 
thus regain her ancient equilibrium. But these processes, 
under ordinary circumstances, demand, not years, generations, 
but centuries ; + and man, who even now finds searce breathing- 
room on this vast globe, cannot retire from the Old World to 
some yet undiscovered continent, and wait for the slow action 


* SURELL, Les Torrents des Hautes Alpes, chap. xxiv. In such cases, the 
clearing of the ground, which, in consequence of a temporary diversion of the 
waters, or from some other cause, has become rewooded, sometimes renews 
the ravages of the torrent. Thus, on the left bank of the Durance, a wooded 
declivity had been formed by the débryis brought down by torrents, which had 
extincuished themselves after having swept off much of the superficial strata 
of the mountain of Morgon. ‘‘ All this district was covered with woods, which 
have now been thinned out and are perishing from day to day ; consequently, 
the torrents have recommenced their devastations, and if the clearings con- 
tinue, this declivity, now fertile, will be ruined, like so many others.” —Jdid., 
p. 155. 

+ Where a torrent has not been long in operation, and earth still remains 
mixed with the rocks and gravel it heaps up at its point of eruption, vegeta- 
tion soon starts up and prospers, if protected from encroachment. In Pro- 
vence, ‘‘ several communes determined, about ten years ago, to reserve the 
soils thus wasted, that is, to abandon them for a certain time, to spontaneous 
vegetation, which was not slow in making its appearance.”—BECQUEREL, 
Des Climats, p. 315. 


CRUSHING FORCE OF TORRENTS. o71 


of such causes to replace, by a new creation, the Iden he has 
wasted. 


Crushing Force of Torrents. 


I must here notice a mechanical effect of the rapid flow of 
the torrent, which is of much importance in relation to the des- 
olating action it exercises by covering large tracts of cultivated 
ground with infertile material. The torrent, as we have seen, 
shoots or rolls forwards, with great velocity, masses and frag- 
ments of rock, and sometimes rounded pebbles from more an- 
cient formations. Every inch of this violent movement is 
accompanied with crushing concussion, or, at least, with great 
abrasion of the mineral material, and, as you follow it along 
the course of the waters which transport it, you find the stones 
gradually rounding off in form, and diminishing in size, until 
they pass successively into grayel, and, in the beds of the rivers 
to which the torrents convey it, sand, and lastly impalpable 
slime. 

There are few operations of nature where the effect seems 
more disproportioned to the cause than in this crushing and 
comminution of rock in the channel of swift waters. Igneous 
rocks are generally so hard as to be wrought with great dif_i- 
culty, and they bear the weight of enormous superstructures 
without yielding to the pressure; but to the torrent they are 
as wheat to the millstone. The streams which pour down the 
southern scarp of the Mediterranean Alps along the Riviera di 
Ponente, near Genoa, have short courses, and a brisk walk of a 
couple of hours or even less takes you from the sea-beach to 
the headspring of many of them. In their heaviest floods, they 
bring rounded masses of serpentine quite down to the sea, but 
at ordinary high water their lower course is charged only with 
finely divided particles of that rock. Hence, while, near their 
sources, their channels are filled with pebbles and angular frag- 
ments, intermixed with a little gravel, the proportions are re- 
versed near their mouths, and, just above the points where 
their outlets are partially choked by the rolling shingle of the 


272 CRUSHING FORCE OF TORRENTS. 


beach, their beds are composed of sand and gravel to the 
almost total exclusion of pebbles. 

Guglielmini argued that the gravel and sand of the beds of 
running streams were derived from the trituration of rocks by 
the action of the currents, and inferred that this action was 
generally sudiicient to reduce hard rock to sand in its passage 
from the source to the outlet of rivers. Frisi controverted this 
opinion, and maintained that river-sand was of more ancient 
origin, and he inferred from experiments in artificially grinding 
stones that the concussion, friction, and attrition of rock in 
the channel of running waters were inadequate to its com- 
minution, though he admitted that these same canses might re. 
duce silicious sand to a fine powder capable of transportation 
to the sea by the currents.* Frisi’s experiments were tried 
upon rounded and polished river-pebbles, and prove nothing 
with regard to the action of torrents upon the irregular, more 
or less weathered, and often cracked and shattered rocks which 
lie loose in the ground at the head of mountain valleys. The 
fury of the waters and of the wind which accompanies them 
in the floods of the French Alpine torrents is such, that large 
blocks of stone are hurled out of the bed of the stream to the 
height of twelve or thirteen feet.| The impulse of masses 
driven with such force overthrows the most solid masonry, and 
their concussion cannot fail to be attended with the crushing 
of the rocks themselves. 

The greatest depth of the basin of the Ardeéche is seventy- 
five miles, but most of its tributaries have a much shorter 
course. “These affluents,’ says Mardigny, “hurl into the bed 
of the Ardéche enormous blocks of rock, which this river, in its 


* Frist, Del modo di regolare i Fiumi et Torrenti, pp. 4-19. See in Lom- 
BARDINI, Sulle Inondazioni in Francia, p. 87, notices of the action of cur- 
rents transporting only fine material in wearing down hard rock. In the 
sluices for gold-washing in California having a grade of 1 to 144, and paved 
with the hardest stones, the wear of the bottom is at the rate of two inches 
in three months.—RAYMOND, Minera! Statistics, 1870, p. 480. 

¢{ SuRELL, Ltude sur les Torrents, pp. 31-36. 


CRUSHING FORCE OF TORRENTS. oe 


turn, bears onwards, and grinds down, at high water, so that its 
current rolls only gravel at its confluence with the Rhone.” * 

Duponchel makes the following remarkable statement: “The 
river Herault rises in a granitic region, but soon reaches calca- 
reous formations, which it traverses for more than sixty kilome- 
tres, rolling through deep and precipitous ravines, into which the 
torrents are constantly discharging enormous masses of pebbles 
belonging to the hardest rocks of the Jurassian period. These 
débris, continually renewed, compose, even below the exit of 
the gorge where the river enters into a regular channel cut in a 
tertiary deposit, broad beaches, prodigious accumulations of 
rolled pebbles, extending several kilométres down the stream, 
but they diminish in size and weight so rapidly that above the 
mouth of the river, which is at a distance of thirty or thirty-five 
kilométres from the gorge, every trace of calcareous matter has 
disappeared from the sands of the bottom, which are exclusive- 
ly silicious.” + 

Similar effects of the rapid flow of water and the concussion 
of stones against each other in river-beds may be observed in 
almost every Alpine gorge which serves as the channel of a 
swift stream. ‘The tremendous cleft through which the well- 
known Via Mala is carried receives, every year, from its own 
erumbling walls and from the Hinter Rhein and its mild tribu- 
taries, enormous quantities of rock, in blocks and boulders. In 
fact, the masses hurled into it in a single flood like those of 
1868 would probably fill it up, at its narrow points, to the 


* At Rinkenberg, on the right bank of the Vorder Rhein, in the flood of 
1868, a block of stone computed to weigh nearly 9,000 cwt. was carried bodily 
forwards, not rolled, by a torrent, a distance of three-quarters of a mile.— 
Coaz, die Hochwasser im 1868, p. 54. 

Mémoire sur les Inondations des Riviéres de ? Ardéche, p. 16. ‘‘ The terrific 
roar, the thunder of the raging torrents proceeds principally from the stones 
which are rolled along in the bed of the stream. This movement is attended 
with such powerful attrition that, in the Southern Alps, the atmosphere of 
valleys where the limestone contains bitumen, has, at the time of floods, the 
marked bituminous smell produced by rubbing pieces of such limestone to- 
gether.”—-WESsELY, Die Oecsterreichischen Alpenlinder, i., p. 113. 

t ase pour la création @un sol fertile, p. 20. 


274 TRANSPORTING POWER OF WATER. 


level of the road 400 feet above its bottom, were not the stones 
crushed and carried off by the force of the current. Yet below 
the outlet at Thusis only small rounded boulders, pebbles, and 
gravel, not rock, are found in the bed of the river. The Swiss 
glaciers bring down thousands of cubic yards of hard rock 
every season. Where the glacier ends in a plain or wide valley, 
the rocks are accumulated in a terminal moraine, but in numer- 
ous instances the water which pours from the ice-river has force 
enough to carry down to larger streams the masses delivered by 
the glacier, and there they, with other stones washed out from 
the earth by the current, are ground down, so that few of the 
afiluents of the Swiss lakes deliver into them anything but fine 
sand and slime. 

Great rivers carry no boulders to the sea, and, in fact, receive 
none from their tributaries. LLombardini found, twenty years 
avo, that the mineral matter brought down to the Po by its 
tributaries was, in general, comminuted to about the same degree 
of fineness as the sands of its bed at their points of discharge. 
Jn the case of the Trebbia, which rises high in the Apennines 
and empties into the Po at Piacenza, it was otherwise, that 
river rolling pebbles and coarse gravel into the channel of the 
principal stream. The banks of the other affluents—excepting 
some of those which discharge their waters into the great lakes— 
then either retained their woods, or had been so long clear of 
them that the torrents had removed most of the disintegrated 
and loose rock in their upper basins. The valley of the Trebbia 
had been recently cleared, and all the forces which tend to the 
degradation and transportation of rock were in full activity.* 


Transporting Power of Water. 


But the geographical effects of the action of torrents are not 


* Since the date of Lombardini’s observations, many Alpine valleys have been 
stripped of their woods. It would be interesting to know whether any sensi- 
ble change has been produced in the character or quantity of the matter trans- 
ported by the rivers to the Po.—WNotice sur les Riviéres de la Lombardie, An- 
nales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1847, ler sémestre, p. 131. 


TRANSPORTING POWER OF WATER. 275 


confined to erosion of earth and comminution of rock; for 
they and the rivers to which they contribute transport the dé- 
bris of the mountains to lower levels and spread them out over 
the dry land and the bed of the sea, thus forming alluvial de- 
posits, sometimes of a beneficial, sometimes of an injurious, 
character, and of vast extent.* 

A mountain rivulet swollen by rain or melted snow, when it 
escapes from its usual channel and floods the adjacent fields, 
naturally deposits pebbles and gravel upon them; but even at 
low water, if its course is long enough for its grinding action 
to have full scope, it transports the solid material with which it 
is charged to some larger stream, and there lets it fall in a state 
of minute division, and at last the spoil of the mountain is used 
to raise the level of the plains or carried down to the sea. 

An instance that fell under my own observation, in 1857, will 
serve to show something of the eroding and transporting power 
of streams which, in these respects, fall incalculably below the 
torrents of the Alps. In a flood of the Ottaquechee, a small 
river which flows through Woodstock, Vermont, a mill-dam on 
that stream burst, and the sediment with which the pond was 
filled, estimated after careful measurement at 13,000 cubic 
yards, was carried down by the current. Between this dam 
and the slackwater of another, four miles below, the bed of the 
stream, which is composed of pebbles interspersed in a few 
places with larger stones, is about sixty-five feet wide, though, 
at low water, the breadth of the current is considerably less. 
The sand and fine gravel were smoothly and evenly distributed 
over the bed to a width of fifty-five or sixty feet, and, for a dis- 
tance of about two miles, except at two or three intervening 
rapids, filled up all the interstices between the stones, covering 
them to the depth of nine or ten inches, so as to present a regu- 


* Lorentz, in an official report quoted by Marchand, says: ‘‘ The felling of 
the woods produces torrents which cover the cultivated soil with pebbles and 
fragments of rock, and they do not confine their ravages to the vicinity of the 
mountains, but extend them into the fertile fields of Provence and other de- 
partments, to the distance of forty or fifty leagues,”—Hntwaldung der Gebirge, 
p17. 


276 TRANSPORTING POWER OF WATER. 


larly formed concave channel, lined with sand, and reducing 
the depth of water, in some places, from five or six feet to 
fifteen or eighteen inches. Observing this deposit after the 
river had subsided and become so clear that the bottom could 
be seen, I supposed that the next flood would produce an ex- 
traordinary erosion of the banks and some permanent changes 
in the channel of the stream, in consequence of the elevation 
of the bed and the filling up of the spaces between the stones 
through which formerly much water had flowed; but no such 
result followed. The spring freshet of the next year entirely 
washed out the sand its predecessor had left, deposited some of 
it in ponds and still-water reaches below, carried the residue be- 
yond the reach of observation, and left the bed of the river 
almost precisely in its former condition, though, of course, with 
the displacement of the pebbles which every flood produces in 
the channels of such streams. The pond, though often pre- 
viously discharged by the breakage of the dam, had then been 
undisturbed for about twenty-five years, and its contents 
consisted almost entirely of sand, the rapidity of the cur- 
rent in floods being such that it would let fall little lighter 
sediment, even above an obstruction like a dam. The quantity 
I have mentioned evidently bears a very inconsiderable propor- 
tion to the total erosion of the stream during that period, be- 
cause the wash of the banks consists chiefly of fine earth rather 
than of sand, and after the pond was once filled, or nearly so, 
even this material could no longer be deposited in it. The fact 
of the complete removal of the deposit I have described be- 
tween the two dams in a single freshet, shows that, in spite of 
considerable obstruction from roughness of bed, large quantities 
of sand may be taken up and carried off by streams of no great 
rapidity of inclination; for the whole descent of the bed of the 
river between the two dams—a distance of four miles—is but 
sixty feet, or fifteen feet to the mile.* 


* Tn a sheet-iron siphon, 1,000 feet long, with a diameter of four inches, 
having the entrance 18 feet, the orifice of discharge 40 feet below the summit 
of the curve, employed in draining a mine in California, the force of the current 


SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 277 


The facts which I have adduced may aid us in forming an 
idea of the origin and mode of transportation of the prodigious 
deposits at the mouth of great rivers like the Mississippi, the 
Nile, the Ganges, and the Hoang-Ho, the delta of which last river, 
composed entirely of river sediment, has a superficial extent of 
not less than 96,500 square miles. But we shall obtain a clearer 
conception of the character of this important geographical pro- 
cess by measuring, more in detail, the mass of earth and rock 
which a well-known river and its tributaries have washed from 
the mountains and transported to the plains or the sea, within 
the historic period. 


The Po and tts Deposits. 


The current of the River Po, for a considerable distance after 
its volume of water is otherwise sufficient for continuous navi- 
gation, is too rapid for that purpose unti] near Cremona, where 
its velocity becomes too much reduced to transport great quan- 
tities of mineral matter, except in a state of minute division. 
Its southern affluents bring down from the Apennines a large 
quantity of fine earth from various geological formations, while 
its Alpine tributaries west of the Ticino are charged chiefly 
with rock ground down to sand or gravel. The bed of the river 
has been somewhat elevated by the deposits in its channel, 
though not by any means above the level of the adjacent plains, 
as has been so often represented. The dikes, which confine the 
current at high water, at the same time augment its velocity 
and compel it to carry most of its sediment to the Adriatic. It 
has, therefore, raised neither its own channel nor its alluvial 
shores, as it would have done if it had remained unconfined. 
But, as the surface of the water in floods is above the general 
level of the plains through which it flows, the Po can, at that 
period, receive no contributions of earth from the washing of 


was such as to carry through the tube great quantities of sand and coarse 
gravel, some of the grains of which were as large as an English walnut.—RAy- 
MOND, Mining Statistics, 1870, p. 602. 


278 SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 


the fields of Lombardy, and there is no doubt that a large pro- 
portion of the sediment it now deposits at its mouth descended 
from the Alps in the form of rock, though reduced by the 
grinding action of the waters, in its passage seaward, to the 
condition of fine sand, and often of silt. 

We know little of the history of the Po, or of the geography 
of the coast near the point where it enters the Adriatic, at any 
period more than twenty centuries before our own. Still less 
can we say how much of the plains of Lombardy had been 
formed by its action, combined with other causes, before man 
accelerated its levelling operations by felling the first woods on 
the mountains whence its waters are derived. But we know 
that since the Roman conquest of Northern Italy, its deposits 
have amounted to a quantity which, if recemented into rock, 
recombined into gravel, common earth, and vegetable mould, 
and restored to the situations where eruption or upheaval origi- 
nally placed or vegetation deposited it, would fill up hundreds 
of deep ravines in the Alps and Apennines, change the plan 
and profile of their chains, and give their southern and north- 
ern faces respectively a geographical aspect very different from 
that they now present. Ravenna, forty miles south of the prin- 
cipal mouth of the Po, was built like Venice, in a lagoon, and 
the Adriatic still washed its walls at the commencement of the 
Christian era. The mud of the Po has filled up the lagoon, 
and Ravenna is now four miles from the sea. The town of 
Adria, which lies between the Po and the Adige, at the dis- 
tance of some four or five miles from each, was once a harbor 
famous enough to have given its name to the Adriatic Sea, and 
it was still accessible to large vessels, if not by the open sea at 
least by lagoons, in the time of Augustus. The combined ac- 
tion of the two rivers has so advanced the coast-line that Adria 
is now more than fourteen miles inland, and, in other places, 
the deposits made within the same period by these and other 
neighboring streams have a width of twenty miles. 

What proportion of the earth with which they are charged 
these rivers have borne out into deep water, during the last two 


SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 279 


thousand years, we do not know, but as they still transport 
enormous quantities, as the North Adriatic appears to have 
shoaled rapidly, and as long islands, composed in great part of 
fluviatile deposits, have formed opposite their mouths, it must 
evidently have been very great. The floods of the Po occur 
but once, or sometimes twice, in a year.* At other times, its 
waters are comparatively limpid and seem to hold no great 
amount of mud or fine sand in mechanical suspension; but at 
high water it contains a large proportion of solid matter, and, 
according to Lombardini, it annually transports to the shores 
of the Adriatic not less than 42,760,000 cubic metres, or very 
nearly 55,000,000 cubic yards, which carries the coast-line out 


* In the earlier medixval centuries, when the declivities of the mountains 
still retained a much larger proportion of their woods, the moderate annual 
floods of the Po were occasioned by the melting of the snows on the lower 
slopes, and, according to a passage of Tasso quoted by Castellani (Dell? In- 
Jluenea delle Selve, i., p. 58, note), they took place in May. The usually more 
violent inundations of later ages are due to rains, the waters of which are no 
longer retained by a forest-soil, but conveyed at once to the rivers—and they 
occur almost uniformly in the autumn or late summer. Castellani, on the 
page just quoted, says that even so late as about 1780, the Po required a heavy 
rain of a week to overflow its banks, but that forty years later it was some- 
times raised to full flood in a single day. 

Pliny says: ‘‘ The Po, which is inferior to no river in swiftness of current, 
is in flood about the rising of the dog-star, the snow then melting, and though 
so rapid in flow, it washes nothing from the soil, but leaves it increased in fer- 
tility.’"— Natural History, Book iii., 20. 

The first terrible inundation of the Po in 1872 took place in May, and ap- 
pears to have been occasioned by heavy rains on the southern flank of the 
Alps, and to have received little accession from snow. The snow on the higher 
Alps does not usually thaw so as to occasion floods before August, and often 
considerably later. The more destructive flood of October, 1872, was caused 
both by thaws in the high mountains and by an extraordinary fall of rain. 
See River Hmbankments ; post. 

Pliny’s remark as to enrichment of the soil by the floods appears to be veri- 
fied in the case of that of October, 1872, for it is found that the water has 
left very extensively a thick deposit of slime on the fields. 

See a list of the historically known great inundations of the Po by the 
engineer Zuccholli in TORELLI, Progetto di Legge per la Vendita di Beni 
incoitt. Roma, 1872. 


oo 


280 SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 


into the sea at the rate of more than 200 feet ina year.* The 
depth of the annual deposit is stated at eighteen centimetres, or 
rather more than seven inches, and it would cover an area of 
not much less than ninety square miles with a layer of that 
thickness. The Adige, also, brings every year to the Adriatic 
many million cubic yards of Alpine detritus, and the contribu- 
tions of the Brenta from the same source are far from incon- 
siderable. The Adriatic, however, receives but a small propor- 
tion of the soil and rock washed away from the Italian slope of 
the Alps and the northern declivity of the Apennines by tor- 
rents. Nearly the whole of the débris thus removed from the 
southern face of the Alps between Monte Rosa and the sources 
of the Adda—a length of watershed ¢ not less than one hun- 
dred and fifty miles—is arrested by the still waters of the Lakes 


* This change of coast-line cannot be ascribed to upheaval, for a compari- 
son of the level of old buildings—as, for instance, the church of San Vitale and 
the tomb of Theodoric at Ravenna—with that of the sea, tends to prove a de- 
pression rather than an elevation of their foundations. 

A computation by a different method makes the deposits at the mouth of 
the Po 2,123,000 métres less; but as both of them omit the gravel and silt 
carried down at ordinary and low water, we are safe in assuming the larger 
quantity. 

+ Sir John F. W. Herschel (Physical Geography, 137, and elsewhere) spells this 
word water-sched, because he considers it a translation, or rather an adoption, 
of the German ‘‘ Wasser-scheide, separation of the waters, not water-shed the 
slope down which the waters run.” As a point of historical etymology, it is 
probable that the word in question was suggested to those who first used it by 
the German Wasserscheide ; but the spelling water-sched, proposed by Her- 
schel, is objectionable, both because sch is a combination of letters wholly un- 
known to modern English orthography and properly representing no sound re- 
cognized in English orthoepy, and for the still better reason that water-shed, 
in the sense of division-of-the-waters, has a legitimate English etymology. 

The Anglo-Saxon sccadan meant both to separate or divide, and to shade or 
shelter. It is the root of the English verbs to shed and to shade, and in the 
former meaning is the A. 8. equivalent of the German verb schetden. 

Shed in Old English had the meaning to separate or distinguish. It is so 
used in the Owl and the Nightingale, v. 197. Palsgrave (Lesclarcissement, ete., 
p. 717) defines Z shede, I departe thinges asonder; and the word still means 
to divide in several English local dialects. Hence, watershed, the division or 
separation of the waters, is good English both in etymology and in spelling. 


SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 981 


Maggiore and Como, and some smaller lacustrine reservoirs, and 
never reaches the sea. The Po is not continuously embanked 
except for the lower half of its course. Above Cremona, there- 
fore, it spreads and deposits sediment over a wide surface, and 
the water withdrawn from it for irrigation at lower points, as 
well as its inundations in the occasional ruptures of its banks, 
carry over the adjacent soil a large amount of slime. * 

If to the estimated annual deposits of the Po at its mouth, 
we add the earth and sand transported to the sea by the Adige, 
the Brenta, and other less important streams, the prodigious 
mass of detritus swept into Lago Maggiore by the Tosa, the 
Maggia, and the Ticino, into the lake of Como by the Maira 
and the Adda, into the lakes of Garda, Lugano, Iseo, and Idro, 
by their affluents,t and the yet vaster heaps of pebbles, gravel, 
and earth permanently deposited by the torrents near their 
points of eruption from mountain gorges, or spread over the 
wide plains at lower levels, we may safely assume that we have 
an aggregate of not less than ten times the quantity carried to 
the Adriatic by the Po, or 550,000,000 cubic yards of solid 
matter, abstracted every year from the Italian Alps and the 
Apennines, and removed out of their domain by the force of 
running water. ¢ 


* The quantity of sediment deposited by the Po on the plains which border 
it, before the construction of the continuous dikes and in the floods which oc- 
casionally burst through them, is vast, and the consequent elevation of those 
plains is very considerable. Ido not know that this latter point has been 
made a subject of special investigation, but vineyards, with the vines still at- 
tached to the elms which supported them, have been found two or three yards 
below the present surface at various points on the plains of Lombardy. 

{+ The Po receives about four-tenths of its waters from these lakes. See 
LOMBARDINI, Dei cangiamenti nella condizione del Po, p. 29. All the sedi- 
ment carried into the lakes by their tributaries is deposited in them, and the 
water which flows out of them is perfectly limpid. From their proximity to 
the Alps and the number of torrents which empty into them, they no doubt 
receive vastly more transported matter than is contributed to the Po by the 
six-tenths of its waters received from other sources. 

t Mengotti estimated the mass of solid matter annually ‘‘ united to the wa- 
ters of the Po” at 822,000,000 cubic métres, or nearly twenty times as much 


2982, SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 


The present rate of deposit at the mouth of the Po has con- 
tinued since the year 1600, the previous advance of the coast, 
after the year 1200, having been only one-third as rapid. The 
great increase of erosion and transport is ascribed by Lombar- 
dini chiefly to the destruction of the forests in the basin of that 
river and the valleys of its tributaries, since the beginning of 
the seventeenth century.* We have no data to show the rate 
of deposit in any given century before the year 1200, and it 
doubtless varied according to the progress of population and 
the consequent extension of clearing and cultivation. The 
transporting power of torrents is greatest soon after their for- 
mation, because at that time their points of delivery are lower, 
and, of course, their general slope and velocity more rapid, 
than after years of erosion above, and deposit below, have 
depressed the beds of their mountain valleys, and elevated the 
channels of their lower course. Their eroding action also is 
most powerful at the same period, both because their mechan- 
ical force is then greatest, and because the loose earth and 
stones of freshly cleared forest-ground are most easily removed. 
-Many of the Alpine valleys west of the Ticino—that of the 
Dora Baltea, for instance—were nearly stripped of their forests 
in the days of the Roman Empire, others in the Middle Ages, 
and, of course, there must have been, at different periods before 
the year 1200, epochs when the erosion and transportation of 
solid matter from the Alps and the Apennines were at least as 
great as since the year 1600. 

Upon the whole, we shall not greatly err if we assume that, 
for a period of not less than two thousand years, the walls of 
the basin of the Po—the Italian slope of the Alps, and the 


as, according to Lombardini, that river delivers into the Adriatic. Castellani 
supposes the computation of Mengotti to fall much below the truth, and there 
can be no doubt that a vastly larger quantity of earth and gravel is washed 
down from the Alps and the Apennines than is carried to the sea.—-CASTEL- 
LANI, Dell’ Immediata Influenza delle Selve sul corso delle Acque, i., pp. 42, 43. 

I have contented myself with assuming less than one-half of Mengotti’s esti- 
mate. 

* BAUMGARTEN, An. des Ponts et Chaussées, 1847, ler sémestre, p, 175. 


SEDIMENT OF THE PO. 283 


northern and north-eastern declivities of the Apennines——have 
annually sent down into the lakes, the plains, and the Adriatic, 
not less than 375,000,000 cubic yards of earth and disintegrated 
rock. We have, then, an aggregate of 750,000,000,000 cubic 
yards of such material, which, allowing to the mountain surface 
in question an area of 50,000,000,000 square yards, would 
cover the whole to the depth of fifteen yards.* There are very 
large portions of this area, where, as we know from ancient 
remains—roads, bridges, and the like—from other direct. testi- 
mony, and from geological considerations, very little degrada- 
tion has taken place within twenty centuries, and hence the 
quantity to be assigned to localities where the destructive causes 
have been most active is increased in proportion. 

If this vast mass of pulverized rock and earth were restored 
to the localities from which it was derived, it certainly would 
not obliterate valleys and gorges hollowed out by great geo- 
logical causes, but it would reduce the length and diminish the 
depth of ravines of later formation, modify the inclination of 
their walls, reclothe with earth many bare mountain ridges, 
essentially change the line of junction between plain and 
mountain, and carry back a long reach of the Adriatic coast 
many miles to the west.t 

It is, indeed, not to be supposed that all the degradation of 


* The total superficies of the basin of the Po, down to Ponte Lagoscuro 
[Ferrara]—a point where it has received all its affluents—is 6,938,200 hec- 
tares, that is, 4,105,600 in mountain lands, 2,832,600 in plain lands.— 
Dumont, Travaux Publics, ete., p. 272. 

These latter two quantities are equal respectively to 10,145,348, and 
6,999,638 acres, or 15,852 and 10,937 square miles. 

+ I do not use these quantities as factors the value of which is precisely 
ascertained ; nor, for the purposes of the present argument, is quantitative 
exactness important. JI employ numerical statements simply as a means of 
aiding the imagination to form a general and certainly not extravagant idea of 
the extent of geographical revolutions which man has done much to accelerate, 
if not, strictly speaking, to produce. 

There is an old proverb, Dolus latet in generakibus, and Arthur Young is not 
the only public economist who has warned his readers against the deceitfulness 
of round numbers. I think, on the contrary, that vastly more error has been 
produced by the affectation of precision in cases where precision is impossible. 


284 MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 


the mountains is due to the destruction of the forests—that the 
flanks of every Alpine valley in Central Europe below the 
snow-line were once covered with earth and green with woods, 
but there are not many particular cases in which we can, with 
certainty, or even with strong probability, affirm the contrary. 


Mountain Slides. 


Terrible as are the ravages of the torrent and the river-flood, 
the destruction of the woods exposes human life and industry 
to calamities even more appalling than those which I have yet 
described. The slide in the Notch of the White Mountains, by 
which the Willey family lost their lives, is an instance of the 
sort I refer to, though I am not able to say that in this particu- 
lar case the slip of the earth and rock was produced by the 
denudation of the surface. It may have been occasioned by 
this cause, or by the construction of the road through the Notch, 
the excavations for which, perhaps, cut through the natural 
buttresses that supported the sloping strata above. 

Not to speak of the fall of earth when the roots which held 
it together, and the bed of leaves and mould which sheltered 


In all the great operations of terrestrial nature, the elements are so numerous 
and so difficult of exact appreciation, that, until the means of scientific obser- 
vation and measurement are much more perfected than they now are, we 
must content ourselves with general approximations. I say terrestrial nature, 
because in cosmical movements we have fewer elements to deal with, and may 
therefore arrive at much more rigorous proportional accuracy in determination 
of time and place than we can in fixing and predicting the quantities and the 
epochs of variable natural phenomena on the earth’s surface. 

Travellers are often misled by local habits in the use of what may be called 
representative numbers, where a definite is put for an indefinite quantity. <A 
Greek, who wished to express the notion of a great but undetermined num- 
ber, used ‘‘myriad, or ten thousand; ” a Roman, ‘‘ six hundred ;” an Orien- 
tal, ‘‘ forty,” or, at present, very commonly, ‘‘fifteen thousand.” Many a 
tourist has gravely repeated, as an ascertained fact; the vague statement of 
the Arabs and the monks of Mount Sinai, that the ascent from the convent 
of St. Catherine to the summit of Gebel Moosa counts ‘* fifteen thousand ” 
steps, though the difference of level is two thousand feet; and the ‘‘ Forty” 
Thieves, the ‘‘ forty” martyr-monks of the convent of El Arbain—not to 


MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 285 


it both from disintegrating frost and from sudden drenching 
and dissolution by heavy showers, are gone, it is easy to see 
that, in a climate with severe winters, the removal of the for- 
est, and, consequently, of the soil it had contributed to form, 
might cause the displacement and descent of great masses of 
rock. The woods, the vegetable mould, and the soil beneath, 
protect the rocks they cover from the direct action of heat and 
cold, and from the expansion and contraction which accompany 
them. Most rocks, while covered with earth, contain a con- 
siderable quantity of water.* A fragment of rock pervaded 
with moisture cracks and splits, if thrown into a furnace, and 


speak of a similar use of this numeral in more important cases—have often 
been understood as expressions of a known number, when in fact they mean 
simply many. The number “‘ fifteen thousand” has found its way to Rome, 
and De Quincey seriously informs us, on the authority of a lady who had 
been at much pains to ascertain the evact truth, that, including closets large 
enough for a bed, the Vatican contains fifteen thousand rooms. Any one who 
has observed the vast dimensions of most of the apartments of that structure 
will admit that we make a very small allowance of space when we assign a 
square rod, sixteen and a half feet square, to each room upon the average. 
On an acre, there might be one hundred and sixty such rooms, including parti- 
tion walls; and, to contain fifteen thousand of them, a building must cover 
more than nine acres, and be ten stories high, or possess other equivalent 
dimensions, which, as every traveller knows, many times exceeds the truth. 

The value of a high standard of accuracy in scientific observation can 
hardly be overrated; but habits of rigorous exactness will never be formed 
by an investigator who allows himself to trust implicitly to the numerical 
precision of the results of a few experiments, The wonderful accuracy of 
geodetic measurements in modern times is, in general, attained by taking the 
mean of a great number of observations at every station, and this final pre- 
cision is but the mutual balance and compensation of numerous errors. 

The pretended exactness of statistical tables is too often little better than 
an imposture ; and those founded not on direct estimation by competent ob- 
servers, but on the report of persons who have no particular interest in know- 
ing the truth, but often have a motive for distorting it, are commonly to be 
regarded as but vague guesses at the actual fact. 

* Rock is permeable by water to a greater extent than is generally sup- 
posed. Freshly quarried marble, and even granite, as well as most other 
stones, are sensibly heavier, as well as softer and more easily wrought, than 
after they are dried and hardened by air-seasoning. Many sandstones are 
porous enough to serve as filters for liquids, and much of that of Upper Egypt 


286 MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 


sometimes with a loud detonation; and it is a familiar ob- 
servation that the fire, in burning over newly cleared lands, 
breaks up and sometimes almost pulverizes the stones. This 
effect is due partly to the unequal expansion of the stone, partly 
to the action of heat on the water it contains in its pores. The 
sun, suddenly let in upon rock which had been covered with 
moist earth for centuries, produces more or less disintegration 
in the same way, and the stone is also exposed to chemical influ- 
ences from which it was sheltered before. But in the climate 
of the United States as well as of the Alps, frost is a still more 
powerful agent in breaking up mountain masses. The soil 
that protects the lime and sandstone, the slate and the granite 
from the influence of the sun, also prevents the water whic 

filters into their crevices and between their strata from freez- 
ing in the hardest winters, and the moisture descends, in a 
liquid form, until it escapes in springs, or passes off by deep 
subterranean channels. But when the ridges are laid bare, the 
water of the autumnal rains fills the minutest pores and veins 
and fissures and lines of separation of the rocks, then suddenly 
freezes, and bursts asunder huge, and apparently solid blocks 
of adamantine stone.* Where the strata are inclined at a con- 
siderable angle, the freezing of a thin film of water over a large 


and Nubia hisses audibly when thrown into water, from the escape of the air 
forced out of it by hydrostatic pressure and the capillary attraction of the 
pores for water. i 

Even the denser silicious stones are penetrable by fluids and the coloring 
matter they contain, to such an extent that agates and other forms of silex 
may be artificially stained through their substance. The colors of the stones 
cut at Oberstein are generally produced, or at least heightened, by art. This 
art was known to and practised by the ancient lapidaries, and it has been re- 
vived in recent times. 

* Palissy had observed the action of frost in disintegrating rock, and he 
thus describes it, in his essay on the formation of ice: ‘‘I know that the 
stones of the mountains of Ardennes he harder than marble. Nevertheless, 
the people of that country do not quarry the said stones in winter, for that 
they be subject to frost; and many times the rocks have been seen to fall 
without being cut, by means whereof many people have been killed, when 
the said rocks were thawing.” Palissy was ignorant of the expansion of 
water in freezing—in fact, he supposed that the mechanical force exerted by 


MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 287 


interstratal area might occasion a slide that should cover miles 
with its ruins; and similar results might be produced by the 
simple hydrostatic pressure of a column of water, admitted, by 
the removal of the covering of earth, to flow into a crevice 
faster than it could escape through orifices below. 

Earth or rather mountain slides, compared to which the ca- 
tastrophe that buried the Willey family in New Hampshire was 
but a pinch of dust, have often occurred in the Swiss, Italian, 
and French Alps. The land-slip, which overwhelmed, and 
covered to the depth of seventy feet, the town of Plurs in the 
valley of the Maira, on the night of the 4th of September, 1618, 
sparing not a soul of a population of 2,430 inhabitants, is one 
of the most memorable of these catastrophes, and the fall of 
the Rossberg or Rufiberg, which destroyed the little town of 
Goldau in Switzerland, and 450 of its people, on the 2d of 
September, 1806, is almost equally celebrated. In 1771, ac- 
cording to Wessely, the mountain-peak Piz, near Alleghe in 
the province of Belluno, slipped into the bed of the Cordevole, 
a tributary of the Piave, destroying in its fall three hamlets and 
sixty lives. The rubbish filled the valley for a distance of nearly 
two miles, and, by damming up the waters of the Cordevole, 
formed a lake about three miles long, and a hundred and fifty 
feet deep, which still subsists, though reduced to half its origi- 
nal length by the wearing down of its outlet.* 

The important provincial town of Veleia, near Piacenza, 
where many interesting antiquities have been discovered within 


freezing-water was due to compression, not dilatation—and therefore he as- 
cribes to thawing alone effects resulting not less from congelation. 

Various forces combine to produce the stone avalanches of the higher Alps, 
the fall of which is one of the greatest dangers incurred by the adventurous 
explorers of those regions—the direct action of the sun upon the stone, the 
expansion of freezing-water, and the loosening of masses of rock by the thaw- 
ing of the ice which supported them or held them together. 

* WESSELY, Die Oesterreichischen Alpenlinder und thre Forste, pp. 125, 
126. Wessely records several other more or less similar occurrences in the 
Austrian Alps. Some of them, certainly, are not to be ascribed to the removal 
of the woods, but in most cases they are clearly traceable to that cause. 
See Revue des Haux et Foréts for 1869, pp. 182, 205. 


288 MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 


a few years, was buried by a vast land-slip, probably about the 
time of Probus, but no historical record of the event has sur- 
vived to us. 

On the 14th of February, 1855, the hill of Belmonte, a little 
below the parish of San Stefano, in Tuscany, slid into the val- 
ley of the Tiber, which consequently flooded the village to the 
depth of fifty feet, and was finally drained off by a tunnel. 
The mass of débris is stated to have been about 3,500 feet long, 
1,000 wide, and not less than 600 high.* 

Occurrences of this sort have been so numerous in the Alps and 
Apennines, that almost every Italian mountain commune has its 
tradition, its record, or its still visible traces of a great land-slip 
within its own limits. The old chroniclers contain frequent 
notices of such calamities, and Giovanni Villani even records 
the destruction of fifty houses and the loss of many lives by a 
slide of what seems to have been a spur of the hill of San 
Giorgio in the city of Florence, in the year 1284.t 

Such displacements of earth and rocky strata rise to the mag- 
nitude of geological convulsions, but they are of so rare occur- 
rence in countries still covered by the primitive forest, so com- 
mon where the mountains have been stripped of their native 
covering, and, in many cases, so easily explicable by the drench- 
ing of incohesive earth from rain, or the free admission of 
water between the strata of rocks—both of which a coating 
of vegetation would have prevented—that we are justified in 
ascribing them for the most part to the same cause as that to 
which the destructive effects of mountain torrents are chiefly 
due—the felling of the woods. 


* Brancui, Appendix to the Italian translation of Mrs. SOMERVILLE’S 
Physical Geography, p. ¥Xxvi. 

+ Cronica di GIOVANNI VILLANI, lib. vii., cap. 97. For descriptions of 
other slides in Italy, see same author, lib. xi., cap. 26; FANFANI, Antologia 
Italiana, parte ii., p. 95; GIULIANI, Linguaggio vivente della Toscana, 1865, 
lettera 63, 

{ There is good reason for thinking that many of the earth and rock slides 
in the Alps occurred at an earlier period than the origin of the forest vegeta- 
tion which, in later ages, covered the flanks of those mountains. See Bericht 


MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 289 


In nearly every case of this sort the circumstances of which 
are known—except the rare instances attributable to earth- 
quakes—the immediate cause of the slip has been the imbibi- 
tion of water in large quantities by bare earth, or its introdue- 
tion between or beneath solid strata. If water insinuates itself 
between the strata, it creates a sliding surface, or it may, by 
its expansion in freezing, separate beds of rock, which had 
been nearly continuous before, widely enough to allow the 
gravitation of the superincumbent mass to overcome the re- 
sistance afforded by inequalities of face and by friction; if it 
finds its way beneath hard earth or rock reposing on clay or 
other bedding of similar properties, it converts the supporting 
layer into a semi-fluid mud, which opposes no obstacle to the 
sliding of the strata above. 

The upper part of the mountain which buried Goldau was 
composed of a hard but brittle conglomerate, called nagelfue, 
resting on an unctuous clay, and inclining rapidly towards the 
village. Much earth remained upon the rock, in irregular 
masses, but the woods had been felled, and the water had free 
access to the surface, and to the crevices which sun and frost 
had already produced in the rock, and, of course, to the slimy 
stratum beneath. The whole summer of 1806 had been very 
wet, and an almost incessant deluge of rain had fallen the day 
preceding the catastrophe, as well as on that of its occurrence. 
All conditions, then, were favorable to the sliding of the rock, 
and, in obedience to the laws of gravitation, it precipitated itself 
into the valley as soon as its adhesion to the earth beneath it 
was destroyed by the conversion of the latter into a viscous 
paste. The mass that fell measured between two and a half 
and three miles in length by one thousand feet in width, and 


X93) 


iiber die Untersuchung der Schweizerischen LHochgebirgswaldungen, 1862, p. 
61. 

Where more recent slides have been again clothed with woods, the trees, 
shrubs, and smaller plants which spontaneously grow upon them are usually of 
different species from those observed upon soil displaced at remote periods, 
This difference is so marked that the site of a slide can often be recognized at 
a great distance by the general color of the foliage of its vegetation. 

( 


19 


290 PROTECTION AGAINST AVALANCHES. 


its average thickness is thought to have been about a hundred 
feet. The highest portion of the mountain was more than 
three thousand feet above the village, and the momentum 
acquired by the rocks and earth in their descent carried huge 
blocks of stone far up the opposite slope of the Rigi. 

The Piz, which fell into the Cordevole, rested on a steeply 
inclined stratum of limestone, with a thin layer of calcareous 
marl intervening, which, by long exposure to frost and the in- 
filtration of water, had lost its original consistence, and become 
a loose and slippery mass instead of a cohesive and tenacious 


bed. 
Protection against Avalanches. 


In Switzerland and other snowy and mountainous countries, 
forests render a most important service by preventing the for- 
mation and fall of destructive avalanches, and in many parts 
of the Alps exposed to this catastrophe, the woods are pro- 
tected, thongh too often ineffectually, by law. No forest, in- 
deed, could arrest a large avalanche once in full motion, but 
the mechanical resistance afforded by the trees prevents their 
formation, both by obstructing the wind, which gives to the 
dry snow of the Staub-Lawine, or dust-avalanche, its first im- 
pulse, and by checking the disposition of moist snow to gather 
itself into what is called the Mutsch-Lawine, or sliding ava- 
lanche. Marchand states that, the very first winter after the 
felling of the trees on the higher part of a declivity between 
Saanen and Gsteig where the snow had never been known to 
slide, an avalanche formed itself in the clearing, thundered 
down the mountain, and overthrew and carried with it a 
hitherto unviolated forest to the amount of nearly a million 
cubie feet of timber.* Elisée Reclus informs us in his re- 
markable work, Za Terre, vol. i., p. 212, that a mountain, which 
rises to the south of the Pyrenzean village Araguanet in the upper 
valley of the Neste, having been partially stripped of its woods, 
a formidable avalanche rushed down from a plateau above in 


— 


* Bntwaldung der Gebirge, p. 41. 


PROTECTION AGAINST AVALANCHES. 291 


1846, and swept off more than 15,000 pine-trees. The path 
once opened down the flanks of the mountain, the evil is almost 
beyond remedy. The snow sometimes carries off the earth 
from the face of the rock, or, if the soil is left, fresh slides 
every winter destroy the young plantations, and the restoration 
of the wood becomes impossible. The track widens with every 
new avalanche. Dwellings and their occupants are buried in 
the snow, or swept away by the rushing mass, or by the furious 
blasts it occasions through the displacement of the air; roads 
and bridges are destroyed; rivers blocked up, which swell till 
they overflow the valley above, and then, bursting their snowy 
barrier, flood the fields below with all the horrors of a winter 
inundation.* 


* The importance of the wood in preventing avalanches is well illustrated 
by the fact that, where the forest is wanting, the inhabitants of localities ex- 
posed to snow-slides often supply the place of the trees by driving stakes 
through the snow into the ground, and thus checking its propensity to slip. 
The woods themselves are sometimes thus protected against avalanches 
originating on slopes above them, and asa further security, small trees are 
cut down along the upper line of the forest, and laid against the trunks of 
larger trees, transversely to the path of the slide, to serve as a fence or dam 
to the motion of an incipient avalanche, which may by this means be arrested 
before it acquires a destructive velocity and force. 

In the volume cited in the text, Reclus informs us that ‘‘ the village and 
the great thermal establishment of Baréges in the Pyrenees were threatened 
yearly by avalanches which precipitated themselves from a height of 1,200 
métres and at an angle of 35 degrees; so that the inhabitants had been obliged 
to leave large spaces between the different quarters of the town for the free 
passage of the descending masses. Attempts have been recently made to 
prevent these avalanches by means similar to those employed by the Swiss 
mountaineers. They cut terraces three or four yards in width across the 
mountain slopes and supported these terraces by a row of iron piles. Wattled 
fences, with here and there a wall of stone, shelter the young shoots of trees, 
which grow up by degrees under the protection of these defences. Until 
natural trees are ready to arrest the snows, these artificial supports take 
their place and do their duty very well. The only avalanche which swept 
down the slope in the year 1860, when these works were completed, did not 
amount to 350 cubic yards, while the masses which fell before this work was 
undertaken contained from 75,000 to 80,000 cubic yards..—La Terre, vol. i., 
p. 283. 


299 MINOR USES OF THE FOREST. 


Minor Uses of the Forest. 


Besides the important conservative influences of the forest 
and its value as the source of supply of a material indispensa- 
ble to all the arts and industries of human life, it renders other 
services of a less obvious and less generally recognized char- 
acter. 

Woods often subserve a valuable purpose in preventing the 
fall of rocks, by mere mechanical resistance. Trees, as well as 
herbaceous vegetation, grow in the Alps upon declivities of 
surprising steepness of inclination, and the traveller sees both 
luxuriant grass and flourishing woods on slopes at which the 
soil, in the dry air of lower regions, would crumble and fall by 
the weight of its own particles. When loose rocks lie scattered 
on the face of these declivities, they are held in place by the 
trunks of the trees, and it is very common to observe a stone 
that weighs hundreds of pounds, perhaps even tons, resting 
against a tree which has stopped its progress just as it was be- 
ginning to slide down to a lower level. When a forest in such 
a position is cut, these blocks lose their support, and a single 
wet season is enough not only to bare the face of a considerable 
extent of rock, but to cover with earth and stone many acres of 
fertile soil below.* 

In alluvial plains and on the banks of rivers trees are ex- 
tremely useful as a check to the swift flow of the water in inun- 
dations, and the spread of the mineral material it transports ; 
but this will be more appropriately considered in the chapter 
on the Waters; and another most important use of the woods, 
that of confining the loose sands of dunes and plains, will be 
treated of in the chapter on the Sands. 


* See in Konn, Alpenreisen, i., 120, an account of the ruin of fields and pas- 
tures, and even of the destruction of a broad belt of forest, by the fall of rocks 
in consequence of cutting a few large trees. Cattle are very often killed in 
Switzerland by rock-avalanches, and their owners secure themselves from loss 
by insurance against this risk as against damage by fire or hail. 


SMALLER FOREST PLANTS. 293 


Small Forest Plants, and Vitality of Seed. 


Another function of the woods, to which I have barely 
alluded, deserves a fuller notice than can be bestowed upon it 
in a treatise the scope of which is purely economical. The 
forest is the native habitat of a large number of humbler plants, 
to the growth and perpetuation of which its shade, its humidi- 
ty, and its vegetable mould appear to be indispensable necessi- 
ties.* We cannot positively say that the felling of the woods 
in a given vegetable province would involve the final extinction 
of the smaller plants which are found only within their pre- 
cincts. Some of these, though not naturally propagating them- 
selves in the open ground, may perhaps germinate and grow 


* “CA hundred and fifty paces from my house is a hill of drift-sand, on 
which stood a few scattered pines (Pinus sylvestris). Sempervivum tecto- 
gum in abundance, Statice armeria, Ammone vernalis, Dianthus carthusiano- 
rum, with other sand-plants, were growing there. I planted the hill with a 
few birches, and all the plants I have mentioned completely disappeared, 
though there were many naked spots of sand between the trees. It should 
be added, however, that the hillock is more thickly wooded than before. 
. . - It seems then that Sempervivum tectorum, etc., will not bear the 
neighborhood of the birch, though growing well near the Pinus sylvestris. I 
have found the large red variety of Agaricus deliciosus only among the roots 
of the pine; the greenish-blue Agaricus deliciosus among alder roots, but not 
near any other tree. Birds have their partialities among trees and shrubs. 
The Stiiie prefer the Pinus Lariz to other trees. In my garden this Pins is 
never without them, but I never saw a bird perch on Thuja occidentalis or 
Juniperus sabina, although the thick foliage of these latter trees affords birds 
a better shelter than the loose leafage of other trees. Not even a wren ever 
finds its way to one of them. Perhaps the scent of the 7uja and the Juni- 
perus is offensive to them. I have spoiled one of my meadows by cutting 
away the bushes. It formerly bore grass four feet high, because many um- 
belliferous plants, such as Heraclewm spondylium, Spirea ulmaria, Laserpi- 
tium latifolia, etc., grew in it. Under the shelter of the bushes these plants 
ripened and bore seed, but they gradually disappeared as the shrubs were ex- 
tirpated, and the grass now does not grow to the height of more than two 
feet, because it is no longer obliged to keep pace with the umbellifera which 
flourished among it.” Seea paper by J. G. BUTTNER, of Kurland, in Bere- 
HAUS'S Geographisches Jahrbuch, 1852, No. 4, pp. 14, 15. 

These facts are interesting as illustrating the multitude of often obsecur 


294 VITALITY OF SEEDS. 


under artificial stimulation and protection, and finally become 
hardy enough to maintain an independent existence in very 
different circumstances from those which at present seem essen- 
tial to their life. 

Besides this, although the accounts of the growth of seeds, 
which have lain for ages in the ashy dryness of Egyptian cata- 
combs, are to be received with great caution, or, more proba- 
bly, to be rejected altogether, yet their vitality seems almost 
imperishable while they remain in the situations in which nature 
deposits them. When a forest old enough to have witnessed 
the mysteries of the Druids is felled, trees of other species 


conditions upon which the life or vigorous growth of smaller organisms de- 
pends. Particular species of truffles and of mushrooms are found associated 
with particular trees, without being, as is popularly supposed, parasites deriv- 
ing their nutriment from the dying or dead roots of those trees. The success 
of Rousseau’s experiments seem decisive on this point, for he obtains larger 
crops of truffles from ground covered with young seedling oaks than from that 
filled with roots of old trees. See an article on Mont Ventoux, by Charles 
Martins, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Avril, 1863, p. 626. 

It ought to be much more generally known than it is, that most if not all 
mushrooms, even of the species reputed poisonous, may be rendered harmless 
and healthful as food by soaking them for two hours in acidulated or salt 
water. The water requires two or three spoonfuls of vinegar or two spoon- 
fuls of gray salt to the quart, and a quart of water is enough for a pound of 
sliced mushrooms. After thus soaking, they are well washed in fresh water, 
thrown into cold water, which is raised to the boiling-point, and, after re- 
maining half an hour, taken out and again washed. Gérard, to prove that 
‘ crumpets is wholesome,” ate one hundred and seventy-five pounds of the 
most poisonous mushrooms thus prepared, in a single month, fed his family 
ad libitum with the same, and finally administered them, in heroic doses, to 
the members of a committee appointed by the Council of Health of the city 
of Paris. See Fiaurmr, L’ Année Scientifique, 1862, pp. 353, 384. It should be 
observed that the venomous principle of poisonous mushrooms is not decom- 
posed and rendered innocent by the process described in the note. It is merely 
extracted by the acidulated or saline water employed for soaking the plants, 
and care should be taken that this water be thrown away out of the reach 
of mischief. 

It has long been known that the Russian peasantry eat, with impunity, 
mushrooms of species everywhere else regarded as very poisonous. Is it not 
probable that the secret of rendering them harmless—which was known to 
Pliny, though since forgotten in Italy—is possessed by the rustic Muscovites ? 


VITALITY OF SEEDS. 995 


spring up in its place; and when they, in their turn, fall be- 
fore the axe, sometimes even as soon as they have spread their 
protecting shade over the surface, the germs which their prede- 
cessors had shed years, perhaps centuries before, sprout up, and 
in due time, if not choked by other trees belonging to a later 
stage in the order of natural succession, restore again the origi- 
nal wood. In these eases, the seeds of the new crop may have 
been brought by the wind, by birds, by quadrupeds, or by other 
causes ; but, in many instances, this explanation is not probable. 

When newly cleared ground is burnt over in the United 
States, the ashes are hardly cold before they are covered with 
a crop of fire-weed, Senecio hieracifolius, a tall, herbaceous 
plant, very seldom seen growing under other circumstances, and 
often not to be found for a distance of many miles from the 
clearing. Its seeds, whether the fruit of an ancient vegetation 
or newly sown by winds or birds, require either a quickening 
by a heat which raises to a certain high point the temperature 
of the stratum where they lie buried, or a special pabulum fur- 
nished only by the combustion of the vegetable remains that 
cover the ground in the woods. 

Earth brought up from wells or other excavations soon pro 
duces a harvest of plants often very unlike those of the local 
flora, and Hayden informs us that on our great Western desert 
plains, “ wherever the earth is broken up, the wild sun-flower 
(Helianthus) and others of the taller-growing plants, though 
previously unknown in the vicinity, at once spring up, almost 
as if spontaneous generation had taken place.” * 

Moritz Wagner, as quoted by Wittwer,t remarks in his de- 
scription of Mount Ararat: “ A singular phenomenon to which 
my guide drew my attention is the appearance of several 
plants on the earth-heaps left by the last catastrophe [an earth- 
quake], which grow nowhere else on the mountain, and had 
never been observed in this region before. The seeds of these 
plants were probably brought by birds, and found in the loose, 


* Geological Survey of Wyoming, p. 455. 
+ Physikaiische Geographie, p. 486. 


296 VITALITY OF SEEDS. 


clayey soil remaining from the streams of mud, the conditions 
of growth which the other soil of the mountain refused them.” 
This is probable enough, but it is hardly less so that the flowing 
mud brought them up to the influence of air and sun, from depths 
where a previous convulsion had buried them ages before. 
Seeds of small sylvan plants, too deeply buried by successive 
layers of forest foliage and the mould resulting from its decom- 
position to be reached by the plough when the trees are gone 
and the ground brought under cultivation, may, if a wiser pos- 
terity replants the wood which sheltered their parent stems, 
germinate and grow, after lying for generations in a state of 
suspended animation. 

Darwin says: “On the estate of a relation there was a large 
and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by 
the hand of man, but several hundred acres of exactly the same 
nature had been enclosed twenty-five years previously and 
planted with Scotch fir. The change in the native vegetation 
of the planted part of the heath was most remarkable—more 
than is generally seen in passing from one quite different soil 
to another; not only the proportional numbers of the heath- 
plants were wholly changed, but twelve species of plants (not 
counting grasses and sedges) flourished in the plantation which 
could not be found on the heath.” * Had the author informed 
us that these twelve plants belonged to species whose seeds 
enter into the nutriment of the birds which appeared with the 
young wood, we could easily account for their presence in the 
soil; but he says distinctly that the birds were of insectivorous 
species, and it therefore seems more probable that the seeds had 
been deposited when an ancient forest protected the growth of 
the plants which bore them, and that they sprang up to new life 
when a return of favorable conditions awaked them from a sleep 
of centuries. Darwin indeed says that the heath ‘ had never 
been touched by the hand of man.” Perhaps not, after it be- 
came a heath ; but what evidence is there to control the general 
presumption that this heath was preceded by a forest, in whose 


* Origin of Species, American edition, p. 69. 


SMALL FOREST PLANTS. 297 


shade the vegetables which dropped the seeds in question might 
have grown ¢ * 

Although, therefore, the destruction of a wood and the re- 
claiming of the soil to agricultural uses suppose the death of 
its smaller dependent flora, these revolutions do not exclude 
the possibility of its resurrection. In a practical view of the 
subject, however, we must admit that when the woodman fells 
a tree he sacrifices the colony of humbler growths which had 
vegetated under its protection. Some wood-plants are known 
to possess valuable medicinal properties, and experiment may 
show that the number of these is greater than we now suppose. 
Few of them, however, have any other economical value than 


* Writers on vegetable physiology record numerous instances where seeds 
have grown after lying dormant for ages. The following cases are mentioned 
by Dr. Dwight (77avels, ii., pp. 458, 439). 

““The lands [in Panton, Vermont], which have here been once cultivated, 
and again permitted to lie waste for several years, yield a rich and fine growth of 
hickory [Carya porcina]. Of this wood there is not, I believe, a single tree 
in any original forest within fifty miles from this spot. The native growth was 
here white pine, of which I did not see a single stem in a whole grove of hick- 
ory.” 

The hickory is a walnut, bearing a fruit too heavy to be likely to be carried 
fifty miles by birds, and besides, I believe it is not eaten by any bird indige- 
nous to Vermont. We have seen, however, on a former page, that birds trans- 
port the nutmeg, which when fresh is probably as heavy-as the walnut, from 
one island of the Indian archipelago to another. 

‘A field, about five miles from Northampton, on an eminence called Rail 
Hill, was cultivated about a century ago. The native growth here, and in all 
the surrounding region, was wholly oak, chestnut, etc. As the field belonged 
to my grandfather, I had the best opportunity of learning its history. It con- 
tained about five acres, in the form of an irregular parallelogram. As the 
savages rendered the cultivation dangerous, it was given up. On this ground 
there sprang up a grove of white pines covering the field and retaining its fig- 
ure exactly. So far as I remember, there was not in it a single oak or chestnut 
tree. .. . There was not a single pine whose seeds were, or, probably, had 
for ages been, sufficiently near to have been planted on this spot. The fact 
that these white pines covered this field exactly, so as to preserve both its ex- 
tent and its figure, and that there were none in the neighborhood, are decisive 
proofs that cultivation brought up the seeds of a former forest within the 
limits of vegetation, and gave them an opportunity to germinate.” 

See, on the Succession of the Forest, THorEavu, Hvcursions, p. 135 et sega. 


298 SMALL FOREST PLANTS. 


that of furnishing a slender pasturage to cattle allowed to 
roam in the woods; and even this small advantage is far more 
than compensated by the mischief done to the young trees by 
browsing animals, Upon the whole, the importance of this! 
class of vegetables, as physic or as food, is not such as to fur- 
nish a very telling popular argument for the conservation of the 
forest as a necessary means of their perpetuation. More potent 
remedial agents may supply their place in the materia medica, 
and an acre of grass-land yields more nutriment for cattle than 
a range of a hundred acres of forest. But he whose sympathies 
with nature have taught him to feel that there is a fellowship 
between all God’s creatures; to love the brilliant ore better 
than the dull ingot, iodic silver and crystallized red copper 
better than the shillings and the pennies forged from them by 
the coiner’s cunning; a venerable oak-tree than the brandy-cask 
whose staves are split out from its heart-wood ; a bed of ane- 
mones, hepaticas, or wood violets than the leeks and onions 
which he may grow on the soil they have enriched and in the 
air they made fragrant—he who has enjoyed that special train- 
ing of the heart and intellect which can be acquired only in the 
unviolated sanctuaries of nature, “where man is distant, but 
God is near”—will not rashly assert his right to extirpate a 
tribe of harmless vegetables, barely because their products 
neither tickle his palate nor fill his pocket; and his regret at 
the dwindling area of the forest solitude will be augmented by 
the reflection that the nurselings of the woodland perish with 
the pines, the oaks, and the beeches that sheltered them.* 
Although, as I have said in a former chapter, birds do not 

frequent the deeper recesses of the wood, yet a very large pro- 


* Quaint old Valvasor had observed the subduing influence of nature’s soli- 
tudes. In describing the lonely Canker-Thal, which, though rocky, was in 
his time well wooded with “ fir, larches, beeches and other trees,’ he says: 
‘“ Gladsomeness and beauty, which dwell in many valleys, may not be looked 
for there. The journey through it is cheerless, melancholy, wearisome, and 
serveth to temper and mortify over-joyousness of thought. ... In sum it is 
a very desert, wherein the wildness of human pride doth grow tame.” —Wkre 
der Crain, i., p. 186, b. 


GENERAL FUNCTIONS OF FORESTS. 299 


portion of them build their nests in trees, and find in their 
foliage and branches a secure retreat from the inclemencies of 
the seasons and the pursuit of the reptiles and quadrupeds 
which prey upon them. The borders of the forests are vocal 
with song; and when the gray and dewy morning calls the 
creeping things of the earth out of their night-cells, it summons 
from the neighboring wood legions of their winged enemies, 
which swoop down upon the fields to save man’s harvests by 
devouring the destroying worm, and surprising the lagging 
beetle in his tardy retreat to the dark cover where he lurks 
through the hours of daylight. 

The insects most injurious to the rural industry of the garden 
and the ploughland do not multiply in or near the woods. The 
locust, which ravages the East with its voracious armies, is bred 
in vast open plains which admit the full heat of the sun to 
hasten the hatching of the eggs, gather no moisture to destroy 
them, and harbor no bird to feed upon the larve.* It is only 
since the felling of the forests of Asia Minor and Cyrene that 
the locust has become so fearfully destructive in those coun- 
tries; and the grasshopper, which now threatens to be almost 
as great a pest to the agriculture of some North American soils, 
breeds in seriously injurious numbers only where a wide extent 
of surface is bare of woods. 


General Functions of Forests. 


In the preceding pages we have seen that the electrical and 
chemical action of the forest, though obscure, exercises proba- 
bly a beneficial, certainly not an injurious, influence on the 
composition and condition of the atmosphere ; that it serves as 


* Smela, in the government of Kiew, has, for some years, not suifered at 
all from the locusts, which formerly came every year in vast swarms, and the 
curculio, so injurious to the turnip crops, is less destructive there than in 
other parts of the province. This improvement is owing partly to the more 
thorough cultivation of the soil, partly to the groves which are interspersed 
among the ploughlands. . . . When inthe midst of the plains woods 
shall be planted and filled with insectivorous birds, the locusts will cease to be 
a plague and a terror to the farmer.—RENTzscH, Der Wald, pp. 40, 46. 


800 GENERAL FUNCTIONS OF FORESTS. 


a protection against the diffusion of miasmatic exhalations and 
malarious poisons; that it performs a most important fune- 
tion as a mechanical shelter from blasting winds to grounds 
and crops in the lee of it; that, as a conductor of heat, it tends to 
equalize the temperature of the earth and the air; that its dead © 
products form a mantle over the surface, which protects the 
earth from excessive heat and cold; that the evaporation from 
the leaves of living trees, while it cools the air around them, 
diffuses through the atmosphere a medium which resists the 
escape of warmth from the earth by radiation, and hence that 
its general effect is to equilibrate caloric influences and mode- 
rate extremes of temperature. 

We have seen, further, that the forest is equally useful as a re- 
gulator of terrestrial and of atmospheric humidity, preventing by 
its shade the drying up of the surface by parching winds and 
the scorching rays of the sun, intercepting a part of the pre- 
cipitation, and pouring out a vast quantity of aqueous vapor 
into the atmosphere ; that if it does not increase the amount of 
rain, it tends to equalize its distribution both in time and in 
place; that it preserves a hygrometric equilibrium in the 
superior strata of the earth’s surface; that it maintains and 
regulates the flow of springs and rivulets; that it checks the 
superficial discharge of the waters of precipitation and conse- 
quently tends to prevent the sudden rise of rivers, the violence 
of floods, the formation of destructive torrents, and the abrasion 
of the surface by the action of running water ; that it impedes 
the fall of avalanches and of rocks, and destructive slides of the 
superficial strata of mountains; that it is a safeguard against 
the breeding of locusts, and finally that it furnishes nutriment 
and shelter to many tribes of animal and of vegetable life 
which, if not necessary to man’s existence, are conducive to his 
rational enjoyment. In fine, in well-wooded regions, and in 
inhabited countries where a due proportion of soil is devoted to 
the growth of judiciously distributed forests, natural destrue- 
tive tendencies of all sorts are arrested or compensated, and 
man, bird, beast, fish, and vegetable alike find a constant uni- 


EFFECTS OF DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST. 301 


formity of condition most favorable to the regular and harmo- 
nious coexistence of them all. 


General Consequences of the Destruction of the Forest. 


With the extirpation of the forest, all is changed. At one 
season, the earth parts with its warmth by radiation to an open 
sky—receives, at another, an immoderate heat from the unob- 
structed rays of the sun. Hence the climate becomes excessive, 
and the soil is alternately parched by the fervors of summer, 
and seared by the rigors of winter. Bleak winds sweep unre- 
sisted over its surface, drift away the snow that sheltered it 
from the frost, and dry up its scanty moisture. The precipita- 
tion becomes as irregular as the temperature; the melting 
snows and vernal rains, no longer absorbed by a loose and 
bibulous vegetable mould, rush over the frozen surface, and 
pour down the valleys seawards, instead of filling a retentive 
bed of absorbent earth, and storing up a supply of moisture to 
feed perennial springs. The soil is bared of its covering of 
leaves, broken and loosened by the plough, deprived of the 
fibrous rootlets which held it together, dried and pulverized by 
sun and wind, and at last exhausted by new combinations. 
The face of the earth is no longer a sponge, but a dust-heap, 
and the floods which the waters of the sky pour over it hurry 
swiftly along its slopes, carrying in suspension vast quantities 
of earthy particles which increase the abrading power and 
mechanical force of the current, and, augmented by the sand and 
gravel of falling banks, fill the beds of the streams, divert them 
into new channels, and obstruct their outlets. The rivulets, 
wanting their former regularity of supply and deprived of the 
protecting shade of the woods, are heated, evaporated, and 
thus reduced in their summer currents, but swollen to raging 
torrents in autumn and inspring. From these causes, there is 
a constant degradation of the uplands, and a consequent eleva- 
tion of the beds of water-courses and of lakes by the deposition 
of the mineral and vegetable matter carried down by the 
waters. The channels of great rivers become unnayigable, their 


802 PROPORTION OF WOODLAND. 


estuaries are choked up, and harbors which once sheltered large 
navies are shoaled by dangerous sand-bars. The earth, stripped 
of its vegetable glebe, grows less and less productive, and, con- 
sequently, less able to protect itself by weaving a new network 
of roots to bind its particles together, a new carpeting of turf 
to shield it from wind and sun and scouring rain. Gradually 
it becomes altogether barren. The washing of the soil from 
the mountains leaves bare ridges of sterile rock, and the rich 
organic mould which covered them, now swept down into the 
dank low grounds, promotes a luxuriance of aquatic vegetation 
that breeds fever, and more insidious forms of mortal disease, 
by its decay, and thus the earth is rendered no longer fit for 
the habitation of man.* 

To the general truth of this sad picture there are many ex- 
ceptions, even in countries of excessive climates. Some of 
these are due to favorable conditions of surface, of geological 
structure, and of the distribution of rain; in many others, the 
evil consequences of man’s improvidence have not yet been ex- 
perienced, only because a sufficient time has not elapsed, since 
the felling of the forest, to allow them to develop themselves. 
But the vengeance of nature for the vielation of her harmonies, 
though slow, is sure, and the gradual deterioration of soil and 
climate in such exceptional regions is as certain to result from 
the destruction of the woods as is any natural effect to follow its 
cause. 


Due Proportion of Woodland. 


The proportion of woodland that ought to be permanently 
maintained for its geographical and atmospheric influences 
varies according to the character of soil, surface, and climate. 


* Almost every narrative of travel in those countries which were the earliest 
seats of civilization, contains evidence of the truth of these general statements, 
and this evidence is presented with more or less detail in most of the special 
works on the forest which I have occasion tocite. I may refer particularly to 
HouenstEeIn, Der Wald, 1860, as full of important facts on this subject. See 
also CAIMI, Cenni sulla Importanza det Boschi, for some statistics, not readily 
found elsewhere, on this and other topics connected with the forest. 


DUE PROPORTION OF WOODLAND. 303 


In countries with a humid sky, or moderately undulating sur- 
face and an equable temperature, a small extent of forest, 
enough to serve as a mechanical screen against the action of 
the wind in localities where such protection is needed, suflices. 
But most of the territory occupied by civilized man is exposed, 
by the character of its surface and its climate, to a physical 
degradation which cannot be averted except by devoting a large 
amount of soil to the growth of the woods. 

From an economical point of view, the question of the due 
proportion of forest is not less complicated or less important 
than in its purely physical aspects. Of all the raw materials 
which nature supplies for elaboration by human art, wood is 
undoubtedly the most useful, and at the same time the most 
indispensable to social progress.* 

The demand for wood, and of course the quantity of forest 
required to furnish it, depend upon the supply of fuel from 
other sources, such as peat and coal, upon the extent to which 
stone, brick, or metal can advantageously be substituted for 
wood in building, upon the development of arts and industries 
employing wood and other forest products as materials, and 


* In an imaginary dialogue in the Recepte Véritable, the author, Palissy, 
having expressed his indignation at the folly of men in destroying the woods, 
his interlocutor defends the policy of fellmg them, by citing the example of 
“* divers bishops, cardinals, priors, abbots, monkeries and chapters, which, by 
cutting their woods, have made three profits,” the sale of the timber, the rent 
of the ground, and the ‘“ good portion” they received of the grain grown by 
the peasants upon it. To this argument Palissy replies: ‘‘I cannot enough 
detest this thing, and I call it not an error, but a curse and a calamity to ail 
France; for when forests shall be cut, all arts shall cease, and they which 
practise them shall be driven out to eat grass with Nebuchadnezzar and the 
beasts of the field. Ihave divers times thought to set down in writing the 
arts which shall perish when there shall be no more wood; but when I had 
written down a great number, I did perceive that there could be no end of my 
writing, and having diligently considered, I found there was not any which 
could be followed without wood.” . . ‘And truly I could well allege to 
thee a thousand reasons, but "tis so cheap a philosophy, that the very chamber- 
wenches, if they do but think, may see that without wood, it is not possible 
fo exercise any manner of human art or cunning.”— Guwvres de BERNARD 
PALIssy. Paris, 1844, p. 89. 


304 WOODLAND IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. 


upon the cost of obtaining them from other countries, or upon 
their commercial value as articles of export. 

Upon the whole, taking civilized Europe and America 
together, it is probable that from twenty to twenty-five per 
cent. of well-wooded surface is indispensable for the mainte- 
nance of normal physical conditions, and for the supply of ma- 
terials so essential to every branch of human industry and every 
form of social life as those which compose the harvest of the 
woods. 

There is probably no country—there are few large farms 
even—where at least one-fourth of the soil is not either unfit 
for agricultural use, or so unproductive that, as pasture or 
as ploughland, it yields less pecuniary return than a thrifty 
wood. Every prairie has its sloughs where willows and poplars 
would find a fitting soil, every Eastern farm its rocky nooks and 
its barren hillsides suited to the growth of some species from 
our rich forest flora, and everywhere belts of trees might ad- 
yantageously be planted along the roadsides and the boundaries 
and dividing fences. In most cases, it will be found that trees 
may be made to grow well where cultivated crops will not re- 
pay the ontlay of tillage, and it is a very plain dictate of sound 
economy that if trees produce a better profit than the same 
ground would return if devoted to grass or grain, the wood 


should be substituted for the field. 


Woodland in European Countries. 


In 1862, Rentzsch calculated the proportions of woodland in 
different European countries as follows : * 


INOXWAY 5 Ace cue eatiodiss stds Sees ae Sects . 66 ~— percent. 
SWEGEN serra eRe aes, celeloer aes os a slae . 60 a 
Russiat cal 4584 Bas ese ih ee, Seas Ma isisctse aioe 30.90 J 
Germany. iiss ee cae SCAR TDA OS OAS EES 26.58 At 
Belen awmiy 414, See a keistelare jist slay ooh oles 18.52 ie 
ECANCO! 2), fercpsir clan eine staat eave Bie selene 16.79 cs 
Swatzerlandy% Sie ceveeleatee. Seat aven ofe's 15 Oe 


* Der Wald, pp. 123, 124, 


WOODLAND IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. 805 


Sardinia Ast2 RR ANGite das dete ae 12.29 per cent. 
Neapolitan, States sy ergueyssio sb acto ore 9.43 ve 
olla ns), sera ces yer tetera Goleicusloloivre fovea aveiecs 7.10 oy 
SDAIN sc rerahers or ee eet Bera \are oie tele: stoped trate 5.52 a 
DENA sii te.t A eet etic Moe ss Be es 5.50 es 
GreatrBintain yea eee oes tetas. Seale Cala Aah SS 
POLtUG Al) sy snciete: «,csaperepanettousselaleees aicteieh abel austere . 4.40 ec 


The large proportion of woodland in Norway and Sweden is 
in a great measure to be ascribed to the mountainous character 
of the surface, which renders the construction of roads difficult 
and expensive, and hence the forests are comparatively inac- 
cessible, and transportation is too costly to tempt the inhabit- 
ants to sacrifice their woods for the sake of supplying distant 
markets. 

The industries which employ wood as a material have only 
lately been much developed in these countries, and though the 
climate requires the consumption of much wood as a fuel, the 
population is not numerous enough to create, for this purpose, 
a demand exceeding the annually produced supply, or to need 
any great extension of cleared ground for agricultural purposes. 
Besides this, in many places peat is generally employed as do- 
mestic fuel. Hence, though Norway has long exported a con- 
siderable quantity of lumber,* and the iron and copper works 
of Sweden consume charcoal very largely, the forests have not 
diminished rapidly enough to produce very sensible climatic or 
even economical evils. 

At the opposite end of the scale we find Holland, Denmark, 
Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal. In the three first-named 
countries a cold and humid climate renders the almost con- 
stant maintenance of domestic fires a necessity, while in Great 


* Railway-ties, or, as they are called in England, sleepers, are largely ex- 
ported from Norway to India, and sold at Calcutta at a lower price than tim- 
ber of equal quality can be obtained from the native woods.— Reports on Forest 
Conservancy, vol. i., pt. ii., p. 1533. 

From 1861 to 1870 Norway exported annually, on the average, more than 
60,000,000 cubic feet of lumber.—WULFSBERG, Norges Velstandskilder. Chris- 
tiania, 1872. 


20 


306 WOODLAND IN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. 


Britain especially the demand of the various industries which 
depend on wood as a material, or on mechanical power derived 
from heat, are very great. Coal and peat serve as a combustible 
instead of wood in them all, and England imports an immense 
quantity of timber from her foreign possessions. J ortunately, 
the character of soil, surface, and climate renders the forest of 
less importance as a geographical agent in these northern re- 
gions than in Spain and Portugal, where all physical conditions 
concur to make a large extent of forest an almost indispensable 
means of industrial progress and social advancement. 

Rentzsch, in fact, ascribes the political decadence of Spain 
almost wholly to the destruction of the forest. “Spain,” ob- 
serves he, “seemed destined by her position to hold dominion 
over the world, and this in fact she once possessed. But she has 
lost her political ascendancy, because, during the feeble adminis- 
tration of the successors of Philip II., her exhausted treasury 
could not furnish the means of creating new fleets, the destruc- 
tion of the woods having raised the price of timber above the 
means of the state.”* On the other hand, the same writer 
argues that the wealth and prosperity of modern England are 
in great part due to the supply of lumber, as well as of other 
material for ship-building, which she imports from her colonies 


* Der Wald, p. 63. Antonio Ponz (Viage de Espana, i., prélogo, p. lxiii.), 
says: ‘‘ Nor would this be so great an evil, were not some of them declaimers 
against trees, thereby proclaiming themselves, in some sort, enemies of the 
works of God, who gave us the leafy abode of Paradise to dwell in, where we 
should be even now sojourning, but for the first sin, which expelled us from 
ag 

I do not know at what period the two Castiles were bared of their woods, 
but the Spaniard’s proverbial ‘‘hatred of a tree” is of long standing. Her- 
rera combats this foolish prejudice; and Ponz, in the prologue to the ninth 
volume of his journey, says that many carried it so far as wantonly to destroy 
the shade and ornamental trees planted by the municipal authorities. ‘‘ Trees,” 
they contended, and still believe, ‘‘ breed birds, and birds eat up the grain.” 
Our author argues against the supposition of the ‘‘ breeding of birds by trees,”’ 
which, he says, is as absurd as to believe that an elm-tree can yield pears ; 
and he charitably suggests that the expression is, perhaps, a maniére de dire, 
a popular phrase, signifying simply that trees harbor birds, 


FORESTS IN GREAT BRITAIN. 307 


and other countries with which she maintains commercial rela- 
tions. 


Forests of Great Britain. 


The proportion of forest is very small in Great Britain, where, 
as I have said, on the one hand, a prodigious industrial activity 
requires a vast supply of ligneous material, but where, on the 
other, the abundance of coal, which furnishes a sufficiency of 
fuel, the facility of importation of timber from abroad, and the 
conditions of climate and surface combine to reduce the neces- 
sary quantity of woodland to its lowest expression. 

With the exception of Russia, Denmark, and parts of Ger- 
many, no European countries can so well dispense with the 
forests, in their capacity of conservative influences, as England 
and Ireland. Their insular position and latitude secure an 
abundance of atmospheric moisture ; the general inclination of 
surface is not such as to expose it to special injury from tor- 
rents, and it is probable that the most important climatic ac- 
tion exercised by the forest in these portions of the British em- 
pire, is in its character of a mechanical screen against the effects 
of wind. The due proportion of woodland in England and 
Jreland is, therefore, a question not of geographical, but almost 
purely of economical, expediency, to be decided by the com- 
parative direct pecuniary return from forest-growth, pasturage, 
and ploughland. 

Contrivances for economizing fuel came later into use in 
the British Islands than on the Continent. Before the intro- 
duction of a system of drainage, the soil, like the sky, was, in 
general, charged with humidity; its natural condition was un- 
favorable for the construction and maintenance of substantial 
common roads, and the transportation of so heavy a material 
as coal, by land, from the remote counties where alone it was 
mined in the Middle Ages, was costly and difficult. For all 
these reasons, the consumption of wood was large, and appre- 
hensions of the exhaustion of the forests were excited at an 
early period. Legislation there, as elsewhere, proved ineffectual 


808 FORESTS IN GREAT BRITAIN. 


to protect them, and many authors of the sixteenth century ex- 
press fears of serious evils from the wasteful economy of the 
people in this respect. Harrison, in his curious chapter “ Of 
Woods and Marishes” in Holinshed’s compilation, complains 
of the rapid decrease of the forests, and adds: “ Howbeit thus 
much I dare affirme, that if woods go so fast to decaie in the 
next hundred yeere of Grace, as they haue doone and are like 
to doo in this, . . . it is to be feared that the fennie 
bote, broome, turfe, gall, heath, firze, brakes, whinnes, ling, 
dies, hassacks, flags, straw, sedge, réed, rush, and also seacole, 
will be good merchandize euen in the citie of London, where- 
unto some of them euen now haue gotten readie passage, and 
taken vp their innes in the greatest merchants’ parlours. . . . 
I would wish that I might line no longer than to sée foure 
things in this land reformed, that is: the want of discipline in 
the chureh: the couetous dealing of most of our merchants in 
the preferment of the commodities of other countries, and 
hinderance of their owne: the holding of faires and markets 
ypon the sundaie to be abolished and referred to the wednes- 
daies: and that euerie man, in whatsoeuer part of the cham- 
paine soile enioieth fortie acres of land, and vpwards, after that 
rate, either by frée deed, copie hold, or fee farme, might plant 
one acre of wood, or sowe the same with oke mast, hasell, beech, 
and suflicient prouision be made that it may be cherished and 
kept. But I feare me that I should then liue too long, and so 
long, that I should either be wearie of the world, or the world 
of me.’?.* 


* HOLINSHED, reprint of 1807, i., pp. 857, 358. It is evident from this 
passage, and from another on page 397 of the same volume, that, though sea- 
coal was largely exported to the Continent, it had not yet come into general 
use in England. It is a question of much interest, when mineral coal was first 
employed in England for fuel. I can find no evidence that it was used as a 
combustible until more than a century. after the Norman conquest. It has 
been said that. it was known to the Anglo-Saxon population, but I am ac- 
quainted with no passage in the literature of that people which proves this. 
The dictionaries explain the Anglo-Saxon word gr@fa by sea-coal. I have met 
with this word in no Anglo-Saxon work, except in the Chronicle, A.D. 852, 


FORESTS IN GREAT BRITAIN. 309 


Evelyn’s “ Silva,” the first edition of which appeared in 1664, 
rendered an extremely important service to the cause of the 
woods, and there is no doubt that the ornamental plantations in 
which England far surpasses all other countries, are, in some 
measure, the fruit of Evelyn’s enthusiasm. In England, how- 


from a manuscript certainly not older than the 12th century, and in two citations 
from Anglo-Saxon charters, one published by Kemble in Codex Diplomuticus, 
the other by Thorpe in Diplomatarium Anglicum, in all which passages it more 
probably means peat than mineral coal. According to Way, Promptorium 
Parrulorum, p. 506, note, the Catholicon Anglicanum has ‘‘ A turfe grafte, 
turbarium.”  Grafte is here evidently the same word as the A.-S. grefa, 
and the Danish 70rvegraf, a turf-pit, confirms this opinion. Coal is not men- 
tioned in King Alfred’s Bede, in Neckam, in Glanville or in Robert of Glouces- 
ter, though the two latter writers speak of the allied mineral, jet, and are very 
full in their enumeration of the mineral productions of the island. 

In a Latin poem ascribed to Giraldus Cambrensis, who died after the year 
1220, but found also in the manuscripts of Walter Mapes (see Camden Society 
edition, pp. 131 and 350), and introduced into Higden’s Polychronicon (Lon- 
don, 1865, pp. 898, 399), carbo sub terra cortice, which can mean nothing but 
pit-coal, is enumerated among the natural commodities of England. Some of 
the translations of the 13th and 14th century render carbo by cool or col, some 
by gold, and some omit this line, as well as others unintelligible to the trans- 
lators. Hence, although Giraldus was acquainted with coal, it certainly was 
not generally known to English writers until at least a century after the time 
of that author. 

The earliest mediaeval notice of mineral coal I have met with is in a pas- 
sage cited by Ducange from a document of the year 1198, and it is an etymolo- 
gical observation of some interest, that carbones ferrei, as sea-coal is called in 
the document, are said by Ducange to have been known in France by the popu- 
lar name of julia, a word evidently identical with the modern French houwille 
and the Cornish Huel, which in the form wheal is an element in the name of 
many mining localities. 

England was anciently remarkable for its forests, but Caesar says it wanted 
the fagus and the abies. There can be no doubt that fagus means the beech, 
which, as the remains in the Danish peat-mosses show, is a tree of late intro- 
duction into Denmark, where it succeeded the fir, a tree not now native to 
that country. The succession of forest crops seems to have been the same in 
England; for Harrison, p. 359, speaks of the ‘‘ great store of firre” found 
lying ‘‘ at their whole lengths” in the ‘‘fens and marises”’ of Lancashire and 
other counties, where not even bushes grew in his time. We cannot be sure 
what species of evergreen Cesar intended by abies. The popular designations 
of spike-leaved trees are always more vague and uncertain in their application 


810 FORESTS IN GREAT BRITAIN. 


ever, arboriculture, the planting and nursing of single trees, has, 
until comparatively recent times, been better understood than 
sylviculture, the sowing and training of the forest. Dut this 
latter branch of rural improvement now receives great attention 
from private individuals, though, so far as I know, not from the 


than those of broad-leaved trees. Pinas, pine, has been very loosely employed 
even in botanical nomenclature, and Kiefer, Fichte, and Tanne are often con- 
founded in German.—RossMissLER, Der Wald, pp. 256, 289, 324. A similar 
confusion in the names of this family of trees exists in India. Dr. Cleghorn, 
Inspector-General of the Indian Forests, informs us in his official Circular No. 
2, that the name of deodar is applied in some provinces to a cypress, In some 
to a cedar, and in others to a juniper. If it were certain that the adies of 
Cesar was the fir formerly and still found in peat-mosses, and that he 
was right in denying the existence of the beech in England in his time, 
the observation would be very important, because it would fix a date at 
which the fir had become extinct, and the beech had not yet appeared in the 
island. 

The English oak, though strong and durable, was not considered generally 
suitable for finer work in the sixteenth century. There were, however, ex- 
ceptions. ‘‘ Of all in Essex,” observes HARRISON, Holinshed, i., p. 357, ‘‘ that 
growing in Bardfield parke is the finest for ioiners craft: for oftentimes haue - 
Iseene of their workes made of that oke so fine and faire, as most of the 
wainescot that is brought hither out of Danske [Danzig] ; for our wainescot is 
not made in England. Yet diuerse haue assaied to deale with our okes to 
that end, but not with so good successe as they haue hoped, bicause the ab or 
juice will not so soone be remoued and cleane drawne out, which some attri- 
bute to want of time in the salt water.” 

This passage is also of interest as showing that soaking in salt-water, as a 
mode of seasoning, was practised in Harrison’s time. 

But the importation of wainscot, or boards for ceiling, panelling, and other- 
wise finishing rooms, which was generally of oak, commenced at least three 
centuries before the time of Harrison. On page 204 of the Liber Albus men- 
tion is made of ‘‘ squared oak timber,” brought in from the country by carts, 
and of course of domestic growth, as free of city duty or octroi, and of ‘‘ planks 
of oak” coming in in the same way as paying one plank a cart-load. But in 
the chapter on the ‘‘ Customs of Billyngesgate,” pp. 208, 209, relating to goods 
imported from foreign countries, an import duty of one halfpenny is imposed 
on every hundred of boards called ‘‘ weynscotte ’—a term formerly applied 
only to oak—and of one penny on every hundred of boards called ‘*‘ Rygholt.”’ 
The editor explains ‘‘ Rygholt” as ‘‘ wood of Riga.” This was doubtless pine 
or fir. The year in which these provisions were made does not appear, but 
they belong to the reign of Henry ITI. 


FORESTS IN GREAT BRITAIN. oli 
National Government, except in the East Indian provinces, 
where the forestal department has assumed great importance.* 

In fact, England is, I believe, the only European country 
where private enterprise has pursued sylviculture on a really 
great scale, though admirable examples have been set in many 
others. In England the law of primogeniture, and other insti- 
tutions and national customs which tend to keep large estates 
long undivided and in the same line of inheritance, the wealth 
of the landholders, the special adaptation of the climate to the 
growth of forest-trees, and the difficulty of finding safe and pro- 
fitable investments of capital, combine to afford encouragements 
for the plantation of forests, which scarcely exist elsewhere in 
the same degree. 

In Scotland, where the country is for the most part broken 
and mountainous, the general destruction of the forests has 
been attended with very serious evils, and it is in Scotland that 
many of the most extensive British forest plantations have now 
been formed. But although the inclination of surface in Scot- 
land is rapid, the geological constitution of the soil is not of a 
character to promote such destructive degradation by running 
water as in Southern France, and it has not to contend with 
the parching droughts by which the devastations of the torrents 
are rendered more injurious in those provinces. 

It is difficult to understand how either Jaw or public opinion, in 
a country occupied by a dense and intelligent population, and, 
comparatively speaking, with an infertile soil, can tolerate the 


* The improvidence of the population under the native and early foreign 
goveraments has produced great devastations in the forests of the British East 
Indian provinces, and the demands of the railways for fuel and timber have 
greatly augmented the consumption of lumber, and of course contributed to 
the destruction of the woods. The forests of British India are now, and for 
several years have been, under the control of an efficient governmental organi- 
zation, with great advantage both to the government and to the general private 
interests of the people. 

The official Reports on Forest Conservancy from May, 1862, to August, 1871, 
in 4 vols. folio, contain much statistical and practical information on all sub- 
jects connected with the administration of the forest. 


312 FORESTS OF FRANCE. 


continued withdrawal of a great portion of the territory from the 
cultivation of trees and from other kinds of rural economy, 
merely to allow wealthy individuals to amuse themselves with 
field-sports. In Scotland, 2,000,000 acres, as well suited to the 
growth of forests and for pasture as is the soil generally, are 
withheld from agriculture, that they may be given up to herds of 
deer protected by the game laws. A single nobleman, for ex- 
ample, thus appropriates for his own pleasures not less than 100,- 
000 acres.* In this way one-tenth of all the land of Scotland is 
rendered valueless in an economical point of view—for the re- 
turns from the sale of the venison and other game scarcely 
suffice to pay the game-keepers and other incidental expenses— 
and in these so-called forests there grows neither building tim- 
ber nor fire-wood worth the cutting, as the animals destroy the 
young shoots. 


Lorests of Hrance. 


The preservation of the woods was one of the wise measures 
recommended to France by Sully, in the time of Henry IV., 
but the advice was little heeded, and the destruction of the 
forests went on with such alarming rapidity, that, two genera- 
tions later, Colbert uttered the prediction: “France will 
perish for want of wood.” Still, the extent of wooded soil 
was very great, and the evils attending its diminution were 
not so sensibly felt, that either the government or public opin- 
ion saw the necessity of authoritative interference, and in 
1750 Mirabeau estimated the remaining forests of the king- 
dom at seventeen millions of hectares [42,000,000 acres]. In 
1860 they were reduced to eight millions [19,769,000 acres], 
or at the rate of 82,000 hectares [202,600 acres] per year. 
Troy, from whose valuable pamphlet, Ltude sur le Reboisement 
des Montagnes, I take these statistical details, supposes that 
Mirabeau’s statement may have been an extravagant one, but 
it still remains certain that the waste has been enormous; for 


* ROBERTSON, Our Deer Forests. London, 1867. 


FORESTS OF FRANCE. ole 


it is known that, in some departments, that of Ariége, for in- 
stance, clearing has gone on during the last half-century at the 
rate of three thousand acres a year, and in all parts of the 
empire trees have been felled faster than they have grown. * 
The total area of France in Mirabeaw’s time, excluding Savoy, 
but including Alsace and Lorraine, was about one hundred and 
thirty-one millions of acres. The extent of forest supposed by 
Mirabeau would be about thirty-two per cent. of the whole ter- 
ritory. In a country and a climate where the conservative 
influences of the forest are so necessary as in France, trees 
must cover a large surface and be grouped in large masses, in 
order to discharge to the best advantage the various functions 
assigned to them by nature. The consumption of wood is 
rapidly increasing in that empire, and a large part of its terri- 
tory is mountainous, sterile, and otherwise such in character or 
situation that it can be more profitably devoted to the growth 
of wood than to any agricultural use. Hence it is evident that 
the proportion of forest in 1750, taking even Mirabeau’s large 


* Among the indirect proofs of the comparatively recent existence of exten- 
sive forests in France, may be mentioned the fact that wolves were abundant, 
not very long since, in parts of the empire where there are now neither wolves 
nor woods to shelter them. Arthur Young more than once speaks of the ‘‘ in- 
numerable multitudes” of these animals which infested France in 1789, and 
George Sand states, in the Histoire de ma Vie, that some years after the res- 
toration of the Bourbons, they chased travellers on horseback in the southern 
provinces, and literally knocked at the doors of her father-in-law’s country 
seat. HEugénie de Guérin, writing from Rayssac in Languedoc in 1831 speaks 
of hearing the wolves fighting with dogs in the night under her very windows. 
Lettres, 2d ed., p. 6. 

There seems to have been a tendency to excessive clearing in Central and 
Western, earlier than in South-eastern, France. Bernard Palissy, in the ecepte 

Véritable, first printed in 1563, thus complains: ‘‘When I consider the value 
of the least clump of trees, or even of thorns, I much marvel at the great 
ignorance of men, who, as it seemeth, do nowadays study only to break down, 
fell, and waste the fair forests which their forefathers did guard so choicely. 
I would think no evil of them for cutting down the woods, did they but re- 
plant again some part of them; but they care nought for the time to come, 
neither reck they of the great damage they do to their children which shall 
come after them.’’— Cijuvres Comptes de BERNARD PALIssy, 1844, p. 88, 


814 FORESTS OF FRANCE. 


estimate, was not very much too great for permanent main- 
tenance, though doubtless the distribution was so unequal that 
it would have been sound policy to fell the woods and clear 
land in some provinces, while large forests should have been 
planted in others.* During the period in question France 
neither exported manufactured wood or rough timber, nor de- 
rived important collateral advantages of any sort from the de- 
struction of her forests. She is consequently impoverished and 
crippled to the extent of the difference between what she actu- 
ally possesses of wooded surface and what she ought to have 
retained. + 

The force of the various considerations which have been sug- 
gested in regard to the importance of the forest has been gene- 
rally felt in France, and the subject has been amply debated in 


* The view I have taken of this point is confirmed by the careful investiga- 
tions of Rentzsch, who estimates the proper proportion of woodland to entire 
surface at twenty-three per cent. for the interior of Germany, and supposes 
that near the coast, where the air is supplied with humidity by evaporation 
from the sea, it might safely be reduced to twenty per cent. See Rentzsch’s 
very valuable prize essay, Der Wald im Haushalt der Natur und der Volks- 
wirthschaft, cap. viii. 

The due proportion in France would considerably exceed that for the Ger- 
man States, because France has relatively more surface unfit for any growth 
but that of wood, because the form and geological character of her mountains 
expose her territory to much greater injury from torrents, and because at least 
her southern provinces are more frequently visited both by extreme droughts 
and by deluging rains. 

+ In 1863, France imported lumber to the value of twenty-five and a half 
millions of dollars, and exported to the amount of six and a half millions of 
dollars. The annual consumption of France was estimated in 1866 at 212,- 
000,000 cubic feet for building and manufacturing, and 1,588,500,000 for fire- 
wood and charcoal. The annual product of the forest-soil of France does not 
exceed 70,000,000 cubic feet of wood fit for industrial use, and 1,300,000,000 
cubic feet consumed as fuel. This estimate does not include the product of 
scattered trees on private grounds, but the consumption is estimated to exceed 
the production of the forests by the amount of about twenty millions of dol- 
lars. It is worth noticing that the timber for building and manufacturing 
produced in France comes almost wholly from the forests of the state or of 
the communes,—J ULES CLAV, in Revue des Deux Mondes for March 1, 1866, 
p. 207. 


FORESTS OF FRANCE. 315 


special treatises, in scientific journals, and by the public press, 
as well as in the legislative body of that country. Perhaps no 
one point has been more prominent in the discussions than the 
influence of the forest in equalizing and regulating the flow of 
the water of precipitation. Opinion is still somewhat divided 
on this subject, but the value of the woods as a safeguard against 
the ravages of torrents is universally acknowledged, and it is 
hardly disputed that the rise of river-floods is, even if as great, at 
least less sudden in streams haying their sources in well-wooded 
territory. 

Upon the whole, the conservative action of the woods in re- 
gard to torrents and to inundations has been generally recognized 
by the public of France as a matter of prime importance, and 
the Government of the empire has made this principle the basis 
of a special system of legislation for the protection of existing 
forests, and for the formation of new. The clearing of wood- 
land, and the organization and functions of a police for its pro- 
tection, are regulated by a law bearing date June 18th, 1859, 
and provision was made for promoting the restoration of private 
woods by a statute adopted on the 28th of July, 1860. The 
former of these laws passed the legislative body by a vote of 
246 against 4, the latter with but a single negative voice. The 
influence of the Government, in a country where the throne is 
so potent as in France, would account for a large majority, but 
when it is considered that both laws, the former especially, in- 
terfere very materially with the rights of private domain, the 
almost entire unanimity with which they were adopted is proof 
of a very general popular conviction, that the protection and 
extension of the forests is a measure more likely than any 
other to arrest the devastations of the torrents and check the vio- 
lence, if not to prevent the recurrence, of destructive river inun- 
dations. The law of July 28th, 1860, appropriated 10,000,000 
francs, to be expended, at the rate of 1,000,000 franes per year, 
in executing or aiding the replanting of woods. It is computed 
that this appropriation—which, considering the vast importance 
of the subject, does not seem extravagant for a nation rich 


316 FORESTS OF FRANCE. 


enough to be able to expend annually six hundred times that 
sum in the maintenance of its military establishments in times 
of peace—will secure the creation of new forest to the extent of 
about 200,000 acres, or one fourteenth part of the soil, where the 
restoration of the woods is thought feasible, and, at the same 
time, specially important as a security against the evils ascribed, 
in a great measure, to its destruction.* 

In 1865 the Legislative Assembly passed a bill amendatory of 
the law of 1860, providing, among other things, for securing the 
soil in exposed localities by grading, and by promoting the 
growth of grass and the formation of greensward over the sur- 
face. This has proved a most beneficial measure, and its adop- 
tion under corresponding conditions in the United States is 
most highly to be recommended. The leading features of the 
system are: 

1. Marking out and securing from pasturage and all other 
encroachments a zone along the banks and around the head of 
ravines. 

2. Turfing this zone, which in France accomplishes itself, if 
not spontaneously, at least with little aid from art. 

3. Consolidation of the scarps of the ravines by grading and 
wattling and establishing barriers, sometimes of solid masonry, 
but generally of fascines or any other simple materials at hand, 
across the bed of the stream. 


* Tn 1848 the Government of the so-called French Republic sold to the Bank 
of France 187,000 acres of public forests, and notwithstanding the zeal with 
which the Imperial Government had pressed the protective legislation of 1860, 
it introduced into the Legislative Assembly in 1865 a bill for the sale, and con- 
sequently destruction, of the forests of the state to the amount of one hundred 
million francs. The question was much debated in the Assembly, and public 
opinion manifested itself so energetically against the measure that the ministry 
felt itself compelled to withdraw it. See the discussions in L’ Aliénation des 
Fovréts deV Etat. Paris, 1865. 

The late Imperial Government sold about 170,000 acres of woodland between 
1852 and 1866, both inclusive. The other Governments, since the restoration of 
the Bourbons in 1814, alienated more than 700,000 acres of the public forests, 
exclusive of sales between 1836 and 1857, which are not reported,—Annuaire 
des Haua et Horéts, 1872, p. 9. 


REMEDIES AGAINST TORRENTS. oly 


4, Cutting banquettes or narrow terraces along the scarps, and 
planting rows of small deciduous trees and arborescent shrubs 
upon them, alternating with belts of grass obtained by turfing 
with sods or sowing grass-seeds. Planting the banquettes and 
slopes with bushes, and sowing any other vegetables with tena- 
cious roots, is also earnestly recommended.* 


Remedies against Torrents. 


The rural population, which in France is generally hostile to all 
forest laws, soon acquiesced in the adoption of this system, and its 
success has far surpassed all expectation. At the end of the year 
1868 about 190,000 acres had been planted with trees,t and nearly 
7,000 acres well turfed over in the Department of the Hautes 
Alpes. Many hundred ravines, several of which had been the 
channels of formidable torrents, had been secured by barriers, 
grading and planting, and according to official reports the aspect 
of the mountains in the Department, wherever these methods 
were employed, had rapidly changed. The soil had acquired 
such stability that the violent rains of 1868, so destructive else- 
where, produced no damage in the districts which had been 
subjected to these operations, and numerous growing torrents 
which threatened irreparable mischief had been completely ex- 
tinguished, or at least rendered altogether harmless. 

Besides the processes directed by the Government of France, 


* See a description of similar processes recommended and adopted by Men- 
gotti, in his Jdraulica, vol. ii., chap. xvii. 

+ Travellers spending the winter at Nice may have a good opportunity of 
studying the methods of forming and conducting the rewooding of mountain 
slopes, under the most unfavorable conditions, by visiting Mont Boron, in the 
immediate vicinity of that city, and other coast plantations in that province, 
where great difficulties have been completely overcome by the skill and per- 
severance of French foresters. See Les Foréts des Maures, Revue des Haux et 
Foréts, January, 1869. 

¢ For ample details of processes and results, see the second volume of Su- 
RELL, Etude sur les Torrents, Paris, 1872, and a Report by Dr LA Gry#, in 
the Revue des Haua et Foréts for January, 1869. 


318 FORESTS OF ITALY. 


various subsidiary measures of an easily and economically prac- 
ticable character have been suggested. Among them is one 
which has long been favorably known in our Southern States 
under the name of czrcling, and the adoption of which in hilly 
regions in other States is to be strongly recommended. 

It is simply a method of preventing the wash of surface by 
rains, and at the same time of providing a substitute for irriga- 
tion of steep pasture-grounds, consisting in little more than in 
running horizontal furrows along the hillsides, thus converting 
the scarp of the hills into a succession of small terraces which, 
when once turfed over, are very permanent. Experience is said 
to have demonstrated that this simple process at least partially 
checks the too rapid flow of surface-water into the valleys, and, 
consequently, in a great measure obviates one of the most prom- 
inent causes of inundations, and that it suffices to retain the 
water of rains, of snows, and of small springs, long enough for 
the irrigation of the soil, thus increasing its product of herbage 
in a fivefold proportion.* 

As a further recommendation, it may be observed that this 
process is an admirable preparation of the ground for forest 
plantations, as young trees planted on the terraces would derive 
a useful protection from the form of the surface and the coat- 
ing of turf, and would also find a soil moist enough to secure 
their growth. 


Forests of Italy. 


According to the most recent statistics, Italy has 17.64 per 
cent. of woodland,+ a proportion which, considering the char- 
acter of climate and surface, the great amount of soil which is 
fit for no other purpose than the growth of trees, and the fact 
that much of the land classed as forest is either very imper- 
fectly wooded, or covered with groves badly administered, and 
not in a state of progressive improvement, might advanta- 


* Troy, Etude sur le Reboisement des Montagnes, $§ 6, 7, 21. 
+ Sremont, Manuale @ Arte Forestale, 2 ediz., Firenze, 1872, p. 542. 


FORESTS OF ITALY. 319 


geously be doubled. Taking Italy as a whole, we may say that 
she is eminently fitted by climate, soil, and superficial forma- 
tion, to the growth of a varied and luxuriant arboreal vegeta- 
tion, and that in the interests of self-protection, the promotion of 
forestal industry is among the first duties of her people. There 
are in Western Piedmont valleys where the felling of the woods 
has produced consequences geographically and economically as 
disastrous as in South-eastern France, and there are many other 
districts in the Alps and the Apennines where human improvi- 
dence has been almost equally destructive. Some of these regions 
must be abandoned to absolute desolation, and for others the 
opportunity of physical restoration is rapidly passing away. 
But there are still millions of square miles which might profit- 
ably be planted with forest-trees, and thousands of acres of 
parched and barren hillside, within sight of almost every Italian 
provincial capital, which might easily and shortly be reclothed 
with verdant woods.* 

The denudation of the Central and Southern Apennines and 
of the Italian declivity of the Western Alps began at a period 
of unknown antiquity, but it does not seem to have been car- 
ried to a very dangerous length until the foreign conquests and 
extended commerce of Rome created a greatly increased de- 


* To one accustomed to the slow vegetation of less favored climes, the ra- 
pidity of growth in young plantations in Italy seems almost magical. The trees 
planted along the new drives and avenues in Florence have attained in three 
or four years a development which would require at least ten in our Northern 
States, This, itis true, is a special case, for the trees have been planted and 
tended with a skill and care which cannot be bestowed upon a forest ; but the 
growth of trees little cared for is still very rapid in Italy. According to Tos- 
canelli, Heonomia rurale nella Provincia di Pisa, p. 8, note—one of the most 
complete, curious, and instructive pictures of rural life which exists in any 
literature—the white poplar, Populus alba, attains in the valley of the Serchioa 
great height, with a mean diameter of two feet, in twenty years. Selmi states 
in his Miasma Palustre, p. 115, that the linden reaches a diameter of sixteen 
inches in the same period. The growthof foreign treesis sometimes extremely 
luxuriant in Italy. Two Atlas cedars, at the well-known villa of Careggi, near 
Florence, grown from seed sown in 1850, measure twenty inches in diameter, 
above the swell of the roots, with an estimated height of sixty feet. 


320 FORESTS OF ITALY. 


mand for wood for the construction of ships and for military 
material.* The Eastern Alps, the Western Apennines, and the 
Maritime Alps retained their forests much later; but even here 
the want of wood, and the injury to the plains and the naviga- 
tion of the rivers by sediment brought down by the torrents, 
led to legislation for the protection of the forests, by the 
Ktepublic of Venice, at various periods between the fifteenth and 
the nineteenth centuries,t by that of Genoa as early at least as 
the seventeenth ; and both these Governments, as well as several 
others, passed laws requiring the proprietors of mountain-lands 
to replant the woods. These, however, seem to have been little 


* An interesting example of the collateral effects of the destruction of the 
forests in ancient Italy may be found in old Roman architecture. In the 
oldest brick constructions of Rome the bricks are very thin, very thoroughly 
burnt, and laid with a thick stratum of mortar between the courses, <A few 
centuries later the bricks were thicker and less well burnt, and the layers of 
mortar were thinner. In the Imperial period the bricks were still thicker, 
generally soft-burnt, and with little mortar between the courses. This fact, 
I think, is due to the abundance and cheapness of fuel in earlier, and its 
growing scarceness and dearness in later, ages. When wood cost little, con- 
structors could afford to burn their brick thoroughly, and to burn and use a 
great quantity of lime. As the price of fire-wood advanced, they were able 
to consume less fuel in brick- and lime-kilns, and the quality and quantity of 
brick and lime used in building were gradually reversed in proportion. 

The multitude of geographical designations in Italy which indicate the 
former existence of forests show that even in the Middle Ages there were 
woods where no forest-trees are pow to be found. There are hundreds of names 
of medizxval towns derived from abete, acero, carpino, castagno, faggio, frassino, 
pino, quercia, and other names of trees. 

+See A. de Berenger’s valuable Saggio Storico della Legislazione Veneta 
Forestale. Venezia, 1863. 

We do not find in the Venetian forestal legislation much evidence that geo- 
graphical arguments were taken into account by the lawgivers, who seem to 
have had an eye only to economical considerations. 

According to Hummel, the desolation of the Karst, the high plateau lying 
north of Trieste, now one of the most parched and barren districts in Europe, 
is owing to the felling of its woods, centuries ago, to build the navies of Venice. 
‘‘ Where the miserable peasant of the Karst now sees nothing but bare rock 
swept and scoured by the raging Bora, the fury of this wind was once subdued 
by mighty firs, which Venice recklessly cut down to build her fleets.”—-Phy- 
sische Geographie, p. 32. 


FORESTS OF ITALY. Ste 


observed, and it is generally true that the present condition of 
the forest in Italy is much less due to the want of wise legisla- 
tion for its protection than to the laxity of the Governments in 
enforcing their laws. 

It is very common in Italy to ascribe to the French occupa- 
tion under the first Empire all the improvements and all the 
abuses of recent times, according to the political sympathies of 
the individual; and the French are often said to have prostra- 
ted every forest which has disappeared within this century. 
But, however this may be, no energetic system of repression 
or restoration was adopted by any of the Italian States after the 
downfall of the Empire, and the taxes on forest property in 
some of them were so burdensome that rural municipalities 
sometimes proposed to cede their common woods to the Goy- 
ernment, without any other compensation than the remission of 
the taxes imposed on forest-lands.* Under such circumstances, 
woodlands would soon become disafforested, and where facili- 
ties of transportation and a good demand for timber have in- 
creased the inducements to fell it, as upon the borders of the 
Mediterranean, the destruction of the forest and all the evils 
which attend it have gone on at a seriously alarming rate. 

Gallenga gives a striking account of the wanton destruction 
of the forests in Northern Italy within his personal recollection,+ 
and there are few Italians past middle life whose own memory 
will not supply similar reminiscences. The clearing of the 
mountain valleys of the provinces of Bergamo and of Brescia is 
recent, and Lombardini informs us the felling of the woods in 
the Valtelline commenced little more than forty years ago. 

Although no country has produced more able writers on the 


* See the Politeenico for the month of May, 1862, p. 234. 

+ ‘‘ Far away in the darkest recesses of the mountains a kind of universal 
conspiracy seems to have been got up among these Alpine people,—a destruc- 
tive mania to hew and sweep down everything that stands on roots.” — Country 
Life in Piedmont, p. 134. 

** There are huge pyramids of mountains now bare and bleak from base to 
summit, which men still living and still young remember seeing richly man- 
tled with ali oo primeval forests.”—Jdid., p. 135. 

| 


329 FORESTS OF ITALY. 


value of the forest and the general consequences of its destrue- 
tion than Italy, yet the specific geographical importance of the 
woods, except as a protection against inundations, has not 
been so clearly recognized in that country as in the States bor- 
dering it on the north and west. It is true that the face 
of nature has been as completely revolutionized by man, and 
that the action of torrents has created almost as wide and as 
hopeless devastation in Italy as in France; but in the French 
Umpire the recent desolation produced by clearing the forests 
is more extensive, has been more suddenly effected, has occurred 
in less remote and obscure localities, and, therefore, exvites a 
livelier and more general interest than in Italy, where public 
opinion does not so readily connect the effect with its true cause. 
Italy, too, from ancient habit, employs little wood in architec- 
tural construction; for generations she has maintained no 
military or commercial marine large enough to require ex- 
haustive quantities of timber,* and the mildness of her climate 
makes small demands on the woods for fuel. Besides these 
circumstances, it must be remembered that the sciences of obser- 
vation did not become knowledges of practical application till 
after the mischief was already mainly done and even forgotten 
in Alpine Italy, while its evils were just beginning to be sensibly 
felt in France when the claims of natural philosophy as a liberal 
study were first acknowledged in modern Europe. The former 
political condition of the Italian Peninsula would have effectu- 
ally prevented the adoption of a general system of forest econo- 


* The great naval and commercial marines of Venice and of Genoa must 
have occasioned an immense consumption of lumber in the Middle Ages, and 
the centuries immediately succeeding those commonly embraced in that desig- 
nation. The marine construction of that period employed larger timbers than 
the modern naval] architecture of most commercial countries, but apparently 
without a proportional increase of strength. The old modes of ship-building 
have been, to a considerable extent, handed down to very recent times in the 
Mediterranean, and though better models and modes of construction are now 
employed in Italian shipyards, an American or an Englishman looks with aston- 
ishment at the huge beams and thick planks so often employed in the con- 
struction of very small vessels navigating that sea, and not yet old enough to 
be broken up as unseaworthy. 


FORESTS OF GERMANY. 823 


my, however clearly the importance of a wise administration of 
this great public interest might have been understood. The 
woods which controlled and regulated the flow of the river- 
sources were very often in one jurisdiction, the plains to be 
irrigated, or to be inundated by floods and desolated by tor- 
rents, in another. Concert of action, on such a subject, between 
a multitude of jealous petty sovereignties, was obviously impos- 
sible, and nothing but the permanent union of all the Italian 
States under a single government can render practicable the 
establishment of such arrangements for the conservation and 
restoration of the forests, and the regulation of the flow of the 
waters, as are necessary for the full development of the yet 
unexhausted resources of that fairest of lands, and even for the 
maintenance of the present condition of its physical geography. 


The Forests of Germany. 


Germany, including a considerable part of the Austrian 
Empire, from character of surface and climate, and from the 
attention which has long been paid in all the German States to 
sylviculture, is in a far better condition in this respect than its 
more southern neighbors; and though in the Alpine provinces 
of Bavaria and Austria the same improvidence which marks 
the rural economy of the corresponding districts of Switzerland, 
Italy, and France, has produced effects hardly less disastrous,* 


* Asan instance of the scarcity of fuelin some parts of the territory of 
Bavaria, where, not long since, wood abounded, I may mention the fact that 
the water of salt-springs is, in some instances, conveyed to the distance of 
sixty miles, in iron pipes, to reach a supply of fuel for boiling it down. 

In France, the juice of the sugar-beet is sometimes carried three or four 
miles in pipes for the same reason. 

Many of my readers may remember that it was not long ago proposed to 
manufacture the gas for the supply of London at the mouths of the coal- 
mines, and convey it to the city in pipes, thus saving the transportation of the 
coal; but as the coke and mineral tar would still have remained to be dis- 
posed of, the operation would probably not have proved advantageous. 

Great economy in the production of petroleum has resulted from the appli- 
cation of cast-iron tubes to the wells. instead of barrels; the oil is thus carried 


O24 FORESTS OF RUSSIA. 


yet, as a whole, the German States, as Siemoni well observes, 
must be considered as in this respect the model countries of 
Europe. Not only is the forest area in general maintained 
without diminution, but new woods are planted where they are 
specially needed,* and, though the slow growth of forest-trees in 
those climates reduces the direct pecuniary returns of woodlands 
to a minimum, the governments wisely persevere in encouraging 
this industry. The exportation of sawn lumber from Trieste is 
large, and in fact the Turkish and Egyptian markets are in 
great part supplied from this source. 


Forests of Russia. 


Russia, which we habitually consider as substantially a forest 
country—which has in fact a large proportion of woodland—is 
beginning to suffer seriously for want of wood. Jourdier 
observes: “ Instead of a vast territory with immense forests, 
which we expect to meet, one sees only scattered groves thinned 
by the wind or by the axe of the mowjzk, grounds cut over and 
more or less recently cleared for cultivation. There is probably 
not a single district in Russia which has not to deplore the 
ravages of man or of fire, those two great enemies of Muscovite 
sylviculture. This is so true, that clear-sighted men already 
foresee a crisis which will become terrible, unless the discovery 


over the various inequalities of surface for three or four miles to the tanks on 
the railroads, and forced into them by steam-engines. The price of transport 
is thus reduced one-fifth. 

* The Austrian Government is making energetic efforts for the propagation 
of forests on the desolate waste of the Karst. The difficulties from drought 
and from the violence of the winds, which might prove fatal to young and 
even to somewhat advanced plantations, are very serious, but in 1866 upwards 
of 400,000 trees had been planted and great quantities of seeds sown. Thus 
far, the results of this important experiment are said to be encouraging. See 
the Chronique Foresticre in the Revue des Haua et Foréts, Feb. 1870. 

+ For information respecting the forests of Germany, as well as other 
European countries, see, besides the works already cited, the very valuable 
Manuale @ Arte Forestale of Siemoni, 2de edizione, Firenze, 1872. 


FORESTS OF RUSSIA. 325 


of great deposits of some new combustible, as pit-coal or anthra- 
cite, shall diminish its evils.” * 


*CLavi, Etudes sur Economie Forestiére, p. 261. Clavé adds (p. 262): 
‘‘ The Russian forests are very unequally distributed through the territory of 
this vast empire. In the north they form immense masses, and cover whole 
provinces, while in the south they are so completely wanting that the inhabit- 
ants have no other fuel than straw, dung, rushes, and heath.” . . . ‘At 
Moscow, firewood costs thirty per cent. more than at Paris, while, at the dis- 
tance of a few leagues, it sells for a tenth of that price.” 

This state of things is partly due to the want of facilities of transportation, 
and some parts of the United States are in a similar condition. During a 
severe winter, ten or twelve years ago, the sudden freezing of the canals and 
rivers, before a large American town had received its usual supply of fuel, 
occasioned an enormous rise in the price of wood and coal, and the poor 
suffered severely for want of it. Within a few hours of the city were large 
forests and an abundant stock of firewood felled and prepared for burning. 
This might easily have been carried to town by the railroads which passed 
through the woods; but the managers of the roads refused to receive it as 
freight, because a rival market for wood might raise the price of the fuel 
they employed for their locomotives. Truly, our railways ‘‘ want a master.’’ 

Hohenstein, who was long professionally employed as a forester in Russia, 
describes the consequences of the general war upon the woods in that country 
as already most disastrous, and as threatening still more ruinous evils. The 
river Volga, the life artery of Russian internal commerce, is drying up from 
this cause, and the great Muscovite plains are fast advancing to a desolation 
like that of Persia.—Der Wald, p. 223. 

The level of the Caspian Sea is eighty-three feet lower than that of the Sea 
of Azoff, and the surface of Lake Aral is fast sinking. Von Baer maintains 
that the depression of the Caspian was produced by a sudden subsidence, 
from geological causes, and not gradually by excess of evaporation over sup- 
ply. See Kaspische Studien, p. 25. But this subsidence diminished the area 
and consequently the evaporation of that sea, and the rivers which once main- 
tained its ancient equilibrium ought to have raised it to its former level, if 
their own flow had not been diminished. It is, indeed, not proved that the lay- 
ing bare of a wooded country diminishes the total annual precipitation upon 
it; but it is certain that the summer delivery of water from the surface of a 
champaign region, like that through which the Volga, its tributaries, and the 
feeders of Lake Aral, flow, is lessened by the removal of its woods. Hence, 
though as much rain may still fall in the valleys of those rivers as when their 
whole surface was covered with forests, more moisture may be carried off by 
evaporation, and a less quantity of water be discharged by te rivers since 
their basins were cleared, and therefore the present condition of the inland 
waters in question may be due to the removal of the forests in their val!eys 
and the adjacent plains, 


826 FORESTS OF UNITED STATES. 


Forests of United States. 


I greatly doubt whether any one of the American States, ex- 
cept, perhaps, Oregon, has, at this moment, more woodland than 
it ought permanently to preserve, though, no doubt, a different 
distribution of the forests in all of them might be highly ad- 
vantageous. It is, perhaps, a misfortune to the American Union 
that the State Governments haye so generally disposed of their 
original domain to private citizens. It is true that public pro- 
perty is not sufficiently réspected in the United States; and 
within the memory of almost every man of mature age, timber 
was of so little value in the northernmost States that the own- 
ers of private woodlands submitted, almost without complaint, 
to what would be regarded elsewhere as very aggravated tres- 
passes upon them.* Persons in want of timber helped them- 
selves to it wherever they could find it, and a claim for dam- 
ages, for so insignificant a wrong as cutting down and carrying off 
a few pine or oak trees, was regarded as a mean-spirited act in 
a proprietor. The habits formed at this period are not alto- 
gether obsolete, and even now the notion of a common right of 
property in the woods still lingers, if not as an opinion at least 
as asentiment. Under such circumstances it has been difficult 
to protect the forest, whether it belong to the State or to indi- 


* According to the maxims of English jurisprudence, the common law con- 
sists of general customs so long established that ‘‘ the memory of man runneth 
not to the contrary.”’ In other words, long custom makes law. In new conn- 
tries, the change of circumstances creates new customs, and, in time, new 
law, without the aid of legislation. Had the American colonists observed a 
more sparing economy in the treatment of their woods, a new code of custom- 
ary forest-law would have sprung up and acquired the force of a statute. 
Popular habit was fast elaborating the fundamental principles of such a code, 
when the rapid increase in the value of timber, in consequence of the reckless 
devastation of the woodlands, made it the interest of the proprietors to inter- 
fere with this incipient system of forest jurisprudence, and appeal to the rules 
of English law for the protection of their woods. The courts have sustained 
these appeals, and forest property is now legally as inviolable as any other, 
though common opinion still combats the course of judicial decision on such 
questions. 


27 


(et) 


FORESTS OF UNITED STATES. 


viduals. Property of this kind is subject to plunder, as well as 
to frequent damage by fire. The destruction from these causes 
would, indeed, considerably lessen, but would by no means 
wholly annihilate the climatic and geographical influences of 
the forest, or ruinously diminish its value as a regular source of 
supply of fuel and timber. 

It is evidently a matter of the utmost importance that the 
public, and especially land-owners, be roused to a sense of the 
dangers to which the indiscriminate clearing of the woods may 
expose not only future generations, but the very soil itself. 
Some of the American States, as well as the Governments of 
many European colonies, still retain the ownership of great 
tracts of primitive woodland. The State of New York, for ex- 
ample, has, in its north-eastern counties, a vast extent of terri- 
tory in which the lumberman has only here and there estab- 
lished his camp, and where the forest, though interspersed with 
permanent settlements, robbed of some of its finest pine groves, 
and often ravaged by devastating fires, still covers far the lar- 
gest proportion of the surface. Through this territory the soil 
is generally poor, and even the new clearings have little of the 
luxuriance of harvest which distinguishes them elsewhere. 
The value of the land for agricultural uses is therefore very 
small, and few purchases are made for any other purpose than 
to strip the soil of its timber. It has been often proposed that 
the State should declare the remaining forest the inalienable 
property of the commonwealth, but I believe the motive of the 
suggestion has originated rather in poetical than in economical 
views of the subject. Both these classes of considerations have 
a real worth. It is desirable that some large and easily access- 
ible region of American soil should remain, as far as possible, 
in its primitive condition, at once a museum for the instruction 
of the student, a garden for the recreation of the lover of na- 
ture, and an asylum where indigenous tree, and humble plant 
that loves the shade, and fish and fowl and four-footed beast, 
may dwell and perpetuate their kind, in the enjoyment of such 
imperfect protection as the laws of a people jealous of restraint 


328 THE ADIRONDACK FOREST. 


can afford them. The immediate loss to the public treasury 
from the adoption of this policy would be inconsiderable, for 
these lands are sold at low rates. The forest alone, economi- 
cally managed, would, without injury, and even with benefit to 
its permanence and growth, soon yield a regular income larger 
than the present value of the fee. 

The collateral advantages of the preservation of these forests 
would be far greater. Nature threw up those mountains and 
clothed them with lofty woods, that they might serve as a reser- 
voir to supply with perennial waters the thousand rivers and 
rills that are fed by the rains and snows of the Adirondacks, 
and asa screen for the fertile plains of the central counties 
against the chilling blasts of the north wind, which, meet no 
other barrier in their sweep from the Arctic pole. The climate 
of Northern New York even now presents greater extremes of 
temperature than that of Southern France. The long-contin- 
ued cold of winter is more intense, the short heats of summer 
even fiercer than in Provence, and hence the preservation of 
every influence that tends to maintain an equilibrium of tempe- 
rature and humidity is of cardinal importance. The felling of 
the Adirondack woods would ultimately involve for Northern 
and Central New York consequences similar to those which have 
resulted from the laying bare of the southern and western de- 
clivities of the French Alps and the spurs, ridges, and detached 
peaks in front of them. 

It is true that the evils to be apprehended from the clearing 
of the mountains of New York may be less in degree than 
those which a similar cause has produced in Southern France, 
where the intensity of its action has been increased by the 
inclination of the mountain declivities, and by the peculiar 
geological constitution of the earth. The degradation of the 
soil is, perhaps, not equally promoted by a combination of the 
same circumstances, in any of the American Atlantic States, 
but still they have rapid slopes and loose and friable soils 
enough to render widespread desolation certain, if the further 
destruction of the woods is not soon arrested. The effects of 


FORMATION OF TORRENTS. 3829 


clearing are already perceptible in the comparatively unvio- 
lated region of which Iam speaking. The rivers which rise 
in it flow with diminished currents in dry seasons, and with 
augmented volumes of water after heavy rains. They bring 
down larger quantities of sediment, and the increasing ob- 
structions to the navigation of the Hudson, which are extend- 
ing themselves down the channel in proportion as the fields are 
encroaching upon the forest, give good grounds for the fear of 
irreparable injury to the commerce of the important towns on 
the upper waters of that river, unless measures are taken to 
prevent the expansion of “ improvements ” which have already 
been carried beyond the demands of a wise economy. 

In the Eastern United States the general character of the 
climate, soil, and surface is such, that for the formation of very 
destructive torrents a much longer time is required than would 
be necessary in the mountainous provinces of Italy or of France. 
But the work of desolation has begun even there, and wher- 
ever a rapid mountain-slope has been stripped of wood, incipi- 
ent ravines already plough the surface, and collect the pre- 
cipitation in channels which threaten serious mischief in the 
future. There is a peculiar action of this sort on the sandy sur- 
face of pine-forests and in other soils that unite readily with 
water, which has excited the attention of geographers and 
geologists. Soils of the first kind are found in all the Eastern 
States; those of the second are more frequent in the exhausted 
counties of Maryland, where tobacco is cultivated, and in the 
more southern territories of Georgia and Alabama. In these 
localities the ravines which appear after the cutting of the forest, 
through some accidental disturbance of the surface, or, in some 
formations, through the cracking of the soil in consequence of 
great drought or heat, enlarge and extend themselves with fear- 
ful rapidity. 

In Georgia and in Alabama, Lyell saw “the beginning of the 
formation of hundreds of valleys in places where the primitive 
forest had been recently cut down.” One of these, in Georgia, 
in a soil composed of clay and sand produced by the decompo-. 


330 AMERICAN FOREST-TREES. 


sition én si¢u of hornblendic gneiss with layers and veins of 
quartz, “and which did not exist before the felling of the 
forest twenty years previous,” he describes as more than 55 feet 
in depth, 800 yards in length, and from 20 to 180 feet in 
breadth. Our author refers to other cases in the same States, 
“ where the cutting down of the trees, which had prevented the 
rain from collecting into torrents and running off in sudden 
land-floods, has given rise to ravines from 70 to 80 feet deep.” * 

Similar results often follow in the North-eastern States from 
cutting the timber on the “ pine plains,” where the soil is usually 
of a sandy composition and loose texture. 


American Forest-Trees. 


The remaining forests of the Northern States and of Canada 
no longer boast the mighty pines which almost rivalled the 
gigantic sequoia and redwood of California; and the growth 
of the larger forest-trees is so slow, after they have attained to 
a certain size, that if every pine and oak were spared for two 
centuries, the largest now standing would not reach the stature 
of hundreds recorded to have been cut within two or three 
generations. Dr. Williams, who wrote about sixty years ago, 


* LYELL, Principles of Geology, 10th ed., vol. i., 345-6. 

+ The growth of the white pine, on a good soil and in open ground, is 
rather rapid until it reaches the diameter of a couple of feet, after which it 
is much slower. The favorite habitat of this tree is light, sandy earth. On 
this soil, and in a dense wood, it requires a century to attain the diameter of 
a yard. Emerson (7vees of Massachusetts, p. 65), says that a pine of this 
species, near Paris, ‘‘ thirty years planted, is eighty feet high, with a diameter 
of three feet.” He also states that ten white pines planted at Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, in 1809 or 1810, exhibited, in the winter of 1841 and 1842, an 
average of twenty inches diameter at the ground, the two largest measuring, 
at the height of three feet, four feet eight inches in circumference ; and he 
mentions another pine growing in a rocky swamp, which, at the age of thirty- 
two years, ‘‘gave seven feet in circumference at the but, with a height of 
sixty-two feet six inches.” This latter I suppose to be a seedling, the others 
transplanted trees, which might have been some years old when placed where 
they finally grew. 

The following case came under my own observation: In 1824 a pine-tree, 


AMERICAN FOREST-TREES. oo 


states the following as the dimensions of “such trees as are 
esteemed large ones of their kind in that part of America” 
[Vermont], qualifying his account with the remark that his 
measurements “do not denote the greatest which nature has 
produced of their particular species, but the greatest which are 
to be found in most of our towns.” 


Diameter. Height, 
ING), ssi aie ors wrote oilesiete 6 feet, 247 feet. 
Maple...... olsen wae ene 5 ‘* 9 inches, 
Buttonwood....... rea AO pe eee 
TEL «deena Bee oe Ea De 
Hemlock sateen A eee Oban <o | 
Ga 4 « From 100 to 200 feet. 
Basswood 2) 223s oes a 
TNS Wy Oe Ser Rael a's hae Aust 
EB INCHS Ae yseheee neice As uk 


He adds a note saying that a white pine was cut in Dun- 
stable, New Hampshire, in the year 1736, the diameter of 
which was seven feet and eight inches. Dr. Dwight says that 
a fallen pine in Connecticut was found to measure two hun- 


so small that a young lady, with the help of a lad, took it up from the ground 
and carried it a quarter of a mile, was planted near a house in a town in 
Vermont. It was occasionally watered, but received no other special treat- 
ment, I measured this tree in 1860, and found it, at four feet from the 
ground, and entirely above the spread of the roots, two feet and four inches 
in diameter. A new measurement in 1871 gave a diameter of two feet eight 
inches, being an increase of four inches in eleven years, a slower rate than 
that of preceding years. It could not have been more than three inches 
through when transplanted, and up to 1860 must have increased its diameter 
at the rate of about seven-tenths of an inch per year, almost double its later 
growth. In 1871 the crown had a diameter of 62 feet. 

In the same neighborhood, elms transplanted in 1803, when they were not 
above three or four inches through, had attained, in 1871, a diameter of from 
four feet to four feet two inches, with a spread of crown of from 90 to 112 
feet. Sugar-maples, transplanted in 1822, at about the same size, measured 
two feet three inches through. This growth undoubtedly considerably ex- 
ceeds that of trees of the same species in the natural forest, though the 
transplanted trees had received no other fertilizing application than an un- 
limited supply of light and air. 


832 AMERICAN FOREST-TREES. 


dred and forty-seven feet in height, and adds: “A few years 
since, such trees were in great numbers along the northern 
parts of Connecticut River.” In another letter, he speaks of 
the white pine as “frequently six feet in diameter, and two 
hundred and fifty feet in height,” and states that a pine had 
been cut in Lancaster, New Hampshire, which measured two 
hundred and sixty-four feet. Emerson wrote in 1846: “ Fifty 
years ago, several trees growing on rather dry land in Bland- 
ford, Massachusetts, measured, after they were felled, two hun- 
dred and twenty-three feet.” All these trees are surpassed by 
a pine felled at Hanover, New Hampshire, about a hundred 
years ago, and described as measuring two hundred and seyenty- 
four feet.* These descriptions, it will be noticed, apply to 
trees cut from seventy to one hundred and forty years since. 
Persons, whom observation has rendered familiar with the 
present character of the American forest, will be struck with 
the smallness of the diameter which Dr. Williams and Dr. 
Dwight ascribe to trees of such extraordinary height. Indi- 
viduals of the several species mentioned in Dr. Williams’s table 
are now hardly to be found in the same climate, exceeding 
one-half or at most two-thirds of the height which he assigns 
to them; but, except in the case of the oak and the pine, the 
diameter stated by him would not be thought very extraordi- 
nary in trees of far less height, now standing. Even in the 
species I have excepted, those diameters, with half the heights 
of Dr. Williams, might perhaps be paralleled at the present 
time ; and many elms, transplanted, at a diameter of six inches, 
within the memory of persons still living, measure four and 
sometimes even five feet through. For this change in the 
growth of forest-trees there are two reasons: the one is, that 
the great commercial value of the pine and the oak have caused 
the destruction of all the best—that is, the tallest and straight- 
est—specimens of both; the other, that the thinning of the 


* WinuiAMs, History of Vermont, ii., p. 53. Dwieur’s Travels, iv., p. 21, 
and iii, p. 36. Emmerson, Z’rees of Massachusetts, p. 61. Parisn, Life of 
President Wheelock, p. 56. 


AMERICAN FOREST-TREES. 3am 


woods by the axe of the lumberman has allowed the access of 
light and heat and air to trees of humbler worth and lower 
stature, which have survived their more towering brethren. 
These, consequently, have been able to expand their crowns 
and swell their stems to a degree not possible so long as they 
were overshadowed and stifled by the lordly oak and pine. 
While, therefore, the New England forester must search long 
before he finds a pine 


fit to be the mast 
Of some great ammiral, 


beeches and elms and birches, as sturdy as the mightiest of 
their progenitors, are still no rarity.* 

California fortunately still preserves her magnificent se- 
quoias, which rise to the height of three hundred feet, and 


* The forest-trees of the Northern States do not attain to extreme longevity 
in the dense woods.- Dr. Williams found that none of the huge pines, the age 
of which he ascertained, exceeded three hundred and fifty or four hundred 
years, though he quotes a friend who thought he had noticed trees consider- 
ably older. The oak lives longer than the pine, and the hemlock-spruce is 
perhaps equally long lived. A tree of this latter species, cut within my knowl- 
edge in a thick wood, counted four hundred and eighty-six, or, according to 
another observer, five hundred annual circles. 

Great luxuriance of animal and vegetable production is not commonly ac- 
companied by long duration of the individual. The oldest men are not found 
in the crowded city ; and in the tropics, where life is prolific and precocious, 
it is also short. The most ancient forest-trees of which we have accounts 
have not been those growing in thick woods, but isolated specimens, with no 
taller neighbor to intercept the light and heat and air, and no rival to share 
the nutriment afforded by the soil. 

The more rapid growth and greater dimensions of trees standing near the 
boundary of the forest, are matters of familiar observation. ‘‘ Long experi- 
ence has shown that trees growing on the confines of the wood may be cut at 
sixty years of age as advantageously as others of the same species, reared in 
the depth of the forest, at a hundred and twenty. We have often remarked, 
in our Alps, that the trunk of trees upon the border of a grove is most de- 
veloped or enlarged upon the outer or open side, where the branches extend 
themselves farthest, while the concentric circles of growth are most uniform 
in those entirely surrounded by other trees, or standing entirely alone.”—A. 
and G. VILLA, Wecessita dei Boschi, pp. 17, 13. 


O04 VARIETY OF TREES IN AMERICA, 


sometimes, as we are assured, even to three hundred and sixty 
and four hundred feet, and she has also pines and cedars of 
scarcely inferior dimensions. The public being now convinced 
of the importance of preserving these colossal trees, it is very 
probable that the fear of their total destruction may prove 
groundless, and we may still hope that some of them may 
survive even till that distant future when the skill of the forester 
shall have raised from their seeds a progeny as lofty and as 
majestic as those which now exist.* 


European and American Trees compared. 


The woods of North America are strikingly distinguished 
from those of Europe by the vastly greater variety of species 
they contain. According to Clavé, there are in “France and 
in most parts of Europe only about twenty forest-trees, five 
or six of which are spike-leaved and resinous, the remainder 
broad-leaved.” + Our author, however, doubtless means genera, 
though he uses the word especes. Rossmissler enumerates fifty- 
seven species of forest-trees as found in Germany, but some of 
these are mere shrubs, some are fruit and properly garden 
trees, and some others are only varieties of familiar species. 
The valuable manual of Parade describes about the same num- 
ber, including, however, two of American origin—the locust, 
Robinia pseudacacia, and the Weymouth or white pine, Pinus 
strobus—and the cedar of Lebanon from Asia, which, or at 
least a very closely allied species, is indigenous in Algeria 
also. We may then safely say that Europe does not possess 


* California must surrender to Australia the glory of possessing the tallest 
trees. According to Dr. Mueller, Director of the Government Botanic Gar- 
den at Melbourne, a Hucalyptus, near Healesville, measured 480 feet in height, 
Later accounts speak of trees of the same species fully 500 feet in height. 
See ScHLEIDEN, Piir Baum und Wald, p. 21. 

If we may credit late reports, the growth of the eucalyptus is so rapid in 
California, that the child is perhaps now born who will see the tallest sequoia 
overtopped by this new vegetable emigrant from Australia. 

+ Etudes Forestiéres, p. 7. 


VARIETY OF TREES IN AMERICA. oan 


above forty or fifty native trees of such economical value as 
to be worth the special care of the forester, while the oak alone 
numbers more than thirty species in the United States,* and 
some other North American genera are almost equally diversi- 


fied.+ 


* For full catalogues of American forest-trees, and remarks on their geo- 
graphical distribution, consult papers on the subject by Dr. J. G. Cooper, in 
the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1858, and the Report of the 
United States Patent Office, Agricultural Division, for 1860. 

+ Although Spenser’s catalogue of trees occurs in the first canto of the first 
book of the ‘‘ Faéry Queene ”—the only canto of that exquisite poem actually 
read by most students of English literature—it is not so generally familiar as 
to make the quotation of it altogether superfluous: 


AYALA Ee 


Enforst to seeke some covert nigh at hand, 

A shadie grove not farr away they spide, 

That promist ayde the tempest to withstand ; 

Whose loftie trees, yclad with sommers pride, 

Did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide, 

Not perceable with power of any starr: 

And all within were pathes and alleies wide, 

With footing worne, and leading inward farr ; 

Faire harbour that them seems; so in they entered ar. 


Hraieacnce 


And foorth they passe, with pleasure forward led, 
Joying to heare the birdes sweete harmony, 
Which therein shrouded from the tempest dred, 
Seemd in their song to scorne the cruell sky. 
Much can they praise the trees so straight and hy, 
The sayling pine; the cedar stout and tall; 

The vine-propp elm ; the poplar never dry ; 

The bnilder oake, sole king of forrests all ; 

The aspine good for staves; the cypresse funerall ; 


EX. 


The laurell, meed of mightie conquerours 

And poets sage; the firre that weepeth still; 

The willow, worne of forlorn paramours ; 

The eugh, obedient to the benders will 5 

The birch for shaftes; the sallow for the mill; 

The mirrhe sweete-bleeding in the bitter wound $ 
The warlike beech; the ash for nothing ill; 

The fruitfull olive; and the platane round 5 

The carver holme; the maple seeldom inward sound. 


Although the number of species of American forest-trees is much larger 
than of European, yet the distinguishable variectics are relatively more numer- 


836 TREES OF EUROPE AND AMERICA COMPARED. 


While the American forest flora has made large contribu- 
tions to that of Europe, comparatively few European trees have 
been naturalized in the United States, and as a general rule the 
indigenous trees of Europe do not succeed well in our climate. 
The European mountain-ash—which in beauty, dimensions, and 
healthfulness of growth is superior to our own *—the horse- 
chestnut, and the abele, or silver poplar, are valuable additions 
to the ornamental trees of North America. The Swiss arve or 
zirbelkiefer, Pinus cembra, which yields a well-flavored edible 
seed and furnishes excellent wood for carving, the umbrella- 
pine, + which also bears a seed agreeable to the taste, and 
which, from the color of its foliage and the beautiful form of 
its dome-like crown, is among the most elegant of trees, the 
white birch of Central Europe, with its pendulous branches 
almost rivalling those of the weeping willow in length, flexi- 
bility, and gracefulness of fall, and, especially, the “ cypresse 
funerall,’ might be introduced into the United States with 
great advantage to the landscape. The European beech and 
chestnut furnish timber of far better quality than that of their 
American congeners. The fruit of the European chestnut, 
though inferior to the American in sweetness and flavor, is 


ous in the Old World, even in the case of trees not generally receiving special 
eare. This multiplication of varieties is no doubt a result, though not a 
foreseen or intended one, of human action; for the ordinary operations of 
European forest economy expose young trees to different conditions from 
those presented by nature, and new conditions produce new forms. All Euro- 
pean woods, except in the remote North, even if not technically artificial for- 
ests, acquire a more or less artificial character from the governing hand of man, 
and the effect of this interference is seen in the constant deviation of trees 
from the original type. The holly, for example, even when growing as abso- 
lutely wild as any tree can ever grow in countries long occupied by man, pro- 
duces numerous varieties, and twenty or thirty such, not to mention inter- 
mediate shades, are described and named as recognizably different, in treatises 
on the forest-trees of Europe. 

*JIn the Northern Tyrol mountain-ashes fifteen inches in diameter are not 
uncommon. The berries are distilled with grain to flavor the spirit. 

+ The mountain ranges of our extreme West produce a pine closely resembling 
the Huropean umbrella-pine. 


EUROPEAN TREES. Bom 


larger, and is an important article of diet among the French 
and Italian peasantry. The walnut of Europe, though not 
equal to some of the American species in beauty of growth or 
of wood, or to others in strength and elasticity of fibre, is valua- 
ble for its timber and its oil.* The maritine pine, which has 
proved of such immense use in fixing drifting sands in France, 


* The walnut is a more valuable tree than is generally supposed. It yields 
one-third of the oil produced in France, and in this respect occupies an inter- 
mediate position between the olive of the south and the oleaginous seeds of 
the north. A hectare (about two and a half acres) will produce nuts to the 
value of five hundred francesa year, which cost nothing but the gathering. 
Unfortunately, its maturity must be long waited for, and more nut-trees are 
felled than planted. The demand for its wood in cabinet-work is the princi- 
pal cause of its destruction. See LAVERGNE, Economie Rurale de la France, 
p. 203. 

According to Cosimo Ridolfi (Lezioni Orali, ii., p. 424), France obtains three 
times as much oil from the walnut as from the olive, and nearly as much as 
from all oleaginous seeds together. He states that the walnut bears nuts at 
the age of twenty years, and yields its maximum product at seventy,and that a 
hectare of ground, with thirty trees, or twelve to the acre, is equal to a capital 
of twenty-five hundred francs. 

The nut of this tree is known in the United States as the ‘‘ English walnut.” 
The finit and the wood much resemble those of the American black walnut, 
Juglans nigra, but for cabinet-work the American is the more beautiful 
material, especially when the large knots are employed. The timber of the 
European species, when straight-grained, and clear, or free from Imots, is, for 
ordinary purposes, better than that of the American black walnut, but bears 
no comparison with the wood of the hickory, when strength combined with 
elasticity is required, and its nut is very inferior in taste to that of the shag- 
bark, as well as to the butternut, which it somewhat resembles. . 

‘‘ The chestnut is more valuable still, for it produces on a sterile soil, which, 
without it, would yield only ferns and heaths, an abundant nutriment for 
man.”—LAVERGNE, Economie Rurale dela France, p. 253. 

I believe the varieties developed by cultivation are less numerous in the 
walnut than in the chestnut, which latter tree is often grafted in Southern 
Europe. 

The chestnut crop of France was estimated in 1848 at 3,478,000 hectolitres, 
or 9,877,520 Winchester bushels, and valued at 13,528,000 francs, or more than 
two million and a half dollars. In Tuscany the annual yield is computed at 
about 550,000 bushels. 

The Tuscan peasants think the flour of the dried chestnut not less nutritious 
than Indian cornmeal, and it sells at the same price, or about three cents per 


English pound, in the mountains, and four cents in the towns. 
22 


308 EUROPEAN TREES. 


may perhaps be better adapted to this purpose than any of the 
pines of the New World, and it is of great importance for its 
turpentine, resin, and tar. The épicéa, or common fir, Adzes 
prcea, Abies excelsa, Picea excelsa, abundant in the mountains 
of France and the contiguous country, is known for its product, 
Burgundy pitch, and, as it flourishes in a greater variety of soil 
and climate than almost any other spike-leaved tree, it might 
be well worth transplantation.* The cork oak has been intro- 
duced into California and some other parts of the United 
States, I believe, and would undoubtedly thrive in the Southern 
section of the Union.t 


* This fir is remarkable for its tendency to cicatrize or heal over its stumps, 
a property which it possesses in common with some other firs, the maritime 
pine, and the European larch. When these trees grow in thick clumps, their 
roots are apt to unite by a species of natural grafting, and if one of them be 
felled, although its own proper rootlets die, the stump may continue, some- 
times for a century, to receive nourishment from the radicles of the surround- 
ing trees, and a dome of wood and bark of considerable thickness be formed 
over it. The healing is, however, only apparent, for the entire stump, except 
the outside ring of annual growth, soon dies, and even decays within its cover- 
ing, without sending out new shoots. See Monthly Report, Department of 
Agriculture, for October, 1872. 

+ At the age of twelve or fifteen years, the cork-tree is stripped of its outer 
bark for the first time. This first yield is of inferior quality, and is employed 
for floats for nets and buoys, or burnt for lampblack. After this, a new layer 
of cork, an inch or an inch and a quarter in thickness, is formed about once in 
ten years, and is removed in large sheets without injury to the tree, which 
lives‘a hundred and fifty years or more. According to Clavé (p. 252), the 
annual product of a forest of cork oaks is calculated at about 660 kilogrammes, 
worth 150 francs, to the hectare, which, deducting expenses, leaves a profit 
of 100 francs. This is about equal to 250 pound weight, and eight dollars 
profit to the acre. The cork oaks of the national domain in Algeria cover 
about 500,000 acres, and are let to individuals at rates which are expected, 
when the whole is rented, to yield to the state a revenue of about $2,000,000. 

George Sand, in the Histoire de ma Vie, speaks of the cork-forests in 
Southern France as among the most profitable of rural possessions, and states, 
what I do not remember to have seen noticed elsewhere, that Russia is the 
best customer for cork. The large sheets taken from the trees are slit into 
thin plates, and used to line the walls of apartments in that cold climate. On 
the cultivation and management of the cork oak, see Des Incendies et de la 
culture du Chene-liege, in Revue des Haux et Foréts for February, 1869. 


TREES OF SOUTHERN EUROPE. 309 

In the walnut, the chestnut, the cork oak, the mulberry, the 
olive, the orange, the lemon, the fig, and the multitude of other 
trees which, by their fruit, or by other products, yield an annual 
revenue, nature has provided Southern Europe with a partial com- 
pensation for the loss of the native forest. It is true that these 
trees, planted as most of them are at such distances as to admit 
of cultivation, or of the growth of grass among them, are but an 
inadequate substitute for the thick and shady wood; but they 
perform to a certain extent the same offices of absorption and 
transpiration, they shade the surface of the ground, they serve 
to break the force of the wind, and on many a steep declivity, 
many a bleak and barren hillside, the chestnut binds the soil 
together with its roots, and prevents tons of earth and gravel 
from washing down upon the fields and the gardens. Fruit- 
trees are not wanting, certainly, north of the Alps. The apple, 
the pear, and the prune are important in the economy both of 
man and of nature, but they are far less numerous in Switzerland 
and Northern France than are the trees I have mentioned in 
Southern Europe, both because they are in general less remu- 
nerative, and because the climate, in higher latitudes, does not 
permit the free introduction of shade trees into grounds occu- 
pied for agricultural purposes.* 


* The walnut, the chestnut, the apple, and the pear are common to the bor- 
der between the countries I have mentioned, but the range of the other trees 
is bounded by the Alps, and by a well-defined and sharply drawn line to the 
west of those mountains. From some peculiarity in the sky of Europe, culti- 
vated plants will thrive, in Northern Italy, in Southern France, and even in 
Switzerland, under a depth of shade where no crop, not even grass, worth 
harvesting, would grow in the United States with an equally high summer 
temperature. Hence the cultivation of all these trees is practicable in Europe 
to a greater extent than would be supposed reconcilable with the interests of 
agriculture. Some idea of the importance of the olive orchards may be formed 
from the fact that Sicily alone, an island scarcely exceeding 10,000 square 
miles in area, of which one-third at least is absolutely barren, has exported to 
the single port of Marseilles more than 2,000,000 pounds weight of olive-oil per 
year, for the last thirty years. 

According to Cosimo Ridolfi, Lezion? Orali, vol. ii., p. 340, in a favorable soil 
and climate the average yield of oil from poorly manured trees, which com- 
pose the great majority, is six English pounds, while with the best cultivation it 


340 THE AMERICAN FORESTS. 


The multitude of species, intermixed as they are in their 
spontaneous growth, gives the American forest landscape a 
variety of aspect not often seen in the woods of Europe, and 
the gorgeous tints, which nature repeats from the dying dolphin 
to paint the falling leaf of the American maples, oaks, and ash 
trees, clothe the hillsides and fringe the water-courses with a 
rainbow splendor of foliage, unsurpassed by the brightest 
groupings of the tropical flora. It must be confessed, however, 
that both the northern and the southern declivities of the Alps 
exhibit a nearer approximation to this rich and multifarious 
coloring of autumnal vegetation than most American travellers 
in Europe are willing to allow; and, besides, the small decidu- 
ous shrubs which often carpet the forest-glades of these moun- 
tains are dyed with a ruddy and orange glow, which, in the 
distant landscape, is no mean substitute for the scarlet and 
crimson and gold and amber of the transatlantic woodland.* 

I admit, though not without reluctance, that the forest-trees 


rises to twenty-three pounds. The annual production of olive-oil in the whole 
of Italy is estimated at upwards of 850,000,000 pounds, and if we allow twelve 
pounds to the tree, we have something more than 70,000,000 trees. The real 
number of trees is, however, much greater than this estimate, for in Tuscany 
and many other parts of Italy the average yield of oil per tree does not exceed 
two pounds, and there are many millions of young trees not yet in bearing. 
Probably we shall not exaggerate if we estimate the olive trees of Italy at 
100,000,000, and as there are about a hundred trees to the acre, the quantity 
of land devoted to the cultivation of the olive may be taken at a million acres, 
Although olive-oil is much used in cookery in Italy, lard is preferred as more 
nutritious. Much American lard is exported to South-eastern Italy, and olive- 
oil is imported in return. 

* The most gorgeous autumnal coloring I have observed in the vegetation of 
Europe has been in the valleys of the Durance and its tributaries in Dauphiny. 
I must admit that neither in variety nor in purity and brilliancy of tint, does 
this coloring fall much, if at all, short of that of the New England woods. 
But there is this difference: in Dauphiny, it is only in small shrubs that this 
rich painting is seen, while in North America the foliage of large trees is dyed 
in full splendor. Hence the American woodland has fewer broken lights and 
more of what painters call breadth of coloring. Besides this, the arrangement 
of the leafage in large globular or conical masses, affords a wider scale of light 
and shade, thus aiding now the gradation now the contrast of tints, and gives 


THE AMERICAN FORESTS. 3841 


of Central and Southern Europe have a great advantage over 
our own in the corresponding latitudes, in density of foliage as 
well as in depth of color and persistence of the leaves in 
deciduous species. An American, who, after a long absence 
from the United States, returns in the full height of summer, 
is painfully surprised at the thinness and poverty of the leafage 
even of the trees which he had habitually regarded as specially 
umbrageous, and he must wait for the autumnal frosts before 
he can recover his partiality for the glories of his native woods. 

None of our north-eastern evergreens resemble the umbrella 
pine sufficiently to be a fair object of comparison with it. A 
cedar, very common above the Highlands on the Hudson, and 
elsewhere, is extremely like the cypress, straight, slender, with 
erect, compressed ramification, and feathered to the ground, but 
its foliage is neither so dark nor so dense, the tree does not 
attain the majestic height of the cypress, nor has it the lithe 
flexibility of that tree.* In mere shape, the Lombardy poplar 
nearly resembles this latter, but it is almost a profanation to 
compare the two, especially when they are agitated by the 
wind; for under such circumstances, the one is the most 


the American October landscape a softer and more harmonious tone than 
marks the humble shrubbery of the forest hillsides of Dauphiny. 

Thoreau—who was not, like some very celebrated landscape critics of the 
present day, an outside spectator of the action and products of natural forces, 
but, in the old religious sense, an observer of organic nature, living, more than 
almost any other descriptive writer, among and with her children—has a very 
eloquent paper on the ‘‘ Autumnal Tints” of the New England landscape.— 
See his Hxeursions, pp. 215 et segq. 

Few men have personally noticed so many facts in natural history accessible 
to unscientific observation as Thoreau, and yet he had never seen that very 
common and striking spectacle, the phosphorescence of decaying wood, until, 
in the latter years of his life, it caught his attention in a bivouac in the forests 
of Maine. He seems to have been more excited by this phenomenon than by 
any other described in his works. It must be a capacious eye that takes in all 
the visible facts in the history of the most familiar natural object.—Te Maine 
Woods, p. 184. 

* The cold winter, or rather spring, of 1872 proved fatal to many cypresses as 
well as olive trees in the Val d’Arno, The cypress, therefore, could be intro- 
duced only into California and our Southern States. 


3842 EVERGREENS OF SOUTHERN EUROPE, 


majestic, the other the most ungraceful, or—if I may apply 
such an expression to anything but human affectation of 
movement —the most awkward of trees. The poplar trembles 
before the blast, flutters, struggles wildly, dishevels its foliage, 
gropes around with its feeble branches, and hisses as in 
impotent passion. The cypress gathers its limbs still more 
closely to its stem, bows a gracious salute rather than an hum- 
ble obeisance to the tempest, bends to the wind with an elasti- 
city that assures you of its prompt return to its regal attitude, 
and sends from its thick leaflets a murmur like the roar of the 
far-off ocean. 

The cypress and the umbrella-pine are not merely conven- 
tional types of the Italian landscape. They are essential ele- 
ments in a field of rural beauty which can be seen in perfec- 
tion only in the basin of the Mediterranean, and they are as 
characteristic of this class of scenery as is the date-palm of the 
oases of the Eastern desert. There is however, this difference : 
a single cypress or pine is often enough to shed beauty over a 
wide area; the palm is a social tree, and its beauty is not so 
much that of the individual as of the group.* The frequency 
of the cypress and the pine—combined with the fact that the 
other trees of Southern Europe which most interest a stranger 
from the north, the orange and the lemon, the cork oak, the 
ilex, the myrtle, and the laurel, are evergreens—goes far to ex- 
plain the beauty of the winter scenery of Italy. Indeed, it is 
only in the winter that a tourist who confines himself to wheel- 
carriages and high roads can acquire any notion of the face of 


* European poets, whose knowledge of the date-palm is not founded on per- 
sonal observation, often describe its trunk as not only slender, but particularly 
struight. Nothing can be farther from the truth. When the Orientals com- 
pare the form of a beautiful girl to the stem of the palm, they do not repre- 
sent it as rigidly straight, but on the contrary as made up of graceful curves, 
which seem less like permanent outlines than like flowing motion. Ina palm 
grove, the trunks, so far from standing planted upright like the candles of a 
chandelier, bend in a vast variety of curves, now leaning towards, now diverg- 
ing from, now crossing, each other, and among a hundred you will hardly see 
two whose axes are parallel. 


FOREST FURNISHES NO FOOD FOR MAN. 643 


the earth, and form any proper geographical image of that 
country. At other seasons, not high walls only, but equally im- 
pervious hedges, and now, unhappily, acacias thickly planted 
along the railway routes, confine the view so completely, that 
the arch of a tunnel, or a night-cap over the traveller’s eyes, is 
scarcely a more effectual obstacle to the gratification of his 
curiosity.* 


The Forest does not furnish Food for Man. 


In a region absolutely covered with trees, human life could 
not long be sustained, for want of animal and vegetable food. 
The depths of the forest seldom furnish either bulb or fruit 
suited to the nourishment of man; and the fowls and beasts on 
which he feeds are scarcely seen except upon the margin of the 
wood, for here only grow the shrubs and grasses, and here only 
are found the seeds and insects, which form the sustenance of 
the non-carnivorous birds and quadrupeds.t 


* Besides this, in a country so diversified in surface as Italy, with the exception 
f the champaign region drained by the Po, every new field of view requires 
either an extraordinary cowp d@ wil in the spectator, or a long study, in order to 
master its relief, its plans, its salient and retreating angles. In summer, ex- 
cept of course in the bare mountains, the universal greenery confounds light 
and shade, distance and foreground; and though the impression upon a trav- 
eller, who journeys for the sake of ‘‘ sensations,” may be strengthened by the 
mysterious annihilation of all standards for the measurement of space, yet 
the superior intelligibility of the winter scenery of Italy is more profitable to 
those who see with a view to analyze. 

+ Clavé, as well as many earlier writers, supposes that primitive man de- 
rived his nutriment from the spontaneous productions of the wood. ‘‘Itis 
to the forests,” says he, ‘‘ that man was first indebted for the means of sub- 
sistence. Exposed alone, without defence, to the rigor of the seasons, as 
well as to the attacks of animals stronger and swifter than himself, he found 
in them his first shelter, drew from them his first weapons. In the first period 
of humanity, they provided for all his wants: they furnished him wood for 
warmth, fruits for food, garments to cover his nakedness, arms for his de- 
fence.” —Iitudes sur 0 Economie Forestiére, p, 13. 

But the history of savage life, as far as it is known to us, presents man in 
that condition as inhabiting only the borders of the forest and the open 


344 FIRST REMOVAL OF THE FOREST. 


First Removal of the Forest. 


When multiplying man had filled the open grounds alcng 
the margin of the rivers, the lakes, and the sea, and sufticiently 
peopled the natural meadows and savannas of the interior, 
where such existed, he could find room for expansion and fur- 
ther growth only by the removal of a portion of the forest 
that hemmed him in. The destruction of the woods, then, was 
man’s first geographical conquest, his first violation of the har- 
monies of inanimate nature. 


grounds that skirt the waters and the woods, and as finding only there the 
aliments which make up his daily bread. The villages of the North American 
Indians were upon the shores of rivers and lakes, and theix weapons and other 
relics are found only in the narrow open grounds which they had burned over 
and cultivated, or in the margin of the woods around their hamlets, 

Except upon the banks of rivers or of lakes, the woods of the interior of 
North America, far from the habitations of man, are almost destitute of animal 
life. Dr. Newberry, describing the vast forests of the yellow pine of the West, 
Pinus ponderosa, remarks: ‘‘ In the arid and desert regions of the interior basin, 
we made whole days’ marches in forests of yellow pine, of which neither the 
monotony was broken by other forms of vegetation, nor its stilmess by the 
flutter of a bird or the hum of an insect.”—Pucific Railroad Report, vol. vi., 
1857. Dr. NEwBeRRY’s Report on Botany, p. 37. 

Cheadle and Milton’s North-west Passage confirms these statements, Val- 
vasor says, ina paragraph already quoted, ‘“‘ In my many journeys through 
this valley, I did never have sight of so much as a single bird.”’ 

The wild fruit and nut trees, the Canada plum, the cherries, the many species 
of walnut, the butternut, the hazel, yield very little, frequently nothing, so long 
as they grow in the woods; and it is only when the trees around them are 
cut down, or when they grow in pastures, that they become productive. The 
berries, too—the strawberry, the blackberry, the raspberry, the whortleberry, 
scarcely bear fruit at all except in cleared ground. 

The rank forests of the tropics are as unproductive of human aliment as 
the less luxuriant woods of the temperate zone. In Strain’s unfortunate ex- 
pedition across the great American isthmus, where the journey lay principally 
through thick woods, several of the party died of starvation, and for many 
days the survivors were forced to subsist on the scantiest supplies of unnutri- 
tious vegetables perhaps never before employed for food by man. See the 
interesting account of that expedition in Harper's Magazine for March, April, 
and May, 1855. 


FIRST REMOVAL OF THE FOREST. 345 


Primitive man had little occasion to fell trees for fuel, or for 
the construction of dwellings, boats, and the implements of his 
rude agriculture and handicrafts. Windfalls would furnish a 
thin population with a sufficient supply of such material, and 
if occasionally a growing tree was cut, the injury to the forest 
would be too insignificant to be at all appreciable. 

The accidental escape and spread of fire, or, possibly, the 
combustion of forests by lightning, must have first suggested 
the advantages to be derived from the removal of too abun- 
dant and extensive woods, and, at the same time, have pointed 
out a means by which a large tract of surface could readily be 
cleared of much of this natural incumbrance. As soon as agri- 
culture had commenced at all, it would be observed that the 
growth of cultivated plants, as well as of many species of wild 
vegetation, was particularly rapid and luxuriant on soils which 
had been burned over, and thus a new stimulus would be 
given to the practice of destroying the woods by fire, as a 
means of both extending the open grounds, and making the 
acquisition of a yet more productive soil. After a few har- 
vests had exhausted the first rank fertility of the virgin mould, 
or when weeds and briers and the sprouting roots of the trees 
had begun to choke the crops of the half-subdued soil, the 
ground would be abandoned for new fields won from the forest 
by the same means, and the deserted plain or hillock would 
soon clothe itself anew with shrubs and trees, to be again sub- 
jected to the same destructive process, and again surrendered 
to the restorative powers of vegetable nature.* This rude 


* In many parts of the North American States, the first white settlers 
found extensive tracts of thin woods, of a very park-like character, called 
‘** oak-openings,” from the predominance of different species of that tree upon 
them. These were the semi-artificial pasture-grounds of the Indians, brought 
into that state, and so kept, by partial clearing, and by the annual burning of 
the grass. The object of this operation was to attract the deer to the fresh 
herbage which sprang up after the fire. The oaks bore the annual scorching 
at least for a certain time; but if it had been indefinitely continued, they 
would very probably have been destroyed at last. The soil would have then been 
much in the prairie condition, and would have needed nothing but grazing for 


346 CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST. 


economy would be continued for generations, and, wasteful as it 
is, is still largely pursued in Northern Sweden, Swedish Lap- 
land, and sometimes even in France and the United States.* 


Principal Causes of the Destruction of the Forest. 


The needs of agriculture are the most familiar cause of the 
destruction of the forest in new countries; for not only does 
an increasing population demand additional acres to grow the 
vegetables which feed it and its domestic animals, but the sloy- 
enly husbandry of the border settler soon exhausts the luxuri- 
ance of his first fields, and compels him to remove his household 
gods to a fresher soil. The extent of cleared ground required 
for agricultural use depends very much on the number and 
kinds of the cattle bred. We have seen, in a former chapter, 
that, in the United States, the domestic quadrupeds amount to 
more than a hundred millions, or nearly three times the num- 
ber of the human population of the Union. In many of the 


a long succession of years to make the resemblance perfect. That the an- 
nual fires alone occasioned the peculiar character of the oak-openings, is 
proved by the fact that as soon as the Indians had left the country, young 
trees of many species sprang up and grew luxuriantly upon them. See a 
very interesting account of the oak-openings in DwieuHt’s TZ7avels, iv., pp- 
58-63. 

* The practice of burning over woodland, at once to clear and manure the 
ground, is called in Swedish svedjande, a participial noun from the verb 
att svedja, to burn over. Though used in Sweden as a preparation for crops 
of rye or other grain, itis employed in Lapland more frequently to secure an 
abundant growth of pasturage, which follows in two or three years after the 
fire; and it is sometimes resorted to as a mode of driving the Laplanders and 
their reindeer from the vicinity of the Swedish backwoodsman’s grass-grounds 
and hay-stacks, to which they are dangerous neighbors. The forest, indeed, 
rapidly recovers itself, but it is a generation or more before the reindeer-moss 
grows again. When the forest consists of pine, tal/, the ground, instead of 
being rendered fertile by this process, becomes hopelessly barren, and for a 
long time afterwards produces nothing but weeds and briers.—La:sTADIUS, Om 
Uppodlingar i Lappmarken, p. 15. See also ScHuBeRT, Resa t Sverge, ii., p. 
375. 

In some parts of France this practice is so general that Clavé says: ‘‘In 
the department of Ardennes it (/e sartage) is the basis of agriculture.” 


CAUSES OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST. 847 


Western States, the swine subsist more or less on acorns, nuts, 
and other products of the woods, and the prairies, or natural 
meadows of the Mississippi valley, yield a large amount of food 
for beast, as well as for man. With these exceptions, all this 
vast army of quadrupeds is fed wholly on grass, grain, pulse, 
and roots grown on soil reclaimed from the forest by European 
settlers. It is true that the flesh of domestic quadrupeds en- 
ters very largely into the aliment of the American people, and 
greatly reduces the quantity of vegetable nutriment which they 
would otherwise consume, so that a smaller amount of agricul- 
tural product is required for immediate human food, and, of 
course, a smaller extent of cleared land is needed for the growth 
of that product, than if no domestic animals existed. But the 
flesh of the horse, the ass, and the mule is not consumed by 
man, and the sheep is reared rather for its fleece than for food. 
Besides this, the ground required to produce the grass and 
grain consumed in rearing and fattening a grazing quadruped, 
would yield a far larger amount of nutriment, if devoted to 
the growing of breadstuffs, than is furnished by his flesh; and, 
upon the whole, whatever advantages may be reaped from the 
breeding of domestic cattle, it is plain that the cleared land de- 
voted to their sustenance in the originally wooded part of the 
United States, after deducting a quantity sufficient to produce 
an amount of aliment equal to their flesh, still greatly exceeds 
that cultivated for vegetables, directly consumed by the people 
of the same regions; or, to express a nearly equivalent idea in 
other words, the meadow and the pasture, taken together, much 
exceed the ploughland.* 


* The two ideas expressed in the text are not exactly equivalent, because, 
though the consumption of animal food diminishes the amount of vege- 
table aliment required for human use, yet the animals themselves consume 
a great quantity of grain and roots grown on ground ploughed and cultivated 
as regularly and as laboriously as any other. 

The 280,000,000 bushels of oats raised in the United States in 1870, and fed 
to the 7,000,000 horses, the potatoes, the turnips, and the maize employed in 
fattening the oxen, the sheep, and the swine slaughtered the same year, oc- 
cupied an extent of ground which, cultivated by hand-labor and with Chinese 


3048 DESTRUCTION OF FORESTS BY GOVERNMENTS. 


Governments and military commanders have at different 
periods deliberately destroyed forests by fire or the axe, because 
they afforded a retreat to robbers, outlaws, or enemies, and this 
was one of the hostile measures practised by both Julius Czesar 
and the Gauls in the Roman war of conquest against that peo- 
ple. It was also resorted to in the Mediterranean provinces of 
France, then much infested by robbers and deserters, as late as 
the reign of Napoleon I., and is said to have been employed by 
the early American colonists in their exterminating wars with 
the native Indians.* 

In the Middle Ages, as well as in earlier and later centuries, 
attempts have been made to protect the woods by law, as 


industry and skill, would probably have produced a quantity of vegetable 
food equal in alimentary power to the flesh of the quadrupeds killed for do- 
mestic use. Hence, so far as the naked question of amount of aliment is 
concerned, the meadows and the pastures might as well have remained in the 
forest condition. It must, however, be borne in mind that animal labor, if 
not a necessary, is probably an economical, force in agricultural occupations, 
and that without animal manure many branches of husbandry could hardly 
be carried on at all. At the same time, the introduction of machinery into 
rural industry, and of artificial, mineral, and fossil manures, is working great 
revolutions, and we may find at some future day that the ox is no longer 
necessary as a help to the farmer. 

* For many instances of this sort, see Maury, Les Yoréts de la Gaule, pp. 3-5, 
and BECQUEREL, Des Climats, etc., pp. 301-803. In 1664 the Swedes made 
an incursion into Jutland and felled a considerable extent of forest. After 
they retired, 2 survey of the damage was had, and the report is still extant. 
The number of trees cut was found to be 120,000, and as an account was taken 
of the numbers of each species of tree, the document is of much interest in 
the history of the forest, as showing the relative proportions between the 
different trees which at that time composed the wood. See VAUPELL, 
Bigens Indvandring, p. 35, and Notes, p. 55. 

| Stanley, quoting Selden, De Jure Naturali, lib. vi., and Fabricius, Cod. 
Pseudap., V. T., i. 874, mentions a noteworthy Hebrew tradition of uncertain 
date, but unquestionably very ancient, which is one of the oldest proofs of a 
public respect for the woods. 

“A Hebrew tradition attributes to Joshua ten statutes, containing precise 
rerulations for the protection of the property of every tribe and of every head 
of a family against irregular depredations. Small quadrupeds were allowed to 
pasture in dense woods, not in thin ones; but no animal could feed in any 
forest without the consent of the proprietor of the soil. Every Hebrew might 


ROYAL FORESTS. 3849 


necessary for the breeding of deer, wild boars, and other game, 
or for the more reasonable purpose of furnishing a supply of 
building timber and fuel for future generations. It was 
reserved for more advanced ages to appreciate the geographical 
importance of the woods, and it is only in the most recent 
times, only in a few countries of Europe, that the general 
destruction of the forests has been recognized as the most 
potent among the many causes of the physical deterioration of 
the earth.* 


Royal Forests and Game Laws. 


The French authors I have quoted, as well as many other 
writers of the same nation, refer to the French Revolution as hay- 
ing given anew impulse to destructive causes which were already 
threatening the total extermination of the woods.t The general 
crusade against the forests, which accompanied that important 
event, is to be ascribed, in a considerable degree, to political re- 


pick up fallen boughs and twigs, but was not permitted to cut them. ‘Trees 
might be pruned for the trimmings, with the exception of the olive and other 
fruit-trees, and provided there was sufficient shade in the place.”—Lectures on 
the History of the Jewish Church, parti., p. 271. 

Alfred Maury mentions several provisions taken from the laws of the Indian 
legislator Manu, on the same subject.—Les Foréts de la Gaule, p. 9. 

The very ancient Tables of Heraclea contain provisions for the protection 
of woods, but whether these referred only to sacred groves, to public forests, 
or to leased lands, is not clear. 

* We must perhaps make an exception in favor of the Emperor Constantine, 
who commenced the magnificent series of aqueducts and cisterns which still 
supply Constantinople with water, and enacted strict laws for the protection of 
the forest of Belgrade, in which rise the springs that feed the aqueducts. See 
an article by Mr. H. A. Homes on the Water-Supply of Constantinople in the 
Albany Argus of June 6, 1872. 

{ Religious intolerance had produced similar effects in France at an earlier 
period. ‘‘The revocation of the edict of Nantes and the dragonnades occa- 
sioned the sale of the forests of the unhappy Protestants, who fled to seek in 
foreign lands the liberty of conscience which was refused to them in France. 
The forests were soon felled by the purchasers, and the soil in part brought 
under cultivation.” —-BECQUEREL, Des Climats, etc., p. 303. 


350 GAME LAWS. 


sentments. The forest codes of the medizeval kings, and the local 
“ coutumes ” of feudalism, contained many severe and even in- 
human provisions, adopted rather for the preservation of game 
than from any enlightened views of the more important fune- 
tions of the woods. Ordericus Vitalis informs us that William 
the Conqueror destroyed sixty parishes and drove out their in- 
habitants, in order that he might turn their lands into a forest,* 
to be reserved as a hunting-ground for himself and his posterity, 
and he punished with death the killing of a deer, wild boar, or 
even a hare. His successor, William Rufus, according to the 
Listoire des Ducs de Normandie et des Rois @ Angleterre, p. 67, 
“ was hunting one day in a new forest, which he had caused to be 
made out of eighteen parishes that he had destroyed, when, by 
mischance, he was killed by an arrow wherewith Tyreus de 
Rois [Sir Walter Tyrell] thought to slay a beast, but missed 
the beast, and slew the king, who was beyond it. And in 
this very same forest, his brother Richard ran so hard against 
a tree that he died of it. And men commonly said that these 
things were because they had so laid waste and taken the said 
parishes.” 

These barbarous acts, as Bonnemére observes,} were simply 
the transfer of the customs of the French kings, of their vassals, 
and even of inferior gentlemen, to conquered England. “The 


* The American reader must be reminded that, in the language of the chase 
and of the English law, a ‘‘forest” is not necessarily a wood. Any large 
extent of ground, withdrawn from cultivation, reserved for the pleasures of 
the chase, and allowed to clothe itself with a spontaneous growth, serving as 
what is technically called ‘‘ cover” for wild animals, is, in the dialects I have 
mentioned, a forest. When, therefore, the Norman kingsafforested the grounds 
referred to in the text, it is not to be supposed that they planted them with 
trees, though the protection afforded to them by the game laws would, if cattle 
had been kept out, soon have converted them into real woods. 

+ Histoire des Paysans, ii., p. 190. The work of Bonnemére is of great value 
to those who study the history of medieval Europe from a desire to know its 
real character, and not in the hope of finding apparent facts to sustain a false 
and dangerous theory. Bonnemére is one of the few writers who, like Miche- 
let, have been honest enough and bold enough to speak the truth with regard 
to the relations between the church and the people in the Middle Ages. 


GAME LAWS. 351 


death of a hare,” says our author, “was a hanging matter, the 
murder of a plover a capital crime. Death was inflicted on 
those who spread nets for pigeons; wretches who had drawn 
a bow upon a stag were to be tied to the animal alive; and 
among the seigniors it was a standing excuse for having killed 
game on forbidden ground, that they aimed at aserf.” The 
feudal lords enforced these codes with unrelenting rigor, and 
not unfrequently took the law into their own hands. In the 
time of Louis 1X., according to William of Nangis, “ three 
noble children, born in Flanders, who were sojourning at the 
abbey of St. Nicholas in the Wood, to learn the speech of 
France, went out into the forest of the abbey, with their bows 
and iron-headed arrows, to disport them in shooting hares, 
chased the game, which they had started in the wood of the 
abbey, into the forest of Enguerrand, lord of Coucy, and were 
taken by the sergeants which kept the wood. When the fell 
and pitiless Sir Enguerrand knew this, he had the children 
straightway hanged without any manner of trial.” * The mat- 
ter being brought to the notice of good King Louis, Sir En- 
guerrand was summoned to appear, and, finally, after many 
feudal shifts and dilatory pleas, brought to trial before Louis 
himself and a special council. Notwithstanding the opposition 
of the other seigniors, who, it is needless to say, spared no 
efforts to save a peer, probably not a greater criminal than 
themselves, the king was much inclined to inflict the punish- 
ment of death on the proud baron. “If he believed,” said he, 
“that our Lord would be as well content with hanging as with 
pardoning, he would hang Sir Enguerrand in spite of all his 
barons;” but noble and clerical interests unfortunately pre- 
vailed. ‘The king was persuaded to inflict a milder retribution, 
and the murderer was condemned to pay ten thousand livres in 
coin, and to “build for the souls of the three children two 


* It is painful to add that a similar outrage was perpetrated a very few 
years ago, in one of the European states, by a prince of a family now de- 
throned, Jn this case, however, the prince killed the trespasser with his own 
hand, his sergeants refusing to execute his mandate. 


852 GAME LAWS. 


chapels wherein mass should be said every day.” * The hope 
of shortening the purgatorial term of the young persons, by the 
religious rites to be celebrated in the chapels, was doubtless 
the consideration which operated most powerfully on the mind 
of the king; and Europe lost a great example for the sake of 
a mass. 

The desolation and depopulation, resulting from the exten- 
sion of the forest and the enforcement of the game laws, ir. 
duced several of the French kings to consent to some relaxation 
of the severity of these latter. Francis I., however, revived 
their barbarous provisions, and, according to Bonnemére, even 
so good a monarch as Henry IV. re-enacted them, and “ signed 
the sentence of death upon peasants guilty of having defended 
their fields against devastation by wild beasts.” “A fine of 
twenty livres,’ he continues, “ was imposed on every one shoot- 
ing at pigeons, which, at that time, swooped down by thousands 
upon the new-sown fields and devoured the seed. But let us 
count even this a progress, for we have seen that the murder of 
a pigeon had been a capital crime.” + 

Not only were the slightest trespasses on the forest domain-—— 
the cutting of an oxgoad, for instance—severely punished, but 
game animals were still sacred when they had wandered from 


* GUILLAUME DE NANGIS, as quoted in the notes to JOINVILLE, Nouvelle 
Collection des Mémoires, ete., par Michaud et Poujoulat, premicre série, i., p. 
330. 

Persons acquainted with the character and influence of the medieval clergy 
will hardly need to be informed that the ten thousand livres never found 
their way to the royal exchequer. It was easy to prove to the simple-minded 
king that, as the profits of sin were a monopoly of the church, he ought not 
to derive advantage from the commission of a crime by one of his subjects; 
and the priests were cunning enough both to secure to themselves the amount 
of the fine, and to extort from Louis large additional grants to carry out the 
purposes to which they devoted the money. ‘‘ And though the king did take 
the moneys,’’ says the chronicler, ‘‘he put them not into his treasury, but 
turned them into good works; for he builded therewith the maison-Dieu of 
Pontoise, and endowed the same with rents and lands; also the schools and 
the dormitory of the friars preachers of Paris, and the monastery of the 
Minorite friars.” 

+ Listoire des Paysans, ii., p. 290. 


GAME LAWS. Soe 


their native precincts and were ravaging the fields of the 
peasantry. A herd of deer or of wild boars often consumed or 
trod down a harvest of grain, the sole hope of the year for a 
whole family ; and the simple driving out of such animals from 
this costly pasturage brought dire vengeance on the head of the 
rustic, who had endeavored to save his children’s bread from 
their voracity. “ At all times,” says Paul Louis Courier, speak- 
ing in the name of the peasants of Chambord, in the “ Simple 
Discours,” “the game has made war upon us. Paris was block- 
aded eight hundred years by the deer, and its environs, now so 
rich, so fertile, did not yield bread enough to support the game- 
keepers.” * The Tiers Etat declared, in 1789, “the most ter- 


* The following details from Bonnemére will serve to give a more complete 
‘idea of the vexatious and irritating nature of the game laws of France. The 
officers of the chase went so far as to forbid the pulling up of thistles and 
weeds, or the mowing of any unenclosed ground before St. John’s day (24th 
June), in order that the nests of game birds might not be disturbed. It 
was unlawful to fence-in any grourcds in the plains where royal residences 
were situated ; thorns were ordered to be planted in all fields of wheat, bar- 
ley, or oats, to prevent the use of ground-nets for catching the birds which 
consumed, or were believed to consume, the grain, and it was forbidden to 
cut or pull stubble before the first of October, lest the partridge and the quail 
might be deprived of their cover. For destroying the eggs of the quail, a fine 
of one hundred livres was imposed for the first offence, double that amount 
for the second, and for the third the culprit was flogged and banished for Sve 
years to a distance of six leagues from the forest.—Wistotre des Paysans, ii., 
p. 202, text and notes. 

Neither these severe penalties, nor any provisions devised by the ingenuity 
of modern legislation, have been able effectually to repress poaching. ‘‘ The 
game laws,” says Clavé, ‘‘have not delivered us from the poachers, who kill 
twenty times as much game as the sportsmen. In the forest of Fontainebleau, 
as in all those belonging to the state, poaching is a very common and a very 
profitable offence. It is in vain that the gamekeepers are on the alert night 
and day, they cannot prevent it. Those who follow the trade begin by care- 
fully studying the habits of the game. They will lie motionless on the 
ground, by the roadside or in thickets, for whole days, watching the paths 
most frequented by the animals,” etc.—Revue des Deux Mondes, Mai, 1863, p. 
160. 

The writer adds many details on this subject, and it appears that, as there 
are ‘‘ beggars on horseback’ in South America, there are poachers in carriages 
in France. 


28 


54 EFFECTS OF FRENCH REVOLUTION. 


ive) 


rible scourge of agriculture is the abundance of wild game, 
a consequence of the privileges of the chase; the fields are 
wasted, the forests ruined, and the vines gnawed down to the 
roots.” 


Lifects of the French Leevolution. 


The abrogation of the game laws and of the harsh provisions 
of the forestal code was one of the earliest measures of the 
revolutionary government; and the removal of the ancient 
restrictions on the chase and of the severe penalties imposed on 
trespassers upon the public forests, was immediately followed by - 
unbridled license in the enjoyment of the newly conceded 
rights. 

In the popular mind the forest was associated with all the 
abuses of feudalism, and the evils the peasantry had suffered 
from the legislation which protected both it and the game it 
sheltered, blinded them to the still greater physical mischiefs 
which its destruction was to entail upon them. No longer 
under the safeguard of the law, the crown forests and those of 
the great lords were attacked with relentless fury, unscrupu- 
lously plundered and wantonly laid waste, and even the rights 
of property in small private woods ceased to be respected.* 
Various absurd theories, some of which are not even yet 
exploded, were propagated with regard to the economical 
advantages of converting the forest into pasture and plongh- 
land, the injurious effects of the woods upon climate, health, 
facility of internal communication, and the like. Thus resent- 
ful memory of the wrongs associated with the forest, popular 
ignorance, and the cupidity of speculators cunning enough to 


* “Whole trees were sacrificed for the most insignificant purposes; the 
peasants would cut down two firs to make a single pair of wooden shoes.”— 
MictELET, as quoted by CLAV&. Etudes, p. 24. 

A similar wastefulness formerly prevailed in Russia, though not from the 
sime cause. It St. Pierre’s time, the planks brought to St. Petersburg were 
not sawn, but hewn with the axe, and a tree furnished but a single plank. 


DEMAND FOR LUMBER. 355 


turn these circumstances to profitable account, combined to 
hasten the sacrifice of the remaining woods, and a waste was 
produced which hundreds of years and millions of treasure will 
hardly repair. 

In the era of savage anarchy which followed the benefi- 
cent reforms of 1789, economical science was neglected, and 
statistical details upon the amount of the destruction of woods 
during that period are wanting. But it is known to have been 
almost incaleulably rapid, and the climatic and financial evils, 
which elsewhere have been a more gradual effect of this 
cause, began to make themselves felt in France within three or 
four years after that memorable epoch.* 


Increased Demand for Lumber. 


With increasing population and the development of new in- 
dustries, come new drains upon the forest from the many arts 
for which wood is the material. The demands of the near and 
the distant market for this product excite the cupidity of the 
hardy forester, and a few years of that wild industry of which 
Springer’s “Forest Life and Forest Trees” so vividly depicts 
the dangers and the triumphs, suffice to rob the most inaccessible 
glens of their fairest ornaments. The value of timber increases 
with its dimensions in almost geometrical proportion, and the 
tallest, most vigorous, and most symmetrical trees fall the first 
sacrifice. This is a fortunate circumstance for the remainder 
of the wood ; for the impatient lumberman contents himself 
with felling afew of the best trees, and then hurries on to 
take his tithe of still virgin groves. 


* See BECQUEREL, Mémoire sur les Foréts, in the Mém. de ? Académie 
des Sciences, t. xxxv., p. 411 et seqgq. 

Similar circumstances produced a like result, though on a far smaller scale, 
in Italy, at a very recent period. Gallenga says: ‘‘ The destruction of the 
majestic timber [between the Vals Sesia and Sessera] dates no farther back than 
1848, when, on the first proclamation of the Constitution, the ignorant boor 
had taken it for granted that all the old social ties would be loosened, and 
therefore the old forest-laws should be at once set at naught.”—Oountry Life 
in Piedmont, p. 136. 


356 DEMAND FOR LUMBER. 


The vast extension of railroads, of manufactures and the 
mechanical arts, of military armaments, and especially of the 
commercial fleets and navies of Christendom, within the pres- 
ent century, has incredibly augmented the demand for wood,* 


* Let us take the supply of timber for railroad-ties. According to Clavé 
(p. 248), France had, in 1862, 9,000 kilométres of railway in operation, 7,000 
in construction, half of which is built with a double track, Adding turn-outs 
and extra tracks at stations, the number of ties required for a single track is 
stated at 1,200 to the kilométre, or, as Clavé computes, for the entire network 
of France, 58,000,000. This number is too large, for 16,000+8,000 for the 
double track halfway = 24,000, and 24,000 x 1,200 = 28,800,000. In an article 
in the Revue des Deux Mondes, July, 1863, Gandy states that 2,000,000 trees 
had been felled to furnish the ties for the French railroads, and as the ties 
must be occasionally renewed, and new railways have been constructed since 
1863, we may probably double this number. 

The United States had in operation on the first of January, 1872, 61,000 
miles, or about 97,000 kilométres, of railroad, Allowing the same proportion as in 
France, the American railroads required 116,400,000 ties. The Report of the 
Agricultural Department of the United States for November and December, 
1869, estimates the number of ties annually required for our railways at 30,- 
000,000, and supposes that 150,000 acres of the best woodland must be felled 
to supply this number. This is evidently an error, perhaps a misprint for 
15,000. The same authority calculates the annual expenditure of the Ameri- 
can railroads for lumber for buildings, repairs, and cars, at $38,000,000, and 
for locomotive fuel, at the rate of 19,000 cords of wood per day, at $50,- 
000,000. ; 

The walnut trees cut in Italy and France to furnish gunstocks to the Ameri- 
can army, during our late civil war, would alone have formed a considerable 
forest. A single establishment in Northern Italy used twenty-eight thousand 
large walnut trees for that purpose in the years 1862 and 1863. 

The consumption of wood for lucifer matches is enormous, and I have heard 
of several instances where tracts of pine forest, hundreds and even thousands 
of acres in extent, have been purchased and felled, solely to supply timber 
for this purpose. The United States government tax, at one cent per hun- 
dred, produces $2,000,000 per year, which shows a manufacture of 20,000,- 
000,000 matches. Allowing nothing for waste, there are about fifty matches 
to the cubic inch of wood, or 86,400 to the cubic foot, making in all upwards 
of 230,000 cubic feet, and, as only straight-grained wood, free from knots, can 
be used for this purpose, the sacrifice of not less than three or four thousand 
well-crown pines is required for this purpose. 

If we add to all this the supply of wood for telegraph-posts, wooden pave- 
ments, wooden wall tapestry-paper, shoe-pegs, and even wooden nails, which 
have lately come into use—not to speak of numerous other recent applications 


DEMAND FOR LUMBER. 857 


and but for improvements in metallurgy and the working 
of iron, which have facilitated the substitution of that metal 


of this material which American ingenuity has devised—we have an amount 
of consumption, for entirely new purposes, which is really appalling. 

Wooden field and garden fences are very generally used in America, and 
some have estimated the consumption of wood for this purpose as not less 
than that for architectural uses. 

Fully one-half our vast population is lodged in wooden houses, and barns 
and country out-houses of all descriptions are almost universally of the same 
material. 

The consumption of wood in the United States as fuel for domestic pur- 
poses, for charcoal, for brick and lime kilns, for breweries and distilleries, for 
steamboats, and many other uses, defies computation, and is vastly greatcr 
than is employed in Europe for the same ends. [For instance, in rural Swit- 
zerland, cold as is the winter climate, the whole supply of wood for domestic 
fires, dairies, breweries, distilleries, brick and lime kilns, fences, furniture, 
tools, and even house-building and small smitheries, exclusive of the small 
quantity derived from the trimmings of fruit-trees, grape-vines, and hedges, 
and from decayed fences and buildings, does not exceed two hundred and 
thirty cubic feet, or less than two cords a year, per household.—See Bericht iber 
die Untersuchung der Schweiz Hochgebirgswaidungen, pp. 85-89. In 1789, 
Arthur Young estimated the annual consumption of firewood by single fami- 
lies in France at from two anda half to ten Paris cords of 134 cubic feet.— 
Travels, vol. ii., chap. xv. 

The report of the Commissioners on the Forests of Wisconsin, 1867, allows 
three cords of wood to each person for household fires alone. Taking fami- 
lies at an average of five persons, we have eight times the amount consumed 
by an equal number of persons in Switzerland for this and all other purposes 
to which this material is ordinarily applicable. I donot think the consump- 
tion in the North-eastern States is at all less than the calculation for Wis- 
consin. 

Evergreen trees are often destroyed in immense numbers in the United Sates 
for the purpose of decoration of churches and on other festive occasions. 
The New York city papers reported that 113,000 young evergreen trees, be- 
sides 20,000 yards of small branches twisted into festoons, were sold in the 
markets of that city, for this use, at Christmas, in 1869. At the Cincinnati 
Industrial Exhibition of 1872, three miles of evergreen festoons were hung 
upon the beams and rafters of the ‘‘ Floral Hall.” 

Important statistics on the consumption and supply of wood in the United 
States will be found in a valuable paper by the Rey. Frederick Starr, Jr., in 
the Zransactions of the Agricultural Society for : 

Of course, there is a vast consumption of ligneous material for all these uses 
in Europe, but it is greatly less than at earlier periods. The waste of wood 


358 DEMAND FOR LUMBER. 


for wood, the last twenty-five years would have almost stripped 
Europe of her last remaining tree fit for these uses.* 


in European carpentry was formerly enormous, the beams of houses being 
both larger and more numerous than permanence or stability required. In 
examining the construction of the houses occupied by the eighty families 
which inhabit the village of Faucigny, in Savoy, in 1854, the forest inspector 
found that fifty thousand trees had been employed in building them. The 
builders ‘‘ seemed,” says Hudry-Menos, ‘‘ to have tried to solve the problem 
of piling upon the walls the largest quantity of timber possible without crush- 
ing them.”—Revue des Dewx Mondes, 1st June, 1864, p. 601. 

European statistics present comparatively few facts on this subject, of 
special interest to American readers, but it is worth noting that France em- 
ploys 1,500,000 cubic feet of oak per year for brandy and wine casks, which is 
about half her annual consumption of that material; and it is not a wholly 
insignificant fact that, according to Rentzsch, the quantity of wood used in 
parts of Germany for small carvings and for children’s toysis so large, that the 
export of such objects from the town of Sonneberg alone, amounted, in 1858, 
to 60,000 centner, or three thousand tons’ weight.—Der Wald, p. 68. 

Tn an article in the Revue des Haux et Foréts for November, 1868, it is 
stated that 200,000 dozens of drums for boys are manufactured per month in 
Paris. This is equivalent to 28,800,000 per year, for which 56,000,000 
drumsticks are required, and the writer supposes that the annual growth of 
50,000 acres of woodland would not more than supply the material. In the 
same article the consumption of matches in France is given at 7,200,000,- 
000, and the quantity of lumber annually required for this manufacture is 
computed at 80,000 stéres, or cubic métres—evidently an erroneous calculation. 

* Besides the substitution of iron for wood, a great saving of consumption 
of this latter material has been effected by the revival of ancient methods of in- 
creasing its durability, and the invention of new processes for the same purpose. 
The most effectual preservative yet discovered for wood employed on land, is 
sulphate of copper, a solution of which is introduced into the pores of the 
wood while green, by soaking, by forcing-pumps, or, most economically, hy 
the simple pressure of a column of the fiuid in asmall pipe connected with the 
end of the piece of timber subjected to the treatment. Clavé (Ltudes Fo- 
resticres, pp. 240-249) gives an interesting account of the various processes em- 
ployed for rendering wood imperishable, and states that railroad-ties injected 
with sulphate of copper in 1846, were found absolutely unaltered in 1855 ; and 
telegraphic posts prepared two years earlier, are now in a state of perfect 
preservation. 

For many purposes, the method of injection is too expensive, and some 
simpler process is much to be desired. ‘The question of the proper time of 
felling timber is not settled, and the best modes of air, water, and steam 
seasoning are not yet fully ascertained. Experiments on these subjects would 


a 


DEMAND FOR LUMBER. 3859 


Ihave spoken of the foreign demand for American agricul- 
tural products as having occasioned an extension of cultivated 
ground, which had led to clearing land not required by the 
necessities of home consumption. But the forest itself has be- 
come, so to speak, an article of exportation. England, as we 
have seen, imported oak and pine from the Baltic ports more 
than six hundred years ago. She has since drawn largely on 
the forests of Norway, and for many years has received vast 
quantities of lumber from her American possessions. 

The unparalleled facilities for internal navigation, afforded 
by the numerous rivers of the present and former British colo- 
nial possessions in North America, have proved very fatal to the 
forests of that continent. Quebec became many years ago a 


be well worth the patronage of Governments in new countries, where they can 
be very easily made, without the necessity of much waste of valuable mate- 
rial, and without expensive arrangements for observation. 

The practice of stripping living trees of their bark some years before they 

re felled, is as old as the time of Vitruvius, but is much less followed than it 
deserves, partly because the timber of trees so treated inclines to crack and 
split, and partly because it becomes so hard as to be wrought with consider- 
able difficulty. 

In America, economy in the consumption of fuel has been much promoted 
by the substitution of coal for wood, the general use of stoves both for wood 
and coal, and recently by the employment of anthracite in the furnaces of 
stationary and locomotive steam-engines. All the objections to the use of 
anthracite for this latter purpose appear to have been overcome, and the im- 
provements in its combustion have been attended with a great pecuniary sav- 
ing, and with much advantage to the preservation of the woods. 

The employment of coal has produced a great reduction in the consumption 
of firewood in Paris. In 1815, the supply of firewood for the city required 
1,200,000 stéres, or cubic métres; in 1859 it had fallen to 501,805, while, in 
the meantime, the consumption of coal had risen from 600,000 to 4,320,000 
metrical quintals. See CLave, Etudes, p. 212. 

In 1869 Paris consumed 951,157 stéres of firewood, 4,902,414 hectoliires, 
or more than 13,000,000 bushels, of charcoal, and 6,872,000 metrical quintals, 
or more than 7,000,600 tons of mineral coal.— Annuaire de la Revue des Eaux 
et Foréts for 1872, p. 26. 

The increase in the price of firewood at Paris, within a century, has been 
comparatively small, while that of timber and of sawed lumber has increased 
enormously. ~ 


360 DEMAND FOR LUMBER. 


centre for a lumber trade, which, in the bulk of its material, and, 
consequently, in the tonnage required for its transportation, 
rivalled the commerce of the greatest European cities. Immense 
rafts were collected at Quebec from the great Lakes, from the 
Ottawa, and from all the other tributaries which unite to swell 
the current of the St. Lawrence and help it to struggle against 
its mighty tides.* Ships, of burden formerly undreamed of, 
have been built to convey the timber to the markets of Europe, 
and during the summer months the St. Lawrence is almost as 
crowded with shipping as the Thames.t 


*The tide rises at Quebec to the height of twenty-five feet, and when it is 
aided by a north-east wind, it flows with almost irresistible violence. Rafts 
containing several hundred thousand cubic feet of timber are often caught by 
the fiood-tide, torn to pieces, and dispersed for miles along the shores. 

+ One of these, the Baron of Renfrew—so named from one of the titles of 
the kings of England—built forty or fifty years ago, measured 5,000 tons. 
They were little else than rafts, being almost solid masses of timber designed 
to be taken to pieces and sold as lumber on arriving at their port of desti- 
nation. 

The lumber trade at Quebec is still very large. According to an article in 
the Revue des Deux Mondes, that city exported, in 1860, 80,000,000 cubic feet 
of squared timber, and 400,000,000 square feet of ‘‘ planches.” The thickness 
of the boards is not stated, but I believe they are generally cut an inch and a 
quarter thick for the Quebec trade, and as they shrink somewhat in drying, 
we may estimate ten square for one cubic foot of boards. This gives a total of 
70,000,000 cubic feet. The specifie gravity of white pine is .554, and the 
weight of this quantity of lumber, very little of which is thoroughly seasoned, 
would exceed a million of tons, even supposing it to consist wholly of wood as 
light as pine. 

The London Times of Oct. 10, 1871, states the exportation of lumber from 
Canada to Europe, in 1870, at 200,000,000 cubic feet, and adds that more than 
three times that quantity was sent from the same province to the United 
States. A very large proportion of this latter quantity goes to Burlington, 
Vermont, whence it is distributed to other parts of the Union. 

There must, I think, be some error or exaggeration in these figures. Perhaps 
instead of cubic feet we should read square feet. Two hundred millions of 
cubic feet of timber would require more than half the entire tonnage of Eng- 
land for its transportation. 

I suppose the quantities in the following estimates, from a carefully prepared 
article in the St. Louis Republican, must be understood as meaning square or 
superficial feet, board measure, allowing a thickness of one inch : 

‘‘'The lumber trade of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, for the year 


FOREST FIRES. 361 


Lifects of Forest Fires. 


The operations of the lumberman involve other dangers to 
the woods besides the loss of the trees felled by him. The 
narrow clearings around his shanties form openings which let 
in the wind, and thus sometimes occasion the overthrow of 
thousands of trees, the fall of which dams up small streams, 
and creates bogs by the spreading of the waters, while the de- 
caying trunks facilitate the multiplication of the insects which 
breed in dead wood and are, some of them, injurious to living 
trees. The escape and spread of camp-fires, however, is the 
most devastating of all the causes of destruction that find their 
origin in the operations of the lumberman. The proportion of 
trees fit for industrial uses is small in all primitive woods. Only 
these fall before the forester’s axe, but the fire destroys, almost in- 
discriminately, every age and every species of tree.* While, then, 


1869, shows the amount cut as being 2,029,872,255 feet for the State of 
Michigan, and 317,400,000 feet for the State of Minnesota, and 964,600,000 
feet for the State of Wisconsin. This includes the lake shore and the whole 
State of Wisconsin, which heretofore has been difficult to get a report from. 
The total amount cut in these States was 3,311,572,255 feet, and that to 
obtain this quantity there have been shipped 883,032 acres, or 1,380 square 
miles of pine have been removed. It is calculated that 4,000,000 acres of land 
still remain unstripped in Michigan, which will yield 15,000,000,000 feet of lum- 
ber; while 3,000,000 acres are still standing in Wisconsin, which will yield 11,- 
250,000,000 feet, and that which remains in Minnesota, taking the estimate of a 
few years since of that which was surveyed and unexplored, after deducting 
the amount cut the past few years, we find 3,630,000 acres to be the proper 
estimate of trees now standing which will yield 52,562,500,000 feet of lumber. 
This makes a total of 15,630,000 acres of pine lands, which remain standing in 
the above States, that will yield 58,612,500,000 feet of lumber, and it is thought 
that fifteen or twenty years will be required to cut and send to market the 
trees now standing.” 

See also BRYANT, Forest Trees, chap. iv. 

* Trees differ in their power of resisting the action of forest fires. Differ- 
ent woods vary greatly in combustibility, and even when the bark is scarcely 
scorched, trees are, partly in consequence of physiological character, and 
partly from the greater or less depth at which their roots habitually lie below 
the surface, differently affected by running fires. The white pine, Pius 


862 FOREST FIRES. 


without fatal injury to the younger growths, the native forest will 
bear several “ cuttings over” in a generation—for the increasing 
value of lumber brings into use, every four or five years, a 
quality of timber which had been before rejected as unmarket- 
able—a fire may render the declivity of a mountain unprodue- 
tive for a century.* 

Aside from the destruction of the trees and the laying bare of 
the soil, and consequently the freer admission of sun, rain, and air 
to the ground, the fire of itself exerts an important influence on 
its texture and condition. It cracks and sometimes even pulveri- 


strobus, as it is the most valuable, is also perhaps the most delicate tree of the 
American forest, while its congener, the Northern pitch-pine, Pinws rigida, is 
less injured by fire than any other tree of that country. I have heard expe- 
rienced lumbermen maintain that the growth of this pine was even accele- 
rated by a fire brisk enough to destroy all other trees, and I have myself seen 
it still flourishing after a conflagration which had left not a green leaf but its 
own in the wood, and actually throwing out fresh foliage, when the old had 
been quite burnt off and the bark almost converted into charcoal. The wood 
of the pitch-pine is of comparatively little value for the joiner, but it is useful 
for very many purposes. Its rapidity of growth in even poor soils, its hardi- 
hood, and its abundant yield of resinous producis, entitle it to much more 
consideration, as a plantation tree, than it has hitherto received in Europe or 
America. 

* Between sixty and seventy years ago, a steep mountain with which I am 
familiar, composed of metamorphic rock, and at that time covered with a 
thick coating of soil and a dense primeval forest, was accidentally burnt over. 
The fire took place in a very dry season, the slope of the mountain was too 
rapid to retain much water, and the conflagration was of an extraordinarily 
fierce character, consuming the wood almost entirely, burning the leayes and 
combustible portion of the mould, and in many places cracking and disinte- 
grating the rock beneath. The rainsof the following autumn carried off much 
of the remaining soil, and the mountain-side was nearly bare of wood for 
two or three years afterwards. At length a new crop of trees sprang up and 
grew vigorously, and the mountain is now thickly covered again. But the 
depth of mould and earth is too small to allow the trees to reach maturity, 
When they attain to the diameter of about six inches, they uniformly die, and 
this they will no doubt continue to do until the decay of leaves and wood on 
the surface, and the decomposition of the subjacent rock, shall have formed, 
perhaps hundreds of years hence, a stratum of soil thick enough to support a 
full-grown forest. Under favorable conditions, however, as in the case of the 
fire of Miramichi, a burnt forest renews itself rapidly and permanently. 


EFFECTS OF BURNING FOREST. 363 


zes the rocks and stones upon and near the surface; * it con- 
sumes a portion of the half-decayed vegetable mould which 
served to hold its mineral particles together and to retain the 
water of precipitation, and thus loosens, pulverizes, and dries 
the earth; it destroys reptiles, insects, and worms, with their 
egos, and the seeds of trees and of smaller plants; it supplies, 
in the ashes which it deposits on the surface, important ele- 
ments for the growth of a new forest clothing, as well as of the 
usual objects of agricultural industry ; and by the changes thus 
produced, it fits the ground for the reception of a vegetation 
different in character from that which had spontaneously cov- 
ered it. These new conditions help to explain the natural 
succession of forest crops, so generally observed in all woods 
cleared by fire and then abandoned. There is no doubt, how- 
ever, that other influences contribute to the same result, be- 
cause effects more or less analogous follow when the trees are 
destroyed by other causes, as by high winds, by the woodman’s 
axe, and even by natural decay.t 


* Tn the burning over of a hill-forest in the Lower Engadine, in September, 
1865, the fire was so intense as to shatter and calcine the rocks on the slope, 
and their fragments were precipitated into the valley below.—Mivista Fo- 
restale del Regno @ Lialia, Ottobre, 1865, p. 474. 

{ The remarkable mounds and other earthworks constructed in the valley 
of the Ohio and elsewhere in the territory of the United States, by a people 
apparently more advanced in culture than the modern Indian, were overgrown 
with a dense clothing of forest when first discovered by the whites. But 
though the ground where they were erected must have been occupied by a 
large population for a considerable length of time, and therefore entirely 
cleared, the trees which grew upon the ancient fortresses and the adjacent 
lands were not distinguishable in species, or even in dimensions and character 
of growth, from the neighboring forests, where the soil seemed never to have 
been disturbed. This apparent exception to the law of change of crop in 
natural forest growth was ingeniously explained by General Harrison’s sugges- 
tion, that the lapse of time since the era of the mound-builders was so great 
as to have embraced several successive generations of trees, and occasioned, 
by their rotation, a return to the original vegetation. 

The successive changes in the spontaneous growth of the forest, as proved 
by the character of the wood found in bogs, are such as to have suggested the 
theory of a considerable change of climate during the human period. But 


864 FLOATING OF TIMBER. 


Another evil, sometimes of serious magnitude, which attends 
the operations of the lumberman, is the injury to the banks of 
rivers from the practice of floating. Ido not here allude to 
rafts, which, being under the control of those who navigate 
them, may be so guided as to avoid damage to the shore, but 
to masts, logs, and other pieces of timber singly entrusted to 
the streams, to be conveyed by their currents to sawmill ponds, 


this theory cannot be admitted upon the evidence in question. In fact, the 
order of succession—for a rotation or alternation is neither proved nor 
probable—may be made to move in opposite directions in different countries 
with the same climate and at the same time. Thus in Denmark and in Hol- 
land the spike-leaved firs have given place to the broad-leaved beech, while in 
Northern Germany the process has been reversed, and evergreens have sup- 
planted the oaks and birches of deciduous foliage. The principal determining 
cause seems to be the influence of light upon the germination of the seeds 
and the growth of the young tree. In a forest of firs, for instance, the dis- 
tribution of the light and shade, to the influence of which seeds and shoots 
are exposed, is by no means the same as in a wood of beeches or of oaks, and 
hence the growth of different species will be stimulated in the two forests. 

When ground is laid bare both of trees and of vegetable mould, and left to 
the action of unaided and unobstructed nature, she first propagates trees 
which germinate and grow only under the influence of a full supply of light 
and air, and then, in succession, other species, according to their ability to 
bear the shade and their demand for more abundant nutriment. In Northern 
Europe the larch, the white birch, the aspen, first appear; then follow the 
maple, the alder, the ash, the fir; then the oak and the linden; and then the 
beech, The trees called by these respective names in the United States are 
not specifically the same as their European namesakes, nor are they always 
even the equivalents of these latter, and therefore the order of succession in 
America would not be precisely as indicated by the foregoing list, but, so far 
as is known, it nevertheless very nearly corresponds to it. 

It is thought important to encourage the growth of the beech in Denmark 
and Northern Germany, because it upon the whole yields better returns than 
other trees, and does not exhaust, but on the contrary enriches, the soil; for 
by shedding its leaves it returns to it most of the nutriment it has drawn from 
it, and at the same time furnishes a solvent which aids materially in the de- 
composition of its mineral constituents, 

When the forest is left to itself, the order of succession is constant, and its 
occasional inversion is always explicable by some human interference. It is 
curious that the trees which require most light are content with the poorest 
soils, and vice versa. The trees which first appear are also those which pro- 
pagate themselves farthest to the north. The birch, the larch, and the fir 


st 


FLOATING OF TIMBER. 565 


or to convenient places for collecting them into rafts. The 
lumbermen usually haul the timber to the banks of the rivers 
in the winter, and when the spring floods swell the streams and 
break up the ice, they roll the logs into the water, leaving them 
to float down to their destination. If the transporting stream 
is too small to furnish a sufficient channel for this rude naviga- 
tion, it is sometimes dammed up, and the timber collected in 
the pond thus formed above the dam. When the pond is full, a 
sluice is opened, or the dam is blown up or otherwise suddenly 
broken, and the whole mass of lumber above it is hurried down 
with the rolling flood. Both of these modes of proceeding ex- 
pose the banks of the rivers employed as channels of flotation to 
abrasion,* and in some of the American States it has been found 
necessary to protect, by special legislation, the lands through 
which they flow from the serious injury sometimes received 
through the practices I have described.t 


bear a severer climate than the oak, the oak than the beech. ‘“‘ These paral- 
lelisms,” says Vaupell, ‘‘ are very interesting, because, though they are entirely 
independent of each other,” they all prescribe the same order of succession.— 
Bigens Indvandring, p. 42. See also Bere, Das Verdringen der Laubwéiilder 
im Nordlichen Deutschland, 1844. HryrEr, Das Verhalten der Waldbiume 
gegen Licht und Schatten, 1852. Srarrine, De Bodem van Nederland, 1856, 
i., pp. 120-200. VaupPreLi, De Danske Skove, 1863. Knorr, Studien tiber 
die Buchen- Wirthschaft, 1863. A, Maury, Les Foréts dela Gaule, pp. 73, 74, 
877, 384. 

* Caimi states that ‘‘a single flotation in the Valtelline, in 1839, caused 
damages appraised at $250,000.”—Cenni sulla Importanza e Coltura det Bos- 
chi, p. 65. 

+ Many physicists who have investigated the laws of natural hydraulics main- 
tain that, in consequence of direct obstruction and frictional resistance to the 
flow of the water of rivers along their banks, there is both an increased rapid- 
ity of current and an elevation of the water in the middle of the channel, so 
that a river presents always a convex surface. Others have thought that 
the acknowledged greater swiftness of the central current must produce a 
depression in that part of the stream. The lumbermen affirm that, while 
rivers are rising, the water is highest in the middle of the channel, and 
tends to throw floating objects shorewards; while they are falling, it is lowest 
in the middle, and floating objects incline towards the centre. Logs, they say, 
rolled into the water during the rise, are very apt to lodge on the banks, while 
those set afloat during the falling of the waters keep in the current, and are 


3866 RESTORATION OF THE FOREST. 


Restoration of the Forest. 


In most countries of Europe—and I fear in many parts of 
the United States—the woods are already so nearly extirpated, 
that the mere protection of those which now exist is by no means 
an adequate security against a great increase of the evils which 
have already resulted from the diminution of them. Besides 
this, experience has shown that where the destruction of the 
voods has been carried beyond a certain point, no coercive legis- 
lation can absolutely secure the permanence of the remainder, 
especially if it is held by private hands. The creation of new 
forests, therefore, is generally recognized, wherever the subject 
has received the attention it merits, as an indispensable measure 
of sound public economy. Enlightened individuals in some 
Iuropean states, the Governments in others, have made exten- 
sive plantations, and France, particularly, has now set herself 
energetically at work to restore the woods in her southern 


carried without hindrance to their destination, and this law, which has been 
a matter of familiar observation among woodmen for generations, is now 
admitted as a scientific truth. 

Foresters and lumbermen, like sailors and other persons whose daily ocecu- 
pations bring them into contact, and often into conflict, with great natural 
forces, have many peculiar opinions, not to say superstitions. In one of these 
categories we must rank the universal belief of lumbermen, that with a given 
head of water, and in a given number of hours, a sawmill cuts more lumber 
by night than by day. Having been personally interested in several sawmills, 
IT have frequently conversed with sawyers on this subject, and have always 
been assured by them that their uniform experience established the fact that, 
other things being equal, the action of the machinery of sawmills is more 
rapid by night than by day. I am sorry—perhaps I ought to be ashamed—to 
say that my skepticism has been too strong to allow me to avail myself of 
my opportunities of testing this question by passing a night, watch in hand, 
counting the strokes of a millsaw. More unprejudiced, and, I must add, very 
intelligent and credible persons have informed me that they have done so, and 
found the report of the sawyers abundantly confirmed. A land surveyor, 
who was also an experienced lumberman, sawyer, and machinist, a good ma- 
thematician and an accurate observer, has repeatedly told me that he had 
very often ‘‘timed” sawmills, and found the difference in favor of night- 
work above thirty per cent. Sed quere, 


ECONOMY OF THE FOREST. 367 


provinces, and thereby to prevent the utter depopulation and 
waste with which that once fertile soil and genial climate are 
threatened. __ 

The objects of the restoration of the forest are as multi- 
farious as the motives that have led to its destruction, and as 
the evils which that destruction has occasioned. It is hoped 
that the replanting of the mountain slopes, and of bleak and 
infertile plains, will diminish the frequency and violence of 
river inundations, prevent the formation of new torrents and 
check the violence of those already existing, mitigate the ex- 
tremes of atmospheric temperature, humidity, and precipitation, 
restore dried-up springs, rivulets, and sources of irrigation, 
shelter the fields from chilling and from parching winds, arrest 
the spread of miasmatic efiluvia, and, finally, furnish a self- 
renewing and inexhaustible supply of a material indispensable 
to so many purposes of domestic comfort, and to the successful 
exercise of every art of peace, every destructive energy of 
war.* 


The Economy of the Forest. 


The legislation of European states upon sylviculture, and the 
practice of that art, divide themselves into two great branches 
—the preservation of existing forests, and the creation of new. 
Although there are in Europe many forests neither planted 
nor regularly trained by man, yet from the long operation of 
causes already set forth, what is understood in America and 
other new countries by the “ primitive forest,’ no longer exists 
in the territories which were the seats of ancient civilization 
and empire, except upon a small scale, and in remote and 
almost inaccessible glens quite out of the reach of ordinary 
observation. The oldest European woods are indeed native, 


* The preservation of the woods on the former eastern frontier of France, 
as a kind of natural abattis, was recognizel by the Government of that 
country as an important measure of military defence, though there have been 
conflicting opinions on the subject. 


268 ECONOMY OF THE FOREST. 


that is, sprung from self-sown seed, or from the roots of trees 
which have been felled for human purposes ; but their growth 
has been controlled, in a variety of ways, by man and by do- 
mestic animals, and they almost uniformly present more or less 
of an artificial character and arrangement. Both they and 
planted forests—which, though certainly not few, are of com- 
paratively recent date in Europe—demand, as well for protec- 
tion as for promotion of growth, a treatment different in some 
respects from that which would be suited to the character and 
wants of the virgin wood. 

On this latter branch of the subject, the management of 
the primitive wood, experience and observation have not yet 
collected a sufficient stock of facts to serve for the construction 
of a complete system of this department of sylviculture ; but 
the government of the forest as it exists in France—the differ- 
ent zones and climates of which country present many points 
of analogy with those of the United States and of some of the 
British colonies—has been carefully studied, and several manuals 
of practice have been prepared for the foresters of that empire. 
I believe the Cours Elémentaire de Culture des Bois eréé a 
VEcole Forestiére de Nancy, par M. Lorentz, complété et 
publié par A. Parade, with a supplement under the title of 
Cours d’Aménagement des Foréts, par Henri Nanquette, has 
been generally considered the best of these. The Etudes sur 
W’Economie Forestiére, par Jules Clavé, which I have often 
quoted, presents a great number of interesting views on this 
subject, but it is not designed as a practical guide, and it does 
not profess to be sufficiently specific in its details to serve that 
purpose.* Notwithstanding the difference of conditions be- 
tween the aboriginal and the trained forest, the judicious ob- 
server who aims at the preservation of the former will reap 


* Among more recent manuals may be mentioned: in French, Les Etudes de 
Maitre Pierre, Paris, 1864, 12mo; Bazeatre, T’raité de Reboisement, 2d edi- 
tion, Paris, 1864; Pasron, L’Aménagement des Foréts, Paris, 1867; in English, 
GreGor, Arboriculture, Edinburgh, 1503; in Italian, SteMoNI’s very valuable 
Manuale teorico-pratico d’Arte Forestale, 2d ediz., Firenze, 1872; the ex- 


QUALITY OF TIMBER. 569 


much instruction from the treatises I have cited, and I helieve 
he will be convinced that the sooner a natural wood is brought 
into the state of an artificially regulated one, the better it is for 
all the multiplied interests which depend on the wise adminis- 
tration of this branch of public economy. 

One consideration bearing on this subject has received less 
attention than it merits, because most persons interested in such 
questions have not opportunities for the comparison I refer to. 
I mean the great general superiority of cultivated timber to 
that of strictly spontaneous growth. I say general superiority, 
because there are exceptions to the rule. The white pine, 
Pinus strobus, for instance, and other trees of similar character 
and uses, require, for their perfect growth and _ best ligneous 
texture, a density of forest vegetation around them, which pro- 
tects them from too much agitation by wind, and from the per- 
sistence of the lateral branches which fill the wood with knots. 
A pine which has grown under those conditions possesses a tall, 
straight stem, admirably fitted for masts and spars, and, at the 
same time, its wood is almost wholly free from knots, is regular 
in annular structure, soft and uniform in texture, and, conse- 
quently, superior to almost all other timber for joinery. If, 
while a large pine is spared, the broad-leaved or other smaller 
trees around it are felled, the swaying of the tree from the 
action of the wind mechanically produces separations between 
the layers of annual growth, and greatly diminishes the value 
of the timber. The same defect is often observed in pines 
which, from some accident of growth, have much overtopped 
their fellows in the virgin forest. 

The white pine, growing in the fields, or in open glades in 
the woods, is totally different from the true forest-tree, both in 
general aspect and in quality of wood. Its stem is much 


cellent work of CeRINI, Dei Vantaggi di Societa, por l’Impianto e Conser- 
vazione dei Boschi, Milano, 1844, 8vo; and the prize essay of MeGuscHER, 
Memoria sui Boschi, etc., 2d edizione, Milano, 1859, Svo. Another very im- 
portant treatise on the uses of the forest, though not a manual of sylviculture, 
is SCHLEIDEN, Pir Baum und Waid, Leipzig, 1870. 


24- 


870 QUALITY OF TIMBER. 


shorter, its top less tapering, its foliage denser and more 
inclined to gather into tufts, its branches more numerous and of 
larger diameter, its wood shows much more distinctly the 
divisions of annual growth, is of coarser grain, harder and more 
difficult to work into mitre-joints. Intermixed with the most 
valuable pines in the American forests, are met many trees of 
the character I have just described. The lumbermen call them 
“saplings,” and generally regard them as different in species 
from the true white pine, but botanists are unable to establish 
a distinction between them, and as they agree in almost all 
respects with trees grown in the open grounds from known 
white-pine seedlings, I believe their peculiar character is due 
to unfavorable circumstances in their early growth. The pine, 
then, is an exception to the general rule as to the inferiority of 
the forest to the open-ground tree. The pasture oak and 
pasture beech, on the contrary, are well known to produce far 
better timber than those grown in the woods, and there are few 
trees to which the remark is not equally applicable.* 


*Tt is often laid down as a universal law, that the wood of trees of slow 
vegetation is superior to that of quick growth. This is one of those common- 
places by which men love to shield themselves from the labor of painstaking 
observation. It has, in fact, s0 many exceptions, that it may be doubted 
whether it isin any sense true. Most of the cedars are slow of growth; but 
while the timber of some of them is firm and durable, that of others is light, 
brittle, and perishable. The hemlock-spruce is slower of growth than the 
pines, but its wood is of very little value. The pasture oak and beech show a 
breadth of grain—and, of course, an annual increment—twice as great as trees 
of the same species grown in the woods; and the American locust, Robinia 
pseudacacia, the wood of which is of extreme toughness and durability, is, of 
all trees indigenous to North-eastern America, by far the most rapid in growth. 
Some of the species of the Australian Hucalyptus furnish wood of remarkable 
strength and durability, and yet the eucalyptus is surpassed by no known tree 
in rapidity of growth. 

As an illustration of the mutual interdependence of the mechanic arts, 
I may mention that in Italy, where stone, brick, and plaster are almost the 
only materials used in architecture, and where the ‘‘hollow ware’? kitchen 
implements are of copper or of clay, the ordinary tools for working wood are 
of a very inferior description, and the locust timber is found too hard for their 

emper., At the same time the work of the Italian stipcttai, or cabinet-makers, 


_— 


SYLVICULTURE. BY Gl 


Another advantage of the artificially regulated forest is, 
that it admits of such grading of the ground as to favor the 
retention or discharge of water at will, while the facilities it 
affords for selecting and duly proportioning, as well as prop- 
erly spacing, and in felling and removing, from time to time, 
the trees which compose it, are too obvious to require to be 
more than hinted at. In conducting these operations, we must 
have a diligent eye to the requirements of nature, and must re- 
member that a wood is not an arbitrary assemblage of trees to 
be selected and disposed according to the caprice of its owner. 
“ A forest,” says Clavé, “is not, as is often supposed, a simple 
collection of trees succeeding each other in long perspective, 
without bond of union, and capable of isolation from each other ; 
it is, on the contrary, a whole, the different parts of which are 
interdependent upon each other, and it constitutes, so to speak, 
a true individuality. Every forest has a special character, de- 
termined by the form of the surface it grows upon, the kinds 
of trees that compose it, and the manner in which they are 
grouped.” 

The art, or, as the Continental foresters rather ambitiously 
call it, the science of sylviculture has been so little pursued in 
England and America, that its nomenclature has not been in- 
troduced into the English vocabulary, and it would not be pos- 
sible to describe its processes with technical propriety of lan- 
guage, without occasionally borrowing a word from the forest 


and carvers in wood, who take pains to provide themselves with tools of better 
metal, is wholly unsurpassed in finish and in accuracy of adjustment as well as 
in taste. When a small quantity of mahogany was brought to England, early 
in the last century, the cabinet-makers were unable to use it, from the defective 
temper of their tools, until the demand for furniture from the new wood com- 
pelled them to improve the quality of their implements. In America, the 
cheapness of wood long made it the preferable material for almost all purposes 
to which it could by any possibility be applied. The mechanical cutlery and 
artisans’ tools of the United States are of admirable temper, finish, and con- 
venience, and no wood is too hard, or otherwise too refractory, to be wrought 
with great facility, both by hand-tools and by the multitude of ingenious 
machines which the Americans have invented for this purpose. 


3872 SYLVICULTURE. 


literature of France and Germany. A full discussion of the 
methods of sylviculture would, indeed, be out of place in a 
work like the present, but the want of conveniently accessible 
means of information on the subject, in the United States, will 
justify me in presenting it with somewhat more of detail than 
would otherwise be pertinent. 

The two best known methods of treating already existing 
forests are those distinguished as the ¢az/lis, copse or coppice 
treatment,* and the futaie, for which I find no English equiva- 
lent, but which may not inappropriately be called the fudl- 
growth system. <A taillis, copse, or coppice, is a wood compos- 
ed of shoots from the roots of trees previously cut for fuel and 
timber. The shoots are thinned out from time to time, and 
finally cut, either after a fixed number of years, or after the 
young trees have attained to certain dimensions, their roots be- 
ing then left to send out a new progeny as before. This is the 
cheapest method of management, and therefore the best wher- 
ever the price of labor and of capital bears a high proportion 
to that of land and of timber; but it is essentially a wasteful 
economy.t+ If the woodland is, in the first place, completely cut 


* Copse, or coppice, from the French cowper, to cut, means properly a wood 
the trees of which are cut at certain periods of immature growth, and allow- 
ed to shoot up again from the roots; but it has come to signify, very common- 
ly, a young wood, grove, or thicket, without reference to its origin, or to its 
character of a forest crop. 

+ ‘‘In America,” says Clavé (p. 124, 125), ‘‘ where there is a vast extent of 
land almost without pecuniary value, but where labor is dear and the rate of 
interest high, it is profitable to till a large surface at the least possible cost ; 
extensive cultivation is there the most advantageous. In England, France, and 
Germany, where every corner of soil is occupied, and the least bit of ground 
is sold at a high price, but where labor and capital are comparatively cheap, it 
is wisest to employ intensivé cultivation. . . All the efforts of the culti- 
vator ought to be directed to the obtaining of a given result with the least 
sacrifice, and there is equally a loss to the commonwealth if the application of 
improved agricultural processes be neglected where they are advantageous, or 
if they be employed where they are not required. . . In this point of 
view, sylviculture must follow the same laws as agriculture, and, like it, be 
modified according to the economical conditions of different states. In coun- 
tries abounding in good forests, and thinly peopled, elementary and cheap 


COPPICES. BY) 


over, as is found most convenient in practice, the young shoots 
have neither the shade nor the protection from wind so impor- 
tant to forest growth, and their progress is comparatively slow, 
while, at the same time, the thick clumps they form choke the 
seedlings that may have sprouted near them.* The evergreens, 
once cut, do not shoot up again,t and the mixed character of 
the forest—in many respects an important advantage, if not an 
indispensable condition of growth—is lost ;{ and besides this, 


methods must be pursued; in civilized regions, where a dense population re- 
quires that the soil shall be made to produce all it can yield, the regular arti- 
ficial forest, with all the processes that science teaches, should be cultivated. 
It would be absurd to apply to the endless woods of Brazil and of Canada the 
method of the Spessart by ‘‘double stages,” but not less so in our country, 
where every yard of ground has a high value, to leave to nature the task of 
propagating trees, and to content ourselves with cutting, every twenty or 
twenty-five years, the meagre growths that chance may have produced.” 

* In ordinary coppices, there are few or no seedlings, because the young 
shoots are cut before they are old enough to mature fertile seed, and this is one 
of the strongest objections to the system. 

t+ It was not long ago stated, upon the evidence of the Government forest- 
ers of Greece, and of the queen’s gardener, that a large wood has been discov- 
ered in Arcadia, consisting of a fir which has the property of sending up both 
vertical and lateral shoots from the stump of felled trees and forming a new 
crown. It was at first supposed that this forest grew only on the ‘‘ moun- 
tains,” of which the hero of About’s most amusing story, Le Roi des Montagnes, 
was ‘‘king;” but stumps, with the shoots attached, have been sent to Ger- 
many, and recognized by able botanists as true natural products, and the fact 
must now be considered as established. Daubeny refers to Theophrastus as 
ascribing this faculty of reproduction to the éAary or fir, but he does not cite 
chapter and verse, and I have not been able to find the passage. The same 
writer mentions a case where an entire forest of the common fir in France had 
been renewed in this way.—Trees and Shrubs of the Ancients, 1865, pp. 27-28. 
The American Northern pitch possesses the same power in a certain degree. 

According to Charles Martins, the cedar of Mount Atlas—which, if no tidenti- 
eal with the cedar of Lebanon, is closely allied to it—possesses the same 
power.-—Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1864, p. 315. 

¢ Natural forests are rarely, if ever, composed of trees of a single species, 
and experience has shown that oaks and other broad-leaved trees, planted as 
artificial woods, require to be mixed, or associated with others of different 
habits. 

In the forest of Fontainebleau, ‘‘ oaks, mingled with beeches in due propor- 


874 FUTAIE, OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM. 


large wood of any species cannot be grown in this method, be- 
cause trees which shoot from decaying stumps and their dying 
roots, become hollow or otherwise unsound before they acquire 
their full dimensions. A more fatal objection still, is, that the 
roots of trees will not bear more than two or three, or at most 
four cuttings of their shoots before their vitality is exhausted, 
and the wood can then be restored only by replanting entirely. 
The period of cutting coppices varies in Europe from fifteen to 
forty years, according to soil, species, and rapidity of growth. 
In the futace, or full-growth system, the trees are allowed to 
stand as long as they continue in healthy and vigorous growth. 
This is a shorter period than would be at first supposed, when 
we consider the advanced age and great dimensions to which, 
under favorable circumstances, many forest-trees attain in 
temperate climates. But, as every observing person familiar 
with the forest is aware, these are exceptional cases, just as are 
instances of great longevity or of gigantic stature among men. 
Able vegetable physiologists have maintained that the tree, 


tion,”’ says Clavé, ‘‘may arrive at the age of five or six hundred years in full 
vigor, and attain dimensions which I have never seen surpassed ; when, how- 
ever, they are wholly unmixed with other trees, they begin to decay and die 
at the top, at the age of forty or fifty years, like men, old before their time, 
weary of the world, and longing’ only to quit it. This has been observed in 
most of the oak plantations of which I have spoken, and they have not been 
able to attain to full growth. When the vegetation was perceived to languish, 
they were cut, in the hope that this operation would restore their vigor, and 
that the new shoots would succeed better than the original trees; and, in 
fact, they seemed to_be recovering for the first few years. But the shoots 
were soon attacked by the same decay, and the operation had to be renewed 
at shorter and shorter intervals, until at last it was found necessary to treat 
as coppices plantations originally designed for the full-growth system. Nor 
was this all: the soil, periodically bared by these cuttings, became impover- 
ished, and less and less suited to the growth of the oak. . . It wasthen 
proposed to introduce the pine and plant with it the vacancies and glades. 

By this means, the forest was sayed from the ruin which threatened 
it, and now more than 10,000 acres of pines, from fifteen to thirty years old, 
are disseminated at various points, sometimes intermixed with broad-leayed 
trees, sometimes forming groves by themselves.”—Reovue des Deue Mondes, 
Mai, 1863, pp. 153, 154. 


FUTAIE, OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM. 375 


like most fish and reptiles, has no natural limit of life or of 
growth, and that the only reason why our oaks and our pines do 
not reach the age of twenty centuries and the height of a hun- 
dred fathoms, is, that in the multitude of accidents to which 
they are exposed, the chances of their attaining to such a length 
of years and to such dimensions of growth are millions to one 
against them. But another explanation of this fact is possible. 
In trees affected by no discoverable external cause of death, 
decay begins at the topmost branches, which seem to wither and 
die for want of nutriment. The mysterious force by which the 
sap is carried from the roots to the utmost twigs, cannot be 
conceived to be unlimited in power, and it is probable that it 
differs in different species, so that while it may suflice to raise 
the fluid to the height of five hundred feet in the eucalyptus, 
it may not be able to carry it beyond one hundred and fifty in 
the oak. The limit may be different, too, in different trees of 
the same species, not from defective organization in those of 
inferior growth, but from more or less favorable conditions of 
soil, nourishment, and exposure. Whenever a tree attains to 
the limit beyond which its circulating fluids cannot rise, we may 
suppose that decay begins, and death follows from want of 
nutrition at the extremities, and from the same causes which 
bring about the same results in animals of limited size—such, 
for example, as the interruption of functions essential to life, in 
consequence of the clogging up of ducts by matter assimilable 
in the stage of growth, but no longer so when increment has 
ceased. 

In the natural woods we observe that, though, among the 
myriads of trees which grow upon a square mile, there are 
several vegetable giants, yet the great majority of them begin 
to decay long before they have attained their maximum of 
stature, and this seems to be still more emphatically true of the 
artificial forest. In France, according to Clavé, “oaks, in a 
suitable soil, may stand, without exhibiting any sign of decay, 
for two or three hundred years; the pines hardly exceed one 
hundred and twenty, and the soft or white woods [bozs blancs], 


376 FUTAIE, OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM, 

in wet soils, languish and die before reaching the fiftieth year.” * 
These ages are certainly below the average of those of American 
forest-trees, and are greatly exceeded in very numerous well- 
attested instances of isolated trees in Europe. 

The former mode of treating the futaie, called the gar des 
system, was to cut the trees ini idually as they arene at 
maturity, but, in the best regulated forests, this practice has 
been abandoned for the German method, which embraces not 
only the securing of the largest immediate profit, but the re- 
planting of the forest, and the care of the young growth. This 
is effected in the case of a forest, whether natural or artificial, 
which is to be subjected to regular management, by three 
operations. The first of these consists in felling about one- 
third of the trees, in such way as to leave convenient spaces for 
the growth of seedlings. The remaining two-thirds are relied 
upon to replant the vacancies, by natural sowing, which they 
seldom or never fail to do. The seedlings are watched, are 
thinned out when too dense, and the ill-formed and sickly, as 
well as those of species of inferior value, and the shrubs and 
thorns which might otherwise choke or too closely shade them, 
are pulled up. When they have attained suflicient strength 
and development of foliage to require, or at least to bear, more 
light and air, the second step is taken, by removing a suitable 
proportion of the old trees which had been spared at the first eut- 
ting; and when, finally, the younger trees are hardened enough 
to bear frost nae sun without other protection than that which 
they mutually give to each other, the remainder of the original 
forest is felled, and the wood now consists wholly of young 
and vigorous trees. This result is obtained after about twenty 
years. At convenient periods, the unhealthy stocks and those 
injured by wind or other accidents are removed, and in some 
instances the growth of the remainder is pr omoted by irrigation 
or by fertilizing applications.| When the forest is approaching 


* Etudes Forestiores, p. 89. 
{+ The grounds which it is most important to clothe with wood as a conser- 
vative influence, and which, also, can best be spared from agricultural use, 


by 


FUTAIE, OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM. OTT 


to maturity, the original processes already described are re- 
peated ; and as, in different parts of an extensive forest, they 
would take place at different times in different zones, it would 
afford indefinitely an annual crop of small wood, fuel, and 
timber. 

The duties of the forester do not end here, for it sometimes 
happens that the glades left by felling the older trees are not 
sufficiently seeded, or that the species, or essences,as the French 
oddly call them, are not duly proportioned in the new crop. In 
this case, seed must be artificially sown, or young trees planted 
in the vacancies. Besides this, all trees, whether grown for 
fruit, for fuel, or for timber, require more or less training in 


are steep hillsides. But the performance of all the offices of the forester to 
the tree—seeding, planting, thinning, trimming, and finally felling and remoy- 
ing for consumption—is more laborious upon a rapid declivity than on a level 
soil, and at the same time it is difficult to apply irrigation or manures to trees 
so situated. Experience has shown that there is great advantage in terracing 
the face of a hill before planting it, both as preventing the wash of the earth 
by checking the flow of water down its slope, and as presenting a surface 
favorable for irrigation, as well as for manuring and cultivating the tree. But 
even without so expensive a process, very important results have been obtained 
by simply ditching declivities. ‘‘ In order to hasten the growth of wood on the 
flanks of a mountain, Mr. Hugéne Chevandier divided the slope into zones 
forty or fifty feet wide, by horizontal ditches closed at both ends, and thereby 
obtained, from firs of different ages, shoots double the dimensions of those 
which grew on a dry soil of the same character, where the water was allowed 
to run off without obstruction.”—Dumont, Des Travaux Publics, etc., pp. 94- 
96. 

The ditches were about two feet and a half deep, and three feet and a half 
wide, and they cost about forty francs the hectare, or three dollars the acre. 
This extraordinary growth was produced wholly by the retention of the rain- 
water in the ditches, whence it filtered through the whole soil and supplied 
moisture to the roots of the trees. It may be doubted whether in a climate 
cold enough to freeze the entire contents of the ditches in winter, it would not 
be expedient to draw off the water in the autumn, as the presence of so large a 
quantity of ice in the soil might prove injurious to trees too young and small 
to shelter the ground effectually against frost. 

Chevandier computes that, if the annual growth of the pine in the marshy 
and too humid soil of the Vosges be represented by one, it will equal two in 
ordinary dry ground, four or five on slopes so ditched or graded as to retain 
the water flowing upon them from roads or steep declivities, and six where 


378 FUTAIE, OR FULL-GROWTH SYSTEM. 


order to yield the best returns. The experiments of the Vicomte 
de Courval in sylviculture throw much light on this subject, and 
show, in a most interesting way, the importance of pruning 
forest-trees. The principal feature of De Courval’s very suc- 
cessful method is a systematical mode of trimming which com- 
pels the tree to develop the stem, by reducing the lateral rami- 
fication. Beginning with young trees, the buds are rubbed off 
from the stems, and superfluous lateral shoots are pruned down 
to the trunk. When large trees are taken in hand, branches 
which can be spared, and whose removal is necessary to obtain 
a proper length of stem, are very smoothly cut off quite close 


the earth is kept sufficiently moist by infiltration from running brooks.— 
Comptes Rendus a ? Académie des Sciences, t. xix., Juillet, Déc., 1844, p. 167. 

The effect of accidental irrigation is well shown in the growth of the trees 
planted along the canals of irrigation which traverse the fields in many parts 
of Italy. They flourish most luxuriantly, in spite of continual lopping, and 
yield a very important contribution to the stock of fuel for domestic use ; 
while trees, situated so far from canals as to be out of the reach of infiltration 
from them, are ef much slower growth, under circumstances otherwise equally 
favorable. 

In other experiments of Chevandier, under better conditions, the yield of 
wood was increased, by judicious irrigation, in the ratio of seven to one, the 
profits in that of twelve to one. At the Exposition of 1855, Chambrelent 
exhibited young trees, which, in four years from the seed, had grown to the 
height of sixteen and twenty feet, and the circumference of ten and twelve 
inches. Chevandier experimented with various manures, and found that 
some of them might be profitably applied to young but not to old trees, the 
quantity required in the latter case being too great. Wood-ashes and the 
refuse of soda factories are particularly recommended, See, on the manuring 
of trees, CHEVANDIER, Jvecherches sur Vemploi de divers amendements, etc., 
Paris, 1852, and KopERLE, Grundséilze der Kitnstlichen Dingung im FPorstcul- 
turwesen. Wien, 1865. 

I have seen an extraordinary growth produced in fir-trees by the application 
of soapsuds; in a young and sickly cherry-tree, by heaping the chips and 
dust from a marble-quarry, to the height of two or three feet, over the roots 
and around the stem; and cases have come to my knowledge where like 
resulis followed the planting of vines and trees in holes half filled with frag- 
ments of plaster-castings, and mortar from old buildings. Chevandier’s experi- 
ments in the irrigation of the forest would not have been a ‘‘ new thing under 
the sun” to wise King Solomon, for that monarch says: ‘‘I made me pools of 
water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees.” Hccles. ii. 6, 


¢. 


HILL-PLANTING. 379 


to the trunk, and the exposed surface is ¢mmediately brushed 
over with mineral-coal tar. When thus treated, it is said that 
the healing of the wound is perfect, and without any decay of 
the tree. Trees trained by De Courval’s method, which is now 
universally approved and much practised in France, rapidly at- 
taina great height. They grow with remarkable straightness of 
stem and of grain, and their timber commands the highest 
price:* 

A system of plantation, specially though not exclusively 

uited to very moist soils, recommended by Duhamel a hundred 

years ago, has been revived in Germany, within about twenty 
years, with much success. It is called Aell-planting, and con- 
sists in placing the young tree upright on the greensward with 
its roots properly spread out, and then covering the roots and 
supporting the trunk by thick sods cut so as to form a circular 
hillock around it.t By this method it is alleged trees can be 
grown advantageously both in dry ground and on humid soils, 
where they would not strike root if planted in holes after the 
usual manner. If there is any truth in the theory of a desic- 
cating action in evergreen trees, plantations of this sort might 
have a value as drainers of lands not easily laid dry by other 
processes. There is much ground on the great prairies of the 
West, where experiments with this method of planting are 
strongly to be recommended. 

It is common in Europe to permit the removal of the fallen 
leaves and fragments of bark and branches with which the 
forest-soil is covered, and sometimes the cutting of the lower 
twigs of evergreens. The leaves and twigs are principally 
used as litter for cattle, and finally as manure, the bark and 


* See DE CourVAL, Taille et conduite des Arbres forestiéres et autres arbres 
de grande dimension. Paris, 1861. 

The most important part of Viscount de Courval’s system will be found in 
DL’ Elagage des Arbres, par le Comte A. Des Cars, an admirable little treatise, 
of which numerous editions, at the price of one franc, have been printed since 
the first, of 1864, and which ought to be translated and published without 
delay in the United States. 

+ See ManTHUFFEL, L’ Art de Planter, traduit par Stumper. Paris, 1808. 


380 REMOVAL OF LEAVES. 
wind-fallen branches as fuel. By long usage, sometimes by 
express grant, this privilege has become a vested right of the 
population in the neighborhood of many public and even large 
private forests; but it is generally regarded as a serious evil. 
To remove the leaves and fallen twigs is to withdraw much of 
the pabulum upon which the tree was destined to feed. The 
small branches and leaves are the parts of the tree which yield 
the largest proportion of ashes on combustion, and of course 
they supply a great amount of nutriment for the young shoots. 
“A cubic foot of twigs,” says Vaupell, “yields four times as 
much ashes as a cubic foot of stem wood. . . For every 
hundred weight of dried leaves carried off from a beech forest, 
we sacrifice a hundred and sixty cubic feet of wood. The leaves 
and the mosses are a substitute, not only for manure, but for 
ploughing. The carbonic acid given out by decaying leaves, 
when taken up by water, serves to dissolve the mineral con- 
stituents of the soil, and is particularly active in disintegrating 
feldspar and the clay derived from its decomposition. . : 
The leaves belong to the soil. Without them it cannot preserve 
its fertility, and cannot furnish nutriment to the beech. The 
trees languish, produce seed incapable of germination, and the 
spontaneous self-sowing, which is an indispensable element in 
the best systems of sylviculture, fails altogether in the bared and 
impoverished soil.” * 

Besides these evils, the removal of the leaves deprives the 
soil of much of that spongy character which gives it such im- 


* VAUPELL, Bigens Indvandring 4 de Danske Skove, pp. 29,46. Vaupell 
further observes, on the page last quoted: ‘‘ The removal of leaves is injurious 
to the forest, not only because it retards the growth of trees, but still more 
because it disqualifies the soil for the production of particular species. When 
the beech languishes, and the development of its branches is less vigorous and 
its crown less spreading, it becomes unable to resist the encroachments of the 
fir. This latter tree thrives in an inferior soil, and being no longer stifled by 
the thick foliage of the beech, it spreads gradually through the wood, while 
the beech retreats before it and finally perishes.” 

Schleiden confirms the opinion of Vaupell, and adds many important obser- 
vations on this subject.—Hir Baum und Wald, pp. 64, 65. 


PROTECTION AGAINST ANIMALS. 3881 


mense value as a reservoir of moisture and a regulator of the 
flow of springs; and, finally, it exposes the surface-roots to the 
drying influence of sun and wind, to accidental mechanical 
injury from the tread of animals or men, and, in cold climates, 
to the destructive effects of frost. 


Protection against Wild Animals. 


It is often necessary to take measures for the protection of 
young trees against the rabbit, the mole, and other rodent quad- 
rupeds, and of older ones against the damage done by the larve 
of insects hatched upon the surface or in the tissues of the bark, 
or even in the wood itself. The much greater liability of the 
artificial than of the natural forest to injury from this cause is 
perhaps the only point in which the superiority of the former 
to the latter is not as marked as that of any domesticated vege- 
table to its wild representative. But the better quality of the 
wood and the much more rapid growth of the trained and 
regulated forest are abundant compensations for the loss thus 
occasioned, and the progress of entomological science will, 
perhaps, suggest new methods of preventing the ravages of 
insects. Thus far, however, the collection and destruction of 
the eggs, by simple but expensive means, has proved the most 
effectual remedy.* 


* T have remarked elsewhere that most insects which deposit and hatch 
their eggs in the wood of the natural forest confine themselves to dead trees. 
Not only is this the fact, but it is also true that many of the borers attack 
only freshly-cut timber. Their season of labor is a short one, and unless the 
tree is cut during this period, it is safe from them. In summer you may hear 
them plying their augers in the wood of a young pine with soft, green bark, as 
you sit upon its trunk, within a week after it has been felled, but the wind- 
falls of the winter lie uninjured by the worm and even undecayed for centuries. 
In the pine woods of New England, after the regular lumberman has removed 
the standing trees, these old trunks are hauled out from the mosses and leaves 
which half cover them, and often furnish excellent timber. The slow decay 
of such timber in the woods, it may be remarked, furnishes another proof of 
the uniformity of temperature and humidity in the forest, for the trunk of a 
tree lying on grass or ploughland, and of course exposed to all the alterna- 


882 EXCLUSION OF QUADRUPEDS. 


Exclusion of Domestic Quadrupeds. 


But probably the most important of all rules for the govern- 
ment of the forest, whether natural or artificial, is that which 
prescribes the absolute exclusion of all domestic quadrupeds, 
except swine, from every wood which is not destined to be 
cleared. No growth of young trees is possible where horned 
cattle, sheep, or goats, or even horses, are permitted to pasture 
at any season of the year, though they are doubtless most de- 
structive when trees are in leaf.* ‘These animals browse upon 


tions of climate, hardly resists complete decomposition for a generation. The 
forests of Europe exhibit similar facts. Wessely, in a description of the primi- 
tive wood of Neuwald in Lower Austria, says that the windfalls required from 
150 to 200 years for entire decay.—Die Oecsterreichischen Alpenlinder und thre 
Forste, p. 312. 

The comparative immunity of the American native forests from attacks by 
insects is perhaps in some degree due to the fact that the European destruc- 
tive tribes have not yet found their way across the ocean, and that our native 
species are less injurious to living trees. On the European lignivorous insects, 
see SrmMonI, Manuale @ Arte Forestale, 2d edizione, pp. 369-379. 

* Although the economy of the forest has received little attention in the 
United States, no lover of American nature can have failed to observe a 
marked difference between a native wood from which cattle are excluded 
and one where they are permitted to browse. A few seasons suffice for the 
total extirpation of the ‘‘ underbrush,” including the young trees on which 
alone the reproduction of the forest depends, and all the branches of those 
of larger growth which hang within reach of the cattle are stripped of their 
buds and leaves, and scon wither and fall off. These effects are observable 
at a great distance, and a wood-pasture is recognized, almost as far as it can be 
seen, by the regularity with which its lower foliage terminates at what Rus- 
kin somewhere calls the ‘‘ cattle-line.” This always runs parallel to the sur- 
face of the ground, and is determined by the height to which domestic 
quadrupeds can reach to feed upon the leaves. In describing a visit to the 
grand-dueal farm of San Rossore near Pisa, where a large herd of camels is 
kept, Chateauvieux says: ‘‘In passing through a wood of evergreen oaks, I 
observed that all the twigs and foliage of the trees were chpped up to the 
height of about twelve feet above the ground, without leaving a single spray 
below that level. I was informed that the browsing of the camels had 
trimmed the trees as high as they could reach."_—LULLIN DE CHATEAU- 
vinux, Lettres sur UV Italie, p. 118. 

Browsing animals, and most of all the goat, are considered by foresters 


EXCLUSION OF QUADRUPEDS. O80 


, the terminal buds and the tender branches, thereby stunting, if 
they do not kill, the young trees, and depriving them of all 
beauty and vigor of growth. 


as more injurious to the growth of young frees, and, therefore, to the repro- 
duction of the forest, than almost any other destructive cause. According 
to Beatson’s Saint Helena, introductory chapter, and Darwin’s Journal of Re- 
searches in Geology and Natural History, pp. 582, 583, it was the goats which 
destroyed the beautiful forests that, three hundred and fifty years ago, cov- 
ered a continuous surface of not less than two thousand acres in the interior 
of the island [of St. Helena], not to mention scattered groups of trees. Dar- 
win observes: ‘‘ During our stay at Valparaiso, I was most positively assured 
that sandal-wood formerly grew in abundance on the island of Juan Fernan- 
dez, but that this tree had now become entirely extinct there, having been 
extirpated by the goats which early navigators had introduced. The neigh- 
boring islands, to which goats have not been carried, still abound in sandal- 
wood.” 

In the winter, the deer tribe, especially the great American moose-deer, 
subsists much on the buds and young sprouts of trees; yet—though from the 
destruction of the wolves or from some not easily explained cause, these latter 
animals have recently multiplied so rapidly in some parts of North America, 
that, not long since, four hundred of them are said to have been killed, in one 
season, on a territory in Maine not comprising more than one hundred and 
fifty square miles—the wild browsing quadrupeds are rarely, if ever, numerous 
enough in regions uninhabited by man to produce any sensible effect on the 
condition of the forest. A reason why they are less injurious than the goat 
to young trees may be that they resort to this nutriment only in the winter, 
when the grasses and shrubs are leafless or covered with snow, whereas the 
goat feeds upon buds and young shoots principally in the season of growth. 
However this may be, the natural law of consumption and supply keeps the 
forest growth, and the wild animals which live on its products, in such a 
state of equilibrium as to insure the indefinite continuance of both, and the 
perpetuity of neither is endangered until man interferes and destroys the 
balance. 

When, however, deer are bred and protected in parks, they multiply like 
domestic cattle, and become equally injurious to trees. ‘‘ A few years ago,” 
says Clavé, ‘* there were not less than two thousand deer of different ages in 
the forest of Fontainebleau. For want of grass, they are driven to the trees, 
and they do not spare them. . . It is calculated that the browsing of these 
animals, and the consequent retardation of the growth of the wood, dimin- 
ishes the annual product of the forest to the amount of two hundred thou- 
sand cubic feet per year, . . and besides this, the trees thus mutilated 
are soon exhausted and die. The deer attack the pines, too, tearing off the 
bark in long strips, or rubbing their heads against them when shedding their 


384 FOREST FIRES. 


Forest Fires. 


The difficulty of protecting the woods against accidental or 
incendiary fires is one of the most discouraging cireumstances 
attending the preservation of natural and the plantation of arti- 
ficial forests.* In the spontaneous wood the spread of fire is 


horns; and sometimes, in groves of more than a hundred hectares, not one 
pine is found uninjured by them.”—Revue des Deux Mondes, Mai, 1863, p. 157. 

Vaupell, though agreeing with other writers as to the injury done to the 
forest by most domestic animals and by half-tamed deer—which he illustrates 
in an interesting way in his posthumous work, The Danish Woods—thinks, 
nevertheless, that at the season when the mast is falling, swine are rather use- 
ful than otherwise to forests of beech and oak, by treading into the ground 
and thus sowing beechnuts and acorns, and by destroying moles and mice.— 
De Danske Skove, p. 12. Meguscher is of the same opinion, and adds that 
swine destroy injurious insects and their larvee.—Memoria, etc., p. 233. 

Beckstein computes that a park of 2,500 acres, containing 250 acres of 
marsh, 250 of fields and meadows, and the remaining 2,000 of wood, may 
keep 364 deer of different species, 47 wild boars, 200 hares, 100 rabbits, and 
an indefinite number of pheasants. These animals would require, in winter, 
123,000 pounds of hay, and 22,000 pounds of potatoes, besides what they 
would pick up themselves. The natural forest most thickly peopled with 
wild animals would not, in temperate climates, contain, upon the average, 
one-tenth of these numbers to the same extent of surface. 

* The disappearance of the forests of ancient Gaul and of medizval France has 
been ascribed by some writers as much to accidental fires as to the felling of 
the trees. Allthe treatises on sylviculture are full of narratives of forest 
fires. The woods of Corsica and Sardinia have suffered incalculable injury 
from this cause, and notwithstanding the resistance of the cork-tree to injury 
from common fires, the government forests of this valuable tree in Algeria 
have been lately often set on fire by the natives and have sustained immense 
damage. 

See an article by Ysabeau in the Annales Porestiéres, t. iii., p. 489; DELLA 
Marmora, Voyage en Sardaigne, 2d edition, t. i., p. 426; Rivista Forestale 
del Regno @ Italia, October, 1865, p. 474. 

Five or six years agoI saw in Switzerland a considerable forest, chiefly of 
young trees, which had recently been burnt over. I was told that the poor of 
the commune had long enjoyed a customary privilege of carrying off dead 
wood and windfalls, and that they had set the forest on fire to kill the trees 
and so increase the supply of their lawful plunder. 

The customary rights of herdsmen, shepherds, and peasants in European 


ay 


Oo 


ey) 


FOREST FIRES. 


somewhat retarded by the general humidity of the soil and of 
the beds of leaves which cover it. But in long droughts the su- 
perficial layer of leaves and the dry fallen branches become as 
inflammable as tinder, and the fire spreads with fearful rapid- 
ity, until its further progress is arrested by want of material, 
or, more rarely, by heavy rains, sometimes caused, as many 
meteorologists suppose, by the conflagration itself. 

In the artificial forest the annual removal of fallen or half- 
dried trees and the leaves and other droppings of the wood, 
though otherwise a very injurious practice, much diminishes the 
rapid spread of fires; and the absence of combustible under- 
wood and the greater distance between the trees are additional 
safeguards. But, on the other hand, the comparative dryness 
of the soil, and of any leaves or twigs which may remain upon 
it, and the greater facility for the passage of wind-currents 
through a regularly planted and more open wood, are circum- 
stances unfavorable to the security of the trees against this 
formidable danger. The natural forest, unless isolated and of 
small extent, can be protected from fire only by a vigilance too 
costly to be systematically practised. But the artificial wood 
may be secured by a network of ditches and of paths or occa- 
sional open glades, which both check the running of the fire 
and furnish the means of approaching and combating it.* 

The experience of 1871 ought not to be wholly without value 
as a lesson. It is not possible to estimate the damage by forest 
fires in that disastrous year, in what were lately the North-west- 
ern States, and in Canada, but as the demand for lumber, and, 
consequently, its market price, are rising at a rate higher than 
the interest on capital, in a geometrical ratio, one may almost 


forests are often an insuperable obstacle to the success of attempts to preserve 
the woods or to improve their condition. See, on this subject, ALFRED 
Maury, Les anciens Foréts de la Gaule, chap. xxix. 

* It is stated that in the pine woods of the Landes of Gascony a fire has 
never been known to cross a railway-track ora common road. See Des Jn- 
cendies, etc., dans la Region des Maures in the Revue des Hauax et Foréts for 
February, 1869. Many other important articles on this subject will be found 
in other numbers of the same very valuable periodical. 


386 LEGISLATION ON THE FOREST. 


say it is probable that ten years hence those fires will be thought 
to have diminished the national wealth by a larger amount than 
even the terrible conflagration at Chicago. 

There is no good reason why insurance companies should 
not guarantee the proprietor of a wood as well as the owner of 
a house against damage by fire. In Europe there is no con- 
ceivable liability to pecuniary loss which may not be insured 
against. The American companies might at first be embar- 
rassed in estimating the risk, but the experience of a few years 
would suggest safe principles, and all parties would find adyan- 
tage in this extension of security. 


Forest Legislation. 


I have alleged sufficient reasons for believing that a desola- 
tion, like that which has overwhelmed many once beautiful and 
fertile regions of Europe, awaits an important part of the terri- 
tory of the United States, and of other comparatively new coun- 
tries over which European civilization is now extending its 
sway, unless prompt measures are taken to check the action of 
destructive causes already in operation. It is almost in vain to 
expect that mere restrictive legislation can do anything effect- 
ual to arrest the progress of the evil in those countries, except 
so far as the state is still the proprietor of extensive forests. 
Woodlands which have passed into private hands will every- 
where be managed, in spite of legal restrictions, upon the same 
economical principles as other possessions, and every proprietor 
will, as a general rule, fell his woods, unless he believes that it 
will be for his pecuniary interest to preserve them. Tew of 
the new provinces which the last three centuries have brought 
under the control of the European race, would tolerate any 
interference by the law-making power with what they regard as 
the most sacred of civil rights—the right, namely, of every man 
to do what he will with his own. In the Old World, even in 
France, whose people, of all European nations, love best to be 
governed and are least annoyed by bureaucratic supervision, 


87 


co 


LEGISLATION ON THE FOREST. 


law has been found impotent to prevent the destruction, or 
wasteful economy, of private forests ; and in many of the moun- 
tainous departments of that country, man is at this moment so 
fast laying waste the face of the earth, that the most serious fears 
are entertained, not only of the depopulation of those districts, 
but of enormous mischiefs to the provinces contiguous to them.* 
The only legal provisions from which anything is to be hoped, 
are such as shall make it a matter of private advantage to the 
landholder to spare the trees upon his grounds, and promote the 
growth of the young wood. Much may be done by exempting 
standing forests from taxation, and by imposing taxes on wood 
felled for fuel or for timber, something by more stringent pro- 
visions against trespasses on forest property, and something by 
premiums or honorary distinctions for judicious management of 
the woods; and, in short, in this matter rewards rather than pun- 
ishments must be the incentives to obedience even to a policy of 
enlightened self-interest. It might be difficult to induce gov- 
ernments, general or local, to make the necessary appropriations 


* “The laws against clearing have never been able to prevent these opera- 
tions when the proprietor found his advantage in them, and the long series of 
royal ordinances and decrees of parliaments, proclaimed from the days of 
Charlemagne to our own, with a view of securing forest property against the 
improvideunce of its owners, have served only to show the impotence of legisla- 
tive action on this subject.”,—CLavs, Hiudes sur 0 Economie Forestiére, p. 32. 

‘* A proprietor can always contrive to clear his woods, whatever may be done 
to prevent him; it is a mere question of time, and a few imprudent cuttings, 
a few abuses of the right of pasturage, suffice to destroy a forest in spite of 
all regulations to the contrary.”—DuNoyvER, De la Lnberté du Travail, ii., p. 
452, as quoted by Clavé, p. 353. 

Both authors agree that the preservation of the forests in France is practi- 
cable only by their transfer to the state, which alone can protect them and 
secure their proper treatment. IJtis much to be feared that even this measure 
would be inadequate to preserve the forests of the American Union. There 
is little respect for public property in America, and the Federal Government, 
certainly, would not be the proper agent of the nation for this purpose. It 
proved itself unable to protect the live-oak woods of Florida, which were in- 
tended to be preserved for the use of the navy, and it more than once paid 
contractors a high price for timber stolen from its own forests. The authori- 
ties of the individual States might be more efficient. 


388 AMERICAN FOREST PLANTATIONS. 


for such purposes, but there can be no doubt that it would be 
sound economy in the end. 

In countries where there exist municipalities endowed with 
an intelligent public spirit, the purchase and control of for- 
ests by such corporations would often prove advantageous; and 
in some of the provinces of Northern Lombardy, experience has 
shown that such operations may be conducted with great benefit 
to all the interests connected with the proper management 
of the woods. In Switzerland, on the other hand, except in 
some few cases where woods have been preserved as a de- 
fence against avalanches, the forests of the communes haye 
been of little advantage to the public interests, and have very 
generally gone to decay.* The rights of pasturage, every- 
‘where destructive to trees, combined with toleration of tres- 
passes, have so reduced their value, that there is, too often, 
nothing left that is worth protecting. In the canton of Ticino, 
the peasants have very frequently voted to sell the town-woods 
and divide the proceeds among the corporators. The some- 
times considerable sums thus received are squandered in wild 
revelry, and the sacrifice of the forests brings not even a mo- 
mentary benefit to the proprietors.+ 

Fortunately for the immense economical and sanitary in- 
terests involved in this branch of rural and industrial hus- 
bandry, public opinion in many parts of the United States is 
thoroughly roused to the importance of the subject. In the 
Eastern States, plantations of a certain extent have been made, 
and a wiser system is pursued in the treatment of the remain- 
ing native woods.{ Important experiments have been tried in 


* A belter economy has been of late introduced into the management of 
the forest in Switzerland. Excellent official reports on the subject have been 
published and important legal provisions adopted. 

+ See in Beruepscn, Die Alpen, chapter Holzschliger und Flésser, a lively 
account of the sale of a communal wood. 

¢ When the census of 1860 was taken, the States of Maine and New York pro- 
duced and exported lumber in abundance. Neither of them now has timber 
enough for domestic use, and they are both compelled to draw much of their 
supply from Canada and the West. 


AMERICAN FOREST PLANTATIONS. 8389 


Massachusetts on the propagation of forest-trees on seashore 
bluffs exposed to strong winds. This had been generally sup- 
posed to be impossible, but the experiments in question afford a 
gratifying proof that this is an erroneous opinion. Piper gives 
an interesting account of Mr. Tudor’s success in planting trees 
on the bleak and barren shore of Nahant. “ Mr. Tudor,’ ob- 
serves he, “has planted more than ten thousand trees at Nahant, 
and, by the results of his experiments, has fully demonstrated 
that trees, properly cared for in the beginning, may be made to 
grow up to the very bounds of the ocean, exposed to the biting 
of the wind and the spray of the sea. The only shelter they 
require is, at first, some interruption to break the current of the 
wind, such as fences, houses, or other trees.” * 

Young trees protected against the wind by a fence will some- 
what overtop their shelter, and every tree will serve as a screen 
toa taller one behind it. Extensive groves have thus been 
formed in situations where an isolated tree would not grow at all. 

The people of the Far West have thrown themselves into the 
work, we cannot say of restoration, but rather of creation, of 
woodland, with much of the passionate energy which marks 
their action in reference to other modes of physical improve- 
nent. California has appointed a State forester with a liberal 
salary, and made such legal provisions and appropriations as to 
render the discharge of his duties effectual. The hands that 
built the Pacific Railroad at the rate of miles in a day are now 
busy in planting belts of trees to shelter the track from snow- 
drifts, and to supply, at a future day, timber for ties and fuel 
for the locomotives. The settlers on the open plains, too, are 
not less actively engaged in the propagation of the woods, and 
if we can put faith in the official statistics on the subject, not 
thousands but millions of trees are annually planted on the 
prairies. 

These experiments are of much scientific as well as economi- 
cal interest. The prairies have never been wooded, so far as 
we know their history, and it has been contended that successful 


* Trees of America, p. 10. 


3890 AMERICAN FOREST PLANTATIONS. 


sylviculture would be impracticable in those regions from the 
want of rain. But we are acquainted with no soil and climate 
which favor the production of herbage and forbid the rearing 
of frees, and, as Bryant well observes, “it seems certain that 
where grass will grow trees may be made to grow also.” * In 


* The origin of our Western treeless prairies and plains, as of the Russian 
steppes, which much resemble them, is obscure, but the want of forests upon 
them, seems to be due to climatic conditions and especially to a want of spring 
and summer rains, which prevents the spontaneous formation of forests upon 
them, though not necessarily the growth of trees artificially planted and cared 
for. Climatic conditions more or less resembling those of our Western territo- 
ries produce analogous effects in India. Much valuable information on the 
relations between climate and forest vegetation will be found in an article 
by Dr. BRANDIS, On the Distribution of Forests in India, in Ocean Highways 
for October, 1872. 

In the more eastwardly prairie region fires have done much to prevent the 
spread of the native groves, and throughout the whole woodless plains the 
pasturage of the buffalo alone would suffice to prevent a forest growth. The 
prairies were the proper feeding-grounds of the bison, and the vast number of 
those animals is connected, as cause or consequence, with the existence of these 
vast pastures, The bison, indeed, could not convert the forest into a pasture, 
but he would do much to prevent the pasture from becoming a forest. 

There is positive evidence that some of the American tribes possessed large 
herds of domesticated bisons. See HuuboLptT, Ansichten der Natur, i., pp. 
71-75. What authorizes us to affirm that this was simply the wild bison re- 
claimed, and why may we not, with equal probability, believe that the migra- 
tory prairie-buffalo is the progeny of the domestic animal run wild ? 

There are, both on the prairies, as in Wisconsin, and in deep forests, as in 
Ohio, extensive remains of a primitive people, who must have been more 
numerous and more advanced in art than the present Indian tribes. There 
can be no doubt that the woods where such earthworks are found in Ohio 
were cleared by them, and that the vicinity of these fortresses or temples was 
inhabited by a large population. Nothing forbids the supposition that the 
prairies were cleared by the same or a similar people, and that the growth of 
trees upon them has been prevented by fires and grazing, while the restoration 
of the woods in Ohio may be due to the abandonment of that region by its 
original inhabitants. The climatic conditions unfavorable to the spontaneous 
growth of trees on the prairies may possibly be an effect of too extensive 
clearings, rather than a cause of the want of woods. 

It is disputed whether the steppes of Russia were ever wooded. They 
were certainly bare of forest growth at a very remote period ; for Herodotus 
describes the country of the Scythians between the Ister and the Tanais as 


AMERICAN FOREST PLANTATIONS. 391 


any case the question will now be subjected to a practical test, 
and the plantations are so extensive, and, as is reported, so thrifty 
in growth, that one generation will suffice to determine with 
certainty and precision how far climate is affected by clothing 
with wood a vast territory naturally destitute of that protection. 

I have thus far spoken only of the preservation and training 
of existing woods, not of the planting of new forests, because 
European experience, to which alone we can appeal, is conver 
sant only with conditions so different from those of our own 
climate, soil, and arboreal vegetation, that precedents drawn 
from it cannot be relied upon as entirely safe rules for our 
guidance in that branch of rural economy.* 


woodless, with the exception of the small province of Xylea between the 
Dnieper and the Gulf of Perekop. They are known to have been occupied by 
a large nomade and pastoral population down to the sixteenth century, though 
these tribes are now much reduced in numbers. The habits of such races 
are scarcely less destructive to the forest than those of civilized life. Pastoral 
tribes do not employ much wood for fuel or for construction, but they care- 
lessly or recklessly burn down the forests, and their cattle effectually check 
the growth of young trees wherever their range extends. 

At present, the furious winds which sweep over the plains, the droughts of 
summer, and the rights and abuses of pasturage, constitute very formidable 
obstacles to the employment of measures which have been attended with so 
valuable results on the sand-wastes of France and Germany. The Russian 
Government has, however, attempted the wooding of the steppes, and there 
are thriving plantations in the neighborhood of Odessa, where the soil is of a 
particularly loose and sandy character. The tree best suited to this locality, 
and, as there is good reason to suppose, to sand plains in general, is the 
Ailanthus glandulosa, or Japan varnish-tree. The remarkable success which 
has crowned the experiments with the ailanthus at Odessa, will, no doubt, 
stimulate to similar trials elsewhere, and it seems not improbable that the 
arundo and the maritime pine, which have fixed so many thousand acres of 
drifting sands in Western Europe, will be, partially at least, superseded by 
the tamarisk and the varnish-tree. 

According to HonEnstrern, Der Wald, pp. 228, 229, an extensive planta- 
tion of pines—a tree new to Southern Russia—was commenced in 1842, on 
the barren and sandy banks of the Ingula, near Elisabethgrod, and has met 
with yery flattering success. Other experiments in sylviculture at different 
points on the steppes promise valuable results. 

* Many valuable suggestions on this subject will be found in Bryant, 
Forest Trees, chup. vi. et seqq. 


892 AMERICAN FOREST PLANTATIONS. 


I apprehend that one rule, which is certainly alike appli- 
cable to both sides of the Atlantic—that, namely, of the abso- 
lute exclusion of domestic quadrupeds from all woods, old or 
young, not destined for the axe—would be least likely to be ob- 
served in our practice. The need of shade for cattle, and our 
inveterate habits in this respect, are much more serious obstacles 
to compliance with this precept than any inherent difficulty in 
the thing itself ; for there is no good reason why our cattle may 
not be kept out of our woods as well as out of our wheatfields. 
When forest-planting is earnestly and perseveringly practised, 
means of overcoming this difficulty will be found, and our hus- 
bandry will be modified to meet the exigency. 

The best general advice that can be offered, in the want of 
an experimental code, is to make every plantation consist of a 
great variety of trees, and this not only because nature favors a 
diversified forest-crop, but because the chances of success 
among a multitude of species are far greater than if we confine 
ourselves to one or two. 

It will doubtless be found that in our scorching summer, es- 
pecially on bare plains, shade for young plants is even more 
necessary than in most parts of Europe, and hence a fair propor- 
tion of rapidly growing trees and shrubs, even if themselves of 
little intrinsic value, ought to be regarded as an indispensable 
feature in every young plantation. These trees should be of 
species which bear a full supply of air and light, and therefore, 
in the order of nature, precede those which are of greater value 
for the permanent wood ; and it would be a prudent measure to 
seed the ground with a stock of such plants, a year or two be- 
fore sowing or transplanting the more valuable varieties. 

More specific rules than these cannot at present well be 
given, but very brief experiments, even if not in all respects 
wisely conducted, will suflice to determine the main question: 
whether in a given locality this or that particular tree can ad- 
vantageously be propagated or introduced. The special proces- 
ses of arboriculture suited to the ends of the planter may be 
gathered partly from cautious imitation of European practice, 


GROWTH OF FOREST TREES. 393 


and partly from an experience which, though not pronouncing 
definitively in a single season, will, nevertheless, suggest appro- 
priate methods of planting and training the wood within a 
period not disproportioned to the importance of the object.* 

The growth of arboreal vegetation is comparatively slow, and 
we are often told that, though he who buries an acorn may hope 
to see it shoot up to a miniature resemblance of the majestic 
tree which shall shade his remote descendants, yet the longest 
life hardly embraces the seedtime and the harvest of a forest. 
The planter of a wood, it is said, must be actuated by higher 
motives than those of an investment, the profits of which con- 
sist in direct pecuniary gain to himself or even to his posterity ; 
for if, in rare cases, an artificial forest may, in a generation or 
two, more than repay its original cost, still, in general, the 
value of its timber will not return the capital expended and the 
interest accrued.+ 


* For very judicious suggestions on experiments in sylviculture, see the Rev. 
Frederick Starr’s remarkable paper on the American Forests in the 7’ransac- 
tions of the Agricultural Society for 

+ According to Clavé (Ktudes, p. 159), the net revenue from the forests of 
the state in France, making no allowance for interest on the capital repre- 
sented by the forest, is two dollars per acre. In Saxony it is about the same, 
though the cost of administration is twice as much asin France; in Wiirtem- 
berg it is about a dollar an acre; and in Prussia, where half the income is 
consumed in the expenses of administration, it sinks to less than half a dollar. 
This low rate in Prussia and other German states is partly explained by the 
fact that a considerable proportion of the annual product of the wood is either 
conceded to persons claiming prescriptive rights, or sold, at a very small price, 
to the poor. Taking into account the capital invested in forest-land, and add- 
ing interest upon it, Pressler calculates that a pine wood, managed with a 
view to felling it when eighty years old, would yield one-eighth of one per 
cent. annual profit; a fir wood, at one hundred years, one-sixth of one per 
cent. ; a beech wood, at one hundred and twenty years, one-fourth of one per 
cent. ‘The same author gives the net income of the New Forest in England, 
over and above expenses, interest not computed, at twenty-five cents per acre 
only. In America, where no expense is bestowed upon the woods, the value 
of the annual growth has generally been estimated much higher, 

Forest-trees are often planted in Europe for what may be called an early 
crop. ‘Thus in Germany acorns are sown and the young seedlings cultivated 
like ordinary field-vegetables, and cut at the age of a very few years for the 


894 RESULTS OF FOREST PLANTATION. 


But the modern improved methods of sylviculture show 
vastly more favorable financial results; and when we consider 
the immense collateral advantages derived from the presence 
of the forest, the terrible evils necessarily resulting from its de- 
struction, we cannot but admit that the preservation of existing 
woods, and the more costly extension and creation of them 
where they have been unduly reduced or have never existed, 
are among the plainest dictates of self-interest and most ob- 
vious of the duties which this age owes to those that are to 
come after it. 


Financial Results of Forest Plantation. 


Upon the whole, I am persuaded that the financial statistics 
which are found in French and German authors, as the results 
of European experience in forest economy, present the ques- 
tion under a too unfavorable aspect ; and therefore these calcu- 
lations ought not to discourage landed proprietors from making 
experiments on this subject. These statistics apply to woods 
whose present condition is, in an eminent degree, the effect of 
previous long-continued mismanagement; and there is much 
reason to believe that in the propitious climate of the United 
States new plantations, regulated substantially according to the 
methods of De Courval, Chambrelent, and Chevandier, and ac- 
companied with the introduction of exotic trees, as, for example, 
the Australian caruarina and eucalyptus*—which latter, it is 


sake of the bark and the young twigs used by tanners. In England, trees are 
grown at the rate of two thousand to the acre, and cut for props in the mines 
at the diameter of a few inches. Plantations for hoop-poles, and other special 
purposes requiring small timber, would, no doubt, often prove highly remu- 
nerative. 

* Although the eucalyptus thrives admirably in Algeria—where it attains 
a height of from fifty to sixty feet, and a diameter of fifteen or sixteen inches, 
in six years from the seed—and in some restricted localities in Southern 
Europe, it will not bear the winters even of Florence, and consequently can- 
not be expected to flourish in any part of the United States except the ex- 
treme South and California. The writer of a somewhat enthusiastic article 
en this latter State, in Harper’s Monthly for July, 1872, affirms that he saw a 


RESULTS OF FOREST PLANTATION. 395d 


said, has a growth at least five, and, according to some, ten times 
more rapid than that of the oak—would prove good invest- 
ments even in an economical aspect.* 

There is no doubt that they would pay the expenses of their 
planting at no distant period, at least in every case where irri- 
gation is possible, and in very many situations, terraces, ditches, 
or even horizontal furrows upon the hillsides, would answer as 
a substitute for more artificial irrigation. Large proprietors 
would receive important indirect benefits from the shelter and 
the moisture which forests furnish for the lands in their neigh- 
borhood, and eventually from the accumulation of vegetable 
mould in the woods.t The security of the investment, as in 
the case of all real-estate, is a strong argument for undertaking 
such plantations, and a moderate amount of government patron- 


eucalyptus ‘‘ eight years from a small cutting, which was seventy-five feet in 
height, and two feet and a half in diameter at the base.” 

The paulownia, which thrives in Northern Italy, has a wood of little value, 
but the tree would serve well as a shelter for seedlings and young plants of 
more valuable species, and in other cases where a temporary shade is urgently 
needed. The young shoots, from a stem polled the previous season, almost sur- 
pass even the eucalyptus in rapidity of growth. Such a shoot from a tree not 
six inches in diameter, which I had an opportunity of daily observing, from 
the bursting out of the bud from the bark of the parent stem in April till 
November of the same year, acquired in that interval a diameter of between 
four and five inches and a height of above twenty feet. 

* The economical statistics of GRIGOR, Arboriculture, Edinburgh, 1868, are 
very encouraging. In the preface to that work the author says: ‘‘ Having 
formed several large plantations nearly forty years ago, which are still standing, 
in the Highlands of Scotland, I can refer to them as, after paying every expense, 
yielding a revenue equal to that of the finest arable land in the country, 
where the ground previously to these formations was not worth a shilling an 
acre.” See also HArtTIG, Ueber den Wachsthumsgang und Hrtrag der Buche, 
Hiche und Kiefer, 1869, and especially BRYANT, Forest Trees, chap. ix. 

+ The fertility of newly cleared land is by no means due entirely to the accu- 
mulation of decayed vegetable matter on its surface, and to the decomposition 
of the mineral constituents of the soil by the gases emitted by the fallen 
leaves. Sachs has shown that the roots of living plants exercise a most pow- 
erful solvent action on rocks, and hence stones are disintegrated and resolved 
into elements of vegetable nutrition, by the chemical agency of the forest, 
more rapidly than by frost, rain, and other meteorological influences. 


396 INSTABILITY OF AMERICAN LIFE, 


age and encouragement would be sufficient to render the crea- 
tion of new forests an object of private interest as well as of 
public advantage, especially in a country where the necessity is 
so urgent and the climate so favorable as in the United States. 


Instability of American Life. 


All human. institutions, associate arrangements, modes of 
life, have their characteristic imperfections. The natural, per- 
haps the necessary defect of ours, is their instability, their want 
of fixedness, not in form only, but even in spirit. The face of 
physical nature in the United States shares this incessant fluc- 
tuation, and the landscape is as variable as the habits of the 
population. It is time for some abatement in the restless love 
of change which characterizes us, and makes us almost a no- 
made rather than a sedentary people.* We have now felled 
forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let 
us restore this one element of material life to its normal pro- 
portions, and devise means of maintaining the permanence of 
its relations to the fields, the meadows, and the pastures, to the 


* Tt is rare that a middle-aged American dies in the house where he was 
born, or an old man even in that which he has built; and this is scarcely less 
true of the rural districts, where every man owns his habitation, than of the 
city, where the majority live in hired houses. This life of incessant flitting 
is unfavorable for the execution of permanent improvements of every sort, 
and especially of those which, like the forest, are slow in repaying any part 
of the capital expended inthem. It requires a very generous spirit in a land- 
holder to plant a wood on a farm he expects to sell, or which he knows will pass 
out of the hands of his descendants at his death. But the very fact of hay- 
ing begun a plantation would attach the proprietor more strongly to the soil 
for which he had made such a sacrifice ; and the paternal acres would have a 
greater value in the eyes of a succeeding generation, if thus improved and 
beautified by the labors of those from whom they were inherited. Landed 
property, therefore, the transfer of which is happily free from every legal 
impediment or restriction in the United States, would find, in the feelings thus 
prompted, a moral check against a too frequent change of owners, and would 
tend to remain long enough in one proprietor or one family to admit of 
gradual improvements which would increase its value both to the possessor 
and to the state. 


INSTABILITY OF AMERICAN LIFE. 397 


rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with 
which it waters the earth. The establishment of an approxi- 
mately fixed ratio between the two most broadly character- 
ized distinctions of rural surface—woodland and ploughland— 
would involve a certain persistence of character in all the 
branches of industry, all the occupations and habits of life, 
which depend upon or are immediately connected with either, 
without implying a rigidity that should exclude flexibility of 
accommodation to the many changes of external circumstance 
which human wisdom ean neither prevent nor foresee, and would 
thus help us to become, more emphatically, a well-ordered and 
stable commonwealth, and, not less conspicuously, a people of 
progress. 


CHAPTER IV. 


THE WATERS. 


Land Artificially won from the Waters—Great Works of Material Improvement 
—Draining of Lincolnshire Fens—Incursions of the Sea in the Nether- 
lands—Origin of Sea-dikes—Gain and Loss of Land in the Netherlands— 
Marine Deposits on the Coast of Netherlands—Draining of Lake of Haar- 
lem—Draining of the Zuiderzee—Geographical Effects of Improvements 
in the Netherlands—Ancient Hydraulic Works—Draining of Lake Ce- 
lano by Prince Torlonia—Incidental Consequences of draining Lakes— 
Draining of Marshes—Agricultural Draining—Meteorological Effects of 
Draining—Geographical Effects of Draining—Geographical Effects of 
Aqueducts and Canals—Antiquity of Irrigation—Irrigation in Palestine, 
India, and Egypt—Irrigation in Europe—Meteorological Effects of Irri- 
gation—Water withdrawn from Rivers for Irrigation—Injurious Effects 
of Rice-culture—Salts Deposited by Water of Irrigation—Subterranean 
Waters—Artesian Wells—Artificial Springs—Hconomizing Precipitation 
—Inundations in France—Basins of Reception—Diversion of Rivers— 
Glacier Lakes—River Embankments—Other Remedies against Inunda- 
tions—Dikes of the Nile—Deposits of Tuscan Rivers—Improvements in 
Tuscan Maremma—Improyements in Val di Chiana—Coast of the 
Netherlands, 


Land artificially won from the Waters. 


May, as we have seen, has done much to revolutionize the 
solid surface of the globe, and to change the distribution and 
proportions, if not the essential character, of the organisms 
which inhabit the land and even the waters. Besides the 
influence thus exerted upon the life which peoples the sea, 
his action upon the land has involved a certain amount of 
indirect encroachment upon the territorial jurisdiction of 
the ocean. So far ashe has increased the erosion of run- 
ning waters by the destruction of the forest or by other opera- 
tions which lessen the cohesion of the soil, he has promoted 
the deposit of solid matter in the sea, thus reducing the depth of 


NATURAL CHANGE OF COAST-LINE. 399 


marine estuaries, advancing the coast-line, and diminishing the 
area covered by the waters. He has gone beyond this, and in- 
vaded the realm of the ocean by constructing within its borders 
wharves, piers, light-houses, breakwaters, fortresses, and other 
facilities for his commercial and military operations; and in 
some countries he has permanently rescued from tidal overflow, 
and even from the very bed of the deep, tracts of ground ex- 
tensive enough to constitute valuable additions to his agricul- 
tural domain. The quantity of soil gained from the sea by 
these different modes of acquisition is, indeed, too inconsidera- 
ble to form an appreciable element in the comparison of the 
general proportion between the two great forms of terrestrial 
surface, land and water; but the results of such operations, 
considered in their physical and their moral bearings, are sufli- 
ciently important to entitle them to special notice in every com- 
prehensive view of the relations between man and nature. 

There are cases, as on the western shores of the Baltic, where, 
in consequence of the secular elevation of the coast, the sea ap- 
pears to be retiring; others, where, from the slow sinking of 
the land, it seems to be advancing. These movements depend 
upon geological causes wholly out of our reach, and man can 
neither advance nor retard them.* 


* It is possible that the weight of the sediment let fall at the mouths of 
great rivers, like the Ganges, the Mississippi, and the Po, may cause the de- 
pression of the strata on which they are deposited, and hence if man promotes 
the erosion and transport of earthy material by rivers, he augments the weight 
of the sediment they convey into their estuaries, and consequently his action 
tends to accelerate such depression. There are, however, cases where, in 
spite of great deposits of sediment by rivers, the coast is rising. Further, 
the manifestation of the internal heat of the earth at any given point is 
conditioned by the thickness of the crust at such point. The deposits of 
rivers tend to augment that thickness at their estuaries. The sediment of 
slowly-flowing rivers emptying into shallow seas is spread over so great a sur- 
face that we can hardly imagine the foot or two of slime they let fall over 
a wide area in a century to form an element among even the infinitesimal 
quantities which compose the terms of the equations of nature. But some 
swift rivers, rolling mountains of fine earth, discharge themselves into deeply 
scooped gulfs or bays, and in such cases the deposit amounts, in the course of 
a few years, to a mass the transfer of which from the surface of a large basin, 


400 NATURAL CHANGE OF COAST-LINE. 


There are also cases where similar apparent effects are pro- 
duced by local oceanic currents, by river deposit or erosion, 
by tidal action, or by the influence of the wind upon the waves 
and the sands of the seabeach. A regular current may drift 
suspended earth and seaweed along a coast until they are caught 
by an eddy and finally deposited out of the reach of further dis- 
turbance, or it may scoop out the bed of the sea and undermine 
promontories and headlands; a powerful river, as the wind 
changes the direction of its flow at its outlet, may wash away 
shores and sandbanks at one point to deposit their material at 
another; the tide or waves, stirred to unusual depths by the 
wind, may gradually wear down the line of coast, or they may 
form shoals and coast-dunes by depositing the sand they have 
rolled up from the bottom of the ocean. These latter modes of 
action are slow in producing effects sufficiently important to be 
noticed in general geography, or even to be visible in the repre- 
sentations of coast-line laid down in ordinary maps; but they 
nevertheless form conspicuous features in local topography, and 
they are attended with consequences of great moment to the 
material and the moral interests of men. The forces which 


and its accumulation ata single point, may be supposed to produce other 
effects than those measurable by the sounding-line. Now, almost all the opera- 
tions of rural life, as I have abundantly shown, increase the liability of the 
soil to erosion by water. Hence, the clearing of the valley of the Ganges, for 
example, by man, must have much augmented the quantity of earth trans- 
ported by that river to the sea, and of course have strengthened the effects, 
whatever they may be, of thickening the crust of the earth in the Bay of 
Bengal. In such cases, then, human action must rank among geological influ- 
ences. 

To the geological effects of the thickening of the earth’s crust in the Bay of 
Bengal, are to be added those of thinning it on the highlands where the Ganges 
rises. The same action may, as a learned friend suggests to me, even have a 
cosmical influence. The great rivers of the earth, taken as a whole, transport 
sediment from the polar regions in an equatorial direction, and hence tend to 
increase the equatorial diameter, and at the same time, by their inequality of 
action, to a continual displacement of the centre of gravity, of the earth, 
The motion of the globe, and of all bodies affected by its attraction, is modified 
by every change of its form, and in this case we are not authorized to say that 
such effects are in any way compensated. 


HARBOR AND GOAST IMPROVEMENTS. A401 


produce these limited results are all in a considerable degree 
subject to control, or rather to direction and resistance, by hu- 
man power, and it is in guiding, combating, and compensating 
them that man has achieved some of his most remarkable and 
most honorable conquests over nature. The triumphs in ques- 
tion, or what we generally call harbor and coast improvements, 
whether we estimate their value by the money and labor ex- 
pended upon them, or by their bearing upon the interests of 
commerce and the arts of civilization, must take a very hich 
rank among the great works of man, and they are fast assuming 
a macnitude greatly exceeding their former relative importance. 
The extension of commerce and of the military marine, auc 
especially the introduction of vessels of increased burden and 
deeper draught of water, have imposed upon engineers tasks of 
a character which a century ago would have been pronounced, 
and, in fact, would have been, impracticable ; but necessity has 
stimulated an ingenuity which has contrived means of execut- 
ing them, and which gives promise of yet greater performance 
in time to come. 

Indeed, although man, detached from the solid earth, is al- 
most powerless to struggle against the sea, he is fast becoming 
invincible by it so long as his foot is planted on the shore, or 
even on the bottom of the rolling ocean; and though on some 
battle-fields between the waters and the land he is obliged 
slowly to yield his ground, yet he retreats still facing the foe, 
and will finally be able to say to the sea, “Thus far shalt 
thou come and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be 
stayed!” * 


* Tt is, nevertheless, remarkable that in the particular branch of coast en- 
gineering where great improvements are most urgently needed, comparatively 
little has been accomplished. I refer to the creation of artificial harbors, and 
of facilities for loading and discharging ships. The whole coast of Italy is, one 
may almost say, harborless and even, wharfless, and there are many thousands 
of miles of coast in rich commercial countries in Europe, where vessels can 
neither lie in safety for a single day, nor even, in better protected havens, ship 
or land their passengers or cargoes except by the help of lighters, and other 
not less clumsy contrivances. It is strange that such enormous inconyenien- 


26 


402 HARBOR AND COAST IMPROVEMENTS. 


Great Works of Material Improvement. 


Men have ceased to admire the vain exercise of power which 
heaped up the great pyramid to gratify the pride of a despot 
with a giant sepulchre; for many great harbors, many impor- 
tant lines of internal communication, in the civilized world, 
now exhibit works which in volume and weight of material sur- 
pass the vastest remains of ancient architectural art, and demand 
the exercise of far greater constructive skill and involve a much 
heavier pecuniary expenditure than would now be required for 
the building of the tomb of Cheops. It is computed that the 
great pyramid, the solid contents of which when complete were 
about 8,000,000 cubic yards, could be erected for a million of 
pounds sterling. The breakwater at Cherbourg, founded in 
rough water sixty feet deep, at an average distance of more 
than two miles from the shore, contains double the mass of the 
pyramid, and many a comparatively unimportant canal has been 
constructed at twice the cost which would now build that stu- 
pendous monument. 

The description of works of harbor and coast improvement 
which have only an economical value, not a true geographical 
importance, does not come. within the plan of the present vol- 
ume, and in treating this branch of my subject, I shall confine 
myself to such as are designed either to gain new soil by ex- 
cluding the waters from grounds which they had permanently 
or occasionally covered, or to resist new encroachments of the 
sea upon the land.* 


ces are borne with so little effort to remove them, and especially that break- 
waters are rarely constructed by Governments except for the benefit of the 
military marine. 

* Some notice of great works executed by man in foreign lands, and prob- 
ably not generally familiar to my readers, may, however, prove not uninter- 
esting. 

The desaguadero, or canal constructed by the Viceroy Revillagigedo to pre- 
vent the inundation of the city of Mexico by the lakes in its vicinity, besides 


COAST DIKES. 403 


Draining of Lincolashire Fens. 


The draining of the Lincolnshire fens in England, which 
has converted about 400,000 acres of marsh, pool, and tide- 
washed flat into ploughland and pasturage, is a work, or rather 
series of works, of great magnitude, and it possesses much eco- 
nomical, and, indeed, no trifling geographical, importance. Its 
plans and methods were, at least in part, borrowed from the 
example of like improvements in Holland, and it is, in difii- 
culty and extent, inferior to works executed for the same pur- 
pose on the opposite coast of the North Sea, by Dutch, Frisie, 
and Low German engineers. The space I can devote to such 
operations will be better employed in describing the latter, and 
I content myself with the simple statement I have already made 
of the quantity of worthless and even pestilential land which 
has been rendered both productive and salubrious in Lincoln- 


subsidiary works of great extent, has a cutting half amile long, 1,000 feet wide, 
and from 150 to 200 feet deep.—Horrmann, Hncyclopedie, art. Mexico. 

The adit which drains the mines of Gwennap in Cornwall, with its branches, 
is thirty miles long. Those of the silver mines of Saxony are scarcely less 
extensive, and the Hrnst-August-Stollen, or great drain of the mines of the 
Harz, is fifteen miles long. 

The excavations for the Suez Canal were computed at 75,000,000 cubic 
métres, or about 100,000,000 cubic yards, and those of the Ganges Canal, which, 
with its branches, had a length of 3,000 miles, amount to nearly the same 
quantity. 

The quarries at Maestricht have undermined a space of sixteen miles by 
six, or more than two American townships, and the catacombs of Rome, in 
part, at least, originally quarries, have a lineal extent of five hundred and 
fifty miles. The catacombs of Paris required the excavation of 13,000,000 
cubic yards of stone, or more than four times the volume of the great pyra- 
mid. 

The excavations for the Mt.Cenis tunnel, eight miles in length,wholly through 
solid rock, amounted to more than 900,000 cubic yards, and 16,000,000 of 
brick were employed for the lining. . 

In an article on recent internal improvements in England, in the London 
Quarterly Review for January, 1858, it is stated that in a single rock-cutting on 
the Liverpool and Manchester railway, 480,000 cubic yards of stone were 


404 INUNDATIONS IN THE NETHERLANDS. 


shire, by diking out the sea, and the rivers which traverse the 
fens of that country. 

The almost continued prevalence of west winds upon both 
coasts of the German Ocean occasions a constant set of the 
currents of that sea to the east, and both for this reason and 
on account of the greater violence of storms from the former 
quarter, the English shores of the North Sea are less exposed 
to invasion by the waves than those of the Netherlands and the 
provinces contiguous to them on the north. The old Nether- 
landish chronicles are filled with the most startling accounts 
of the damage done by the irruptions of the ocean, from west 
winds or extraordinarily high tides, at times long before any con- 
siderable extent of seacoast was diked. Several hundreds of 
these terrible inundations are recorded, and in many of them 
the loss of human lives is estimated as high as one hundred 
thousand. It is impossible to doubt that there must be enor- 
mous exaggeration in these numbers; for, with all the reckless 
hardihood shown by men in braving the dangers and priva- 


removed ; that the earth excavated in the construction of English railways up to 
that date amounted to a hundred and fifty million cubic yards, and that at 
the Round Down Cliff, near Dover, a single blast of nineteen thousand pounds 
of powder blew down a thousand million tons of chalk, and covered fifteen 
acres of land with the fragments. 

Tn 1869, a mass of marble equal to one and a half times the cubical contents 
of the Duomo at Florence, or about 450,000 cubic yards, was thrown down at 
Carrara by one blast, and two hours after, another equal mass, which had been 
loosened by the explosion, fell of itself.—ZOLFANELLI, La Lunigiana, p. 43. 

The coal yearly extracted from the mines of England averages not less than 
100,000,000 tons. The specific gravity of British coal ranges from 1.20 to 1.35, 
and consequently we may allow a cubic yard to the ton. If we add the earth 
and rock removed in order to reach the coal, we shall have a yearly amount of 
excavation for this one object equal to more than thirty times the volume of 
the pyramid of Cheops. 

These are wonderful achievements of human industry; but the rebuilding 
of Chicago within a single year after the great fire—not to speak of the extraor- 
dinary material improvements previously executed at that city—snurpasses 
them all, and it probably involved the expenditure of a sum of muscular and 
of moral energy which has never before been exerted in the accomplishment 
of a single material object, within a like period. 


DIKES OF THE NETHERLANDS. 405 


tions attached by nature to their birthplace, it is inconceivable 
that so dense a population as such wholesale destruction of life 
supposes could find the means of subsistence, or content itself 
to dwell, on a territory liable, a dozen times in a century, to 
such fearful devastation. There can be no doubt, however, 
that the low continental shores of the German Ocean very fre- 
quently suffered immense injury from inundation by the sea, 
and it is natural, therefore, that the various arts of resistance to 
the encroachments of the ocean, and, finally, of aggressive war- 
fare upon its domain, and of permanent conquest of its terri- 
tory, should have been earlier studied and carried to higher per- 
fection in the latter countries, than in England, which had less 
to lose or to gain by the incursions or the retreat of the waters. 

Indeed, although the confinement of swelling rivers by arti- 
ficial embankments is of great antiquity, I do not know that 
the defence or acquisition of land from the sea by diking was 
ever practised on a large scale until systematically undertaken 
by the Netherlanders, a few centuries after the commencement 
of the Christian era. The silence of the Roman historians 
affords a strong presumption that this art was unknown to the 
inhabitants of the Netherlands at the time of the Roman inva- 
sion, and the elder Pliny’s description of the mode of life along 
the coast which has now been long diked in, applies precisely 
to the habits of the people who live on the low islands and 
mainland flats lying outside of the chain of dikes, and wholly 
unprotected by embankments of any sort. 


Origin of Sea-dikes. 


it has been conjectured, and not without probability, that the 
causeways built by the Romans across the marshes of the Low 
Countries, in their campaigns against the Germanic tribes, gave 
the natives the first hint of the utility which might be derived 
from similar constructions applied to a different purpose.* If 


* Tt has often been alleged by eminent writers that a part of the fens in 
Lincolnshire was reclaimed by sea-dikes under the government of the Ro- 


406 DIKES OF THE NETHERLANDS. 


this is so, it is one of the most interesting among the many in- 
stances in which the arts and enginery of war have been so 
modified as to be eminently promotive of the blessings of peace, 
thereby in some measure compensating the wrongs and suffer- 
ings they have inflicted on humanity.* The Lowlanders are 


mans. Ihave found no ancient authority in support of this assertion, nor 
can I refer to any passage in Roman literature in which sea-dikes are express- 
ly mentioned otherwise than as walls or piers, except that in Pliny (Hist. Vat., 
xxxvi. 24), where it is said that the Tyrrhenian Sea was excluded from the 
Lucrine Lake by dikes. Dugdale, whose enthusiasm for his subject led him to 
believe that recovering from the sea land subject to be flooded by it, was of 
divine appointment, because God said: ‘‘ Let the waters under the heaven 
be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear,” unhesita- 
tingly ascribes the reclamation of the Lincolnshire fens to the Romans, though 
he is able to cite but one authority, a passage in Tacitus’s Life of Agricola, 
which certainly has no such meaning, in support of the assertion.—/History of 
Limbankment and Drainage, 2d edition, 1772. 

* It is worth mentioning, as an illustration of the applicability of military 
instrumentalities to pacific art, that the sale of gunpowder in the United 
States was smaller during the late rebellion than before, because the war 
caused the suspension of many public and private improvements, in the exe- 
cution of which great quantities of powder were used for blasting. 

The same observation was made in France during the Crimean war, and it 
is alleged that, in general, not ten per cent. of the powder manufactured on 
either side of the Atlantic is employed for military purposes. 

The blasting for the Mount Cenis tunnel consumed gunpowder enough to fill 
more than 200,000,000 musket cartridges. 

It is a fact not creditable to the moral sense of modern civilization, that 
very many of the most important improvements in machinery and the work- 
ing of metals have originated in the necessities of war, and that man’s highest 
ingenuity has been shown, and many of his most remarkable triumphs over 
natural forces achieved, in the contrivance of engines for the destruction of his 
fellow-man. The military material employed by the first Napoleon has be- 
come, in less than two generations, nearly as obsolete as the sling and stone of 
the shepherd, and attack and defence now begin at distances to which, half a 
century ago, military reconnoissances hardly extended. Upon a partial view 
of the subject, the human race seems destined to become its own execu- 
tioner—on the one hand, exhausting the capacity of the earth to furnish sus- 
tenance to her taskmaster ; on the other, compensating diminished production 
by inventing more efficient methods of exterminating the consumer. At the 
present moment, at an epoch of universal peace, the whole civilized world, 
with the happy exception of our own country, is devoting its utmost ener- 


LAND GAINED BY DIKING. 407 


believed to have secured some coast and bay islands by ring- 
dikes, and to have embanked some fresh-water channels, as 
early as the eighth or ninth century; but it does not appear that 
sea-dikes, important enough to be noticed in historical records, 
were constructed on the mainland before the thirteenth cen- 
tury. The practice of draining inland accumulations of water, 
whether fresh or salt, for the purpose of bringing under culti- 
vation the ground they cover, is of later origin, and is said not 
to have been adopted until after the middle of the fifteenth 
century.* 


Gain and Loss of Land in the Netherlands. 


The total amount of surface gained to the agriculture of the 
Netherlands by diking out the sea and by draining shallow bays 
and lakes, is estimated by Staring at three hundred and fifty- 
five thousand bunder or hectares, equal to eight hundred and 
seventy-seven thousand two hundred and forty acres, which is 
one-tenth of the area of the kingdom.t In very many instan- 
ces the dikes have been partially, in some particularly exposed 
localities totally, destroyed by the violence of the sea, and the 
drained lands again flooded. In some cases the soil thus pain- 


gies, applying the highest exercise of inventive genius, to the production of 
new engines of war; and the late exiraordinary rise in the price of iron and 
copper is in great part due to the consumption of those metals in the fabrica- 
tion of arms and armed vessels. The simple substitution of sheet-copper for 
paper and other materials in the manufacture of cartridges has increased the 
market-price of copper by a large percentage on its former cost. 

But war develops great civil virtues, and brings into action a degree and 
kind of physical energy which seldom fails to awaken a new intellectual life 
in a people that achieves great moral and political results through great bero- 
ism and endurance and perseverance. Domestic corruption has destroyed 
more nations than foreign invasion, and a people is rarely conquered till it has 
deserved subjugation. 

* SrariIne, Voormaals en Thans, p. 150. 

+ Idem, p. 163. Much the largest proportion of the lands so reclaimed, 
though for the most part lying above low-water tidemark, are at a lower 
level than the Lincolnshire fens, and more subject to inundation from the 
irruptions of the sea. 


408 LAND GAINED BY DIKING. 


fully won from the ocean has been entirely lost; in others it 
has been recovered by repairing or rebuilding the dikes and 
pumping out the water. Besides this, the weight of the dikes 
gradually sinks them into the soft soil beneath, and this loss of 
elevation must be compensated by raising the surface, while the 
increased burden thus added tends to sink them still lower. 
“Tetens declares,” says Kohl, “that in some places the dikes 
have gradually sunk to the depth of sixty or even a hundred 
feet.” * For these reasons, the processes of dike-building have 
been almost everywhere again and again repeated, and thus 
the total expenditure of money and of labor upon the works 
in question is much greater than would appear from an esti- 
mate of the actual cost of diking-in a given extent of coast- 
land and draining a given area of water-surface.t 


Loss of Land by Incursions of Sea. 


On the other hand, by erosion of the coast-line, the drifting 
of sand-dunes into the interior, and the drowning of fens and 
morasses by incursions of the sea—all caused, or at least 
greatly aggravated, by human improvidence—the Netherlands 


* Die Inseln und Marschen der Herzogthiimer Schleswig und Holstein, iii., p. 
151. 

+ The purely agricultural island of Pelworm, off the coast of Schleswig, 
containing about 10,000 acres, annually expends for the maintenance of its 
dikes not less than £6,000 sterling, or nearly $30,000.—J. G. Kon, Jnseln 
und Marschen Schleswig’s und Holstein’s, ii., p. 894. 

The original cost of the dikes of Pelworm is not stated. 

“The greatest part of the province of Zeeland is protected by dikes measur- 
ing 250 miles in length, the maintenance of which costs, in ordinary years, 
more than a million guilders [above $400,000]. . . . The annual expendi- 
ture for dikes and hydraulic works in Holland is from five to seven million 
guilders” [$2,000,000 to $2,800,000].—Wixp, Die Niederlande, i., p. 62. 

One is not sorry to learn that the Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands had 
some compensations, The great chain of ring-dikes which surrounds a large 
part of Zeeland is due to the energy of Caspar de Robles, the Spanish governor 
of that province, who in 1570 ordered the construction of these works at the 
public expense, as a substitute for the private embankments which had pre- 
viously partially served the same purpose.—WILD, Die Niederlande, i., p. 62. 


CHARACTER OF GROUNDS DIKED IN. 409 


have lost a far larger area of land since the commencement of 
the Christian era than they have gained by diking and drain- 
ing. Staring despairs of the possibility of calculating the loss 
from the first-mentioned two causes of destruction, but he esti- 
mates that not less than six hundred and forty thousand bun- 
der, or one million five hundred and eighty-one thousand 
acres, of fen and marsh have been washed away, or rather de- 
prived of their vegetable surface and covered by water; and 
thirty-seven thousand bunder, or ninety-one thousand four hun- 
dred acres, of recovered land, have been lost by the destruction 
of the dikes which protected them.* The average value of 
land gained from the sea is estimated at about nineteen pounds 
sterling, or ninety dollars, per acre; while the lost fen and 
morass was not worth more than one twenty-fifth part of the 
same price. The ground buried by the drifting of the dunes 
appears to have been almost entirely of this latter character, 
and, upon the whole, there is no doubt that the soil added by 
human industry to the territory of the Netherlands, within the 
historical period, greatly exceeds in pecuniary value that which 
has fallen a prey to the waves during the same era. 

Upon most low and shelving coasts, like those of the Nether- 
lands, the maritime currents are constantly changing, in con- 
sequence of the variability of the winds, and the shifting of 
the sand-banks, which the currents themselves now form and 
now displace. While, therefore, at one point the sea is advanc- 
ing landward, and requiring great effort to prevent the under- 
mining and washing away of the dikes, it is shoaling at another 
by its own deposits, and exposing, at low water, a gradually 
widening belt of sands and ooze. The coast-lands selected for 
diking-in are always at points where the sea is depositing pro- 
ductive soil. The Eider, the Elbe, the Weser, the Ems, the 
Rhine, the Maas, and the Schelde bring down large quantities 
of fine earth. The prevalence of west winds prevents the 
waters from carrying this material far out from the coast, and 
it is at last deposited northward or southward from the mouth 


* Starine, Voormaals en Thans, p. 163. 


410 CHARACTER OF GROUNDS DIKED IN. 


of the rivers which contribute it, according to the varying drift 
of the currents. . 


Marine Deposits. 


The process of natural deposit which prepares the coast for 
diking-in is thus described by Staring: “ All sea-deposited soil 
is composed of the same constituents. First comes a stratuin 
of sand, with marine shells, or the shells of mollusks living in 
brackish water. If there be tides, and, of course, flowing and 
ebbing currents, mud is let fall upon the sand only after the 
latter has been raised above low-water mark; for then only, at 
the change from flood to ebb, is the water still enough to form 
a deposit of so light a material. Where mud is found at great 
depths, as, for example, in a large proportion of the Jj, it is a 
proof that at this point there was never any considerable tidal 
flow or other current. . . . The powerful tidal currents, 
flowing and ebbing twice a day, drift sand with them. They 
scoop out the bottom at one point, raise it at another, and the 
sand-banks in the current are continually shifting. As soon as 
a bank raises itself above low-water mark, flags and reeds es- 
tablish themselves upon it. The mechanical resistance of these 
plants checks the retreat of the high water and favors the 
deposit of the earth suspended in it, and the formation of land 
goes on with surprising rapidity. When it has risen to high- 
water level, it is soon covered with grasses, and becomes what 
is called schor in Zeeland, kwelder in Friesland. Such grounds 
are the foundation or starting-point of the process of diking. 
When they are once elevated to the flood-tide level, no more 
mud is deposited upon them except by extraordinary high tides. 
Their further rise is, accordingly, very slow, and it is seldom 
advantageous to delay longer the operation of diking.” * 

* Voormaals en Thans, pp. 150,151. According to Reventloy, conferve 
first appear at the bottom in shoal water, then, after the deposit has risen 
above the surface, Sulicornia herbacea, The Salicornia is followed by various 
sand-plants, and so the ground rises, by Poa distans and Poa maritum, and 


finally common grasses establish themselves. —Om Markdannelsen poa Vesthys- 
ten af Slesvig, pp. 7, 8. 


THE NETHERLAND DIKES. 411i 


Sea-dikes of the Netherlands. 


The formation of new banks by the sea is constantly going 
on at points favorable for the deposit of sand and earth, and 
hence opportunity is continually afforded for enclosure of new 
land outside of that already diked in, the coast is fast advanc- 
ing seaward, and every new embankment increases the security 
of former enclosures. The province of Zeeland consists of 
islands washed by the sea on their western coasts, and separated 
by the many channels through which the Schelde and some 
other rivers find their way to the ocean. In the twelfth century 
these islands were much smaller and more numerous than at 
present. They have been gradually enlarged, and, in several 
instances, at last connected by the extension of their system of 
dikes. Walcheren is formed of ten islets united into one about 
the end of the fourteenth century. At the middle of the fif- 
teenth century, Goeree and Overflakkee consisted of separate 
islands, containing altogether about ten thousand acres; by 
means of above sixty successive advances of the dikes, they 
have been brought to compose a single island, whose area is not 
less than sixty thousand acres.* 

In the Netherlands—which the first Napoleon characterized 
as a deposit of the Rhine, and as, therefore, by natural law, 
rightfully the property of him who controlled the sources of 
that great river—and on the adjacent Frisic, Low German, and 
Danish shores and islands, sea and river dikes have been con- 
structed ona grander and more imposing scale than in any other 
country. The whole economy of the art has been there most 
thoroughly studied, and the literature of the subject is very ex- 
tensive. For my present aim, which is concerned with results 
rather than with processes, it is not worth while to refer to 


* STARING, Voormaals en Thans, p.152. Kohl states that the peninsula of 
Diksand on the coast of Holstein consisted, at the close of the last century, 
of several islands measuring together less than five thousand acres. In 1837 
they had been connected with the mainland, and had nearly doubled in area. 
—Inseln u. Marschen Schlesw. Holst., iii., p. 262. 


412 CONSTRUCTION OF DIKES. 


professional treatises, and I shall content myself with present- 
ing such information as can be gathered from works of a more 
popular character. 

The superior strata of the lowlands upon and near the coast 
are, as we have seen, principally composed of soil brought down 
by the great rivers I have mentioned, and either directly de- 
posited by them upon the sands of the bottom, or carried out 
to sea by their currents, and then, after a shorter or longer ex- 
posure to the chemical and mechanical action of salt-water and 
marine currents, restored again to the land by tidal overflow 
and subsidence from the waters in which it was suspended. At 
a very remote period the coast-flats were, at many points, 
raised so high by successive alluvious or tidal deposits as to be 
above ordinary high-water level, but they were still liable to 
occasional inundation from river-floods, and from the seawater 
also, when heavy or long-continued west winds drove it land- 
wards. The extraordinary fertility of this soil and its security 
as a retreat from hostile violence attracted to it a considerable 
population, while its want of protection against inundation ex- 
posed it to the devastations of which the chroniclers of the 
Middle Ages have left such highly colored pictures. The first 
permanent dwellings on the coast-flats were erected upon arti- 
ficial mounds, and many similar precarious habitations still 
exist on the unwalled islands and shores beyond the chain of 
dikes. River embankments, which, as is familiarly known, 
have from the earliest antiquity been employed in many coun- 
tries where sea-dikes are unknown, were probably the first 
works of this character constructed in the Low Countries, and 
when two neighboring streams of fresh water had been em- 
banked, the next step in the process would naturally be to con- 
nect the river-walls together by a transverse dike or raised 
causeway, which would serve as a means of communication be- 
tween different hamlets and at the same time secure the inter- 
mediate ground both against the backwater of river-floods and 
against overflow by the sea. The oldest true sea-dikes describ- 
ed in historical records, however, are those enclosing islands in 


CONSTRUCTION OF DIKES. 413 


the estuaries of the great rivers, and it is not impossible that 
the double character they possess as a security against mari- 
time floods and as a military rampart, led to their adoption 
upon those islands before similar constructions had been attemp- 
ted upon the mainland. 

At some points of the coast, various contrivances, such as 
piers, piles, and, in fact, obstructions of all sorts to the ebb of 
the current, are employed to facilitate the deposit of slime, 
before a regular enclosure is commenced. Usually, however, 
the first step is to build low and cheap embankments, extend- 
ing from an older dike, or from high ground, around the parcel 
of flat intended to be secured. These are called summer dikes. 
They are erected when a sufficient extent of ground to repay 
the cost has been elevated enough to be covered with coarse 
vegetation fit for pasturage. They serve both to secure the 
ground from overflow by the ordinary flood-tides of mild 
weather, and to retain the slime deposited by very high water, 
which would otherwise be partly carried off by the retreating 
ebb. The elevation of the soil goes on slowly after this; but 
when it has at last been sufficiently enriched, and raised high 
enough to justify the necessary outlay, permanent dikes are 
constructed by which the water is excluded at all seasons. 
These embankments are constructed of sand from the coast- 
dunes or from sand-banks, and of earth from the mainland or 
from flats outside the dikes, bound and strengthened by 
fascines, and provided with sluices, which are generally 
founded on piles and of very expensive construction, for drain- 
age at low water. The outward slope of the sea-dikes is gentle, 
experience having shown that this form is least exposed to in- 
jury both from the waves and from floating ice, and the most 
modern dikes are even more moderate in the inclination of the 
seaward scarp than the older ones.* The crown of the dike, 
however, for the last three or four feet of its height, is much 
steeper, being intended rather as a protection against the spray 


* The inclination varies from one foot rise in four of base to one foot in 
fourteen.—KOHL, iii., p. 210. 


414 CONSTRUCTION OF DIKES. 


than against the waves, and the inner slope is always compara- 
tively abrupt. 

The height and thickness of dikes varies according to the 
elevation of the ground they enclose, the rise of the tides, the 
direction of the prevailing winds, and other special causes of 
exposure, but it may be said that they are, in general, raised 
from fifteen to twenty feet above ordinary high-water mark. 
The water-slopes of river-dikes are protected by plantations of 
willows or strong semi-aquatic shrubs or grasses, but as these 
will not grow upon banks exposed to salt-water, sea-dikes must 
be faced with stone, fascines, or some other vrevétement.* 
Upon the coast of Schleswig and Holstein, where the people 
have less capital at their command, they defend their embank- 
ments against ice and the waves by a coating of twisted straw 
or reeds, which must be renewed as often as once, sometimes 
twice a year. The inhabitants of these coasts call the chain of 
dikes “the golden border,” a name it well deserves, whether 
we suppose it to refer to its enormous cost, or, as is more 
probable, to its immense value as a protection to their fields 
and their firesides. 

When outlying flats are enclosed by building new embank- 


* The dikes are sometimes founded upon piles, and sometimes protected 
by one or more rows of piles driven deeply down into the bed of the sea in 
front of them. ‘‘ Triple rows of piles of Scandinavian pine,” says Wild, 
‘““have been driven down along the coast of Friesland, where there are no 
dunes, for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles. The piles are bound to- 
gether by strong cross-timbers and iron clamps, and the interstices filled with 
stones. The ground adjacent to the piling is secured with fascines, and at 
exposed points heavy blocks of stone are heaped up as an additional protec- 
tion. The earth-dike is built behind the mighty bulwark of this breakwater, 
and its foot also is fortified with stones.” . . . ‘‘ The great Helder 
dike is about five miles long and forty feet wide at the top, along which 
runs agood road. It slopes down two hundred feet into the sea, at an angle 
of forty degrees. The highest waves do not reach the summit, the lowest 
always cover its base. At certain distances, immense buttresses, of a height 
aud width proportioned to those of the dike, and eyen more strongly built, 
run several hundred feet out into the rolling sea, This gigantic artificial 
coast is entirely composed of Norwegian granite.”—Wu1LD, Die Niederlande, i., 
pp. G1, 62. 


SINKING OF THE SOIL. 415 


ments, the old interior dikes are suffered to remain, both as an 
additional security against the waves, and because the removal 
of them would be expensive. They serve, also, as roads or 
causeways, a purpose for which the embankments nearest the 
sea are seldom employed, because the whole structure might 
be endangered from the breaking of the turf by wheels and 
the hoofs of horses. Where successive rows of dikes have been 
thus constructed, it is observed that the ground defended by 
the more ancient embankments is lower than that embraced 
within the newer enclosures, and this depression of level has 
been ascribed to a general subsidence of the coast from geo- 
logical causes ;* but the better opinion seems to be that it is, in 
most cases, due merely to the consolidation and settling of the 
earth from being more effectually dried, from the weight of 
the dikes, from the tread of men and cattle, and from the 
movement of the heavy wagons which carry off the crops.t 


* A similar subsidence of the surface is observed in the diked ground of the 
Lincolnshire fens, where there is no reason to suspect a general depression 
from geological causes. 

{ The shaking of the ground, even when loaded with large buildings, 
by the passage of heavy carriages or artillery, or by the march of a body 
of cavalry or even infantry, shows that such causes may produce important 
mechanical effects on the condition of the soil. The bogs in the Netherlands, 
as in most other countries, contain large numbers of fallen trees, buried to a 
certain depth by earth and vegetable mould. When the bogs are dry 
enough to serve as pastures, it is observed that trunks of these ancient trees 
rise of themselves to the surface. Staring ascribes this singular phenomenon 
to the agitation of the ground by the tread of cattle. ‘* When roadbeds,” 
observes he, ‘‘are constructed of gravel and pebbles of different sizes, and 
these latter are placed at the bottom without being broken and rolled 
hard together, they are soon brought to the top by the effect of travel on 
the road. Lying loosely, they undergo some motion from the passage of 
every wagou-wheel and the tread of every horse that passes over them. This 
motion is an oscillation or partial rolling, and as one side of a pebble is 
raised, a little fine sand or earth is forced under it, and the frequent re- 
petition of this process by cattle or carriages moving in opposite directions 
brings it at last to the surface. We may suppose that a similar effect is 
produced on the stems of trees in the bogs by the tread of animals.”—De 
Bodem van Nederland, i., pp. 75, 76. 

It is observed in the Northern United States, that when soils containing 


416 DRAINAGE OF LANDS DIKED IN. 


Notwithstanding this slow sinking, most of the land enclosed 
by dikes is still above low-water mark, and can, therefore, be 
wholly or partially freed from rain-water, and from that re- 
ceived by infiltration from higher ground, by sluices opened 
at the ebb of the tide. For this purpose the land is carefully 
ditched, and advantage is taken of every favorable occasion for 
discharging the water through the sluices. But the ground 
cannot be effectually drained by this means, unless it is ele- 
vated four or five feet, at least, above the level of the ebb-tide, 
because the ditches would not otherwise have a sufficient 
descent to carry the water off in the short interval between 
ebb and flow, and because the moisture of the saturated sub- 
soil is always rising by capillary attraction. Whenever, there- 
fore, the soil has sunk below the level I have mentioned, and in 


pebbles are cleared and cultivated, and the stones removed from the surface, 
new pebbles, and even bowlders of many pounds weight, continue to show 
themselves above the ground, every spring, for a long series of years. In 
clayey soils the fence-posts are thrown up in a similar way, and it is not un- 
common to see the lower rail of a fence thus gradually raised a foot or even 
two feet above the ground. This rising of stones and fences is popularly 
ascribed to the action of the severe frosts of that climate. The expansion 
of the ground, in freezing, it is said, raises its surface, and, with the surface, 
objects lying near or connected with it. When the soil thaws in the spring, 
it settles back again to its former level, while the pebbles and posts are pre- 
vented from sinking as low as before by loose earth which has fallen under 
them. The fact that the elevation spoken of is observed only in the spring, 
gives countenance to this theory, which is perhaps applicable also to the 
cases stated by Staring, and it is probable that the two causes above assigned 
concur in producing the effect. 

The question of the subsidence of the Netherlandish coast has been much 
discussed. Not to mention earlier geologists, Venema, in several essays, and 
particularly in Het Dalen van de Noordelijke Kuststreken van ons Land, 1854, 
adduces many facts and arguments to prove a slow sinking of the northern 
provinces of Holland. Laveleye (Affaissement du sol et envasement des fleuves 
survenus dans les temps historiques, 1859), upon a still fuller investigation, ar- 
rives at the same conclusion. The eminent geologist Staring, however, who 
briefly refers to the subject in De Bodem van Nederland, i., p. 356 et segg., 
does not consider the evidence sufficient to prove anything more than the sink- 
ing of the surface of the polders from drying and consolidation.—See HLIsiE 
Recuuvs, La. Terre, vol. i., pp. 780, 732. 


DRAINING OF LAKES. 417 


cases where its surface has never been raised above it, pumps, 
worked by wind or some other mechanical power, must be very 
frequently employed to keep the land dry enough for pasturage 
and cultivation.* 


Draining of the Lake of Haarlem. 


The substitution of steam-engines for the feeble and uncer- 
tain action of windmills, in driving pumps, has much facili- 
tated the removal of water from the polders as well as the 
draining of lakes, marshes, and shallow bays, and thus given 
such an impulse to these enterprises, that not less than one 
hundred and ten thousand acres were reclaimed from the 
waters, and added to the agricultural domain of the Nether- 
lands, between 1815 and 1858. ‘The most important of these 
undertakings was the draining of the Lake of Haarlem, and for 
this purpose some of the most powerful hydraulic engines ever 
constructed were designed and executed.t The origin of this 
lake is unknown. It is supposed by some geographers to be a 
part of an ancient bed of the Rhine, the channel of which, as 
there is good reason to believe, has undergone great changes 
since the Roman invasion of the Netherlands; by others it is 
thought to have once formed an inland marine channel, sepa- 


* The elevation of the lands enclosed by dikes—or polders, as they are 
called in Holland—above low-water mark, depends upon the height of the 
tides, or, in other words, upon the difference between ebb and flood. The 
tide cannot deposit earth higher than it flows, and after the ground is once en- 
closed, the decay of the vegetables grown upon it and the addition of manures 
do not compensate the depression occasioned by drying and consolidation. 
On the coast of Zeeland and the islands of South Holland, the tides, and of 
course the surface of the lands deposited by them, are so high that the 
polders can be drained by ditching and sluices, but at other points, as in 
the enclosed grounds of North Holland on the Zuiderzee, where the tide 
rises but three feet or even less, pumping is necessary from the beginning, 
—STARING, Voormaals en Thans, p. 152. 

+ The principal engine, of 500 horse-power, drove eleven pumps with a 
total delivery of 31,000 cubic yards per hour.—WILD, Die Nederlunde, i., 


p. 87. 
27 


418 DRAINING OF THE LAKE OF HAARLEM. 


rated from the sea by a chain of low islands, which the sand 
washed up by the tides has since connected with the mainland 
and converted into a continuous line of coast. The best 
authorities, however, find geological evidence that the surface 
occupied by the lake was originally a marshy tract containing 
within its limits little solid ground, but many ponds and inlets, 
and much floating as well as fixed fen. 

In consequence of the cutting of turf for fuel, and the de- 
struction of the few trees and shrubs which held the loose soil 
together with their roots, the ponds are supposed to have grad- 
ually extended themselves, until the action of the wind upon 
their enlarged surface gave their waves sufficient force to over- 
come the resistance of the feeble barriers which separated 
them, and to unite them all into a single lake. Popular tradi- 
tion, itis true, ascribes the formation of the Lake of Haarlem 
to a single irruption of the sea, at a remote period, and con- 
nects it with one or another of the destructive inundations of 
which the Netherland chronicles describe so many; but on a 
map of the year 1551, a chain of four smaller waters occupies 
nearly the ground afterwards covered by the Lake of Haarlem, 
and they have most probably been united by gradual encroach- 
ments resulting from the improvident practices above referred 
to, though no doubt the consummation may have been hastened 
by floods, and by the neglect to maintain dikes, or the inten- 
tional destruction of them, in the long wars of the sixteenth 
century. 

The Lake of Haarlem was a body of water not far from 
fifteen miles in length, by seven in greatest width, lying be- 
tween the cities of Amsterdam and Leyden, running parallel 
with the coast of Holland at the distance of about five miles 
from the sea, and covering an area of about 45,000 acres. By 
means of the Ij, it communicated with the Zuiderzee, the 
Mediterranean of the Netherlands, and its surface was little 
above the mean elevation of that of the sea. Whenever, there- 
fore, the waters of the Zuiderzee were acted upon by strong 
north-west winds, those of the Lake of Haarlem were raised pro- 


DRAINING OF THE LAKE OF HAARLEM. 419 


portionally and driven southwards, while winds from the south 
tended to create a flow in the opposite direction. The shores 
of the lake were everywhere low, and though between the years 
1767 and 1848 more than $1,700,000 had been expended in 
checking its encroachments, it often burst its barriers, and 
produced destructive inundations. In November, 1836, a south 
wind brought its waters to the very gates of Amsterdam, and 
in December of the same year, in a north-west gale, they over- 
flowed twenty thousand acres of land at the southern extremity 
of the lake, and flooded a part of the city of Leyden. The 
depth of water in the lake did not, in general, exceed fourteen 
feet, but the bottom was a semi-fluid ooze or slime, which par- 
took of the agitation of the waves, and added considerably to 
their mechanical force. Serious fears were entertained that 
the lake would form a junction with the inland waters of the 
Legmeer and Mijdrecht, swallow up a vast extent of valuable 
soil, and finally endanger the security of a large proportion of 
the land which the industry of Holland had gained in the 
course of centuries from the ocean. 

For this reason, and for the sake of the large addition the 
bottom of the lake would make to the cultivable soil of the 
state, it was resolved to drain it, and the preliminary steps for 
that purpose were commenced in the year 1840. The first 
operation was to surround the entire lake with a ring-canal 
and dike, in order to cut off the communication with the [j, and 
to exclude the water of the streams and morasses which dis- 
charged themselves into it from the land side. The dike was 
composed of different materials, according to the means of 
supply at different points, such as sand from the coast-dunes, 
earth and turf excavated from the line of the ring-canal, and 
floating turf,* fascines being everywhere used to bind and com- 


* In England and New England, where the marshes have been already 
drained or are of comparatively small extent, the existence of large floating 
islands seems incredible, and has sometimes been treated as a fable, but no 
geographical fact is better established. Kohl (Jnseln und Marschen Schleswig- 
Holsteins, iii., p. 809) reminds us that Pliny mentions among the wonders 


420 DRAINING OF THE LAKE OF HAARLEM. 


pact the mass together. This operation was completed in 1848, 
and three steam-pumps were then employed for five years in 
discharging the water. The whole enterprise was conducted at 
the expense of the state, and in 1853 the recovered lands were 
offered for sale for its benefit. Up to 1858, forty-two thousand 
acres had been sold at not far from sixteen pounds sterling or 


of Germany the floating islands, covered with trees, which met the Roman 
fleets at the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser. Ourauthor speaks also of 
having visited, in the territory of Bremen, floating moors, bearing not only 
houses but whole villages. Atlow stages of the water these moors rest upon 
a bed of sand, but are raised from six to ten feet by the high water of spring, 
and remain afloat until, in the course of the summer, the water beneath is 
exhausted by evaporation and drainage, when they sink down upon the sand 
again. 

Staring explains, in an interesting way, the whole growth, formation, and 
functions of floating fens or bogs, in his very valuable work, De Bodem van 
Nederland, i., pp. 36-43. The substance of his account is as follows: The 
first condition for the growth of the plants which compose the substance of 
turf and the surface of the fens, is stillness of the water. Hence they 
are not found in running streams, nor in pools so large as to be subject to 
frequent agitation by the wind. For example, not asingle plant grew in the 
open part of the Lake of Haarlem, and fens cease to form in all pools as soon 
as, by the cutting of the turf for fuel or other purposes, theiz area is suffi- 
ciently enlarged to be much acted on by wind. When still water aboye a 
yard deep is left undisturbed, aquatic plants of various genera, such as Nu- 
phar, Nymphea, Limnanthemum, Stratiotes, Polygonum, and Potamogeton, 
fill the bottom with roots and cover the surface with leaves. Many of the 
plants die every year, and prepare at the bottom a soil fit for the growth of 
a higher order of vegetation, Phragmites, Acorus, Sparganium, Rumex, 
Lythrum, Pedicularis, Spirea, Polystichum, Comarum, Caltha, etc., ete. In 
the course of twenty or thirty years the muddy bottom is filled with roots of 
aquatic and marsh plants, which are lighter than water, and if the depth is 
great enough to give room for detaching this vegetable network, a couple of 
yards for example, it rises to the surface, bearing with it, of course, the soil 
formed above it by decay of stems and leaves. New genera now appear upon 
the mass, such a Carex, Menyanthes, and others, and soon thickly cover it. 
The turf has now acquired a thickness of from two to four feet, and is 
called in Groningen lad ; in Friesland, til, tilland, or drijftil ; in Overijsse', 
krag ; and in Holland, rietzod. It floats about as driven by the wind, grad- 
ually increasing in thickness by.the decay of its annual crops of vegetation, 
and in about half a century reaches the bottom and becomes fixed. If it 
has not been invaded in the meantime by men or cattle, trees «nd arborescent 


DRAINING OF THE LAKE OF HAARLEM. 491 


seventy-seven dollars an acre, amounting altogether to £661,000 
sterling or $3,200,000. The unsold lands were valued at more 
than £6,000 or nearly $30,000, and as the total cost was £764,- 
500 or about $3,700,000, the direct loss to the state, exclusive of 
interest on the capital expended, may be stated at £100,000 or 
something less than $500,000. 

The success of this operation has encouraged others of like 


plants, Alnus, Salix, Myrica, etc., appear, and these contribute to hasten the 
attachment of the turf to the bottom, both by their weight and by sending 
their roots quite through into the ground.” 

This is the regular method employed by nature for the gradual filling up of 
shallow lakes and pools, and converting them first into morass and then into 
dry land. Whenever, therefore, man removes the peat or turf, he exerts an 
injurious geographical agency, and, asI have already said, there is no doubt 
that the immense extension of the inland seas of Holland in modern times is 
owing to this and other human imprudences. ‘‘ Hundreds of hectares of 
floating pastures,’’ says our author, ‘‘ which have nothing in their appearance 
to distinguish them from grass-lands resting on solid bog, are found in 
Overijssel, in North Holland, and near Utrecht. In short, they occur in all 
deep bogs, and wherever deep water is left long undisturbed.” 

In one case a floating island, which had attached itself to the shore, con- 
tinued to float about for a long time after it was torn off by a flood, and was 
solid enough to keep a pond of fresh water upon it sweet, though the water 
in which it was swimming had become brackish from the irruption of the sea. 
After the hay is cut, cattle are pastured, and occasionally root-crops grown 
upon these islands, and they sometimes have large trees growing upon them. 

When the turf or peat has been cut, leaving water less than a yard deep, 
Equisetum limosum grows at once, and is followed by the second class of 
marsh plants mentioned above. Their roots do not become detached from the 
bottom in such shallow water, but form ordinary turf or peat. These pro- 
cesses are so rapid that a thickness of from three to six feet of turf is 
formed in half a century, and many men have lived to mow grass where they 
had fished in their boyhood, and to cut turf twice in the same spot. In 
Ireland the growth of peat is said to be much more rapid. ELIskkE RE- 
cLus, La Terre, i., 591, 592. But see AsBJGRNSEN, Torv og Torvdrift, ii., 
29, 30. 

Captain Gilliss says that before Lake Taguataga in Chili was drained, there 
were in it islands composed of dead plants matted together to a thickness of 
from four to six feet, and with trees of medium size growing upon them. 
These islands floated before the wind ‘‘ with their trees and browsing cattle.” 
— United States Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere, i., 
pp. 16, 17. 


499 DRAINING OF THE ZUIDERZEE. 


nature in Holland. The Zuid Plas, which covered 11,500 acres, 
and was two feet deeper than the Lake of Haarlem, has been 
drained, and a similar work now in course of execution on an 
arm of the Scheld, will recover about 35,000 acres. 

In a country like the United States, of almost boundless 
extent of sparsely inhabited territory, such an expenditure for 
such an object would be poor economy. But Holland has a 
narrow domain, great pecuniary resources, an excessively 
crowded population, and a consequent need of enlarged room 
and opportunity for the exercise of industry. Under such cir- 
cumstances, and especially with an exposure to dangers so for- 
midable, there is no question of the wisdom of the measure. 
It has already provided homes and occupation for more than 
five thousand citizens, and furnished a profitable investment for 
a private capital of not less than £400,000 sterling or $2,000,- 
000, which has been expended in improvements over and 
above the purchase money of the soil; and the greater part 
of this sum, as well as of the cost of drainage, has been paid as 
a compensation for labor. The excess of governmental 
expenditure over the receipts, if employed in constructing 
ships of war or fortifications, would have added little to the 
military strength of the kingdom; but the increase of terri- 
tory, the multiplication of homes and firesides which the peo- 
ple have an interest in defending, and the augmentation of 
agricultural resources, constitute a stronger bulwark against 
foreign invasion than a ship of the line or a fortress armed with 
a hundred cannon. 


Draining of the Zuiderzee. 


I have referred to the draining of the Lake of Haarlem as 
an operation of great geographical as well as economical and 
mechanical interest. A much more gigantic project, of a 
similar character, is now engaging the attention of the Nether- 
landish engineers. It is proposed to drain the great salt-water 
basin called the Zuiderzee. This inland sea covers an area of 


DRAINING OF THE ZUIDERZEE. 493 


not less than two thousand square miles, or about one million 
three hundred thousand acres. The seaward half, or that por- 
tion lying north-west of a line drawn from Enkhuizen to Sta- 
voren, is believed to have been converted from a marsh to an 
open bay since the fifth century after Christ, and this change 
is ascribed, partly if not wholly, to the interference of man 
with the order of nature. The Zuiderzee communicates with 
the sea by at least six considerable channels, separated from 
each other by low islands, and the tide rises within the basin to 
the heicht of three feet. To drain the Zuiderzee, these chan- 
nels must first be closed and the passage of the tidal flood 
through them cut off. If this be done, the coast currents will 
be restored approximately to the lines they followed fourteen 
or fifteen centuries ago, and there can be little doubt that an 
appreciable effect will thus be produced upon all the tidal 
phenomena of that coast, and, of course, upon the maritime 
geography of Holland. 

A ring-dike and canal must then be constructed around the 
landward side of the basin, to exclude and carry off the fresh- 
water streams which now empty into it. One of these, the 
Ijssel, a considerable river, has a course of eighty miles, and is, 
in fact, one of the outlets of the Rhine, though augmented by 
the waters of several independent tributaries. These prepa- 
rations being made, and perhaps transverse dikes erected at 
convenient points for dividing the gulf into smaller portions, 
the water must be pumped out by machinery, in substantially 
the same way as in the case of the Lakeof Haarlem.* No safe 
calculations can be made as to the expenditure of time and 
money required for the execution of this stupendous enter- 
prise, but I believe its practicability is not denied by compe- 
tent judges, though doubts are entertained as to its financial 


* The dependence of man upon the aid of spontaneous nature, in his most 
arduous material works, is curiously illustrated by the fact that one of the 
most serious difficulties to be encountered in executing this gigantic scheme is 
that of procuring brushwood for the fascines to be employedin the embank- 
ments. See Diggelen’s pamphlet, ‘‘ Groote Werken in Nederland.” 


424 DRAINING OF THE ZUIDERZEE. 


expediency.* The geographical results of this improvement 
would be analogous to those of the draining of the Lake of 
Haarlem, but many times multiplied in extent, and its meteor- 
ological effects, though perhaps not perceptible on the coast, 
could hardly fail to be appreciable in the interior of Holland. 

The bearing of the works [have noticed, and of others simi- 
lar in character, upon the social and moral, as well as the 
purely economical, interests of the people of the Netherlands, 
has induced me to describe them more in detail than the gene- 
ral purpose of this volume may be thought to justify; but if 
we consider them simply from a geographical point of view, 
we shall find that they are possessed of no small importance as 
modifications of the natural condition of terrestrial surface. 
There is good reason to believe that before the establishment of 
a partially civilized race upon the territory now occupied by 
Dutch, Frisic, and Low German communities, the grounds not 
exposed to inundation were overgrown with dense woods; that 
the lowlands between these forests and the sea-coasts were 
marshes, covered and partially solidified by a thick matting of 
peat-plants and shrubs interspersed with trees; and that even 
the sand-dunes of the shore were protected by a vegetable 
growth which, in a great measure, prevented the drifting and 
translocation of them. 

The present causes of river and coast erosion existed, in- 
deed, at the pericd in question; but some of them must have 
acted with less intensity, there were strong natural safeguards 
against the influence of marine and fresh-water currents, and 
the conflicting tendencies had arrived at a condition of approx- 
imate equilibrium, which permitted but slow and gradual 


* The plan at present most in favor is that which proposes the drainage of 
only a portion of the southern half of the Zuiderzee, which covers not far 
from 400,000 acres. The project for the construction of a ship-canal directly 
from Amsterdam to the North Sea, now in course of execution, embraces the 
drainage of the Ij, a nearly land-locked basin communicating with the Zui- 
derzee and covering more than 12,000 acres. See official reports on these 
projects in Droogmaking vom het zuidelijk gedeclte der Zuiderzee, te 8’ Gra- 
venhage, 1868, 4to, 


Or 


CHANGES PRODUCED BY MAN. 49 


changes in the face of nature. The destruction of the forests 
around the sources and along the valleys of the rivers by man 
gave them a more torrential character. The felling of the 
trees, and the extirpation of the shrubbery upon the fens by 
domestic cattle, deprived the surface of its cohesion and con- 
sistence, and the cutting of peat for fuel opened cavities in it, 
which, filling at once with water, rapidly extended themselves 
by abrasion of their borders, and finally enlarged to pools, 
lakes, and gulfs, like the Lake of Haarlem and the northern 
part of the Zuiderzee. The cutting of the wood and the depas- 
turing of the grasses upon the sand-dunes converted them from 
solid bulwarks against the ocean to loose accumulations of 
dust, which every sea-breeze drove farther landward, burying, 
perhaps, fertile soil and choking up water-courses on one side, 
and exposing the coast to erosion by the sea upon the other. 


Geographical Effect of Physical Improvements im _ the 
Netherlands. 


The changes which human action has produced within 
twenty centuries in the Netherlands and the neighboring 
provinces, are certainly of no small geographical importance, 
considered simply as a direct question of loss and gain of terri- 
tory. They have also, as we shall see hereafter, undoubtedly 
been attended with some climatic consequences, they have 
exercised a great influence on the spontaneous animal and 
vegetable life of this region, and they cannot have failed to 
produce effects upon tidal and other oceanic currents, the 
range of which may be very extensive. The force of the 
tidal wave, the height to which it rises, the direction of its 
currents, and, in fact, all the phenomena which characterize it, 
as well as all the effects it produces, depend as much upon the 
configuration of the coast it washes, and the depth of water, 
and form of bottom near the shore, as upon the attraction 
which occasions it. Every one of the terrestrial conditions 
which affect the character of tidal and other marine currents 


426 ANCIENT HYDRAULIC WORKS. 


has been very sensibly modified by the operations I have de- 
scribed, and on this coast, at least, man has acted almost as 


powerfully on the physical geography of the sea as on that of 
the land.* 


Ancient Hydraulic Works. 


The hydraulic works of the Netherlands and of the neigh- 
boring states are of such magnitude that—with the exception of 
the dikes of the Mississippi—they quite throw into the shade all 
other known artificial arrangements for defending the land 
against the encroachments of the rivers and the sea, and for 
reclaiming to the domain of agriculture and civilization soil 
long covered by the waters. But although the recovery and 
protection of lands flooded by the sea seems to be an art wholly 
of Netherlandish origin, we have abundant evidence that, in 
ancient as well as in comparatively modern times, great enter- 
prises more or less analogous in character have been success- 
fuliy undertaken, both in inland Europe and in the less familiar 
countries of the East. 

In many cases no historical record remains to inform us 
when or by whom such works were constructed. The Greeks 
and Romans, the latter especially, were more inclined to under- 
take and carry out stupendous material enterprises than to 
boast of them; and many of the grandest and most important 
constructions of those nations are absolutely unnoticed by con- 
temporary annalists, and are first mentioned by writers living 
after all knowledge of the epochs of the projectors of these 
works had perished. Thus the aqueduct known as the Pont du 
Gard, near Nimes, which, though not surpassing in volume or 
in probable cost other analogous constructions of ancient and 
of modern ages, is yet among the most majestic and imposing 
remains of ancient civil architecture, is not so much as spoken 


* See, on the influence of the artificial modification of the coast-line on 
tides and other marine currents, STARING, De Bodem van Nederland, i., p. 
279. 


DRAINING OF LAKE COPAIS. 4°27 


of by any Roman author,* and we are in absolute ignorance 
of the age or the construction of the remarkable tunnel cut to 
drain Lake Copais in Beeotia. This lake, now reduced by 
sedimentary deposit and the growth of aquatic and semi- 
aquatic vegetation to the condition of a marsh, was originally 
partially drained by natural subterranean outlets in the under- 
lying limestone rock, many of which still exist. But these 
emissaries, or katavothra, as they are called in both ancient and 
modern Greek, were insufficient for the discharge of the water, 
and besides, they were constantly liable to be choked by earth 
and vegetables, and in such cases the lake rose to a height 
which produced much injury. To remedy this evil and secure 
a great accession of fertile soil, at some period anterior to the 
existence of a written literature in Greece and ages before the 
time of any prose author whose works have come down to us, 
two tunnels, one of them four miles long, and of course not 
inferior to the Torlonian emissary in length, were cut through 
the solid rock, and may still be followed throughout their 
whole extent. They were repaired in the time of Alexander 
the Great, in the fourth century before Christ, and their date 
was at that time traditionally referred to the reign of rulers 
who lived as early as the period of the Trojan war. 

One of the best known hydraulic works of the Romans is 
the tunnel which serves to discharge the surplus waters of the 
Lake of Albano, about fourteen miles from Rome. This lake, 


* One reason for the silence of Roman writers in respect to great material 
improvements which had no immediate relation to military or political 
objects, is doubtless the contempt in which mechanical operations and me- 
chanical contrivances were held by that nation of spoilers. Even the 
engineer, upon whose skill the attack or defence of a great city depended, 
was only prefectus fabrum, the master-artisan, and had no military rank or 
command. This prejudice continued to a late period in the Middle Ages, 
and the chiefs of artillery were equally without grade or title as soldiers. 

‘** The occupations of all artisans,” says Cicero, ‘‘ are base, and the shop can 
have nothing of the respectable.” De Officiis, 1. i, 42. The position of the 
surgeon relatively to the physician, in Imgland, is a remnant of the same 
prejudice, whichstill survives in full vigor in Italy, with regard to both trade 
and industry. Seep. 6, ante. 


498 ANCIENT HYDRAULIC WORKS. 


about six miles in circuit, occupies one of the craters of an ex- 
tinct volcanic range, and the surface of its waters is about nine 
hundred feet above the sea. It is fed by rivulets and subterra- 
nean springs originating in the Alban Mount, or Monte Cavo, 
the most elevated peak of the volcanic group just mentioned, 
which rises to the height of about three thousand feet. At 
present the lake has no discoverable natural outlet, and it is not 
known that the water ever stood at such a height as to flow reg- 
ularly over the lip of the crater. It seems that at the earliest 
period of which we have any authentic memorials, its level was 
usually kept by evaporation, or by discharge through subterra- 
nean channels, considerably below the rim of the basin which 
encompassed it, but in the year 397 B.c., the water, either 
from the obstruction of such channels, or in consequence of 
increased supplies from unknown sources, rose to such a height 
as to flow over the edge of the crater, and threaten inundation 
to the country below by bursting through its walls. To obviate 
this danger, a tunnel for carrying off the water was pierced at, 
a level much below the height to which it had risen. This gal- 
lery, cut entirely with the chisel through the rock for a distance 
of six thousand feet, or nearly a mile and one-seventh, is still in 
so good condition as to serve its original purpose. The fact 
that this work was contemporaneous with the siege of Veil, 
has given to ancient annalists occasion to connect the two 
events, but modern critics are inclined to reject Livy’s account 
of the matter, as one of the many improbable fables which dis- 
figure the pages of that historian. It is, however, repeated by 
Cicero and by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and it is by no means 
impossible that, in an age when priests and soothsayers monopo- 
lized both the arts of natural magic and the little which yet 
existed of physical science, the Government of Rome, by their 
aid, availed itself at once of the superstition and of the mili- 
tary ardor of its citizens to obtain their sanction to an enter- 
prise which sounder arguments might not have induced them 
to approve. 

Still more remarkable is the tunnel cut by the Emperor 


DRAINING OF LAKE CELANO. 4929 


Claudius to drain the Lake Fucinus, now Lago di Celano, in 
the former Neapolitan territory, about fifty miles eastward of 
Rome. This Jake, as far as its history is known, has varied 
very considerably in its dimensions at different periods, accord- 
ing to the character of the seasons. It lies 2,200 feet above 
the sea, and has no visible outlet, but was originally either 
drained by natural subterranean conduits, or kept within cer- 
tain extreme limits by evaporation. In years of uncommon 
moisture it spread over the adjacent soil and destroyed the 
crops; in dry seasons it retreated, and produced epidemic 
disease by poisonous exhalations from the decay of vegetable 
and animal matter upon its exposed bed. Julius Cesar had 
proposed the construction of a tunnel to lower the bed of the 
lake and provide a regular discharge for its waters, but the 
enterprise was not actually undertaken until the reign of Clau- 
dius, when—after a temporary failure, from errors in levelling 
by the engineers, as was pretended at the time, or, as now ap- 
pears certain, in consequence of frauds by the contractors in the 
execution of the work—it was at least partially completed. 
From this imperfect construction, it soon got out of repair, but 
was restored by Hadrian, and is said to have answered its de- 
sign for some centuries.* In the barbarism which followed 
the downfall of the empire, it again fell into decay, and though 
numerous attempts were made to repair it during the Middle 
Ages, no tolerable success seems to have attended any of these 
efforts until the present generation. 


Draining of Lake Celano by Prince Torlonia. 


Works have been some years in progress and are now sub- 
stantially completed, at a cost of about six millions of dollars, 
for restoring, or rather enlarging and rebuilding, this ancient 


* The fact alluded to in a note on p. 97, ante, that since the opening of a 
communication between Lake Celano and the Garigliano by the works noticed 
in the text, fish, of species common in the lake, but not previously found in 
the river, have become naturalized in the Garigliano, is a circumstance of 


430 DRAINING OF LAKE CELANO. 


tunnel, upon a scale of grandeur which does infinite honor to 
the liberality and public spirit of the projectors, and with an 
ingenuity of design and a constructive skill which reflect the 
highest credit upon the professional ability of the engineers 
who have planned the works and directed their execution. The 
length of the Roman tunnel was 18,634 feet, or rather more 
than three miles anda half, but as the new emissary is designed 
to drain the lake to the bottom, it must be continued to the 
lowest part of the basin. It will consequently have a length of 
not less than 21,000 feet, and, of course, is among the longest 
subterranean galleries in Europe. Many curious particulars in 
the design and execution of the original work have been ob- 
served in the course of the restoration, but these cannot here be 
noticed. The difference between the lowest and highest known 
levels of the surface of the lake is rather more than forty feet, 
and the difference between the areas covered by water at these 
levels is not less than nine thousand acres. The complete 
drainage of the lake, including the ground occasionally flooded, 
will recover, for agricultural occupation, and permanently 
secure from inundation, about forty-two thousand acres of as 
fertile soil as any in Italy.* The ground already dry enough 
for cultivation furnishes occupation and a livelihood for a 
population of 16,000 persons,.and it is thought that this num- 


some weieht as evidence that the emissary was not actually open in ancient 
times ; for if the waters had been really connected, the fish of the lake would 
naturally have followed the descending current and established themselves in 
the river as they have done now. 

* Springs rising in the bottom of the lake have materially impeded the pro- 
cess of drainage, and some engineers believe that they will render the complete 
discharge of the waters impossible. It appears that the earthy and rocky 
strata underlying the lake are extremely porous, and that the ground already 
laid dry on the surface absorbs an abnormally large proportion of the precipi- 
tation upon it. These strata, therefore, constitute a reservoir which contri- 
butes to maintain the springs fed chiefly, no doubt, by underground channels 
from the neighboring mountains. But it is highly probable that, after a cer- 
tain time, the process of natural desiccation noticed in note to p. 20, ante, will 
drain this reservoir, and the entire removal of the surface-water will then 
become practicable. 


DRAINING OF LAKE CELANO. 431 


ber will be augmented to 40,000 when the drainage shall be 
completely effected. 

' The new tunnel follows the line of the Claudian emissary— 
which though badly executed was admirably engineered—but 
its axis is at a somewhat lower level than that of the old 
gallery, and its cross-section is about two hundred and fifteen 
square feet, allowing a discharge of about 2,400 cubic feet 
to the second, while the Roman work had a cross-section of 
only one hundred and two square feet, with a possible delivery 
of 424 cubic feet to the second. 

In consequence of the nature of the rock and of the soil, 
which had been loosened and shattered by the falling in of 
much of the crown and walls of the old tunnel—every stone 
of which it was necessary to remove in the progress of the 
work—and the great head of water in the lake from unusually 
wet seasons, the technical difficulties to be surmounted were 
most baffling and discouraging in character, and of such extreme 
gravity that it may well be doubted whether the art of engi- 
neering has anywhere triumphed over more serious obstacles. 
This great “victory of peace”—probably the grandest work 
of physical improvement ever effected by the means, the 
energy, and the munificence of a single individual—is of no 
small geographical and economical, as well as sanitary, impor- 
tance, but it has a still higher moral value as an almost unique 
example of the exercise of public spirit, courage, and persever- 
ance in the accomplishment of a noble and beneficent enter- 
prise by a private citizen.* 

The crater-lake of Nemi, in the same volcanic region as that 
of Albano, is also drained by a subterranean tunnel probably of 


* The draining of Lake Celano was undertaken by a company, but Prince 
Alessandro Torlonia of Rome bought up the interest of all the shareholders 
and has executed the entire work at his own private expense. Montricher, 
the celebrated constructor of the great aqueduct of Marseilles, was the engi- 
neer who designed and partly carried out the plans, and after his lamentable 
death the work has been directed with equal ability by Bermont and Brisse. 
—See LEON DE Rotrov, Prosciugamento de Lago Fucino, 8vo. Firenze, 
1871. 


439 CONSEQUENCES OF DRAINING LAKES. 


very ancient construction, and the Valle-Riccia appears to have 
once been the basin of a lake long since laid dry, but whether 
by the ‘bursting of its banks or by human art we are unable 
to say. 

The success of the Lake Celano tunnel has suggested other 
like improvements in Italy. A gallery has been cut, under cir- 
cumstances of great difficulty, to drain Lake Agnano near 
Naples, and a project for the execution of a similar operation 
on the Lake of Perugia, the ancient Trasimenus, which covers 
more than 40,000 acres, is under discussion. 

Many similar enterprises have been conceived and executed 
in modern times, both for the purpose of reclaiming land 
covered by water and for sanitary reasons.* They are some- 
times attended with wholly unexpected evils, as, for example, 
in the case of Barton Pond, in Vermont, and in that of a lake 
near Ragunda in Sweden, already mentioned on a former page. 
Another still less obvious consequence of the withdrawal of 
the waters has occasionally been observed in these operations. 
The hydrostatic foree with which the water, in virtue of its 
specific gravity, presses against the banks that confine it, has a 
tendency to sustain them whenever their composition and text- 
ure are not such as to expose them to softening and dissolu- 
tion by the infiltration of the water. If, then, the slope of the 
banks is considerable, or if the earth of which they are com- 


* A considerable work of this character is mentioned by Captain Gilliss as 
having been executed in Chili, a country to which we should hardly have 
looked for an improvement of such anature. The Lake Taguataga was par- 
tially drained by cutting through a narrow ridge of land, not at the natural 
outlet, but upon one side of the lake, and eight thousand acres of land cov- 
ered by it were gained for cultivation.—U. S. Naval Astronomical Expedi- 
tion to the Southern Hemisphere, i., pp. 16, 17. 

Lake Balaton and the Neusiedler See in Hungary have lately been, at least 
partially, drained. 

The lakes of Neuchatel, Bienne, and Morat, in Switzerland, have been con- 
nected and the common level of all of them lowered about four feet. The 
works now in operation will produce, in the course of the year 1874, a further 
depression of four feet, and recover for agricultural use more than twelve 
thousand acres of fertile soil. 


MOUNTAIN LAKES. 433 


posed rests on a smooth and slippery stratum inclining towards 
the bed of the lake, they are lable to fall or slide forward 
when the mechanical support of the water is removed, and 
this sometimes happens on a considerable scale. A few years 
ago the surface of the Lake of Lungern, in the Canton of Un- 
terwalden, in Switzerland, was lowered by driving a tunnel 
about a quarter of a mile long through the narrow ridge, called 
the Kaiserstuhl, which forms a barrier at the north end of the 
basin. When the water was drawn off, the banks, which are 
steep, cracked and burst, several acres of ground slid down as 
low as the water receded, and even the whole village of Lun- 
gern was thought to be in no small danger.* 


Mountain Lakes. 


Other inconveniences of a very serious character have often 
resulted from the natural wearing down, or, much more fre- 
quently, the imprudent destruction, of the barriers which con- 
fine mountain lakes. In their natural condition, such basins 
serve both to receive and retain the rocks and other detritus 
brought down by the torrents which empty into them, and to 
check the impetus of the rushing waters by bringing them to 


* Jn the course of the year 1864 there were slides of the banks of the Lake 
of Como, and in one case the grounds of a villa near the water suffered a con- 
siderable displacement. More important slips occurred at Fesiolo on the 
shore of Lago Maggiore in 1867 and 1869, and on the Lake of Orta in 1868. 
These occurrences excited some apprehensions in regard to the possible effects 
of projects then under discussion for lowering the level of some of the Italian 
lakes, to obtain an increased supply of water for irrigation and as a mechani- 
cal power, but as it was not proposed to depress the surface below the lowest 
natural low-water level, there seems to have been little ground for the fears 
expressed. 

See, for important observations on the character and probable results of 
these projects, TAGLIASECCHI, WVostizie etc. dei Canali del? Alta Lombardia, 
Milano, 1871. 

Jacini says: ‘‘ A large proportion of the water of the lakes, instead of dis- 
charging itself by the Ticino, the Adda, the Oglio, the Mincio, filters through 
the silicious strata which underlie the hills, and follows subterranean chan- 
nels to the plain, where it collects in the fontanili, and being thence con- 


28 


4354 MOUNTAIN LAKES. 


a temporary pause; but if the outlets are lowered so as to 
drain the reservoirs, the torrents continue their rapid flow 
through the ancient bed of the basins, and carry down with 
them the sand and gravel with which they are charged, in- 
stead of depositing their burden as before in the still waters of 
the lakes. 

It is a common opinion in America that the river meadows, 
bottoms, or ¢atervales, as they are popularly called, are gene- 
rally the beds of ancient lakes which have burst their barriers 
and left running currents in their place. It was shown by Dr. 
Dwight, many years ago, that this is very far from being uni- 
versally true; but there is no doubt that mountain lakes were 
of much more frequent occurrence in primitive than in modern 
geography, and there are many chains of such still existing in 
regions where man has yet little disturbed the original fea- 
tures of the earth. In the long valleys of the Adirondack 
range in Northern New York, and in the mountainous parts of 
Maine, eight, ten, and even more lakes and lakelets are some- 
times found in succession, each emptying into the next lower 
pool, and so all at last into some considerable river. When 
the mountain slopes which supply these basins shall be strip- 
ped of their woods, the augmented swelling of the lakes will 
break down their barriers, their waters will run off, and the 
valleys will present successions of flats with rivers running 
through them, instead of chains of lakes connected by natural 
canals, 

A similar state of things seems to have existed in the ancient 
geography of France. “ Nature,” says Lavergne, “ has not ex- 
cayated on the flanks of our Alps reservoirs as magnificent as 


ducted into the canals of irrigation, becomes a source of great fertility.”—Za 
Propricta Fondiaria, ete., p. 144. 

The quantity of water escaping from the lakes by infiltration depends much 
on the hydrostatic pressure on the bottom and the walls of the lake-basins, and 
consequently the depression of the lake surface, diminishing this pressure, 
would diminish the infiltration. Hence it is possible that the lowering of 
the level of these lakes would manifest itself in a decreased supply of water 
for the springs, fontanili, and wells of Lombardy. 


DRAINING OF SWAMPS. 435 


those of Lombardy; she had, however, constructed smaller 
but more numerous lakes, which the improvidence of man has 
permitted to disappear. Auguste de Gasparin demonstrated 
more than thirty years ago that many natural dikes formerly 
existed in the mountain valleys, which have been swept away 
by the waters.” * 

Many Alpine valleys in Switzerland and Italy present un- 
questionable evidence of the former existence of chains of lakes 
in their basins, and this may be regarded as a general fact in 
regard to the primitive topography of mountainous regions. 
Where the forests have not been destroyed, the lakes remain 
as characteristic features of the geographical surface. Dut 
when the woods are felled, these reservoirs are sooner or later 
filled up by wash from the shores, and of course disappear. 
Geologists have calculated the period when the bottom of the 
Lake of Geneva will be levelled up and its outlet worn down. 
The Rhone will then flow, in an unbroken current, from its 
source in the great Rhone glacier to the Mediterranean Sea. 


Draining of Swamps. 


The reclamation of bogs and swamps by draining off the 
surface-water is doubtless much more ancient than the drain- 
ing of lakes. The beneficial results of the former mode of 
improvement are more unequivocal, and balanced by fewer 
disadvantages, and, at the same time, the processes by which it 
is effected are much simpler and more obvious. It has ac- 
cordingly been practised through the whole historical period, 
and in recent times operations for this purpose have assumed a 
magnitude, and been attended with economical as weil as 
sanitary and geographical effects, which entitle them to a high 
place in the efforts of man to ameliorate the natural conditions 
of the soil he occupies. 

The methods by which the draining of marshes is ordinarily 
accomplished are too familiar, and examples of their successful 


* Economie Rurale de la France, p. 289. 


436 DRAINING OF SWAMPS. 


employment too frequent, to require description, and I shall con- 
tent myself, for the moment, with a brief notice of some recent 
operations of this sort which are less generally known than their 
importance merits. 

Within the present century more than half a million acres 
of swamp-land have been drained and brought under cultiva- 
tion in Hungary, and works are in progress which will ulti- 
mately recover a still larger area for human use. The most 
remarkable feature of these operations, and at the same time 
the process which has been most immediately successful and 
remunerative, is what is called in Europe the regulation of 
water-courses, and especially of the River Theiss, on the lower 
course of which stream alone not less than 250,000 acres of pes- 
tilential and wholly unproductive marsh have been eonverted 
into a healthful region of the most exuberant fertility. 

The regulation of a river consists in straightening its channel 
by cutting off bends, securing its banks from erosion by floods, 
and, where necessary, by constructing embankments to confine 
the waters and prevent them from overflowing and stagnating 
upon the low grounds which skirt their current. In the course 
of the Theiss about sixty bends, including some of considerable 
length, have been cut off, and dikes sufficient for securing the 
land along its banks against inundation have been constructed. 

Many thousand acres of land have been recently permanently 
improved in Italy by the draining of swamps, and extensive 
operations have been projected and commenced on the lower 
Rhone, and elsewhere in France, with the same object.* 

* Very interesting and important experiments, on the practicability of wash- 
ing out the saltfrom seacoast lands too highly impregnated with that mineral 
to be fit for cultivation, are now in progress near the mouth of the Rhone, 
where millions of acres of marshy soil can easily be recovered, if these experi- 
ments are successful. 

See DuponcuEL, Traité @ Hydraulique et de Géologie agricoles. Paris, 1868, 
chap. xi. and xii. 

In the neighborhood of Ferrara are pools and marshes covering nearly two 
hundred square miles, or a surface more than equal to eight American town- 


ships. Centrifugal steam-pumps, of 2,000 horse-power, capable of discharging 
more than six hundred and fifty millions of gallons of water per day, have 


DRAINING OF SWAMPS. 437 


But there is probably no country where greater improve- 
ments of this sort have either been lately effected, or are now 
in course of accomplishment, than in our own. Not to speak 
of well-known works on the New Jersey seacoast and the 
shores of Lake Michigan, the people of the new State of Cali- 
fornia are engaging in this mode of subduing nature with as 
much enterprise and energy as they have shown in the search 
for gold. The Report of the Agricultural Department of the 
United States for January, 1872, notices, with more or less 
detail, several highly successful experiments in California in 
the way of swamp-drainage and securing land from overflow, 
and it appears that not far from 200,000 acres have either very 
recently undergone or will soon be subjected to this method of 
improvement. 


Agricultural Draining. 


I have commenced this chapter with a description of the 
dikes and other hydraulic works of the Netherland engineers, 
because both the immediate and the remote results of such 
operations are more obvious and more easily measured, though 
certainly not more important, than those of much older and 
more widely diffused modes of resisting or directing the flow 
of waters, which have been practised from remote antiquity in 
the interior of all civilized countries. Draining and irrigation 
are habitually regarded as purely agricultural processes, having 
little or no relation to technical geography; but we shall find 
that they exert a powerful influence on soil, climate, and animal 
and vegetable life, and may, therefore, justly claim to be re- 
garded as geographical elements. 

Superficial draining is a necessity in all lands newly re- 
claimed from the forest. The face of the ground in the woods 
is never so regularly inclined as to permit water to flow freely 


lately been constructed in England for draining these marshes. This discharge 
is equal to an area of 640 acres, or a mile square, with nearly three feet of 
water, 


438 DRAINING OF SWAMPS. 


over it. There are, even on the hillsides, small ridges and de- 
pressions, partly belonging to the original distribution of the 
soil, and partly occasioned by irregularities in the growth and 
deposit of vegetable matter. These, in the husbandry of 
nature, serve as dams and reservoirs to collect a larger supply 
of moisture than the spongy earth can at once imbibe. Be- 
sides this, the vegetable mould is, even under the most favor- 
able circumstances, slow in parting with the humidity it has 
accumulated under the protection of the woods, and the infil- 
tration from neighboring forests contributes to keep the soil of 
small clearings too wet for the advantageous cultivation of 
artificial crops. For these reasons, surface draining must have 
commenced with agriculture itself,and there is probably no 
cultivated district, one may almost say no single field, which is 
not provided with artificial arrangements for facilitating the 
escape of superficial water, and thus carrying off moisture which, 
in the natural condition of the earth, would have been imbibed 
by the soil. 

All these processes belong to the incipient civilization of the 
ante-historical periods, but the construction of subterranean 
channels for the removal of infiltrated water marks ages and 
countries distinguished by a great advance in agricultural 
theory and practice, a great accumulation of pecuniary capital, 
and a density of population which creates a ready demand and 
a high price for all products of rural industry. Under-drain- 
ing, too, would be most advantageous in damp and cool climates, 
where evaporation is slow, and upon soils where the natural 
inclination of surface does not promote a very rapid flow of the 
surface-waters. All the conditions required to make this mode 
of rural improvement, if not absolutely necessary, at least 
profitable, exist in Great Britain, and it is, therefore, very 
natural that the wealthy and intelligent farmers of England 
should have carried this practice farther, and reaped a more 
abundant pecuniary return from it, than those of any other 
country. ‘ 

Besides superficial and subsoil drains, there is another method 


DRAINAGE BY BORING. 439 


of disposing of superfluous surface-water, which, however, can 
rarely be practised, because the necessary conditions for its 
employment are not of frequent occurrence. Whenever a 
tenacious water-holding stratum rests on a loose, gravelly bed, 
so situated as to admit of a free discharge of water from or 
through it by means of the outcropping of the bed at a lower 
level, or of deep-lying conduits leading to distant points of dis- 
charge, superficial waters may be carried off by opening a 
passage for them through the impervious into the permeable 
stratum. Thus, according to Bischof, as early as the time of 
King Réné, in the first half of the fifteenth century, when sub- 
soil drainage was scarcely known, the plain of Paluns, near 
Marseilles, was laid dry by boring, and Wittwer informs us that 
drainage is effected at Munich by conducting the superfluous 
water into large excavations, from which it filters through into 
a lower stratum of pebble and gravel lying a little above the 
level of the river Isar.* So at Washington, in the western 
part of the city, which lies high above the rivers Potomac and 
Rock Creek, many houses are provided with dry wells for 
draining their cellars and foundations. These extend through 
hard, tenacious earth to the depth of thirty or forty feet, when 
they strike a stratum of gravel, through which the water readily 
passes off. 


* Physikalische Geographie, p. 288. This method is now frequently em- 
ployed in France. Details as to the processes will be found in MaNnGon, 
Pratique du Drainage, pp. 78 et seqgg. Draining by driving down. stakes, 
mentioned in a note in the chapter on the Woods, ante, isa process of the 
same nature. 

In the United States, large tracts of marshy ground, and even shallow lakes 
of considerable extent, have been sufficiently drained not only for pasturage 
but for cultivation, without resort to any special measures for effecting that 
end. The ordinary processes of rural improvement in the vicinity, such as 
felling woods upon and around such grounds, and the construction of roads, 
the side ditches of which act as drains, over or near them, aided now and then 
by the removal of a fallen tree or other accidental obstruction in the beds of 
small streams which flow from them, often suffice to reclaim miles square of 
unproductive swamp and water. See notes on p. 20, and on cedar swamps, 
p. 208, ante. 


440 DRAINAGE BY BORING. 


This practice has been extensively employed at Paris, not 
merely for carrying off ordinary surface-water, but for the dis- 
charge of offensive and deleterious fluids from chemical and 
manufacturing establishments. A well of this sort received, 
in the winter of 1832538, twenty thousand gallons per day 
of the foul water from a starch factory, and the same process 
was largely used in other factories. The apprehension of 
injury to common and artesian wells and springs led to an 
investigation on this subject by Girard and Parent Duchatelet, 
in the latter year. The report of these gentlemen, published 
in the Annales des Ponts et Chaussées for 1833, second half- 
year, is full of curious and instructive facts respecting the 
position and distribution of the subterranean waters under and 
near Paris; but it must suffice to say that the report came to 
the conclusion that, in consequence of the absolute immobility 
of these waters, and the relatively small quantity of noxious 
fluid to be conveyed to them, there was no danger of the 
diffusion of such fluid if discharged into them. This result will 
not surprise those who know that, in another work, Duchatelet 
maintains analogous opinions as to the effect of the discharge 
of the city sewers into the Seine or the waters of that river. 
The quantity of matter delivered by them he holds to be 
so nearly infinitesimal, as compared with the volume of water 
of the river, that it cannot possibly affect it to a sensible de- 
gree, and therefore cannot render the Seine water unfit for 
drinking.* , 


Meteorological Hffects of Draining. 


The draining of lakes diminishes the water-surface of the 
soil, and consequently, in many cases, the evaporation from it, 


* Coste found, in his experiments on pisciculture, that the fermentation, 
which takes place in the water of the Seine in consequence of the discharge 
of the drains into the river, destroyed a large proportion of the eggs of fish 
in his breeding basins. Analysis of Seine water by Boussingault in 1855 
detected a considerable quantity or ammonia. 


METEOROLOGICAL EFFECTS OF DRAINING. 441 


as well as the refrigeration which attends all evaporation.* On 
the other hand, if the volume of water abstracted is great, its 
removal deprives its basin of an equalizing and moderating in- 
fluence; for large bodies of water take very slowly the tem- 
perature of the air in contact with their surface, and are 
almost constantly either sending off heat into the atmosphere 
or absorbing heat from it. Besides, as we have seen, lakes in 
elevated positions discharge more or less water by infiltration, 
and contribute it by the same process to other lakes, to springs, 
and to rivulets, at lower levels. Hence the draining of lakes, 
on a considerable scale, must modify both the humidity and 
the temperature of the atmosphere of the neighboring regions, 
and the permanent supply of ground-water for the lands lying 
below them. 


Meteorological Action of Marshes. 


The shallow water of marshes, indeed, performs this latter 
function, but, under ordinary circumstances, marshes exercise 


* The relative evaporating action of earth and water is a very complicated 
problem, and the results of observation on the subject are conflicting. 
Schiibler found that at Geneva the evaporation from bare loose earth, in the 
months of December, January, and February, was from two and a half to 
nearly six times as great as from a like surface of water in the other 
months, The evaporation from water was from about once and a half to six 
times as great as from earth. Taking the whole year together, the evapora- 
tion from the two surfaces was 199;°; limes from earth and 536;'; lines from 
water. Experiments by Van der Steer, at the Helder, in the years 1861 and 
1862, showed, for the former year, an evaporation of 602.9 millimetres from 
water, 1399.6 millimétres from ground covered with clover and other grasses ; 
in 1862, the evaporation from water was 584.5 millimétres, from grass- 
ground, 875.5.—WILHELM, Der Boden und das Wasser, p. 57; KREcCKE, 
Tet Ktimaat van Nedertand, ii., p. 111. 

On the other hand, the evaporation from the Nile in Egypt and Nubia is 
stated to be three times as great as that from an equal surface of the soil 
which borders it.—LOMBARDINI, Saggio Idrologico sul Nilo, Milano, 1864, 
and Appendiz. The relative thermometrical conditions of land and water in 
the same vicinity are constantly varying, and the hygrometrical state of both 
is equally unstable. Consequently there is no general formula to express the 
proportionate evaporation from fluid and solid geographical surfaces. 


449 ACTION OF MARSHES. 


in but a very small degree the compensating meteorological 
action which I have ascribed to large expansions of deeper water. 
The direct rays of the sun and the warmth of the atmosphere 
penetrate to the soil beneath, and raise the temperature of the 
water which covers it; and there is usually a much greater 
evaporation from marshes than from lakes in the same region, 
during the warmer half of the year. This evaporation implies 
refrigeration, and consequently the diminution of evaporation 
by the drainage of swamps tends to prevent the lowering 
of the atmospheric temperature, and to lessen the frequency 
and severity of frosts. Accordingly it is a fact of experience 
that, other things being equal, dry soils, and the air in contact 
with them, are perceptibly warmer during the season of vegeta- 
tion, when evaporation is most rapid, than moist lands and the 
atmospheric stratum resting upon them. ‘Instrumental obser- 
vation on this special point has not yet been undertaken on a 
large scale, but still we have thermometric data sufficient to 
warrant the general conclusion, and the influence of drainage 
in diminishing the frequency of frost appears to be even better 
established than a direct increase of atmospheric temperature. 
The steep and dry uplands of the Green Mountain range in 
New England often escape frosts when the Indian-corn harvest 
on moister grounds, five hundred or even a thousand feet lower, 
is destroyed or greatly injured by them. The neighborhood of 
a marsh is sure to be exposed to late spring and early autumnal 
frosts, but they cease to be feared after it is drained, and this is 
particularly observable in very cold climates, as, for example, 
in Lapland.* 

In England, under-drains are not generally laid below the 
reach of daily variations of temperature, or below a point from 
which moisture, if not carried off by the drains, might be 


* “« The simplest backwoodsman knows by experience that all cultivation is 
impossible in the neighborhood of bogs and marshes. Why is a crop near the 
borders of a marsh cut off by frost, while a field upon a hillock, a few stone’s 


throws from it, is spared?”—Lars Ley Lasrapius, Om Uppodlingar t 
Lappmarken, pp. 69, 74. 


AGRICULTURAL DRAINAGE. 443 


brought to the surface by capillary attraction, and evaporated 
by the heat of the sun. They, therefore, like surface-drains, 
withdraw from local solar action much moisture which would 
otherwise be vaporized by it, and, at the same time, by drying 
the soil above them, they increase its effective hygroscopicity, 
and it consequently absorbs from the atmosphere a greater 
quantity of water than it did when, for want of under-drainage, 
the subsoil was always humid, if not saturated.* Under-drains, 
then, contribute to the dryness as well as to the warmth of the 
atmosphere, and, as dry ground is more readily heated by the 
rays of the sun than wet, they tend also to raise the mean, and 
especially the summer, temperature of the soil. 


Liffects of Draining Lake of Haarlem. 


The meteorological influence of the draining of lakes and of 
humid soils has not, so far as I know, received much attention 
from experimental physicists ; but we are not altogether with- 
out direct proof in support of theoretical and @ priort conclu- 
sions. Thermometrical observations have been regularly made 
at Zwanenburg, near the northern extremity of the Lake of 
Haarlem, for more than a century; and since 1845 a similar 
registry has been kept at the Helder, forty or fifty miles more 
to the north. In comparing these two series of observations, it 
is found that towards the end of 1852, when the draining of 
the lake was finished, and the following summer had com- 
pletely dried the newly exposed soil—and, of course, greatly 


* Mangon thinks that the diminution of evaporation by agricultural drain- 
age corresponds, in certain circumstances, to five per cent. of the heat received 
from the sun by the same surface ina year. He cites observations by Parkes, 
showing a difference in temperature of 5.5° [centigrade ?] in favor of drained, 
as compared with undrained, ground in the same vicinity.—Jnstructions 
pratiques sur le Drainage, pp. 227, 228. 

The diminution of evaporation is not the only mode in which under-drain- 
ing affects the temperature. The increased efiective hygroscopicity of the 
soil increases its absorbent action, and the condensation of atmospheric vapor 
thus produced is attended with the manifestation of heat. 


444 DRAINING OF LAKE OF HAARLEM. 


diminished the water-surface—a change took place in the rela- 
tive temperature of those two stations. Taking the mean of 
each successive period of five days, from 1845 to 1852, both 
inclusive, the temperature of Zwanenburg was thirty-three 
hundredths of a degree centigrade /ower than at the Helder. 
From the end of 1852 the thermometer at Zwanenburg has 
stood, from the 11th of April to the 20th of September, twenty- 
two hundredths of a degree Aigher than that at Helder; but 
from the 14th of October to the 17th of March, it has marked 
one-tenth of a degree dower than its mean between the same 
dates before 1853.* 

There is no reason to doubt that these differences are due to 
the draining of the lake. In summer, solar irradiation has 
acted more powerfully on the now exposed earth and of 
course on the air in contact with it; and there is no longer a 
large expanse of water still retaining and of course impart- 
ing something of the winter temperature ; in winter, the earth 
has lost more heat by radiation than when covered by water, 
and the influence of the lake, as a reservoir of warmth ac- 
cumulated in summer and gradually given out in winter, was 
of course lost by its drainage. Doubtless the quantity of 
moisture contained in the atmosphere has been modified by the 
same cause, but it does not appear that observations have been 
made upon this point. Facts lately observed by Glaisher tend 
to prove an elevation of not far from two degrees in the mean 
temperature of England during the course of the last hundred 
years. For reasons which I have explained elsewhere, the 
early observations upon which these conclusions are founded 
do not deserve entire confidence ; but admitting the fact of the 
alleged elevation, its most probable explanation would be found 
in the more thorough draining of the soil by superficial and by 
subterranean conduits. 

So far as respects the immediate improvement of soil and 
climate, and the increased abundance of the harvests, the Eng- 
lish system of surface and subsoil drainage has fully justified 


* KRECKE, Let Klimaat van Nederland, ii., p. 64. 


GEOGRAPHICAL EFFECTS OF DRAINING. 445 


the eulogiums of its advocates; but its extensive adoption 
appears to have been attended with some altogether unforeseen 
and undesirable consequences, very analogous to those which 
I have described as resulting from the clearing of the forests. 
The under-drains carry off very rapidly the water imbibed by 
the soil from precipitation, and through infiltration from neigh- 
boring springs or other sources of supply. Consequently, in 
wet seasons, or after heavy rains, a river bordered by artifi- 
cially feteied lands receives in a few hours, from superficial 
and from subterranean conduits, an accession of water which, 
in the natural state of the earth, would have reached it only 
by small instalments after percolating through hidden paths 
for weeks or even months, and would have furnished peren- 
nial and comparatively regular contributions, instead of swelling 
deluges, to its channel. Thus, when human impatience rashly 
ubstitutes swiftly acting artificial contrivances for the slow 
methods by which nature drains the surface and superficial 
strata of a river-basin, the original equilibrium is disturbed, 
the waters of the heavens are no longer stored up in the earth 
to be gradually given out again, byt are hurried out of man’s 
domain with wasteful haste ; and while the inundations of the 
river are sudden and disastrous, its current, when the drains 
have run dry, is reduced to a rivulet, it ceases to supply the 
power to drive the machinery for which it was once amply 
sufficient, and scarcely even waters the herds that pasture upon 
its margin. 

The water of subterranean currents and reservoirs, as well as 
that of springs and common wells, is doubtless principally fur- 
nished by infiltration, and hence its quantity must vary with 
every change of natural surface which tends to accelerate or 
to retard the drainage of the surface-soil. The drainage of 
marshes, therefore, and all other methods of drying the super- 
ficial strata, whether by open ditches or by underground tubes 
or drains, has the same effect as clearing off the forest in de- 
priving the subterranean waters of accessions which they would 
otherwise receive by infiltration, and in proportion as the sphere 


446 EFFECTS OF AQUEDUCTS AND CANALS. 


of such operation is extended, their influence will make itself 
felt in the diminished supply of water in springs and wells.* 


Geographical and Meteorological Liffects of Aqueducts, 
Reservoirs, and Canals. 


Many of the great processes of internal improvement, such as 
aqueducts for the supply of great cities, railroad cuts and em- 
bankments, and the like, divert water from its natural channels, 
and affect its distribution and ultimate discharge. The col- 
lecting of the waters of a considerable district into reservoirs, 
to be thence carried off by means of aqueducts, as, for ex- 
ample, in the forest of Belgrade, near Constantinople, deprives 
the grounds originally watered by the springs and rivulets of 
the necessary moisture, and reduces them to barrenness.f Sim- 
ilar effects must have followed from the construction of the 
numerous aqueducts which supplied ancient Rome with such 


* Babinet condemns the general draining of marshes. ‘‘ Draining,” says 
he, ‘‘ has been much in vogue for some years, and it has been a special object 
to dry and fertilize marshy grounds. I believe that excessive dryness is thus 
produced, and that other soils in the neighborhood are sterilized in propor- 
tion.” —Etudes et Lectures, iv., p. 118. 

‘¢' The extent of soil artificially dried by drainage is constantly increasing, 
and the water received by the surface from precipitation flows off by new chan- 
nels, and isin general carried off more rapidly than before. Must not this 
fact exercise an influence on the régime of springs whose basin of supply thus 
undergoes a more or less complete transformation ?”—BERNUARD CoTTA, 
Preface to PARAMELLE, Quellenkunde, p. vii., viii. 

The effects of agricultural drainage are perceptible at great depths. It has 
been observed in Cornwall that deep mines are more free from water in well- 
drained districts than in those where drainage is not generally practised.— 
Esqurros, Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 Nov., 1863, p. 430. 

See also ASBJORNSEN, Toro og Torvdrift, p. 31. 

+See a very interesting paper on the Water-Supply of Constantinople, by 
Mr. Homes, of the New York State Library, in the Albany Argus of June 6, 
1872. The system of aqueducts for the supply of water to that city was com- 
menced by Constantine, and the great aqueduct, frequently ascribed to Jus- 
tinian, which is 840 feet long and 112 feet high, is believed to have been 
constructed during the reign of the former emperor. 


EFFECTS OF AQUEDUCTS AND CANALS. 447 


a profuse abundance of water.* On the other hand, the filtra- 
tion of water through the banks or walls of an aqueduct car- 
ried upon a high level across low ground, often injures the 
adjacent soil, and is prejudicial to the health of the neighbor- 
ing population; and it has been observed in Switzerland and 
elsewhere, that fevers have been produced by the stagnation of 
the water in excavations from which earth had been taken to 
form embankments for railways. 

If we consider only the influence of physical improvements 
on civilized life, we shall perhaps ascribe to navigable canals a 
higher importance, or at least a more diversified influence, than 
to aqueducts or to any other works of man designed to control 
the waters of the earth, and to affect their distribution. They 
bind distant regions together by social ties, through the agency 
of the commerce they promote; they facilitate the transporta- 
tion of military stores and engines, and of other heavy material 
connected with the discharge of the functions of government ; 
they encourage industry by giving marketable value to raw ma- 
terial and to objects of artificial elaboration which would other- 
wise be worthless on account of the cost of conveyance; they 
supply from their surplus waters means of irrigation and of 
mechanical power; and, in many other ways, they contribute 
much to advance the prosperity and civilization of nations. Nor 
are they wholly without geographical importance. They some- 
times drain lands by conveying off water which would other- 
wise stagnate on the surface, and, on the other hand, like aque- 
ducts, they render the neighboring soil cold and moist by the 
percolation of water through their embankments; + they dam 


* The unhealthiness of the Roman Campagna is ascribed by many medieval 
as well as later writers to the escape of water from the ancient aqueducts, 
which had fallen out of repair from neglect, or been broken down by enemies 
in the sieges of Rome. 

+ Sismondi, speaking of the Tuscan canals, observes: ‘‘ But inundations 
are not the only damage caused by the waters to the plains of Tuscany. 
Raised, as the canals are, above the soil, the water percolates through 
heir banks, penetrates every obstruction, and, in spite of all the efforts 
of industry, sterilizes and turns to morasses fields which nature and the 


448 ANTIQUITY OF IRRIGATION. 


up, check, and divert the course of natural currents, and de- 
liver them at points opposite to, or distant from, their original 
outlets; they often require extensive reservoirs to feed them, 
thus retaining through the year accumulations of water— 
which would otherwise run off, or evaporate in the dry sea- 
son—and thereby enlarging the evaporable surface of the 
country; and we have already seen that they interchange the 
flora and the fauna of provinces widely separated by nature. 
All these modes of action certainly influence climate and the 
character of terrestrial surface, though our means of observation 
are not yet perfected enough to enable us to appreciate and 
measure their effects. 


Antiquity of Irrigation. 


We know little of the history of the extinct civilizations 
which preceded the culture of the classic ages, and no nation 
has, in modern times, spontaneously emerged from barbarism, 
and created for itself the arts of social life.* The improve- 


richness of the soil seemed to have designed for the most abundant har- 
vests. In ground thus pervaded with moisture, or rendered cold, as the 
Tuscans express it, by the filtration of the canal-water, the vines and the 
mulberries, after having for a few years yielded fruit of a saltish taste, rot 
and perish. The wheat decays in the ground, or dies as soon as it sprouts. 
Winter crops are given up, and summer cultivation tried for a time ; but the 
increasing humidity, and the saline matter communicated to the earth— 
which affects the taste of all its products, even to the grasses, which the cat- 
tle refuse to touch—at last compel the husbandman to abandon his fields, and 
leave uncultivated a soil that no longer repays his labor.”—Tableau de lV Agri- 
culture Toscane, pp. 11, 12. 

* T ought perhaps to except the Mexicans and the Peruvians, whose arts 
and institutions are not yet shown to be historically connected with chose of 
any more ancient people. The lamentable destruction of so many memorials 
of these tribes, by the ignorance and bigotry of the so-called Christian bar- 
barians who conquered them, has left us much in the dark as to many points 
of their civilization ; but they seem to have reached that stage whee continued 
progress in knowledge and in power over nature is secure, and a few more cen- 
turies of independence might have brought them to originate for themselves 
most of the great inventions which the last four centuries have } estowed upon 
man, 


IRRIGATION IN EUROPE. 449 


ments of the savage races whose history we can distinctly trace 
are borrowed and imitative, and our theories as to the origin 
and natural development of industrial art are conjectural. Of 
course, the relative antiquity of particular branches of human 
industry depends much upon the natural character of soil, cli- 
mate, and spontaneous vegetable and animal life in different 
countries ; and while the geographical influence of man would, 
under given circumstances, be exerted in one direction, it would, 
under different conditions, act in an opposite or a diverging 
line. I have given some reasons for thinking that in the cli- 
mates to which our attention has been chiefly directed, man’s 
first interference with the natural arrangement and disposal of 
the waters was in the way of drainage of surface. But if we 
are to judge from existing remains alone, we should probably 
conclude that irrigation is older than drainage; for, in the 
regions regarded by general tradition as the cradle of the hnaman 
race, we find traces of canals evidently constructed for the 
former purpose at a period long preceding the ages of which 
we have any written memorials. There are, in ancient Armenia, 
extensive districts which were already abandoned to desolation 
at the earliest historical epoch, but which, in a yet remoter anti- 
quity, had been irrigated by a complicated and highly artificial 
system of canals, the lines of which can still be followed; and 
there are, in all the highlands where the sources of the Euphrates 
rise, in Persia, in Egypt, in India, and in China, works of this 
sort which must have been in existence before man had begun 
to record his own annals. 

In warm countries, such as most of those just mentioned, the 
effects I have described as usually resulting from the clearing of 
the forests would very soon follow. In such climates, the rains 
are inclined to be periodical ; they are also violent, and for these 
reasons the soil would be parched in summer and liable to wash 
in winter. In these countries, therefore, the necessity for irri- 
gation must soon have been felt, and its introduction into moun- 
tainous regions like Armenia must have been immediately 


followed by a system of terracing, or at least searping the hill- 
29 


450 IRRIGATION IN PALESTINE. 


sides. Pasture and meadow, indeed, may be irrigated even 
when the surface is both steep and irregular, as may be observed 
abundantly on the Swiss as well as on the Piedmontese slope of 
the Alps; but in dry climates, ploughland and gardens on hilly 
grounds require terracing, both for supporting the soil and for 
administering water by irrigation, and it should be remembered 
that terracing, of itself, even without special arrangements for 
controlling the distribution of water, prevents or at least checks 
the flow of rain-water, and gives it time to sink into the ground 
instead of running off over the surface. 

The summers in Egypt, in Syria, and in Asia Minor and even 
Rumelia, are almost rainless. In such climates, the necessity 
of irrigation is obvious, and the loss of the ancient means of 
furnishing it helps to explain the diminished fertility of most of 
the countries in question.* The surface of Palestine, for exam- 
ple, is composed, in a great measure, of rounded limestone hills, 
once, no doubt, covered with forests. These were partially re- 
moved before the Jewish conquest.t When the soil began to 


* In Egypt, evaporation and absorption by the earth are so rapid, that all 
annual crops require irrigation during the whole period of their growth. As 
fast as the water retires by the subsidence of the annual inundation, the seed 
issown upon the still moist, uncovered soil, and irrigation beginsat once. Upon 
the Nile, you hear the creaking of the water-wheels, and sometimes the move- 
ment of steam-pumps, through the whole night, while the poorer cultivators 
unceasingly ply the simple shadoof, or bucket-and-sweep, laboriously raising 
the water from trough to trough by as many as six or seven stages when the 
river islow. The bucket is of flexible leather, with a stiff rim, and is emp- 
tied into the trough, not by inverting it like a wooden bucket, but by putting 
the hand beneath and pushing the bottom up till the water all runs out over 
the brim, or, in other words, by turning the vessel inside out. 

The quantity of water thus withdrawn from the Nile is enormous. Most of 
this is evaporated directly from the surface or the superficial strata, but some 
moisture percolates down and oozes through the banks into the river again, 
while a larger quantity sinks till it joins the slow current of infiltration by 
which the Nile water pervades the earth of the valley to the distance, at some 
points, of not less than fifty miles. 

+ ‘‘ Forests,’’ ‘‘ woods,” and ‘‘ groves,” are frequently mentioned in the Old 
Testament as existing at particular places, and they are often referred to by 
way of illustration, as familiar objects. ‘‘ Wood” is twice spoken of asa 
material in the New Testament, but otherwise—at least according to Cruden— 


IRRIGATION IN PALESTINE. AB51 


suffer from drought, reservoirs to retain the waters of winter 
were hewn in the rock near the tops of the hills, and the decli- 
vities were terraced. So long as the cisterns were in good order, 
and the terraces kept up, the fertility of Palestine was unsur- 
passed, but when misgovernment and foreign and intestine war 
occasioned the neglect or destruction of these works—traces of 
which still meet the traveller’s eye at every step,—when the 
reservoirs were broken and the terrace walls had fallen down, 
there was no longer water for irrigation in summer, the rains 
of winter soon washed away most of the thin layer of earth 
upon the rocks, and Palestine was reduced almost to the con- 
dition of a desert. 

The course of events has been the same in Idumea. The 
observing traveller discovers everywhere about Petra, particu- 
larly if he enters the city by the route of Wadi Ksheibeh, very 
extensive traces of ancient cultivation, and upon the neighboring 
ridges are the ruins of numerous cisterns evidently constructed 
to furnish a supply of water for irrigation.* In primitive ages, 
the precipitation of winter in these hilly countries was, in great 
part, retained for a time in the superficial soil, first by the vege- 
table mould of the forests, and then by the artificial arrange- 
ments I have described. The water imbibed by the earth was 
partly taken up by direct evaporation, partly absorbed by vege- 
tation, and partly carried down by infiltration to subjacent strata 


not one of the above words occurs in that volume. In like manner, while the 
box, the cedar, the fir, the oak, the pine, ‘‘ beams,” and ‘‘ timber,” are very 
frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, not one of these words is found 
in the New, except the case of the ‘‘ beam in the eye,” in the parable in Mat- 
thew and Luke. 

This interesting fact, were other evidence wanting, would go far to prove 
that a great change had taken place in this respect between the periods when 
the Old Testament and the New were respectively composed ; for the scrip- 
tural writers, and the speakers introduced into their narratives, are remark- 
able for their frequent allusions to the natural objects and the social and in- 
dustrial habits which characterized their ages and their country. 

* One of these on Mount Hor, two stories deep, is in such good preservation, 
although probably not repaired for many centuries, that Ifound ten feet of 
water in it in June, 1851. 


452 IRRIGATION IN INDIA. 


which gave it out in springs at lower levels, and thus a fertility 
of soil and a condition of the atmosphere were maintained sufli- 
cient to admit of the dense population that once inhabited those 
now arid wastes. At present, the rain-water runs immediately 
off from the surface and is carried down to the sea, or is drunk 
up by the sands of the wadis, and the hillsides which once 
teemed with plenty are bare of vegetation, and seared by the 
scorching winds of the desert. 

In fact, climatic conditions render irrigation a necessity in 
all the oriental countries which have any importance in ancient 
or in modern history,and there can be no doubt that this 
diffusion of water over large surfaces has a certain reaction on 
climate. Some idea of the extent of artificially watered soil 
in India many be formed from the fact that in fourteen districts 
of the Presidency of Madras, not less than 43,000 reservoirs, 
constructed by the ancient native rulers for the purpose of 
irrigation, are now in use, and that there are in those districts 
at least 10,000 more which are in ruins and useless. These 
reservoirs are generally formed by damming the outlets of 
natural valleys; and the dams average half a mile in length, 
though some of them are thirty miles long and form ponds 
covering from 87,000 to 50,000 acres. The areas of these reser- 
voirs alone considerably increase the water-surface, and each 
one of them irrigates an extent of cultivated ground much 
larger than itself. Hence there is a great augmentation of 
humid surface from these constructions.* 


*® The present government of India obtains the same result more eco- 
nomically and advantageously by constructing in many provinces of that vast 
empire canals of great length and capacity, which not only furnish a greater 
supply of water than the old reservoirs, but so distribute it as to irrigate a 
larger area than could be watered by any system of artificial basins. The 
excavations for the Ganges Canal were nearly equal to those for the Suez 
Canal, falling little short of 100,000 cubic yards, without counting feeders and 
accessory lines amounting to a length of 3,000 miles. This canal, according to 
a recent article in the London Times, waters a tract of land 320 miles long by 
50 broad. The Jumna Canal, 130 miles long, with 608 miles of distributing 
branches, waters a territory 120 miles long with a breadth of 15 miles. 

Other statements estimate the amount of land actually under irrigation in 


IRRIGATION IN EGYPT. 453 


The cultivable area of Egypt, or the space between desert and 
desert where cultivation would be possible, is now estimated 
at ten thousand square statute miles.* Much of the surface, 
though not out of the reach of irrigation, lies too high to 
be economically watered, and irrigation and cultivation are 
therefore at present confined to an area of seven thousand 
square miles, nearly the whole of which is regularly and 
constantly watered when not covered by the inundation, except 
in the short interval between the harvest and the rise of the 
waters. or nearly half of the year, then, irrigation adds seven 
thousand square miles to the humid surface of the Nile valley, 
or, in other words, more than decuples the area from which 
an appreciable quantity of moisture would otherwise be evap- 
orated; for after the Nile has retired within its banks, its 
waters by no means cover one-tenth of the space just men- 
tioned. 

The Nile receives not a single tributary in its course below 
Khartoum; there is not so much as one living spring in the 


British India at 6,000,000 acres, and add that canals now in construction will 
water as much more. The Indian irrigation canals are generally navigable, 
some of them by boats of large tonnage, and the canals return a net revenue 
of from five to twenty per cent, on their cost. 

* The area which the waters of the Nile, left to themselves, would now 
cover is greater than it would have been in ancient times, because the bed of 
the river has been elevated, and consequently the lateral spread of the inun- 
dation increased. See Smitu’s Dictionary of Geography, article ‘* Aegyptus.” 
But the industry of the Eeyptians in the days of the Pharaohs and the Ptole- 
mies carried the Nile-water to large provinces, which have now been long aban- 
doned and have relapsed into the condition of desert. ‘+ Anciently,” observes 
the writer of the article ‘‘ Eeypt” in Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible, ‘2,735 
square miles more [about 3,700 square statute miles] may have been cultivat- 
ed. In the best days of Egypt, probably all the land was cultivated that could 
be made available for agricultural purposes, and hence we may estimate the 
ancient arable area of that country at not less than 11,000 square statute 
miles, or fully double its present extent.” 

According to an article in the Bollettino della Socicta Geografica Italiana, 
vol. v., pt. iii., p. 219, the cultivated soil of Egypt in 1869 amounted to 
4,500,000 acres, and the remaining soil capable of cultivation was estimated 
at 2,000,000 acres, 


Sele 


454 IRRIGATION IN EGYPT. 


whole land,* and, with the exception of a narrow strip of 
coast, where the annual precipitation is said to amount to six 
inches, the fall of rain in the territory of the Pharaohs is not 
two inches in the year. The subsoil of the whole valley is 
pervaded with moisture by infiltration from the Nile, and water 
can everywhere be found at the depth of a few feet. Were 
irrigation suspended, and Egypt abandoned, as in that case it 
must be, to the operations of nature, there is no doubt that 
trees, the roots of which penetrate deeply, would in time 
establish themselves on the deserted soil, fill the valley with 
verdure, and perhaps at last temper the climate, and even call 
down abundant rain from the heavens.+ But the immediate 
effect of discontinuing irrigation would be, first, an immense 
reduction of the evaporation from the valley in the dry season, 
and then a greatly augmented dryness and heat of the atmos- 
phere. Even the almost constant north wind—the strength of 
which would be increased in consequence of these changes— 
would little reduce the temperature of the narrow cleft between 
the burning mountains which hem in the channel of the Nile, 
so that a single year would transform the most fertile of soils to 
the most barren of deserts, and render uninhabitable a ter- 
ritory that irrigation makes capable of sustaining as dense a 
population as has ever existed in any part of the world. 
Whether man found the valley of the Nile a forest, or such a 
waste as I have just described, we do not historically know. 
In either case, he has not simply converted a wilderness into a 

* The so-called spring at Heliopolisis only a thread of water infiltrated from 
the Nile or the canals. 

+ The date and the doum palm, the sont and many other acacias, the caroub, 
the sycamore and other trees grow in Egypt without irrigation, and would 
doubtless spread through the entire valley in a few years. 

+ Wilkinson states that the total population, which, two hundred years ago, 
was estimated at 4,000,000, amounted till lately to only about 1,800,000 souls, 
haying been reduced since the year 1800 from 2,500,000 to less than 2,000,000. 
—Handbook for Travellers in Egypt, p. 10. The population at the end of the 
year 1869 is computed at 5,215,000.—Bollettino della Soc. Geog. Ital., vol. v., 


pt. iii, p. 215. This estimate doubtless includes countries bordering on the 
upp-r Nile not embraced in Wilkinson’s statistics, 


IRRIGATION IN EGYPT. 455 


garden, but has unquestionably produced extensive climatic 
change.* 

The fields of Egypt are more regularly watered than those of 
any other country bordering on the Mediterranean, except the 
rice-grounds in Italy, and perhaps the marcite or winter mea- 
dows of Lombardy ; but irrigation is more or less employed 
throughout almost the entire basin of that sea, and is every- 


* Ritter supposes Egypt to have been a sandy desert when it was first 
occupied by man. ‘‘ The first inhabitant of the sandy valley of the Nile was 
a desert-dweller, as his neighbors right and left, the Libyan, the nomade 
Arab, still are. But the civilized people of Egypt transformed, by canals, 
he waste into the richest granary of the world; they liberated themselves 
from the shackles of the rock and sand desert, in the midst of which, by a 
wise distribution of the fluid through the solid geographical form, by izri- 
gation in short, they created a region of culture most rich in historical monu- 
ments.”"—Hinleitung zur allgemeinen vergieichenden Geograuphie, pp. 165, 165. 

This view seems to me highly improbable ; for great rivers, in warm climates, 
are never bordered by sandy plains. A small stream may be swallowed up 
by sands, but if the volume of water is too large to be carried off by evapora- 
tion or drank up by absorption, it saturates its banks with moisture, and 
unless resisted by art, converts them into marshes covered with aquatic 
vegetation. By canals and embankments, man has done much to modify the 
natural distribution of the waters of the Nile; yet the annual inundation is not 
his work, and the river must have overflowed its banks and carried spontaneous 
vegetation with its waters, as well before as since Egypt was first occupied by 
the human family. There is, indeed, some reason to suppose that man lived 
upon the banks of the Nile when its channel was much lower, and the spread 
of its inundations much narrower, than at present; but wherever its flood 
reached, there the forest would propagate itself, and its shores would certainly 
have been morasses rather than sands. 

The opinions of Ritter on this subject are not only improbable, but they are 
contradictory to the little historical testimony we possess. Herodotus informs 
us in Huterpe that except the province of Thebes, all Egypt, that is to say, the 
whole of the Delta and of middle Egypt extending to Hemopolis Magna in N. 
L. 27° 45’, was originally amorass. This morass was doubtless in great part 
covered with trees, and hence, in the most ancient hieroglyphical records, a 
tree is the sign for the cultivated land between the desert and the channel of 
the Nile. In all probability, the real change effected by human art in the 
superficial geography of Egypt, isthe conversion of pools and marshes into dry 
land, by a system of transverse dikes, which compelled the flood-water to 
deposit its sediment on the banks of the river instead of carrying it to the sea. 
The colmate of modern Italy were thus anticipated in ancient Egypt. 


456 IRRIGATION IN EUROPE. 


where attended with effects which, if less in degree, are anal- 
ogous in character, to those resulting from it in Egypt. 

There are few things in European husbandry which surprise 
English or American observers so much as the extent to which 
irrigation is employed in agriculture, and that, too, on soils, and 
with a temperature, where their own experience would have led 
them to suppose it would be injurious to vegetation rather than 
beneficial to it. In Switzerland, for example, grass-grounds on 
the very borders of glaciers are freely irrigated, and on the 
Italian slope of the Alps water is applied to meadows at heights 
exceeding 6,000 feet. The summers in Northern Italy, though 
longer, are very often not warmer than in the Northern United 
States; and in ordinary years, the summer rains are as frequent 
and as abundant in the former country as in the latter.* Yet 


* The mean annual precipitation in Lombardy is thirty-six inches, of which 
nearly two-thirds fall during the season of irrigation. The rain-fall is about 
the same in Piedmont, though the number of days in the year classed as 
‘‘yainy ” is said to be but twenty-four in the former province while it is 
seventy in the latter.—Bargp Smitu, Italian Irrigation, vol.i., p. 196. 

The necessity of irrigation in the great alluvial plain of Northern Italy is 
partly explained by the fact that the superficial stratum of fine earth and 
vegetable mould is very extensively underlaid by beds of pebbles and gravel 
brought down by mountain torrents at a remote epoch. The water of the 
surface-soil drains rapidly down into these loose beds, and passes off by sub- 
terranean channels to some unknown point of discharge ; but this circumstance 
alone is nota sufficient solution. Is it not possible that the habits of vege- 
tables, grown in countries where irrigation has been immemorially employed, 
have been so changed that they require water under conditions of soil and 
climate where their congeners, which have not been thus indulgently treated, 
do not? Itisaremarkable fact that during the season of irrigation, when large 
tracts of surface are almost constantly saturated with water, there is an 
extraordinary dryness in the atmosphere of Lombardy, the hygrometer stand- 
ing for days together a few degrees only above zero, while in winter the in- 
strument indicates extreme humidity of the air, approaching to total satur- 
ation.—Barrp Situ, Italian Irrigation, i., p. 189. 

There are some atmospheric phenomena in Northern Italy, which an 
American finds it hard to reconcile with what he has observed in the United 
States. To an American eye, for instance, the sky of Piedmont, Lombardy, 
and the northern coast of the Mediterranean, is always whitish and curdled, 
and it never has the intensity and fathomless depth of the blue of his native 


IRRIGATION IN EUROPE. 457 
in Piedmont and Lombardy irrigation is bestowed upon almost 
every crop, while in our Northern States it is never employed 
at all in farming husbandry, orindeed for any purpose except in 
kitchen-gardens, and possibly, im rare cases, in some other small 
branch of agricultural industry.* 

In general, it may be said that irrigation is employed only in 
the seasons when the evaporating power of the sun and the 
capacity of the air for absorbing humidity are greatest, or, in 
other words, that the soil is nowhere artificially watered except 
when it isso dry that little moisture would be evaporated from 
it, and, consequently, every acre of irrigated ground is so much 
added to the evaporable surface of the country. When the sup- 
ply of water is unlimited, it is allowed, after serving its purpose 


heavens. And yet the heat of the sun’s rays, as measured by sensation, and, 
at the same time, the evaporation, are greater than they would be with the 
thermometer atthe same point in America. I have frequently felt in Italy, 
with the mercury below 60° Fahrenheit, and with a mottled and almost opaque 
sky, a heat of solar irradiation which I can compare to nothing but the scorch- 
ing sensation experienced in America at a temperature twenty degrees higher, 
during the intervals between showers, or before a rain, when the clear blue of 
the sky seems infinite in depth and transparency. Such circumstances may 
create a necessity for irrigation where it would otherwise be superfluous, if 
not absolutely injurious. 

In speaking of the superior apparent clearness of the sky in America, I 
confine myself to the concave vault of the heavens, and do not mean to 
assert that terrestrial objects are generally visible at greater distances in the 
United States than in Italy. Indeed, I am rather disposed to maintain the 
contrary ; for though I know that the lower strata of the atmosphere in Europe 
never equal in transparency the air near the earth in New Mexico, Peru, and 
Chili, yet I think the accidents of the coast-line of the Riviera, as, for example, 
between Nice and La Spezia, and those of the incomparable Alpine panorama 
seen from Turin, are distinguishable at greater distances than they would be 
in the United States. 

* In our comparatively rainless Western territory, irrigation is extensively and 
very beneficially employed. In the Salt Lake valley and in California, hundreds 
it not thousands of miles of irrigation canals have been constructed, and there 
is little doubt that artificially watering the soil will soon be largely resorted 
to in the older States. See valuable observations on this subjectin HAYDEN, 
Preiminary Report on Geological Survey of Wyoming, 1870, pp. 194, 195, 258- 
261, 


458 IRRIGATION IN EUROPE. 


on one field, to run into drains, canals, or rivers. But in most 
regions where irrigation is regularly: employed, it is necessary 
to economize the water; after passing over or through one par- 
cel of ground, it is conducted to another; no more is usually 
withdrawn from the canals at any one point than is absorbed by 
the soil it irrigates, or evaporated from it, and, consequently, it 
is not restored to liquid circulation, except by infiltration or 
precipitation. We are safe, then, in saying that the humidity 
evaporated from any artificially watered soil is increased by a 
quantity bearing a large proportion to the whole amount dis- 
tributed over it, for most even of that whichis absorbed by the 
earth is immediately given out again either by vegetables or by 
evaporation ; and the hygrometrical and thermometrical con- 
dition of the atmosphere in irrigated countries is modified pro- 
portionally to the extent of the practice, 

It isnot easy to ascertain precisely either the extent of sur- 
face thus watered, or the amount of water supplied, in any 
given country, because these quantities vary with the character 
of the season ; but there are not many districts in Southern Eu- 
rope where the management of the arrangements for irrigation 
is not one of the most important branches of agricultural labor. 
The eminent engineer Lombardini describes the system of irri- 
gation in Lombardy as, “every day in summer, diffusing over 
550,000 hectares [1,875,000 acres] of land 45,000,000 cubic 
metres [nearly 60,000,000 cubic yards] of water, which is equal 
to the entire volume of the Seine, at an ordinary flood, or a rise 
of three metres above the hydrometer at the bridge of La Tour- 
nelle at Paris.” * Niel states the quantity of land irrigated in 
the former kingdom of Sardinia, including Savoy, in 1856, at 
240,000 hectares, or not much less than 600,000 acres. This is 
about four-thirteenths of the cultivable soil of the kingdom. 
According to the same author, the irrigated lands in France did 
not exceed 100,000 hectares, or 247,000 acres, while those in 
Lombardy amounted to 450,000 hectares, more than 1,100,000 


* Memorie sui progetti per Vestensione dell’ Irrigazione, ete., tl Politecnico, for 
January, 1863, p. 6. 


EXTENT OF SOIL IRRIGATED IN EUROPE. 459 


acres. * In these three states alone, then, there were more than 
three thousand square miles of artificially watered land, and if 
we add the irrigated soils of the rest of Italy, + of the Mediter- 
ranean islands, of the Spanish peninsula, of Turkey in Europe 
and in Asia Minor, of Syria, of Egypt and the remainder of 
Northern Africa, we shall see that irrigation increases the 
evaporable surface of the Mediterranean basin by a quantity 
bearing no inconsiderable proportion to the area naturally 
covered by water within it. 

Arrangements are concluded, and new plans proposed, for 
an immense increase of the lands fertilized by irrigation in 
France and in Belgium, as well as in Spain and Italy, and 
there is every reason to believe that the artificially watered soil 
of the latter country will be doubled, that of France quadru- 
pled, before the end of this century. There can be no doubt 
that by these operations man is exercising a powerful influence 
on the soil, on vegetable and animal life, and on climate, and 
hence that in this, as in many other fields of industry, he is 
truly a geographical agency. 


* Nev, LD’ Agriculture des Etats Surdes, p. 232. This estimate, it will be 
observed, is 275,000 acres less than that of Lombardini. 

+ In 1865 the total quantity of irrigated lands in the kingdom of Italy was 
estimated at 1,357,677 hectares, or 2,000,000 acres, of which one-half is supplied 
with water by artificial canals. The Canal Cavour adds 250,000 acres to the 
above amount. The extent of artificially watered ground in Italy is conse- 
quently equal to the entire area of the States of Delaware and Rhode Island. 
—See the official report, Sulle Bonificazioni, Risaie, ed Irrigaziont, 1865, 
p. 269. 

+ It belongs rather to agriculture than to geography to discuss the quality 
of the crops obtained by irrigation, or the permanent effects produced by it 
on the productiveness of the soil. There is no doubt, however, that all crops 
which can be raised without watering are superior in flavor and in nutritive 
power to those grown by the aid of irrigation. Garden vegetables, particu- 
larly, profusely watered, are so insipid as to be hardly eatable. Wherever irri- 
gation is practised, there is an almost irresistible tendency, especially among 
ignorant cultivators, to carry it to excess; and in Piedmont and Lombardy, if 
the supply of water is abundant, it is so liberally applied as sometimes not 
only to injure the quality of the product, but to drown the plants and dimin- 
ish the actual weight of the crop. Grass-lands are perhaps an exception to 


460 EXTENT OF SOIL IRRIGATED IN EUROPE. 


As near as can be ascertained, the amount of water applied 
to irrigated lands is scarcely anywhere less than the total pre- 
cipitation during the season of vegetable growth, and in gen- 


this remark, as it seems almost impossible to apply too much water to them, 
provided it be kept in motion and not allowed to stagnate on the surface. 

Professor Liebig, in his Modern Agriculture, says: ‘‘ There is not to be 
found in chemistry a more wonderful phenomenon, one which more con- 
founds all human wisdom, than is presented by the soil of a garden or field. 
By the simplest experiment, any one may satisfy himself that rain-water 
filtered through field or garden soil does not dissolve out a trace of potash, 
silicic acid, ammonia, or phosphoric acid. The soil does not give up to the 
water one particle of the food of plants which it contains. The most con- 
tinuous rains cannot remove from the field, except mechanically, any of the 
essential constituents of its fertility.” 

‘* The soil not only retains firmly all the food of plants which is actually in 
it, but its power to preserve all that may be useful to them extends much far- 
ther. If rain or other water holding in solution ammonia, potash, and phos- 
phoric and silicic acids, be brought in contact with soil, these substances dis- 
appear almost immediately from the solution; the soil withdraws them from 
the water. Only such substances are completely withdrawn by the soil as are 
indispensable articles of food for plants; all others remain wholly or in part 
in solution.” 

These opinions were confirmed, soon after their promulgation, by the experi- 
mental researches of other chemists, but are now questioned, and they are not 
strictly in accordance with the alleged experience of agriculturists in those 
parts of Italy where irrigation is most successfully applied. They believe 
that the constituents of vegetable growth are washed out of the soil by exces- 
sive and long-continued watering. They consider it also established as a fact 
of observation, that water which has flowed through or over rich ground is 
more valuable for irrigation than water from the same source, which has not 
been impregnated with fertilizing substances by passing through soils contain- 
ing them; and, on the other hand, that water, rich in the elements of vege- 
tation, parts with them in serving to irrigate a poor soil, and is therefore less 
valuable as a fertilizer of lower grounds to which it may afterward be con- 
ducted. See BarrD Smiru, Ltalian Lrrigation, i., p. 25; Scorr MONCRIEFF, 
Irrigation in Southern Hurope, pp. 34, 87, 89 ; LOMBARDINI, Sulle Inondaziont, 
etc., p. 73; Mancon, Les Irrigations, p. 48. 

The practice of irrigation—except in mountainous countries where springs 
and rivulets are numerous—-is attended with very serious economical, social, 
and political evils. The construction of canals and their immensely ramified 
branches, and the grading and scarping of the ground to be watered, are 
always expensive operations, and they very often require an amount of capital 
which can be commanded only by the state, by moneyed corporations, or by 
very wealthy proprietors ; the capacity of the canals must be calculated with 


QUANTITY OF WATER APPLIED. 461 


eral it much exceeds that quantity. In grass-grounds and in 
field-culture it ranges from 27 or 28 to 60 inches, while in 
smaller crops, tilled by hand-labor, it is sometimes carried as 
high as 800 inches.* The rice-grounds and the marcite of 


reference to the area intended to be irrigated, and when they and their 
branches are once constructed, it is very difficult to extend them, or to ac- 
commodate any of their original arrangements to changes in the condition of 
the soil, or in the modes or objects of cultivation ; the flow of the water being 
limited by the abundance of the source or the capacity of the canals, the indi- 
vidual proprietor cannot be allowed to withdraw water at will, according to 
his own private interest or convenience, but both the time and the quantity of 
supply must be regulated by a general system applicable, as far as may be, 
to the whole area irrigated by the same canal, and every cultivator must con- 
form his industry to a plan which may be quite at variance with his special 
objects or with his views of good husbandry. The clashing interests and the 
jealousies of proprietors depending on the same means of supply are a source 
of incessant contention and litigation, and the caprices or partialities of the 
officers who control, or of contractors who farm, the canals, lead not unfre- 
quently to ruinous injustice towards individual landholders. These cireum- 
stances discourage the division of the soil into small properties, and there is a 
eonstant tendency to the accumulation of large estates of irrigated land in 
the hands of great capitalists, and consequently to the dispossession of the 
small cultivators, who pass from the condition of owners of the land to that 
of hireling tillers. The farmers are no longer yeomen, but peasants. Having 
no interest in the soil which composes their country, they are virtually expa- 
triated, and the middle class, which ought to constitute the real physical and 
moral strength of the land, ceases to exist as a rural estate, and is found only 
among the professional, the mercantile, and the industrial population of the 
cities.—See, on the difficulty of regulating irrigation by law, NEGRI, Jdea su una 
Legge in materia di Acqua, 1864; and AGMARD, Irrigations du Midi de 0 Hu- 
rope, where curious and important remarks on the laws and usages of the Span- 
ish Moors and the Spaniards, in respect to irrigation, will be found. The Moors 
were so careful in maintaining the details of their system, that they kept in 
public offices bronze models of their dams and sluices, as guides for repairs 
and rebuilding. Some of these models are still preserved.—Tbidem, pp. 204, 
205. For an account of recent irrigation works in Spain, see Spon, Dictionary 
of Engineering, article Irrigation. 

* Nimx, Agriculture des Etats Sardes, p. 237. Lombardini’s computation 
just given allows eighty-one cubic métres per day to the hectare [two hun- 
dred and sixty cubic yards to the acre], which, supposing the season of irriga- 
tion to be one hundred days, is equal to a precipitation of thirty-two inches. 
But in Lombardy, water is applied to some crops during a longer period than 
one hundred days ; and in the marcite it flows over the ground even in winter. 
According to Boussingault (eonomie Rurale, ii., p. 246), grass-grounds ought 


462 QUANTITY OF WATER APPLIED. 


Lombardy are not included in these estimates of the amount of 
water applied.* 


to receive, in Germany, twenty-one centimctres of water per week, and with 
less than half that quantity it is not advisable to incur the expense of supply- 
ing it. The ground is irrigated twenty-five or thirty times, and if the full 
quantity of twenty-one centimétres is applied, it receives more than two hun- 
dred inches of water, or six times the total amount of precipitation. Puvis, 
quoted by Boussingault, after much research comes to the conclusion that a 
proper quantity is twenty centimctres [eight inches] applied twenty-five or 
thirty times, which corresponds with the estimate just stated. Puvis adds— 
and, as our author thinks, with reason—that this amount might be doubled 
without disadvantage.—Jbidem, ii., p. 248, 249. In some parts of France this 
quantity is immensely exceeded, and it is very important to observe, with 
reference to the employment of irrigation in our Northern States, that water 
is most freely supplied in the colder provinces. Thus, in the Vosges, meadows 
are literally flooded for weeks together, and while in the department of Van- 
cluse a meadow may receive, in five waterings of six and a half hours each, 
twenty-one inches of water, in the Vosges it might be deluged for twenty- 
four hundred hours in six applications, the enormous quantity of thirteen 
hundred feet of water flowing over it. See the important work of HERV& 
Mancon, Sur lemplot des eaux dans les Irrigations, chap. ix. 

Boussingault observes that rain-water is vastly more fertilizing than the 
water of irrigating canals, and therefore the supply of the latter must be 
greater. This is explained partly by the different character of the sub- 
stances held in solution or suspension by the waters of the earth and of the 
sky, partly by the higher temperature of the latter, and, possibly, partly also 
by the mode of application—the rain being finely divided in its fall or by strik- 
ing plants on the ground, river-water flowing in a continuous sheet. 

The temperature of the water is thought even more important than its com- 
position. The sources which irrigate the marcite of Lombardy—meadows so 
fertile that less than an acre furnishes grass for a cow the whole year—are 
very warm. The ground watered by them never freezes, and a first crop, for 
soiling, is cut from it in January or February. The Canal Cavour—which 
takes its supply chiefly from the Po at Chivasso, fourteen or fifteen miles be- 
low Turin—furnishes water of much higher fertilizing power than that de- 
rived from the Dora Baltea and the Sesia, both because it is warmer, and be- 
cause it transports a more abundant and aricher sediment than the latter 
streams, which are fed by Alpine ice-fields and melting snows, and which 
flow, for long distances, in channels ground smooth and bare by ancient gla- 
ciers and not now contributing much vegetable mould or fine slime to their 
waters, 

* About one-seventh of the water which flows over the marcite is absorbed 
by the soil of those meadows or evaporated from their surface, and conse- 
quently six-sevenths of the supply remain for use on ground at lower levels, 


METEOROLOGICAL EFFECTS OF IRRIGATION. 463 


The meteorological effect of irrigation on a large scale, 
which would seem prima facie most probable, would be an 
rinerease of precipitation in the region watered.* Hitherto 
scientific observation has recorded no such increase, but in a 
question of so purely local a character, we must ascribe very 
great importance to a consideration which I have noticed else- 
where, but which has been frequently overlooked by meteorolo- 
gists, namely, that vapors exhaled in one district may very prob- 
ably be condensed and precipitated in another very distant 
from their source. If then it were proved that an extension 
of irrigated soil was not followed by an increase of rain-fall in 
the same territory, the probability that the precipitation was 
augmented somewhere would not be in the least diminished. 
But though we cannot show that in the irrigated portions of 
Italy the summer rain is more abundant than it was before irri- 
gation was practised—for we know nothing of the meteorolo- 
gical conditions of that country at so remote a period—the fact 
that there is a very considerable precipitation in the summer 
months in Lombardy is a strong argument in favor of such in- 
crease. In the otherwise similar climate of Rumelia and of 
much of Asia Minor, irrigation is indeed practised, but in a 
relatively small proportion. In those provinces there is little or 
no summer rain. Is it not highly probable that the difference 
between Italy and Turkey in this respect is to be ascribed, in 
part at least, to extensive irrigation in the former country, and 
the want of it in the latter? It is true that, in its accessible 
strata, the atmosphere of Lombardy is extremely dry during the 
period of irrigation, but it receives an immense quantity of 


* On the pluviometric effect of irrigation, see LOMBARDINI, Sulle Inon- 
dazioni, etc., p. 72, 74; the same author, Hssat Hydrologique sur le Nil, p. 32; 
MESSEDAGLIA, Analist dell’ opera di Champion, pp. 96, 97, note ; and BAIRD 
Situ, Italian Irrigation, i., pp. 189, 190. 

In an article in Aus der Natur, vol. 57, p. 443, it is stated that the rain on the 
Isthmus of Suez has increased since the opening of the canal, and has enlarged 
the evaporable surface of the country; but this cannot be accepted as an 
established fact without further evidence. 


464 WATER WITHDRAWN FOR IRRIGATION. 


moisture by the evaporation from the watered soil, and the ra- 
pidity with which the aqueous vapor is carried up to higher 
regions—where, if not driven elsewhere by the wind, it would 
be condensed by the cold into drops of rain or at least visible 
clonds—is the reason why it is so little perceptible in the air 
near the ground.* 

But the question of an influence on temperature rests on @ 
different ground; for though the condensation of vapor may 
not take place within days of time and degrees of distance from 
the hour and the place where it was exhaled from the surface, 
a local refrigeration must necessarily accompany a local evapo- 
ration. Hence, though the summer temperature of Lombardy 
is high, we are warranted in affirming that it must have been 
still higher before the introduction of irrigation, and would 
again become so if that practice were discontinued.t 

The quantity of water artificially withdrawn from running 
streams for the purpose of irrigation is such as very sensibly 
to affect their volume, and it is, therefore, an important element 
in the geography of rivers. Brooks of no trifling current are 
often wholly diverted from their natural channels to supply the 
canals, and their entire mass of water is completely absorbed 
or evaporated, so that only such proportion as is transmitted by 
infiltration reaches the river they originally fed. Ivrigation, 
therefore, diminishes great rivers in warm countries by cutting 
off their sources of supply as well as by direct abstraction of 
water from their main channels. We have just seen that the 
system of irrigation in Lombardy deprives the Po of a quan- 
tity of water equal to the total delivery of the Seine at ordinary 
flood, or, in other words, of the equivalent of a tributary navi- 
gable for hundreds of miles by vessels of considerable burden, 


* Ts not the mottled appearance of the upper atmosphere in Italy, which I 
have already noticed, perhaps due in part to the condensation of the aqueous 
vapor exhaled by watered ground ? 

+ I do not know that observations have been made on the thermometric 
influence of irrigation, but I have often noticed that, on the irrigated plains 
of Piedmont ten miles south of Turin, the morning temperature in summer 
was several degrees below that marked at the Observatory in the city. 


RESTORATION OF THE WATER. 465 
The new canals executed and projected will greatly increase 
the loss. The water required for irrigation in Egypt is less 
than would be supposed from the exceeding rapidity of evapo- 
ration in that arid climate; for the soil is thoroughly saturated 
during the inundation, and infiltration from the Nile continues 
to supply a considerable amount of humidity in the dryest sea- 
son. Linant Bey computed that, in the Delta, fifteen and one- 
third cubic yards per day sufficed to irrigate an acre. If we sup- 
pose water to be applied for one hundred and fifty days during 
the season of growth, this would be equivalent to a total precipi- 
tation of about seventeen inches and one-third. Taking the area 
of actually cultivated soil in Egypt at the estimate of 4,500,000 
acres, and the average amount of water daily applied in both 
Upper and Lower Egypt at twelve hundredths of an inch in 
depth, we have an abstraction of about 74,000,000 cubic yards, 
which—the mean daily delivery of the Nile being in round 
numbers 820,000,000 cubic yards—is twenty-three per cent. of 
the average quantity of water contributed to the Mediterranean 
by that river.* 

In estimating the effect of this abstraction of water upon the 
volume of great rivers, especially in temperate climates and in 
countries with a hilly surface, we must remember that all the 
water thus withdrawn—except that which is absorbed by vegeta- 
tion, that which enters into new inorganic compounds, and that 
which is carried off by evaporation—is finally restored to the 
original current by superficial flow or by infiltration. It is 
generally estimated that from one-third to one-half of the water 
applied to the fields is absorbed by the earth, and this, with the 
deductions just given, is returned to the river by direct infiltra- 
tion, or descends through invisible channels to moisten lower 


* The proportion of the waters of the Nile withdrawn for irrigation is great- 
er than this calculation makes it. The quantity required for an acre is less 
in the Delta than in Upper Ezypt, both because the soil of the Delta, to 
which Linant Bey’s estimate applies, lies little higher than the surface of the 
river, and is partly saturated by infiltration, and because near the sea, in N. L. 
30°, evaporation is much less rapid than it is several degrees southwards and 
in the vicinity of a parched desert. 


466 RESTORATION OF THE WATER. 


erounds, and thence in part escapes again into the bed of the 
river, by similar conduits, or in the form of springs and rivulets. 
Interesting observations have lately been made on this subject 
in France and important practical results arrived at. It was 
maintained that mountain irrigation is not ultimately injurious 
to that of the plains below, because lands liberally watered in the 
spring, when the supply is abundant, act as reservoirs, storing 
up by absorption water which afterwards filters down to lower 
grounds or escapes into the channel of the river and keeps up 
its current in the dry summer months, so as to compensate for 
what, during those months, is withdrawn from it for upland 
irrigation. Careful investigation showed that though this pro- 
position is not universally true, it is so in many cases, and there 
can be no doubt that the loss in the volume of rivers by the ab- 
straction of water for irrigation is very considerably less than 
the measure of the quantity withdrawn.* 


* See VIGAN, Etude sur les Irrigations, Paris, 1867 ; and Scorr MoNCRIEFF, 

Irrigation in Southern Hurope, pp. 89, 90. 

he brook Ain Musa, which runs through the ruined city of Petra and final- 
ly disappears in the sands of Wadi el Araba, is a considerable stream in winter, 
and the inhabitants of that town were obliged to excavate a tunnel through 
the rock near the right bank, just above the upper entrance of the narrow Sik, 
to discharge a part of its swollen current. The sagacity of Dr. Robinson 
detected the necessity of this measure, though the tunnel, the mouth of 
which was hidden by brushwood, was not discovered till some time after his 
visit. I even noticed, near the arch that crosses the Sik, unequivocal remains 
‘of a sluice by which the water was diverted to the tunnel. Immense labor 
was also expended in widening the natural channel at several points below the 
town, to prevent the damming up and setting back of the water—a fact I be- 
lieve not hitherto noticed by travellers. 

The Fellahheen above Petra still employ the waters of Ain Musa for irriga- 
4ion, and in summer the superficial current is wholly diverted from its natural 
channel for that purpose. At this season, the bed of the brook, which is com- 
posed of pebbles, gravel, and sand, is dry in the Sik and through the town ; 
but the infiltration is such that water is generally found by digging to a small 
depth in the channel. Observing these facts ina visit to Petra in the sum- 
mer, I was curious to know whether the subterranean waters escaped again 
to daylight, and I followed the ravine below the town for a long distance. Not 
very far from the upper entrance of the ravine, arborescent vegetation ap- 
peared upon its bottom, and as soon as the ground was well shaded, a thread 


INJURIOUS EFFECTS OF RICE-CULTURE. 467 


Irrigation, as employed for certain special purposes in Europe 
and America, is productive of very prejudicial climatic effects. 
I refer particularly to the cultivation of rice in the Southern 
States of the American Union and in Italy. The climate of the 
Southern States is in general not necessarily unhealthy for the 
white man, but he can scarcely sleep a single night in the vi- 
cinity of the rice-grounds without being attacked by a dangerous 
fever. The neighborhood of the rice-fields is possibly less pes- 
tilential in Lombardy and Piedmont than in South Carolina and 
Georgia, but still very insalubrious to both man and beast. 
“ Not only does the population decrease where rice is grown,” 
says Escourrou-Milliago, “but even the flocks are attacked by 
typhus. In the rice-grounds the soil is divided into compart- 
ments rising in gradual succession to the level of the irrigating 
canal, in order that the water, after having flowed one field, 
may be drawn off to another, and thus a single current serve 
for several compartments, the lowest field, of course, still being 
higher than the ditch which at last drains both it and the adja- 
cent soil. This arrangement gives a certain force of hydrostatic 
pressure to the water with which the rice is irrigated, and the 
infiltration from these fields is said to extend through neigh- 
boring grounds, sometimes to the distance of not less than a 
myriametre, or six English miles, and to be destructive to crops 
and even trees reached by it. Land thus affected can no longer 
be employed for any purpose but growing rice, and when pre- 
pared for that crop, it propagates still further the evils under 
which it had itself suffered, and, of course, the mischief is a 
growing one.” * 
of water burst out. This was joined by others a little lower down, and, at the 
distance of a mile from the town, a strong current was formed and ran down 
towards Wadi el Araba. 

Similar facts are observed in all countries where the superficial current of 
water-courses is diverted from their bed for irrigation, but this case is of 
special interest because it shows the extent of absorption and infiltration even 
in the torrid climate of Arabia. See Barrp Smiru, Jtalian Irrigation, vol. 
i., pp. 172, 386 and 387. 

* EscourRRovu-MiLuiaGo, L’ Italie a propos de V Exposition de Paris, 1856, 
p. 92. According to an article in the Gazzetta ¢€ ‘Ucrino for the 17th of 


468 DEPOSITION OF SALTS. 


Salts deposited by Water of Irrigation. 


The attentive traveller in Egypt and Nubia cannot fail to 
notice many localities, generally of small extent, where the soil 
is rendered infertile by an excess of saline matter in its com- 
position. In many cases, perhaps in all, these barren spots lie 
rather above the level usually flooded by the inundations of the 
Nile, and yet they exhibit traces of former cultivation. Obser- 
vations in India suggest a possible explanation of this fact. A 
saline efflorescence called “Reh” and “ Kuller” is gradually 
invading many of the most fertile districts of Northern and 
Western India, and changing them into sterile deserts. It con- 
sists principally of sulphate of soda (Glauber’s salts), with 
varying proportions of common salt. These salts (which in 
small quantities are favorable to fertility of soil) are said to be 
the gradual result of concentration by evaporation of river and 
canal waters, which contain them in very minute quantities, 


January, 1869, the deaths from malarious fever in the Canavese district— 
which is asserted to have been altogether free from this disease before the recent 
introduction of rice-culture—between the 1st of January and the 15th of Octo- 
ber, 1868, were two thousand two hundred and fifty. The extent of the injurious 
influence of this very lucrative branch of rural industry in Italy is contested 
by the rice-growers. But see Szeconpo Laura, Le Risaje, Torino, 1869; 
Semi, J] Miasina Palustre, p. 89; and especially CARLO Livt, Della coltiva- 
zione del Riso in Italia, in the Nuova Antologia for July, 1871, p. 599 et sega. 

According to official statistics, the rice-grounds of Italy, including the islands; 
amounted in 1866 to 450,000 acres. Jt is an interesting fact in relation to 
geographical and climatic conditions, that while little rice is cultivated sowth of 
N. L. 44° in Italy, little is grown in the United States north of 35°. To the 
southward of the great alluvial plain of the Po, the surface is in general too 
much broken to admit of the formation of level fields of much extent, and 
where the ground is suitable, the supply of water is often insufficient. 

The Moors introduced the cultivation of rice into Spain at an early period of 
their dominion in that country. The Spaniards sowed rice in Lombardy and 
in the Neapolitan territory in the 16th century; but besides the want of water 
and of level ground convenient for irrigation, rice-husbandry has proved so 
much more pestilential in Southern than in Northern Italy that it has long 
been discouraged by the Neapolitan government. 


DEPOSITION OF SALTS. 469 


and with which the lands are either irrigated or occasionally 
overflowed. The river inundations in hot countries usually 
take place but once in a year, and, though the banks remain 
submerged for days or even weeks, the water at that period, 
being derived principally from rains and snows, must be less 
highly charged with mineral matter than at lower stages, and 
besides, it is always in motion. The water of irrigation, on 
the other hand, is applied for many months in succession, it is 
drawn from rivers and canals at the seasons when the propor- 
tion of salts is greatest, and it either sinks into the superficial 
soil, carrying with it the saline substances it holds in solution, 
or is evaporated from the surface, leaving them upon it. 
Hence irrigation must impart to the soil more salts than natural 
inundation. The sterilized grounds in Egypt and Nubia lying 
above the reach of the floods, as I have said, we may suppose 
them to have been first cultivated in that remote antiquity when 
the Nile valley received its earliest inhabitants, and when its 
lower grounds were in the condition of morasses. They must 
have been artificially irrigated from the beginning; they may 
have been under cultivation many centuries before the soil at 
a lower level was invaded by man, and hence it is natural that 
they should be more strongly impregnated with saline matter 
than fields which are exposed every year, for some weeks, to 
the action of running water so nearly pure that it would be 
more likely to dissolve salts than to deposit: them. 


Subterranean Waters. 


I have frequently alluded to a branch of physical geography, 
the importance of which is but recently adequately recognized 
—the subterranean waters of the earth considered as stationary 
reservoirs, as flowing currents, and as filtrating fluids. The 
earth drinks in moisture by direct absorption from the atmos- 
phere, by the deposition of dew, by rain and snow, by percola- 
tion from rivers and other superficial bodies of water, and 
sometimes by currents flowing into caves or smaller visible 


470 SUBTERRANEAN WATERS. 


apertures.* Some of this humidity is exhaled again by the 


* The great limestone plateau of the Karst in Carniola is completely honey- 
combed by caves through which the drainage of that region is conducted. 
Rivers of considerable volume pour into some of these caves and can be traced 
underground to their exit. Thus the Recca has been satisfactorily identified 
with a stream flowing through the cave of Trebich, and with the Timayo— 
the Timavus of Virgil and the ancient geographers—which empties through 
several mouths into the Adriatic between Trieste and Aquileia. The city of 
Trieste is very insufficiently supplied with fresh water. It has been thought 
practicable to supply this want by tunnelling through the wall of the plateau, 
which rises abruptly in the rear of the town, until some subterranean stream 
is encountered, the current of which can be conducted to the city. More 
visionary projectors have gone further, and imagined that advantage might be 
taken of the natural tunnels under the Karst for the passage of roads, rail- 
ways, and even navigable canals. But however chimerical these latter schemes 
may seem, there is every reason to believe that art might avail itself of these 
galleries for improving the imperfect drainage of the champaign country 
bounded by the Karst, and that stopping or opening the natural channels 
might very much modify the hydrography of an extensive region. See in 
Aus der Natur, xx., pp. 250-254, 263-266, two interesting articles founded on 
the researches of Schmidt. 

The cases are certainly not numerous where marine currents are known to 
pour continuously into cavities beneath the surface of the earth, but there is 
at least one well-authenticated instance of this sort—that of the mill-streams 
at Argostoli in the island of Cephalonia. It had been long observed that the 
sea-water flowed into several rifts and cavities in the limestone rocks of the 
coast, but the phenomenon has excited little attention until very recently. In 
1833, three of the entrances were closed, and a regular channel, sixteen feet 
long and three feet wide, with a fall of three feet, was cut into the mouth of 
a larger cavity. The sea-water flowed into this canal, and could be followed 
eighteen or twenty feet beyond its inner terminus, when it disappeared in 
holes and clefts in the rock. 

In 1858 the canal had been enlarged to the width of five feet and a half, 
and a depth of a foot. The water pours rapidly through the canal into an 
irregular depression and forms a pool, the surface of which is three or four 
feet below the adjacent soil, and about two and a half or three feet below the 
level of the sea. From this pool it escapes through several holes and clefts 
in the rock, and has not yet been found to emerge elsewhere. 

There is a tide at Argostoli of about six inches in still weather, but it is 
considerably higher with asouth wind. I do not find it stated whether water 
flows through the canal into the cavity at low tide, but it distinctly appears 
that there is no refluent current, as of course there could not be from a basin 
so much below the sea. Mousson found the delivery through the canal to be 
at the rate of 24.88 cubic feet to the second; at what stage of the tide does 


SUBTERRANEAN WATERS. A471 


soil, some is taken up by organic growths and by inorganic 
compounds, some poured out upon the surface by springs and 
either immediately evaporated or carried down to larger 
streams and to the sea, some flows by subterranean courses 
into the bed of fresh-water rivers* or of the ocean, and some 
remains, though even here not in forever motionless repose, to 
fill deep cayities and underground channels. In every case 


not appear. Other mills of the same sort have been erected, and there ap- 
pear to be several points on the coast where the sea flows into the land. 

Various hypotheses have been suggested to explain this phenomenon, some 
of which assume that the water descends toa great depth beneath the crust 
of the earth; but the supposition of a difference of level in the surface of the 
sea on the opposite sides of the island, which seéms confirmed by other cir- 
cumstances, is the most obvious method of explaining these singular facts. 
If we suppose the level of the water on one side of the island to be raised by 
the action of currents three or four feet higher than on the other, the exist- 
ence of cayities and channels in the rock would easily account for a subter- 
ranean current beneath the island, and the apertures of escape might be so 
deep or so small as to elude observation. See Aus der Natur, vol. xix., pp. 
129 e¢ seqg. I have lately been informed by a resident of the Jonian Islands, 
who is familiar with the locality, that the sea flows uninterruptedly into the 
sub-insular cavities, at all stages of the tide. 

* “ The affluents received by the Seine below Rouen are so inconsiderable, 
that the augmentation of the volume of that river must be ascribed principally 
to springs rising in its bed. Thisis a point of which engineers now take notice, 
and M. Belgrand, the able officer charged with the improvement of the navi- 
gation of the Seine between Paris and Rouen, has devoted much attention to 
it.”—BaBmnet, Htudes et Lectures, iii., p. 185. 

On page 232 of the volume just quoted, tne same author observes: ‘‘ In 
the lower part of its course, from the falls of the Oise, the Seine receives so 
few important aflluents, that evaporation alone would suffice to exhaust all 
the water which passes under the bridges of Paris.” 

This supposes a much greater amount of evaporation than has been usually 
computed, but I believe it is well settled that the Seine conveys to the sea 
much more water than is discharged into it by all its superficial branches. 
Babinet states the evaporation from the surface of water at Paris to be twice 
as great as the precipitation. 

Belgrand supposes that the floods of the Seine at Paris are not produced by 
the superficial flow of the water of precipitation into its channel, but from 
the angmented discharge of its remote mountain sources, when swollen by 
the rains and melted snows which percolate through the permeable strata in 
its upper course. —Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1851, vol. i. 


472 SUBTERRANEAN WATERS. 


the aqueous vapors of the air are the ultimate source of supply, 
and all these hidden stores are again returned to the atmos- 
phere by evaporation. 

The proportion of the water of precipitation taken up by 
direct evaporation from the surface of the ground seems to 
have been generally exaggerated, sufficient allowance not being 
made for moisture carried downwards or in a lateral direction, 
by infiltration or by crevices in the superior rocky or earthy 
strata. According to Wittwer, Mariotte found that but one- 
sixth of the precipitation in the basin of the Seine was 
delivered into that sea by the river, “so that five-sixths re- 
mained for evaporation and consumption by the organic 
world.” * Maury estimates the annual amount of precipitation 
in the valley of the Mississippi at 620 cubic miles, the discharge 
of that river into the sea at 107 cubic miles, and concludes that 
“this would leave 513 cubic miles of water to be evaporated 
from this river-basin annually.” + In these and other like com- 
putations, the water carried down intothe earth by capillary 
and larger conduits is wholly lost sight of, and no thought is 
bestowed upon the supply for springs, for common and artesian 
wells, and for underground rivers, like those in the great caves 
of Kentucky, which may gush up in fresh-water currents at the 
bottom of the Caribbean Sea, or rise to the light of day in the 
far-off peninsula of Florida. 


* Physicalische Geographie, p.286. It does not appear whether this infer- 
ence is Mariotte’s or Wittwer’s. I suppose it is a conclusion of the latter. 

According to Vallés, the Seine discharges into the sea thirty per cent. of the 
precipitation in its valley, while the Po delivers into the Adriatic two-thirds 
and perhaps even three-quarters of the total down-fall of its basin. The 
differences between the tributaries of the Mississippi in this respect are remark- 
able, the Missouri discharging only fifteen per cent., the Yazoo not less than 
ninety. The explanation of these facts is found in the geographical and 
geological character of the valleys of these rivers. The Missouri flows with 
a rapid current through an irregular country, the Yazoo has a very slow flow 
through a low, alluvial region which is kept constantly almost saturated by 
infiltration. 

+ Physical Geography of the Sea. Tenth edition. London, 1861, § 274. 

t In the low peninsula of Florida, rivers, which must have their sources 


SUBTERRANEAN WATERS. 473 


The progress of the emphatically modern science of geology 
has corrected these erroneous views, because the observations 
on which it depends have demonstrated not only the existence, 
but the movement, of water in nearly all geological formations, 
have collected evidence of the presence of large reservoirs at 
greater or less depths beneath surfaces of almost every char- 
acter, and have investigated the rationale of the attendant 
phenomena.* The distribution of these waters has been 
minutely studied with reference to a great number of local- 
ities, and though the actual mode and rate of their vertical 
and horizontal transmission is still involved in much obscurity, 
the laws which determine their aggregation are so well under- 
stood, that, when the geology of a given district is known, 
it is not difficult to determine at what depth water will be 
reached by the borer, and to what height it will rise. 

The same principles have been successfully applied to the 
discovery of small subterranean collections or currents of water, 
and some persons have acquired, by a moderate knowledge 
of the superficial structure of the earth combined with 
long practice, a skill in the selection of favorable places for 
digging wells which seems to common observers little less 


in mountains hundreds of miles distant, pour forth from the earth with a 
volume sufficient to permit steamboats to ascend to their basins of eruption. 
In January, 1857, a submarine fresh-water river burst from the bottom of 
the sea not far from the southern extremity of the peninsula, and for a 
whole month discharged a current not inferior in volume to the river Missis- 
sippi, or eleven times the mean delivery of the Po, and more than six times 
that of the Nile. We can explain this phenomenon only by supposing that the 
bed of the sea was suddenly burst up by the hydrostatic upward pressure of 
the water in a deep reservoir communicating with some great subterranean 
river or receptacle in the mountains of Georgia or of Cuba, or perhaps even 
in the valley of the Mississippi.—THomassy, Hssai sur  Hydrologie. 

Late southern journals inform us that the creek under the Natural Bridge 
in Virginia has suddenly disappeared, being swallowed up by newly formed 
fissures, of unknown depth, in its channel. It does not appear that an outlet 
for the waters thus absorbed has been discovered, and it is not improbable 
that they are fillmg some underground cavity like that which supplied the 
submarine river just mentioned. 

* See especially StopPant, Corso di Geologia, i., pp. 270 et segq. 


A474 SUBTERRANEAN WATERS. 


than miraculous. The Abbé Paramelle—a French ecclesiastic 
who devoted himself for some years to this subject and was 
extensively employed as a well-finder—states, in his work 
on Fountains, that in the course of thirty-four years he had 
pointed out more than ten thousand subterranean springs, 
and though his geological speculations were often erroneous, 
high scientific authorities have testified to the great practical 
value of his methods, and the general accuracy of his predic- 
tions.* 

Hydrographical researches have demonstrated the existence 
of subterranean currents and reservoirs in many regions 
where superficial geology had not indicated their probable 
presence. Thus, a much larger proportion of the precipitation 
in the valley of the Tiber suddenly disappears than can be ac- 
counted for by evaporation and visible flow into the channel of 
the river. Castelli suspected that the excess was received by 
underground caverns, and slowly conducted by percolation to 
the bed of the Tiber. Lombardini—than whom there is no 
higher authority—concludes that the quantity of water grad- 
ually discharged into the river by subterranean conduits, is not 
less than three-quarters of the total delivery of its basin.t 

What is true of the hydrology of the Tiber is doubtless 
more or less true of that of other rivers, and the immense 
value of natural arrangements which diminish the danger of 
sudden floods by retaining a large proportion of the precipita- 
tion, and of an excessive reduction of river currents in the 
droughts of summer, by slowly conducting into their beds 
water accumulated and stored up in subterranean reservoirs in 
rainy seasons, is too obvions to require to be dwelt upon. 

The readiness with which water not obstructed by impermea- 
ble strata diffuses itself through the earth in all directions—and, 
consequently, the importance of keeping up the supply of sub- 
terranean reservoirs—find a familiar illustration in the effect of 


* PARAMELLE, Quellenkunde, mit einem Vorwort von B. Cotta. 1856, 
+ See LomBarpint, Importanza degli studi sulla Statistica da Fiumt, p, 27; 
also, same author, Sulle Inondazioni avvenute in Francia, etc., p. 29. 


INFILTRATION OF WATER. A475 


paving the ground about the stems of vines and trees. The 
surface-earth around the trunk of a tree may be made almost 
impervious to water, by flagstones and cement, for a distance as 
great as the spread of the roots ; and yet the tree will not suffer 
for want of moisture, except in droughts severe enough sensibly 
to affect the supply in deep wells and springs. Both forest and 
fruit trees attain a considerable age and size in cities where the 
streets and courts are closely paved, and where even the lateral 
access of water to the roots is more or less obstructed by deep 
cellars and foundation walls. The deep-lying veins and sheets 
of water, supplied by infiltration from often comparatively 
distant sources, send up moisture by capillary attraction, and the 
pavement prevents the soil beneath it from losing its humidity by 
evaporation. Hence, city-grown trees find moisture enough for 
their roots, and though plagued with smoke and dust, often 
retain their freshness, while those planted in the open fields, 
where sun and wind dry up the soil faster than the subterranean 
fountains can water it, are withering from drought.* Without 
the help of artificial conduit or of water-carrier, the Thames 
and the Seine refresh the ornamental trees that shade the 
thoroughfares of London and of Paris, and beneath the hot and 
reeking mould of Egypt, the Nile sends currents to the ex- 
tremest border of its valley. 


* The roots of trees planted in towns do not depend exclusively on infiltra- 
tion for their supply of water, for they receive a certain amount of both mois- 
ture and air through the interstices between the paving-stones; but where 
wide surfaces of streets and courts are paved with air and water tight asphal- 
tum, as in Paris, trees suffer from the diminished supply of these necessary 
elements. 

+ See the interesting observations of KRIEGK on this subject, Schriften zur 
allgemeinen Erdkunde, cap. iii., § 6, and especially the passages in RITTER’S 
Erdkunde, vol. i., there referred to. 

The tenacity with which the parched soil of Egypt retains the supply of 
moisture it receives from the Nile is well illustrated by observations of Girard 
cited by Lombardini from the Mémoires de ? Académie des Sciences, t. ii., 1817. 
Girard dug wells at distances of 3,200, 1,800, and 1,200 métres from the Nile, and 
after three months of low water in the river, found water in the most remote 
well, at 4m, $7, in the next at 4m, 23, and in that nearest the bank at 3m, 44 


476 ARTESIAN WELLS. 


Artesian Wells. 


The existence of artesian wells depends upon that of sub- 
terranean reservoirs and rivers, and the supply yielded by 
borings is regulated by the abundance of such sources. The 
waters of the earth are, in many cases, derived from superficial 


above the surface of the Nile. The fact that the water was highest in the 
most distant well appears to show that it was derived from the inundation 
and not, by lateral infiltration, from the river. But water is found beneath 
the sands at points far above and beyond the reach of the inundations, and can 
be accounted for only by subterranean percolation from the Nile. At high 
flood, the hydrostatic pressure on the banks, combined with capillary attrac- 
tion, sends water to great horizontal distances through the loose soil; at low 
water the current is reversed, and the moisture received from the river is 
partly returned, and may often be seen oozing from the banks into the river. 
—CuLor Bry, Apercu sur ? Egypte, i., 128. 

Laurent (Mémoires sur le Sahara Oriental, pp. 8, 9), in speaking of a river 
at El-Faid, ‘‘ which, like all those of the desert, is, most of the time, without 
water,” observes, that many wells are dug in the bed of the river in the dry 
season, and that the subterranean supply of water thus reached extends itself 
laterally, at about the same level, at least a kilométre from the river, as water 
is found by digging to the depth of twelve or fifteen métres at a village situat- 
ed at that distance from the bank. 

Recent experiments, however, have shown that in the case of rivers flowing 
through thickly peopled regions, and especially where the refuse from indus- 
trial establishments is discharged into them, the finely comminuted material 
received from sewers and factories sometimes clogs up the interstices between 
the particles of sand and gravel which compose the bed and banks, and the 
water is consequently confined to the channel and no longer diffuses itself 
laterally through the adjacent soil. This obstruction of course acts in both 
directions, according to circumstances. In one case, it prevents the escape of 
river-water and tends to maintain a full flow of the current; in another it 
intercepts the supply the river might otherwise receive by infiltration from the 
land, and thus tends to reduce the volume of the stream. In some instances, 
pits have been sunk along the banks of large rivers and the water which filters 
into them pumped up to supply aqueducts, This method often succeeds, but 
where the bed of the stream has been rendered impervious by the discharge 
of impurities into it, it cannot be depended upon. 

The tubular wells generally known as the American wells furnish another 
proof of the free diffusion and circulation of water through the soil. Ido 
not know the date of the first employment of these tubes in the United States, 
but as early as 1861, the Chevalier Calandra used wooden tubes for this pur- 


ARTESIAN WELLS. AUT 


currents which are seen to pour into chasms opened, as it were, 
expressly for their reception ; and in others, where no apertures 
in the crust of the earth have been detected, their existence is 
proved by the fact that artesian wells sometimes bring up 
from great depths seeds, leaves, and even living fish, which 
must have been carried down through channels large enough 


pose in Piedmont, with complete success. See the interesting pamphlet, Sulla 
Estrazione delle Acque Sotterranee, by C. CALANDRA. Torino, 1867. 

The most remarkable case of infiltration known to me by personal observa- 
tion is the occurrence of fresh water in the beach-sand on the eastern side of 
the Gulf of Akaba, the eastern arm of the Red Sea. If you dig a cavity in the 
beach near the sea-level, it soon fills with water so fresh as not to be undrink- 
able, though the sea-water two or three yards from it contains even more than 
the average quantity of salt. It cannot be maintained that this is sea-water 
freshened by filtration through a few feet or inches of sand, for salt-water 
cannot be deprived of its salt by that process. It can only come from the 
highlands of Arabia, and it would seem that there must exist some large reser- 
voir in the interior to furnish a supply which, in spite of evaporation, holds 
out for months after the last rains of winter, and perhaps even through the 
year. I observed the fact in the month of June. See Rosinson, Lidlical 
Researches, 1857, voli., p. 167. 

The precipitation in the mountains that border the Red Sea is not known by 
pluviometric measurement, but the mass of débris bronght down the ravines 
by the torrents proves that their volume must be large. The proportion of 
surface covered by sand and absorbent earth, in Arabia Petreea and the neigh- 
boring countries, is small, and the mountains drain themselves rapidly into 
the wadies or ravines where the torrents are formed ; but the beds of earth 
and disintegrated rock at the bottom of the valleys are of so loose and porous 
texture, that a great quantity of water is absorbed in saturating them before 
a visible current is formed on their surface. In a heavy thunder-storm, 
accompanied by a deluging rain, which I witnessed at Mount Sinai in the 
month of May, a large stream of water poured, in an almost continuous cas- 
cade, down the steep ravine north of the convent, by which travellers some- 
times descend from the plateau between the two peaks, but after reaching 
the foot of the mountain, it flowed but a few yards before it was swallowed 
up in the sands. 

Fresh-water wells are not unfrequently found upon the borders of ocean 
beaches. In the dry summer of 1870, drinkable water was procured in many 
places on the coast of Liguria by digging to the depth of a yard in the beach- 
sands. Tubular wells reach fresh water at twelve or fifteen feet below the 
surface on the sandy plains of Cape Cod. In this latter case, the supply is 
more probably derived directly from precipitation than from lateral infiltra- 
tion. 


478 ARTESIAN WELLS. 


to admit a considerable stream.* But in general, the sheets 
and currents of water reached by deep boring appear to be 
primarily due to infiltration from highlands where the water 
is first collected in superficial or subterranean reservoirs. By 
means of channels conforming to the dip of the strata, these 
reservoirs communicate with the lower basins, and exert upon 
them a fluid pressure sufficient to raise a column to the sur- 
face, whenever an orifice is opened.t| The water delivered by 
an artesian well is, therefore, often derived from distant 
sources, and may be wholly unaffected by geographical or 
meteorological changes in its immediate neighborhood, while 
the same changes may quite dry up common wells and springs 
which are fed only by the local infiltration of their own nar- 
row basins. 

In most cases, artesian wells have been bored for purely eco- 
nomical or industrial purposes, such as to obtain good water for 
domestic use or for driving light machinery, to reach saline or 
other mineral springs, and recently, in America, to open fount- 
ains of petroleum or rock-oil. The geographical and geological 
effects of such abstraction of fluids from the bowels of the earth 
are too remote and uncertain to be here noticed ; { but artesian 


* CuarLES Martins, Le Sahara, in Revue des Deux Mondes, Sept. 1, 1864, 
p. 619; SrorPaNnt, Corso di Geologia, i., 281; Dusor, Die Sahara, Basel, 1871, 
pp. 59, 51. 

+ It is conceivable that in shallow subterranean basins superincumbent 
mineral strata may rest upon the water and be partly supported by it. In 
such case the weight of such strata would be an additional, if not the sole, 
cause of the ascent of the water through the tubes of artesian wells. 

The ascent of petroleum in the artesian oil-wells in Pennsylvania, and, in 
many cases, of salt-water in similar tubes, can hardly be ascribed to hydro- 
static pressure, and there is much difficulty in accounting for the rise of water 
in artesian wells in many parts of the African desert on that principle. Perhaps 
the elasticity of gases, which probably aids in forcing up petroleum and saline 
waters, may be, not unfrequently, an agency in causing the flow of water in 
common artesian borings. It is said that artesian wells lately bored in Chi- 
cago, some to the depth of 1,600 feet, raise water to the height of 100 feet 
above the surface. What is the source of the pressure ? 

+ Many more or less probable conjectures have been made on this subject, 
but thus far I am not aware that any of the apprehended results have been 


ARTESIAN WELLS IN THE DESERT. 479 


wells have lately been employed in Algeria for a purpose which 
has even now a substantial, and may hereafter acquire a very 
great geographical importance. It was observed by many ear- 
lier as well as recent travellers in the East, among whom Shaw 
deserves special mention, that the Libyan desert, bordering upon 
the cultivated shores of the Mediterranean, appeared in many 
places to rest upon a subterranean lake at an accessible distance 
below the surface. The Moors are vaguely said to dore artesian 
wells down to this reservoir, to obtain water for domestic use 
and irrigation, and there is evidence that this art was practised 
in Northern Africa in the Middle Ages. But it had been lost 
by the modern Moors, and the universal astonishment and inere- 
dulity with which the native tribes viewed the operations of the 
French engineers sent into the desert for that purpose, are a 
sufficient proof that this mode of reaching the subterranean 
waters was new to them. They were, however, aware of the 
existence of water below the sands, and were dexterous in dig- 
ging wells—square shafts lined with a framework of palm-tree 
stems—to the level of the sheet. The wells so constructed, 
though not technically artesian wells, answer the same purpose ; 


actually shown to have happened. In an article in the Annales des Ponts et 
Chaussées for July and August, 1839, p. 131, it was suggested that the sinking 
of the piers of a bridge at Tours in France was occasioned by the abstraction of 
water from the earth by artesian wells, and the consequent withdrawal of the 
mechanical support it had previously given to the strata containing it. A 
reply to this article will be found in VioLueT, Théorie des Puiis Artésiens, 
p. 217. 

In some instances the water has rushed up with a force which seemed to 
threaten the inundation of the neighborhood, and even the washing away of 
much soil; but in these cases the partial exhaustion of the supply, or the relief 
of hydrostatic or elastic pressure, has generally produced a diminution of the 
flow in a short time, and I do not know that any serious evil has ever been occa- 
sioned in this way. 

In April, 1866, a case of this sort occurred in boring an artesian well near 
the church of St. Agnes at Venice. When the drill reached the depth of 160 
feet, a jet of mud and water was shot up to the height of 180 feet above the 
surface, and continued to flow with gradually diminishing force for about eight 
hours. 


480 ARTESIAN WELLS IN THE DESERT. 


for the water rises to the surface and flows over it as from a 
spring.* 

* See a very interesting account of these wells, and of the workmen who 
clean them out when obstructed by sand brought up with the water, in 
Laurent’s memoir on the artesian wells recently bored by the French Govern- 
ment in the Algerian desert, Mémoire sur le Sahara Oriental, etc., pp. 19 e 
segg. Some of the men remained under water from two minutes to two min- 
utes and forty seconds. Several officers are quoted as having observed im- 
mersions of three minutes’ duration, and M. Berbrugger witnessed one of six 
minutes and five seconds and another of five minutes and fifty-five seconds. 
The shortest of these periods is longer than the best pearl-diver can remain 
below the surface of salt-water. The wells of the Sahara are from twenty to 
eighty métres deep.—DrEsor, Die Sahara, Basel, 1871, p. 43. 

The ancient Egyptians were acquainted with the art of boring artesian 
wells. Ayme, a French engineer in the service of the Pacha of Egypt, found 
several of these old wells, a few years ago, in the oases, They differed little from 
modern artesian wells, but were provided with pear-shaped valves of stone for 
closing them when water was not needed. When freed from the sand and 
rubbish with which they were choked, they flowed freely and threw up fish 
large enough for the table. The fish were not blind, as cave-fish often are, but 
were provided with eyes, and belonged to species common in the Nile The 
sand, too, brought up with them resembled that of the bed of that river. 
Hence it is probable that they were carried to the oases by subterranean chan- 
nels from the Nile.—DrEsor, Die Sahara, Basel, 1871, p. 28; Stoppant, Corso 
di Geologia, i., p. 281. Barth speaks of common wells in Northern Africa 
from 200 to 360 feet deep.—Weisen in Africa, ii., p. 180. 

Ti is certain that artesian wells have been common in China from a very 
remote antiquity, and the simple method used by the Chinese—where the 
drill is raised and let fall by a rope, instead of a rigid rod—has lately been em- 
ployed in Europe with advantage. Some of the Chinese wells are said to be 
3,000 feet deep ; that of Neusalzwerk in Silesia is 2,500. A well was bored at 
St. Louis, in Missouri, a few years ago, to supply a sugar refinery, to the depth 
of 2,199 feet. This was executed by a private firm in three years, at the 
expense of only $10,000. Four years since the boring was recommenced in 
this well and reached a depth of 3,150 feet, but without a satisfactory result. 
Another artesian well was sunk at Columbus, in Ohio, to the depth of 2,500 
feet, but without obtaining the desired supply of water. Perhaps, however, 
the artesian well of the greatest depth ever executed until very recently, is that 
bored within the last six or seven years, for the use of an Insane Asylum near 
St. Louis. This well descends to the depth of three thousand eight hundred 
and forty-three feet, but the water which it furnishes is small in quantity and 
of a quality that cannot be used for ordinary domestic purposes. The bore 
has a diameter of six inches tothe depth of 425 feet, and after that itis re- 
duced to four inches. For about three thousand feet the strata penetrated 


ARTESIAN WELLS IN THE DESERT. A481 


These wells, however, are too few and too scanty im supply 
to serve any other purposes than the domestic wells of other 
countries, and it is but recently that the transformation of 
desert into cultivable land by this means has been seriously 
attempted. The French Government has bored a large num- 
ber of artesian wells in the Algerian desert within a few years, 


were of carboniferous and magnesian limestone alternating with sandstone. 
The remainder of the well passes through igneous rock. At St. Louis the 
Missouri and Mississippi rivers are not more than twenty miles distant from 
each other, and it is worthy of note that the waters of neither of these two 
rivers appear to have opened for themselves a considerable subterranean pass- 
age through the rocky strata of the peninsula which separates them. 

When in boring an artesian well water is not reached at a moderate depth, 
it is not always certain that it will be found by driving the drill still lower. 
In certain formations, water diminishes as we descend, and it seems probable 
that, except in case of caverns and deep fissures, the weight of the superincum- 
bent mineral strata so compresses the underlying ones, at no very great dis- 
tance below the surface, as to render them impermeable to water and con- 
sequently altogether dry. See London Quarterly Journal of Science, No. xvii., 
Jan., 1868, p. 18, 19. 

In the silver mines of Nevada water is scarcely found at depths below 1,000 
feet, and at 1,200 feet from the surface the earth is quite dry.—American 
Annual of Scientific Discovery for 1870, p. 75. 

Similar facts are observed in Australia. The Pleasant Creek News writes: 
‘‘ A singular and unaccountable feature in connection with our deep quartz 
mines is being developed daily, which must surprise those well experienced in 
mining matters. It is the decrease of water as the greater depths are reached. 
In the Magdala shaft at 950 ft. the water has decreased to a minimum ; in the 
Crown Cross Reef Company’s shaft, at 800 ft., notwithstanding the two reefs 
recently struck, no extra water has been met with; and in the long drive of 
the Extended Cross Reef Company, at a depth of over 800 ft., the water is 
lighter than it was nearer the surface.” 

Boring has been carried to a great depth at Sperenberg near Berlin, where, 
in 1871, the drill had descended 5,500 feet below the surface, passing through 
a stratum of salt for the last 3,200 feet ; but the drilling was still in progress, 
the whole thickness of the salt-bed not having been penetrated.—Aws der 
Natur, vol. 55, p. 208. 

The facts that there are mines extending two miles under the bed of the 
sea, which are not particularly subject to inconvenience from water, that lit- 
tle water was encountered in the Mt. Cenis tunnel, 3500 feet below the surface, 
and that at Scarpa, not far from Tivoli, there is an ancient well 1700 feet 
deep with but eighteen feet of water, may also be cited as proofs that water 
is not universally diffused at great distances beneath the surface. 


A82 ARTESIAN WELLS IN THE DESERT. 


and the native sheikhs are beginning to avail themselves of the 
process. Every well becomes the nucleus of a settlement pro- 
portioned to the supply of water, and before the end of the 
year 1860, several nomade tribes had abandoned their wander- 
ing life, established themselves around the wells, and planted 
more than 80,000 palm trees, besides other perennial vege- 
tables.* The water is found at a small depth, generally from 
100 to 200 feet, and though containing too large a proportion of 
mineral matter to be acceptable to a European palate, it an- 
swers well for irrigation, and does not prove unwholesome to 
the natives. 

The most obvious use of artesian wells in the desert at 
present is that of creating stations for the establishment of 
military posts and halting-places for the desert traveller; but 
if the supply of water shall prove adequate for the indefinite 
extension of the system, it is probably destined to produce a 
greater geographical transformation than has ever been effected 
by any scheme of human improvement. 

The most striking contrast of landscape scenery that nature 
brings near together in time or place, is that between the green- 
ery of the tropics, or of a northern summer, and the snowy 
pall of leafless winter. Next to this in startling novelty of 


* “(Tn the anticipation of our success at Oum-Thiour, everything had been 
prepared to take advantage of this new source of wealth without a moment’s 
delay. A division of the tribe of the Selmia, and their sheikh, Aissa ben Sha, 
laid the foundation of a village as soon as the water flowed, and planted 
twelve hundred date-palms, renouncing their wandering life to attach them- 
selves to the soil. In this arid spot, life had taken the place of solitude, and 
presented itself, with its smiling images, to the astonished traveller. Young 
girls were drawing water at the fountain; the flocks, the great dromedaries 
with their slow pace, the horses led by the halter, were moving to the water- 
ing trough; the hounds and the falcons enlivened the group of party-colored 
tents, and living voices and animated movement had succeeded to silence and 
desolation.” —LAURENT, Mémoires sur le Sahara, p. 85. 

Between 1856 and 1864 the French engineers had bored 83 wells in the 
Hodna and the Sahara of the Province of Constantine, yielding, all together, 
9,000 gallons a minute, and irrigating more than 125,000 date-palms.—RECLUS, 
La Terre, i., p. 110. 


eae 


ARTESIAN WELLS IN THE DESERT. 483 


effect, we must rank the sudden transition from the shady and 
verdant oasis of the desert to the bare and burning party-col- 
ored ocean of sand and rock which surrounds it.* The most 
sanguine believer in indefinite human progress hardly expects 
that man’s cunning will accomplish the universal fulfilment of 
the prophecy, “ the desert shall blossom as the rose,” in its literal 
sense ; but sober geographers have thought the future conversion 
of the sand plains of Northern Africa into fruitful gardens, by 
means of artesian wells, not an improbable expectation. They 
have gone farther, and argued that, if the soil were covered 
with fields and forests, vegetation would call down moisture 


* The variety of hues and tones in the local color of the desert is, I think, 
one of the phenomena which most surprise and interest a stranger to those 
regions. In England and the United States, rock is so generally covered with 
moss or earth, and earth with vegetation, that untravelled Englishmen and 
Americans are not very familiar with naked rock as a conspicuous element of 
landscape. Hence, in their conception of a bare cliff or precipice, they 
hardly ascribe definite color to it, but depict it to their imagination as wear- 
ing a neutral tint not assimilable to any of the hues with which nature tinges 
her atmospheric or paints her organic creations. There are certainly exten- 
sive desert ranges, chiefly limestone formations, where the surface is either 
white, or has weathered down to a dull uniformity of tone which can hardly 
be called color at all; and there are sand plains and drifting hills of weari- 
some monotony of tint. But the chemistry of the air, though it may tame 
the glitter of the limestone to a dusky gray, brings out the green and brown 
and purple of the igneous rocks, and the white and red and blue and violet 
and yellow of the sandstone. Many a cliff in Arabia Petreea is as manifold in 
color as the rainbow, and the veins are so variable in thickness and inclination, 
so contorted and involved in arrangement, as to bewilder the eye of the spec- 
tator like a disk of party-colored glass in rapid evolution. 

In the narrower wadies the mirage is not common; but on broad expanses, 
as at many points between Cairoand Suez, and in Wadi el Araba, it mocks 
you with lakes and land-locked bays, studded with islands and fringed with 
trees, all painted with an illusory truth of representation absolutely indis- 
tinguishable from the reality. The checkered earth, too, is canopied with a 
heaven as variegated as itself. You see, high up in the sky, rosy clouds at 
noonday, colored probably by reflection from the ruddy mountains, while 
near the horizon float cumuli of a transparent, ethereal blue, seemingly balled 
up out of the clear cerulean substance of the firmament, and detached from 
the heavenly vault, not by color or consistence, but solely by the light and 
shade of their salient and retreating outlines. ; 


484 ARTIFICIAL SPRINGS. 


from the Libyan sky, and that the showers which are now 
wasted on the sea, or so often deluge Southern Europe with 
destructive inundation, would in part be condensed over the 
arid wastes of Africa, and thus, without further aid from man, 
bestow abundance on regions which nature seems to have con- 
demned to perpetual desolation. 

An equally bold speculation, founded on the well-known 
fact that the temperature of the earth and of its internal waters 
increases as we descend beneath the surface, has suggested that 
artesian wells might supply heat for industrial and domestic 
purposes, for hot-house cultivation, and even for the local 
amelioration of climate. The success with which Count Lar- 
darel has employed natural hot springs for the evaporation 
of water charged with boracic acid, and other fortunate appli- 
cations of the heat of thermal sources, lend some countenance 
to the latter project; but both must, for the present, be ranked 
among the vague possibilities of science, not regarded as prob- 
able future triumphs of man oyer nature. 


Artificial Springs. 


A more plausible and inviting scheme is that of the crea- 
tion of perennial springs by husbanding rain and snow water, 
storing it up in artificial reservoirs of earth, and filtering it 
through purifying strata, in analogy with the operations of 
nature. The sagacious Palissy—starting from the theory that 
all springs are primarily derived from precipitation, and rea- 
soning justly on the accumulation and movement of water in 
the earth—proposed to reduce theory to practice, and to imi- 
tate the natural processes by which rain is absorbed by the 
earth and given out again in running fountains. “When I 
had long and diligently considered the cause of the springing 
of natural fountains and the places where they be wont to 
issue,” says he, “I did plainly perceive, at last, that they do 
proceed and are engendered of nought but the rains. And it 
is this, look you, which hath moved me to enterprise the gath- 


ARTIFICIAL SPRINGS. 485 


ering together of rain-water after the manner of nature, and 
the most closely according to her fashion that Iam able; and 
I am well assured that by following the formulary of the 
Supreme Contriver of fountains, I can make springs, the water 
whereof shall be as good and pure and clear as of such which 
be natural.” *  Palissy discusses the subject of the origin 
of springs at length and with much ability, dwelling specially 
on infiltration, and, among other things, thus explains the fre- 
quency of springs in mountainous regions: “ Having well 
considered the which, thou mayest plainly see the reason why 
there be more springs and rivulets proceeding from the moun- 
tains than from the rest of the earth; which is for no other 
cause but that the rocks and mountains do retain the water of 
the rains like vessels of brass. And the said waters falling 
upon the said mountains descend continually through the earth, 
and through crevices, and stop not till they find some place 
that is bottomed with stone or close and thick rocks; and they 
rest upon such bottom until they find some channel or other 
manner of issue, and then they flow out in springs or brooks 
or rivers, according to the greatness of the reservoirs and of the 
outlets thereof.” + 

After a full exposition of his theory, Palissy proceeds to 
describe his method of creating springs, which is substantially 
the same as that lately proposed by Babinet in the following 
terms: “Choose a piece of ground containing four or five 
acres, with a sandy soil, and with a gentle slope to determine 
the flow of the water. Along its upper line, dig a trench five 
or six feet deep and six feet wide. Level the bottom of the 
trench, and make it impermeable by paving, by macadamizing, 
by bitumen, or, more simply and cheaply, by a layer of clay. 
By the side of this trench dig another, and throw the earth 
from it into the first, and so on until you have rendered the 


* (Huvres de Palissy, Des Eaux et Fontaines, p. 157. 
+Id., p. 166. Palissy’s method has recently been tried with good success 
in various parts of France, 


486 ARTIFICIAL SPRINGS. 


subsoil of the whole parcel impermeable to rain-water. Build 
a wall along the lower line with an aperture in the middle for 
the water, and plant fruit or other low trees upon the whole, 
to shade the ground and check the currents of air which pro- 
mote evaporation. This will infallibly give you a good spring 
which will flow without intermission, and supply the wants of 
a whole hamlet or a large chateau.” * Babinet states that the 
whole amount of precipitation on a reservoir of the proposed 
area, in the climate of Paris, would be about 13,000 cubic 
yards, not above one half of which, he thinks, would be lost, 
and, of course, the other half would remain available to supply 
the spring. JI much doubt whether this expectation would be 
realized in practice, in its whole extent ; for if Babinet is right 
in supposing that the summer rain is wholly evaporated, the 
winter rains, being much less in quantity, would hardly suftice 
to keep the earth saturated and give off so large a surplus. 

The method of Palissy, though, as I have said, similar in 
principle to that of Babinet, would be cheaper of execution, 
and, at the same time, more efficient. He proposes the con- 
struction of relatively small filtering receptacles, into which he 
would conduct the rain falling upon a large area of rocky hill- 
side, or other sloping ground not readily absorbing water. 
This process would, in all probability, be a very successful, as 
well as an inexpensive, mode of economizing atmospheric pre- 
cipitation, and compelling the rain and snow to form perennial 
fountains at will. 


*BaBINet, Etudes et Lectures sur les Sciences d’ Observation, ii., p. 225. 
Our author precedes his account of his method with a complaint which 
most men who indulge in thinking have occasion to repeat many times in 
the course of their lives. ‘‘I will explain to my readers the construction of 
artificial fountains according to the plan of the famous Bernard de Palissy, 
who, a hundred and fifty [three hundred] years ago, came and took away 
from me, a humble academician of the nineteenth century, this discovery 
which I had taken a great deal of pains to make, It is enough to discourage 
all invention when one finds plagiarists in the past as well as in the future! ” 
(P. 224.) 


ECONOMIZING PRECIPITATION. 487 


Economizing Precipitation. 


The methods suggested by Palissy and by Babinet are of 
limited application, and designed only to supply a sufficient 
quantity of water for the domestic use of small villages or large 
private establishments. Dumas has proposed a much more ex- 
tensive system for collecting and retaining the whole precipita- 
tion in considerable valleys, and storing it in reservoirs, whence 
it is to be drawn for household and mechanical purposes, for 
irrigation, and, in short, for all the uses to which the water of 
natural springs and brooks is applicable. His plan consists in 
draining both surface and subsoil, by means of conduits differ- 
ing in construction according to local circumstances, but in the 
main not unlike those employed in improved agriculture, col- 
lecting the water in a central channel, securing its proper fil- 
terage, checking its too rapid flow by barriers at convenient 
points, and finally receiving the whole in spacious, covered 
reservoirs, from which it may be discharged in a constant flow 
or at intervals as convenience may dictate.* 

There is no reasonable doubt that a very wide employment 
of these various contrivances for economizing and supplying 
water is practicable, and the expediency of resorting to them 
is almost purely an economical question. There appears to be 
no serious reason to apprehend collateral evils from them, and 
in fact all of them, except artesian wells, are simply indirect 
methods of returning to the original arrangements of nature, 
or, in other words, of restoring the fluid circulation of the globe; 
for when the earth was covered with the forest, perennial 
springs gushed from the foot of every hill, brooks flowed down 
the bed of every valley. The partial recovery of the fountains 
and rivulets which once abundantly watered the face of the 
agricultural world seems practicable by such means, even with- 
out any general replanting of the forests; and the cost of one 
year’s warfare—or in some countries of that armed peace which 


* M. G. Dumas, La Science des Fontaines, 1857. 


488 INUNDATIONS AND TORRENTS. 


has been called “ Platonic war”—if judiciously expended in a 
combination of both methods of improvement, would secure, to 
almost every country that man has exhausted, an amelioration 
of climate, a renovated fertility of soil, and a general physical 
improvement, which might almost be characterized as a new 
creation. 


Inundations and Torrents. 


In pointing out in a former chapter the evils which have re- 
sulted from the too extensive destruction of the forests, I dwelt 
at some length on the increased violence of river inundations, 
and especially on the devastations of torrents, in countries im- 
providently deprived of their woods, and I spoke of the replant- 
ing of the forests as probably the most effectual method of 
preventing the frequent recurrence of disastrous floods. There 
are many regions where, from the loss of the superficial soil, 
from financial considerations, and from other special causes, the 
general restoration of the woods is not, under present cireum- 
stances, either possible or desirable. In all inhabited countries, 
the necessities of agriculture and other considerations of human 
convenience will always require the occupation of much the 
largest proportion of the surface for purposes inconsistent with 
the growth of extensive forests. Even where large plantations 
are possible and in actual process of execution, many years must 
elapse before the action of the destructive causes in question 
can be arrested or perhaps even sensibly mitigated by their in- 
fluence ; and besides, floods will always occur in years of exces- 
sive precipitation, whether the surface of the soil be generally 
cleared or generally wooded.* 


* All the arrangements of rural husbandry, and we might say of civilized 
occupancy of the earth, are such as necessarily to increase the danger and the 
range of floods by promoting the rapid discharge of the waters of precipitation. 
Superficial, if not subterranean, drainage is a necessary condition of all agri- 
culture. There is no field which has not some artificial disposition for this 
purpose, and even the furrows of ploughed land, if the surface is inclined, 
and especially when it is frozen, serve rather to carry off than to retain 


INUNDATIONS IN FRANCE. 489 


Physical improvement in this respect, then, cannot be con- 
fined to merely preventive measures, but, in countries subject 
to damage by inundation, means must be contrived to obviate 
dangers and. diminish injuries to which human life and all the 
works of human industry will occasionally be exposed, in spite 
of every effort to lessen the frequency of their recurrence by 
acting directly on the causes that produce them. As every 
civilized country is, in some degree, subject to inundation by 
the overflow of rivers, the evil is a familiar one, and needs no 
general description. In discussing this branch of the subject, 
therefore, I may confine myself chiefly to the means that have 
been or may be employed to resist the force and limit the rava- 
ges of floods, which, left wholly unrestrained, would not only 
inflict immense injury upon the material interests of man, but 
produce geographical revolutions of no little magnitude. 


Inundations of 1856 in France. 


The month of May, 1856, was remarkable for violent and 
almost uninterrupted rains, and most of the river-basins of 
France were inundated to an extraordinary height. In the val- 
leys of the Loire and its affluents, about a million of acres, in- 
cluding many towns and villages, were laid under water, and 
the amount of pecuniary damage was almost incalculable.* 
The flood was not less destructive in the valley of the Rhone, 
and in fact an invasion by a hostile army could hardly have 
been more disastrous to the inhabitants of the plains than was 
this terrible deluge. There had been a flood of this latter 
river in the year 1840, which, for height and quantity of water, 
was almost as remarkable as that of 1856, but it took place in 


water. As Becquerel has observed, common road and railway ditches are 
among the most efficient conduits for the discharge of surface-water which 
man has yet constructed, and of course they are powerful agents in causing 
river inundations. All these channels are, indeed, necessary for the conye- 
nience of man, but this convenience, like every other interference with the or- 
der of nature, must often be purchased at a heavy cost. 

* Cuampion, Les Inondations en France, iii., p. 156, note. 


490 INUNDATIONS IN FRANCE. 


the month of November, when the crops had all been harvested, 
and the injury inflicted by it upon agriculturists was, therefore, 
of a character to be less severely and less immediately felt than 
the consequences of the inundation of 1856.* 

In the fifteen years between these two great floods, the popu- 
Jation and the rural improvements of the river valleys had 
much increased, common roads, bridges, and railways had been 
multiplied and extended, telegraph lines had been constructed, 
all of which shared in the general ruin, and hence greater and 
more diversified interests were affected by the catastrophe of 
1856 than by any former like calamity. The great flood of 1840 
had excited the attention and roused the sympathies of the 
French people, and the subject was invested with new interest 
by the still more formidable character of the inundations of 
1856. It was felt that these scourges had ceased to be a matter 
of merely local concern, for, although they bore most heavily 
on those whose homes and fields were situated within the im- 
mediate reach of the swelling waters, yet they frequently de- 
stroyed harvests valuable enough to be a matter of national 
interest, endangered the personal security of the population of 
important political centres, interrupted communication for days 
and even weeks together on great lines of traffic and travel— 
thus severing, as it were, all South-western France from the rest 
of the empire—and finally threatened to produce great and per- 
manent geographical changes. The well-being of the whole 
commonwealth was seen to be involved in preventing the recur- 
rence and in limiting the range of such devastations. The 
Government encouraged scientific investigation of the pheno- 


* Notwithstanding this favorable circumstance, the damage done by the 
inundation of 1840 in the valley of the Rhone was estimated at seventy-two 
millions of francs.—CuHampPrion, Les Inondations en France, iv., p. 124. 

Several smaller floods of the Rhone, experienced at a somewhat earlier sea- 
son of the year in 1846, occasioned a loss of forty-five millions of franes. 
‘¢ What if,” says Dumont, ‘ instead of happening in October, that is, between 
harvest and seedtime, they had occurred before the crops were secured? The 
damage would have been counted by hundreds of millions.”.—Des Travaua 
Publics, p. 99, note. 


ae 4 


BASINS OF RECEPTION. AOL 


mena and their laws. Their causes, their history, their imme- 
diate and remote consequences, and the possible safeguards to 
be employed against them, have been carefully studied by the 
most eminent physicists, as well as by the ablest theoretical 
and practical engineers of France. Many hitherto unobserved 
facts have been collected, many new hypotheses suggested, and 
many plans, more or less original in character, have been de- 
vised for combating the evil; but thus far, the most competent 
judges are not well agreed as to the mode, or even the possi- 
bility, of applying an effectual remedy. 

I have noticed in the next preceding chapter the recent legis- 
lation of france upon the preservation and restoration of the 
forests, with reference to their utility in subduing torrents and 
lessening the frequency and diminishing the violence of river 
inundations. The provisions of these laws are preventive 
rather than remedial, but most beneficial effects have already 
been experienced from the measures adopted in pursuance of 
them, though sufficient time has not yet elapsed for the com- 
plete execution of the greater operations of the system. 


Basins of Lreception. 


Destructive inundations of large rivers are seldom, if ever, 
produced by precipitation within the limits of the principal 
valley, but almost uniformly by sudden thaws or excessive rains 
on the mountain ranges where the tributaries take their rise. 
It is therefore plain that any measures which shall check the 
flow of surface-waters into the channels of the affluents, or 
which shall retard the delivery of such waters into the princi- 
pal stream by its tributaries, will diminish in the same propor- 
tion the dangers and the evils of inundation by great rivers. 
The retention of the surface-waters upon or in the soil can 
hardly be accomplished except by the methods already men- 
tioned, replanting of forests, and furrowing or terracing. The 
current of mountain streams can be checked by various 
methods, among which the most familiar and obvious is the 


499 BASINS OF RECEPTION. 


erection of barriers or dams across their channels, at points 
convenient for forming reservoirs large enough to retain the 
superfluous waters of great rains and thaws.* Besides the 
utility of such basins in preventing floods, the construction of 
them is recommended by very strong considerations, such as the 
furnishing of a constant supply of water for agricultural and 
mechanical purposes, and, also, their value as ponds for 
breeding and rearing fish, and, perhaps, for cultivating aquatic 
vegetables. + 3 

The objections to the general adoption of the system of 
reservoirs are these: the expense of their construction and 
maintenance; the reduction of cultivable area by the amount 
of surface they must cover; the interruption they would 
occasion to free communication; the probability that they 
would soon be filled up with sediment, and the obvious fact 
that when full of earth, or even water, they would no longer 
serve their principal purpose; the great danger to which they 
would expose the country below them in case of the bursting 
of their barriers; { the evil consequences they would occasion 
by prolonging the flow of inundations in proportion as they 
diminished their height; the injurious effects it is supposed 
they would produce upon the salubrity of the neighboring 
districts ; and, lastly, the alleged impossibility of constructing 
artificial basins sufficient in capacity to prevent, or in any con- 


* On the construction of temporary and more permanent barriers to the 
currents of torrents and rivulets, see MARCHAND, Les Torrents des Alpes, in 
Revue des Haux et Foréts for October and November, 1871. 

+In reference to the utilization of artificial as well as natural reservoirs, 
see ACKERHOF, Die Nutruny der Teiche und Gewisser, Quadlinburg, 1869. 

{ For accounts of damage from the bursting of reservoirs, see VALLEE, 
Mémoire sur les Reservoirs @ Alimentation des Canauz, Annales des Ponts et 
Chaussées, 18338, ler sémestre, p. 261. 

The dam of the reservoir of Puentes in Spain, which was one hundred 
and sixty feet high, after having discharged its functions for eleven years, 
burst, in 1802, in consequence of a defect in its foundations, and the eruption 
of the water destroyed or seriously injured eight hundred houses, and pro- 
duced damage to the amount of more than a million dollars.—AYMARD, 
Irrigations du Midi de? Europe, pp. 257-259. 


BASINS OF RECEPTION. 493 


siderable measure to mitigate, the evils they are intended to 
guard against. 

The last argument is more easily reduced to a numerical 
question than the others. The mean and extreme annual pre- 
cipitation of all the basins where the construction of such 
works would be seriously proposed is already approximately 
known by meteorological tables, and the quantity of water, 
delivered by the greatest floods which have occurred within 
the memory: of man, may be roughly estimated from their 
visible traces. From these elements, or from meteorological 
records, the capacity of the necessary reservoirs can be cal- 
culated. Let us take the case of the Ardéche. In the inun- 
dation of 1857, that river poured into the Rhone 1,305,000,000 
cubic yards of water in three days. If we suppose that half 
this quantity might have been suffered to flow down its chan- 
nel without inconvenience, we shall have about 650,000,000 
cubic yards to provide for by reservoirs. The Ardeche and 
its principal affluent, the Chassezac, have, together, about 
twelve considerable tributaries rising near the crest of the 
mountains which bound the basin. If reservoirs of equal 
capacity were constructed upon all of them, each reservoir 
must be able to contain 54,000,000 cubic yards, or, in other 
words, must be equal to a lake 3,000 yards long, 1,000 yards 
wide, and 18 yards deep, and besides, in order to render any 
effectual service, the reservoirs must all have been empty at 
the commencement of the rains which produced the inun- 
dation. 

Thus far I have supposed the swelling of the waters to be 
uniform throughout the whole basin; but such was by no 
means the fact in the inundation of 1857, for the rise of the 
Chassezac, which is as large as the Ardéche proper, did not 
exceed the limits of ordinary floods, and the dangerous excess 
came solely from the headwaters of the latter stream. Hence 
reservoirs of double the capacity I have supposed would have 
been necessary upon the tributaries of that river, to prevent 
the injurious effects of the inundation. It is evident that the 


494 NATURAL BASINS OF RECEPTION. 


construction of reservoirs of such magnitude for such a pur- 
pose is financially, if not physically, impracticable, and when 
we take into account a point I have just suggested, namely, 
that the reservoirs must be empty at all times of apprehended 
flood, and, of course, their utility limited almost solely to the 
single object of preventing inundations, the total inapplicability 
of such a measure in this particular case becomes still more 
glaringly manifest. 

Another not less conclusive fact is, that the valleys of all the 
upland tributaries of the Ardéche descend so rapidly, and have 
so little lateral expansion, as to render the construction of 
capacious reservoirs in them quite impracticable. Indeed, engi- 
neers have found but two points in the whole basin suitable for 
that purpose, and the reservoirs admissible at these would have 
only a joint capacity of about 70,000,000 cubic yards, or less 
than one-ninth part of what I suppose to be required. The 
ease of the Ardéche is no doubt an extreme one, both in the 
topographical character of its basin and in its exposure to 
excessive rains; but all destructive inundations are, in a 
certain sense, extreme cases also, and this of the Ardéche 
serves to show that the construction of reservoirs is not by 
any means to be regarded as a universal panacea against 
floods. 

Nor, on the other hand, is this measure to be summarily 
rejected. Nature has adopted it on a great scale, on both 
flanks of the Alps, and ona smaller, on those of the Adiron- 
dacks and of many lower chains. The quantity of water which, 
in great rains or sudden thaws, rushes down the steep declivi- 
ties of the Alps, is so vast that the channels of the Swiss and 
Italian rivers would be totally incompetent to carry it off as 
rapidly as it would pour into them, were it not absorbed by the 
capacious basins which nature has scooped out for its reception, 
freed from the transported material which adds immensely both 
to the volume and to the force of its current, and then, after 
some reduction by evaporation and infiltration, gradually dis- 
charged into the beds of the rivers. In the inundation of 1829, 


NATURAL BASINS OF RECEPTION. 495 


the water discharged into Lake Como from the 15th to the 20th 
of September amounted to 2,600 cubic yards the second, while 
the outflow from the lake during the same period was only at 
the rate of about 1,050 cubie yards to the second. In those 
five days, then, the lake accumulated 670,000,000 cubic yards 
of superfluous water, and of course diminished by so much the 
quantity to be disposed of by the Po.* In the flood of October, 
1868, the surface of Lago Maggiore was raised twenty-five 
feet above low-water mark in the course of a few hours.+ 
There can be no doubt that without such detention of water by 
the Lakes Como, Maggiore, Garda, and other subalpine basins, 
almost the whole of Lombardy would have been irrecoverably 
desolated, or rather, its great plain would never have become 
anything but a vast expanse of river-beds and marshes; for the 
annual floods would always have prevented the possibility of its 
improvement by man.{ 

Lake Bourget in Savoy, once much more extensive than it is 
at present, served, and indeed still serves, a similar purpose in 
the economy of nature. In a flood of the Rhone, in 1863, this 
lake received from the overflow of that river, which does not 
pass through it, 72,000,000 cubic yards of water, and of course 
moderated, to that extent, the effects of the inundation below.§ 

In fact, the alluvial plains which border the course of most 
considerable streams, and are overflowed in their inundations, 
either by the rise of the water to a higher level than that of their 
banks, or by the bursting of their dikes, serve as safety-valves 
for the escape of their superfluous waters. The current of the 
Po, spreading over the whole space between its widely sepa- 
rated embankments, takes up so much water in its inundations, 
that, while a little below the outlet of the Ticino the discharge 


*Barrp Samira, Italian Irrigation, i., p. 176. 

+ Bollettino della Societa Geog. Italiana, iii., p. 466. 

t See, as to the probable effects of certain proposed hydraulic works at the 
outlet of Lake Maggiore on the action of the lake as a regulating reservoir, 
TAGLIASECCHI, Notizie sui Canali dell’ Alta Lombardia, Milano, 1869. 

§ ELISEEE RecLusE, La Terre, i., p. 460. 


496 NATURAL BASINS OF RECEPTION. 


of the channel is sometimes not less than 19,500 cubic yards to 
the second, it has never exceeded 6,730 yards at Ponte Lago- 
scuro, near Ferrara. The currents of the Mississippi, the 
Rhone, and of many other large rivers, are modified in the 
same way. In the flood of 1858, the delivery of the Missis- 
sippi, a little below the mouth of the Ohio, was 52,000 cubic 
yards to the second, but at Baton Rouge, though of course in- 
creased by the waters of the Arkansas, the Yazoo, and other 
smaller tributaries, the discharge was reduced to 46,760 cubic 
yards. We rarely err when we cautiously imitate the processes 
of nature, and there are doubtless many cases where artificial 
basins of reception and lateral expansions of river-beds might 
be employed with advantage. Many upland streams present 
points where none of the objections usually urged against arti- 
ficial reservoirs, except those of expense and of danger from 
the breaking of dams, could have any application. Reser- 
yoirs may be so constructed as to retain the entire precipitation 
of the heaviest thaws and rains, leaving only the ordinary quan- 
tity to flow along the channel; they may be raised to such a 
height as only partially to obstruct the surface drainage; or 
they may be provided with sluices by means of which their 
whole contents can be discharged in the dry season and a sum- 
mer crop be grown upon the ground they cover at high water. 
The expediency of employing them and the mode of construc- 
tion depend on local conditions, and no rules of universal appli- 
cability can be laid down on the subject.* 

It is remarkable that nations which we, in the inflated pride 
of our modern civilization, so generally regard as little less 
than barbarian, should have long preceded Christian Europe in 
the systematic employment of great artificial basins for the 
various purposes they are calculated to subserve. The ancient 
Peruvians built strong walls, of excellent workmanship, across 


* The insufficiency of artificial basins of reception as a means of averting 
the evils resulting from the floods of great rivers has been conclusively shown, 
in reference to a most important particular case—that of the Mississippi—by 
Humphreys and Abbot, in their admirable monograph of that river. 


DIVERSION OF RIVERS. 497 


the channels of the mountain sources of important streams, and 
the Arabs executed immense works of similar description, both 
in the great Arabian peninsula and in all the provinces of Spain 
which had the good fortune to fall under their sway. The 
Spaniards of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who, in many 
points of true civilization and culture, were far inferior to the 
races they subdued, wantonly destroyed these noble monuments 
of social and political wisdom, or suffered them to perish, be- 
cause they were too ignorant to appreciate their value, or too 
unskilful as practical engineers to be able to maintain them, 
and some of their most important territories were soon reduced 
to sterility and poverty in consequence. 


Diversion of Livers. 


Another method of preventing or diminishing the evils of 
inundation by torrents and mountain rivers, analogous to that 
employed for the drainage of lakes, consists in the permanent 
or occasional diversion of their surplus waters, or of their entire 
currents, from their natural courses, by tunnels or open chan- 
nels cut through their banks. Nature, in many cases, resorts 
to a similar process. Most great rivers divide themselves into 
several arms in their lower course, and enter the sea by differ- 
ent mouths. There are also cases where rivers send. off. lateral 
branches to convey a part of their waters into the channel of 
other streams.* The most remarkable of these is the junction 
between the Amazon and the Orinoco by the natural canal of 
the Cassiquiare and the Rio Negro. In India, the: Cambodja 
and the Menam are connected by the Anam; the Saluen and 
the Irawaddi by the Panlaun. There are similar examples, 


* Some geographical writers apply the term difurcation exclusively to this 
intercommunication of rivers; others, with more etymological propriety, use 
it to express the division of great rivers into branches at the head of their 
deltas. A technical word is wanting to designate the phenomenon mentioned 
in the text, and there is no valid objection to the employment of the anatomi- 
cal term anastomosis for this purpose. 

aad 


498 DIVERSION OF RIVERS. 


though on a much smaller scale, in Europe. The Torned and the 
Calix rivers in Lapland communicate by the Tarando, and in 
Westphalia, the Else, an arm of the Haase, falls into the Weser.* 

The change of bed in rivers by gradual erosion of their 
banks is familiar to all, but instances of the sudden abandon- 
ment of a primitive channel are by no means wanting. Ata 
period of unknown antiquity, the Ardéche pierced a tunnel 200 
feet wide and 100 high, through a rock, and sent its whole cur- 
rent through it, deserting its former bed, which gradually filled 
up, though its course remained traceable. In the great innun- 
dation of 1827, the tunnel proved insufficient for the discharge 
of the water, and the river burst through the obstructions which 
had now choked up its ancient channel, and resumed its original 
course.t 

It was probably such facts as these that suggested to ancient 
engineers the possibility of like artificial operations, and there 
are numerous instances of the execution of works for this pur- 
pose in very remote ages. The Bahr Jusef, the great stream 
which supplies the Fayoum with water from the Nile, has been 
supposed, by some writers, to be a natural channel; but both it 
and the Bahr el Wady are almost certainly artificial canals con- 


* The division of the currents of rivers, as a means of preventing the over- 
flow of their banks, is by no means a remedy capable of general application, 
even when local conditions are favorable to the construction of an emissary. 
The velocity of a stream, and consequently its delivery in a given time, are 
frequently diminished in proportion to the diminution of the volume by 
diversion ; and on the other hand, the increase of volume by the admission of 
a new tributary increases proportionally the velocity and the quantity of water 
delivered. Emissaries may, nevertheless, often be useful in carrying off water 
which has already escaped from the channel and which would otherwise 
become stagnant and prevent further lateral discharge from the main current, 
and it is upon this principle that Humphreys and Abbot think a canal of diver- 
sion at Lake Providence might be advisabie. Emissaries serve an important 
purpose in the lower course of rivers where the bed is nearly a dead level and 
the water moves from previously acquired momentum and the pressure of the 
current above, rather than by the force of gravitation, and it is, in general, 
only under such circumstances, as for example in the deltas at the mouths of 
great rivers, that nature employs them. 

7 Marpvieny, Mémoire sur les Inondations de 0 Ardéche, p. 13. 


NILE CANALS—DIVERSION OF RIVERS. 499 


structed to water that basin, to regulate the level of Lake 
Moeris, and possibly, also, to diminish the dangers resulting 
from excessive inundations of the Nile, by serving as waste-weirs 
to discharge a part of its overflowing waters.* Several of the 
seyen ancient mouths of the Nile are believed to be artificial 
channels, and Herodotus even asserts that King Menes diverted 
the entire course of that river from the Libyan to the Arabian 
side of the valley. There are traces of an ancient river-bed 
along the western mountains, which give some countenance to 
this statement. But it is much more probable that the works 
of Menes were designed rather to prevent a natural, than to 
produce an artificial, change in the channel of the river. 

Two of the most celebrated cascades in Europe, those of the 
Teverone at Tivoli and of the Velino at Terni, owe, if not their 
existence, at least their position and character, to the diversion 
vf their waters from their natural beds into new channels, in 
order to obviate the evils produced by their frequent floods. 
Remarkable works of the same sort have been executed in 
Switzerland, in very recent times. Until the year 1714, the 
Kander, which drains several large Alpine valleys, ran, for a 
considerable distance, parallel with the Lake of Thun, and a 
few miles below the city of that name emptied into the river 
Aar. It frequently flooded the flats along the lower part of its 
course, and it was determined to divert it into the Lake of Thun. 
For this purpose, two parallel tunnels were cut through the in- 
tervening rock, and the river turned into them. ‘The violence 
of the current burst up the roof of the tunnels, and, in a very 
short time, wore the new channel down not less than one hun- 
dred feet, and even deepened the former bed at least fifty feet, 
for a distance of two or three miles above the tunnel. The 
lake was two hundred feet deep at the point where the river 
was conducted into it, but the gravel and sand carried down by 


* The starting-points of these anals were far up the Nile, and of course ata 
comparatively high level, and it is probable that they received water only 
during the inundation. Linant Bey calculates the capacity of Lake Moeris at 
3,686,667 cubic yards and the water received by it at high Nile at 465 cubic 
yards the second, 


500 GLACIER LAKES. 


the Kander has formed at its mouth a delta containing more 
than a hundred acres, which is still advancing at the rate of 
several yards a year. The Linth, which formerly sent its 
waters directly to the Lake of Zurich, and often produced very 
destructive inundations, was turned into the Wallensee about 
fifty years ago, and in both these cases a great quantity of 
valuable land was rescued both from flood and from insalubrity. 


Glacier Lakes. 


In Switzerland, the most terrible inundations often result 
from the damming up of deep valleys by ice-slips or by the 
gradual advance of glaciers, and the accumulation of great 
masses of water above the obstructions. The ice is finally dis- 
solved by the heat of summer or the flow of warm waters, and 
when it bursts, the lake formed above is discharged almost in 
an instant, and all below is swept down to certain destruction. 
In 1595, about a hundred and fifty lives and a great amount of 
property were lost by the eruption of a lake formed by the 
descent of a glacier into the valley of the Drance, and a similar 
calamity laid waste a considerable extent of soil in the year 
1818. On this latter occasion, the barrier of ice and snow was 
8,000 feet long, 600 thick, and 400 high, and the lake which 
had formed above it contained not less than 800,000,000 cubie 
feet. A tunnel was driven through the ice, and about 300,000- 
000 cubic feet of water safely drawn off by it, but the thawing 
of the walls of the tunnel rapidly enlarged it, and before the 
lake was half drained, the barrier gave way and the remaining 
500,000,000 eubic feet of water were discharged in half an 
hour. The recurrence of these floods has since been prevented 
by directing streams of water, warmed by the sun, upon the ice 
in the bed of the valley, and thus thawing it before it aceumnu- 
lates in sufficient mass to form a new barrier and threaten seri- 
ous danger.* 

* In 1845 a similar lake was formed by the extension of the Vernagt glacier. 


When the ice barrier gave way, 3,000,000 cubic yards of water were discharged 
in an hour.—SonKLAR, Die Octathaler Gebirgsgruppe, § 167. 


RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 5OL 


Tn the cases of diversion of streams aboye mentioned, impor- 
tant geographical changes have been directly produced by 
those operations. By the rarer process of draining glacier 
lakes, natural eruptions of water, which would have occasioned 
not less important changes in the face of the earth, have been 
prevented by human agency. 


River Embankments. 


The most obyious and doubtless earliest method of prevent- 
ing the escape of river-waters from their natural channels, and 
the overflow of fields and towns by their spread, is that of 
raised embankments along their course.* The necessity of such 
embankments usually arises from the gradual elevation of the 
bed of running streams in consequence of the deposit of the 
earth and gravel they are charged with in high water ; and, as 
we have seen, this elevation is rapidly accelerated when the 
highlands around the headwaters of rivers are cleared of their 
forests. When a river is embanked at a given point, and, con- 


* Riparian embankments are a real, if not a conscious, imitation of a natural 
process. The waters of rivers which flow down planes of gentle inclination 
deposit, in their inundations, the largest proportion of their sediment as soon 
as, by overflowing their banks, they escape from the swift current of the channel. 
The immediate borders of such rivers consequently become higher than the 
grounds lying further from the stream, and constitute, of themselves, a sort of 
natural dike of small elevation. In the ‘‘intervales” or ‘‘ bottoms” of the 
great North American rivers the alluvial banks are elevated and dry, the flats 
more remote from the river lower and swampy. This is generally observable in 
Ecypt (see FIGARI Bry, Studi Scientifict sul? Hgitto, i., p. 87), though less so 
than in the valley of the Mississippi, where the alluvial banks form natural 
glacis, descending as you recede from the river, and in some places, as below 
Cape Girardeau, at the rate of seven feet in the first milee—HUMPHREYS AND 
Axpsort, feport, pp. 96, 97. 

In fact, rivers, like mountain torrents, often run for a long distance on the 
summit of a ridge built up by their own deposits. The delta of the Missis- 
sippi is a regular cone, or rather mountain, of dejection, extending far out 
into the Gulf of Mexico, along the crest of which the river flows, sending oif 
here and there, as it approaches the sea, a system of lateral streams resembling 
the fan-shaped discharge of a torrent. 


502 RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 


sequently, the water of its floods, which would otherwise 
spread over a wide surface, is confined within narrow limits, 
the velocity of the current and its transporting power are aug- 
mented, and its burden of sand and gravel is deposited at some 
lower point, where the rapidity of its flow is checked by a dam 
or other artificial obstruction, by a diminution in the inclina- 
tion of the bed, by a wider channel, or finally by a lacustrine or 
marine basin which receives its waters. Wherever it lets fall 
solid material, its channel is raised in consequence, and the de- 
clivity of the whole bed between the head of the embankment 
and the slack of the stream is reduced. Hence the current, at 
first accelerated by confinement, is afterwards checked by the 
mechanical resistance of the matter deposited, and by the 
diminished inclination of its channel, and then begins again to 
let fall the earth it holds in suspension, and to raise its bed at 
the point where its overflow had been before prevented by em- 
bankment.* The bank must now be raised in proportion, and 


* In proportion as the dikes are improved, and breaches and the escape of 
the water through them are less frequent, the height of the annual inundations 
is increased. Some towns on the banks of the Po, and of course within the 
system of parallel embankments, were formerly secure from flood by the height 
of the artificial mounds on which they were built ; but they have recently been 
obliged to construct ring-dikes for their protection. 

Lombardini lays down the following general statement of the effects of river 
embankments : 

““'The immediate effect of embanking a river is generally an increase in the 
height of its floods, but, at the same time, a depression of its bed, by reason of 
the increased force, and consequently excavating action, of the current. 

‘Tt is true that coarser material may hence be carried further, and at the 
same time deposit itself on a reduced slope. 

‘“The embankment of the upper branches of a river increases the volume, 
and therefore the height of the floods in the lower course, in consequence of 
the more rapid discharge of its affluents into it. 

‘* When, in consequence of the fiow of a river channel through an alluvial 
soil not yet regulated, or, in other words, which has not acquired its normal 
inclination, the course of the river has not become established, it is natural 
that its bed should rise more rapidly after its embankment. 

‘* The embaukment of the lower course of a river, near its discharge into the 
sea, causes the elevation of the bed of the next reach above, both because the 
swelling of the current, in consequence of its lateral confinement, occasions 


RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 503 


these processes would be repeated and repeated indefinitely, 
had not nature provided a remedy in floods, which sweep out 
recent deposits, burst the bonds of the river and overwhelm the 
adjacent country with final desolation, or divert the current into 
a new channel, destined to become, in its turn, the scene of a 
similar struggle between man and the waters.* 

But here, as in so many other fields where nature is brought 
into conflict with man, she first resists his attempts at inter- 
ference with her operations, then, finding him the stronger, 
quietly submits to his rule, and ends by contributing her aid to 
strengthen the walls and shackles by which he essays to confine 
her. If, by assiduous repair of his dikes, he, for a considerable 
time, restrains the floods of a river within new bounds, na- 
ture, by a series of ingenious compensations, brings the fluc- 
tuating bed of the stream to a substantially constant level, and 


eddies, and of course deposits, and because the prolongation of the course of 
the stream, or the advance of its delta into the sea, is accelerated.’’— Dei congi- 
amentt ciu soggiacque Vidraukca condizione de Po, etc., pp. 41, 42. 

Del Noce states that in the levellings for the proposed Leopolda railway, he 
found that the bed of the Sieue had been permanently elevated two yards be-. 
tween 1708 and 1844, and that of the Fosso di San Gaudenzio more than a 
yard and a half between 1752 and 1845. These, indeed, are not rivers of the 
rank of the Po; but neither are they what are technically called torrents or 
mountain streams, whose flow is only an occasional effect of heavy rains or 
melting snow.—Z7attato delle Macchie e Foreste di Toscana, Firenze, 1857, p. 
29. 

* The Noang-ho has repeatedly burst its dikes and changed the channel of 
its lower course, sometimes delivering its waters into the sea to the north, 
sometimes to the south of the peninsula of Chan-tung, thus varying ils point of 
discharge by a distance of 220 miles.—HLIs&E Recuus, La Terre, t. i., p. 477, 

See interesting notices of the lower course of the Noang-ho in Nature, Nov. 
25, 1869. 

The frequent changes of channel and mouth in the deltas of great rivers are 
by no means always an effect of diking. The mere accumulation of deposits 
in the beds of rivers which transport much sediment compels them continually 
to seek new outlets, and it is only by great effort that art can keep their points 
of discharge approximately constant. The common delta of the Ganges and 
the Brahmapootra is in a state of incessant change, and the latter river is said 
to have shifted its main channel 200 miles to the west since 1785, the revolu- 
tion having been principally accomplished between 1810 and 1830. 


504 RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 


when his ramparts have been, by his toil, raised to a certain 
height and widened to a certain thickness, she, by her laws of 
gravitation and cohesion, consolidates their material until it be- 
comes almost as hard, as indissoluble, and as impervious as the 
rock. 

But, though man may press the forces of nature into his 
service, there is a limit to the extent of his dominion over 
them, and unless future generations shall discover new modes 
of controlling those forces, or new remedies against their 
action, he must at last succumb in the struggle. When the 
marine estuaries and other basins of reception shall be filled up 
with the sedimentary débris of the mountains, or when the 
lower course of the rivers shall be raised or prolonged by their 
own deposits until they have, no longer, such a descent that 
gravitation and the momentum of the current can overcome 
the frictional resistance of the bed and banks, the water will, 
in spite of all obstacles, diffuse itself laterally and for a time 
raise the level of the champaign land upon its borders, and at 
last convert it into morasses. It is for this reason that Lombar- 
dini advises that a considerable space along the lower course of 
rivers be left undiked, and the water allowed to spread itself 
over its banks and gradually raise them by its deposits.* 
This would, indeed, be a palliative, but only a palliative. For 
the present, however, we have nothing better, and here, as 
often in political economy, we must content ourselves with 
“aprés nous le déluge,” allowing posterity to suffer the penalty 
of our improvidence and our ignorance, or to devise means for 
itself to ward off the consequences of them. 

The deposit of slime by rivers upon the flats along their 
banks not only contributes greatly to the fertility of the soil 
thus flowed, but it subserves a still more important purpose in 
the general economy of nature. All running streams begin 
with excavating channels for themselves, or deepening the 


* This method has been adopted on the lower course of the Lamone, and a 
considerable extent of low ground adjacent to that river has been raised by 
spontaneous deposit to a sufficient height to admit of profitable cultivation, 


RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 505 


natural depressions in which they flow ;* but in proportion as 
their outlets are raised by the solid material transported by 
their currents, their velocity is diminished, they deposit gravel 
and sand at constantly higher and higher points, and so at last 
elevate, in the middle and lower part of their course, the beds 
they had previously scooped out. The raising of the channels 


* IT do not mean to say that all rivers excavate their own valleys, for 1 
have no doubt that in the majority of cases such depressions of the surface 
originate in higher geological causes, such as the fissures and other irregu- 
larities of surface which could not fail to accompany upheaval, and hence the 
valley makes the river, not the river the valley. But even if we suppose a 
basin of the hardest rock to be elevated at once, completely formed, from 
the submarine abyss where it was fashioned, the first shower of rain that 
falls upon it, after it rises to the air, will discharge its waters along the 
lowest lines of the surface, and cut those lines deeper, and so on with every 
successive rain. The disintegrated rock from the upper part of the basin 
forms the lower by alluvial deposit, which is constantly transported farther 
and farther until the resistance of gravitation and cohesion balances the 
mechanical force of the running water. Thus plains, more or less steeply 
inclined, are formed, in which the river is constantly changing its bed, accord- 
ing to the perpetually varying force and direction of its currents, modified 
as they are by ever-fluctuating conditions. Thus the Po is said to have long 
inclined to move its channel southwards, at certain points, in consequence 
of the mechanical force of its northern afiluents. A diversion of these trib- 
utaries from their present beds, so that they should enter the main stream at 
other points and in different directions, might modify the whole course of that 
great river. But the mechanical force of the tributary is not the only element 
of its influence on the course of the principal stream, The deposits it lodges 
in the bed of the latter, acting as simple obstructions or causes of diversion, are 
not less important agents of change. 

+ The distance to which a new obstruction to the flow of a river, whether 
by a dam or by a deposit in its channel, will retard its current, or, in popular 
phrase, ‘‘ set back the water,” is a problem of more difficult practical solution 
than almost any other in hydraulics. The elements—such as straightness or 
crookedness of channel, character of bottom and banks, volume and previous 
velocity of current, mass of water far above the obstruction, extraordinary 
drought or humidity of seasons, relative extent to which the river may be 
affected by the precipitation in its own basin, and by supplies received 
through subterranean.channels from sources so distant as to be exposed to 
very different meteorological influences, effects of clearing and other im- 
provements always going on in new countries—are all extremely difficult, and 
some of them impossible, to be known and measured. In the American 
States, very numerous water-mills have been erected within a few years, and 


506 RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 


is compensated in part by the simultaneous elevation of their 
banks and the flats adjoining them, from the deposit of the 
finer particles of earth and vegetable mould brought down 
from the mountains, without which elevation the low grounds 
bordering all rivers would be, as in many cases they in fact 
are, mere morasses. 

All arrangements which tend to obstruct this process of 
raising the flats adjacent to the channel, whether consisting in 
dikes which confine the waters, and, at the same time, augment 
the velocity of the current, or in other means of producing the 
last-mentioned effect, interfere with the restorative economy of 
nature, and at last occasion the formation of marshes where, if 
left to herself, she might have accumulated inexhaustible stores 
of the richest soil, and spread them out in plains above the reach 
of ordinary floods.* 

Dikes, which, as we have seen, are the means most frequently 
employed to prevent damage by inundation, are generally 
parallel to each other and separated by a distance not very much 
greater than the natural width of the bed.t If such walls are 


there is scarcely a stream in the settled portion of the country which has not 
several mill-dams upon it. When a dam is raised—a process which the grad- 
ual diminution of the summer currents renders frequently necessary — or 
when a new dam is built, it often happens that the meadows above are flowed, 
or that the retardation of the stream extends back to the dam next above. 
This leads to frequent law-suits. From the great uncertainty of the facts, 
the testimony is more conflicting in these than in any other class of cases, 
and the obstinacy with which ‘‘ water causes’’ are disputed has become 
proverbial. 

* The sediment of the Po has filled up some lagoons and swamps in its 
delta, and converted them into comparatively dry land; but, on the other 
hand, the retardation of the current from the lengthening of its course, and 
the diminution of its velocity by the deposits at its mouth, have forced its 
waters at some higher points to spread in spite of embankments, and thus 
fertile fields have been turned into unhealthy and unproductive marshes.— 
See BorreR, Sulla condizione dei Terrent Maremmani nel Ferrarese. Annali 
di Agricoltura, etc., Fase. v., 1863. 

+ In the case of rivers flowi ing through wide alluvial plains and much in- 
clined to shift their beds, like the Po, the embankments often leave a very 
wide space between them. The dikes of the Po are sometimes three or four 
miles apart. 


RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 507 


high enough to confine the water and strong enough to resist 
its pressure, they secure the lands behind them from all the 
evils of inundation except those resulting from filtration ; but 
such ramparts are enormously costly in original construction 
and in maintenance, and, as has been already shown, the filling 
up of the bed of the river in its lower course, by sand and 
gravel, often involves the necessity of incurring new expendi- 
tures in increasing the height of the banks.* They are 


* It appears from the investigations of Lombardini that the rate of eleva- 
tion of the bed of the Po has been much exaggerated by earlier writers, and 
in some parts of its course the change is so slow that its level may be re- 
garded as nearly constant. Observation has established a similar constancy 
in the bed of the Rhone and of many other important rivers, while, on the 
other hand, the beds of the Adige and the Brenta, streams of a more torren- 
tial character, are raised considerably above the level of the adjacent fields. 

The length of the lower course of the Po haying been considerably in- 
creased by the filling up of the Adriatic with its deposits, the velocity of the 
current ought, prima facie, to have been diminished and its bed raised in 
proportion. There are abundant grounds for believing that this has hap- 
pened in the case of the Nile, and one reason why the same effect has not 
been more sensibly perceptible in the Po is, that the confinement of the 
current by continuous embankments gives it a high-water velocity sufficient 
to sweep out deposits let fall at lower stages and slower movements of the 
water. Torrential streams tend to excavate or to raise their beds according 
to the inclination, and to the character of the material they transport. 
No general law on this point can be laid down in relation to the middle and 
lower courses of rivers. The conditions which determine the question of the 
depression or elevation of a river-bed are too multifarious, variable, and 
complex, to be subjected to formule, and they can scarcely even be enu- 
merated. 

The following observation, however, though apparently too unconditionally 
stated, is too important to be omitted. 

Rivers which transport sand, gravel, pebbles, heavy mineral matter in short, 
tend to raise their own beds ; those charged only with fine, light earth, to cut 
them deeper. The prairie rivers of the western United States have deep 
channels, because the mineral matter they carry down is not heavy enough 
to resist the impulse of even a moderate current, and those tributaries of 
the Po which deposit their sediment in the lakes—the Ticino, the Adda, the 
Oglio, and the Mincio—flow in deep cuts, for the same reason.—BAUMGAR- 
TEN, p. 182. 

In regard to the level of the bed of the Po, there is another weighty con- 
sideration which does not seem to have received the attention it deserves. I 


508 RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 


attended, too, with some collateral disadvantages. They deprive 
the earth of the fertilizing deposits of the waters, which are 
powerful natural restoratives of soils exhausted by cultivation; 
they accelerate the rapidity and transporting power of the cur- 
rent at high water by confining it toa narrower channel, and it 
consequently conveys to the sea the earthy matter it holds in 
suspension, and chokes up harbors with a deposit which it 
would otherwise have spread over a wider surface; they in- 
terfere with roads and the convenience of river navigation, and 
no amount of cost or care can secure them from occasional 
rupture, in case of which the rush of the waters through the 
breach is more destructive than the natural flow of the highest 
inundation.* 

For these reasons, many experienced engineers are of opinion 


refer to the secular depression of the western coast of the Adriatic, which is 
computed at the rate of fifteen or twenty centimétres in a century, and which 
of course increases the inclination of the bed, and the velocity and trans- 
porting power of the current of the Po, unless we assume that the whole 
course of the river, from the sea to its sources, shares in the depression. Of 
this assumption there is no proof, and the probability is to the contrary. 
For the evidence, though not conclusive, perhaps, tends to show an eleya- 
tion of the Tuscan coast, and even of the Ligurian shore at points lying farther 
west than the sources of the Po. The level of certain parts of the bed of 
the river referred to by Lombardini as constant, is not their elevation as com- 
pared with points nearer the sea, but relatively to the adjacent plains, and 
there is every reason to believe that the depression of the Adriatic coast, 
whether, as is conceivable, occasioned by the mere weight of the fluviatile 
deposits or by more general geological causes, has increased the slope of the 
bed of the river between the points in question and the sea. In this instance, 
then, the relative permanency of the river level at certain points may be, not 
the ordinary case of a natural equilibrium, but the negative effect of an in- 
creased velocity of current which prevents deposits where they would cther- 
wise have happened. 

* To secure the city of Sacramento, in California, from the inundations to 
which it is subject, a dike or levée was built upon the bank of the river and 
raised to an elevation above that of the highest known floods, and it was 
connected, below the town, with grounds lying considerably above the river. 
On one occasion a breach in the dike occurred above the town at a very high 
stage of the flood. The water poured in behind it, and overflowed the lower 
part of the city, which remained submerged for some time after the river had 


RIVER EMBANKMENTS. 509 


that the system of longitudinal dikes is fundamentally wrong, 
and it has been argued that if the Po, the Adige, and the Bren- 
ta had been left unconfined, as the Nile formerly was, and 
allowed to spread their muddy waters at will, according to the 
laws of nature, the sediment they have carried to the coast 
would have been chiefly distributed over the plains of Lombar- 
dy. Their banks, it is supposed, would have risen as fast as 
their beds, the coast-line would not have been extended so far 
into the Adriatic, and, the current of the streams being conse- 
quently shorter, the inclination of theirchannel and the rapidity 
of their flow would not have been so greatly diminished. Had 


retired to its ordinary level, because the dike, which had been built to keep 
the water out, now kept it 7. 

According to Arthur Young, on the lower Po, where the surface of the 
river at high water has been elevated considerably above the level of the ad- 
jacent fields by diking, the peasants in his time frequently endeavored to secure 
their grounds against threatened devastation through the bursting of the 
dikes, by crossing the river when the danger beeame imminent and opening 
a cut inthe opposite bank, thus saving their own property by flooding their 
neighbors’. He adds, that at high water the navigation of the river was abso- 
lutely interdicted, except to mail and passenger boats, and that the guards 
fired upon all others; the object of the prohibition being to prevent the 
peasants from resorting to this measure of self-defence.—TZvravels in Italy - 
and Spain, Nov. 7, 1789. 

In a flood of the Po in 1839, a breach of the embankment took place at 
Bonizzo. The water poured through and inundated 116,000 acres, or 181 
square miles, of the plain to the depth of from twenty to twenty-three feet, in 
the lower parts. The inundation of May, 1872, a great breach occurred in the 
dike near Ferrara, and 170,000 acres of cultivated Jand were overflowed, and a 
population of 30,000 souls driven from their homes. In the flood of October 
in the same year, in consequence of a breach of the dike at Revere, 250,000 
acres of cultivated soil were overflowed, and 60,000 persons were made 
homeless. The dikes were seriously injured at more than forty points. 
See page 279, ante. In the flood of 1856, the Loire made seventy-three breaches 
in its dikes, and thus, instead of a comparatively gradual rise and gentle 
expansion of its waters, it created seventy-three impetuous torrents, which 
inflicted infinitely greater mischief than a simply natural overflow would 
have done. The dikes or levées of the Mississippi, being of more recent con- 
struction than those of the Po, are not yet well consolidated and fortified, and 
for this reason crevasses which occasion destructive inundations are of very 
frequent occurrence, 


510 TRANSVERSE EMBANKMENTS. 


man, too, spared a reasonable proportion of the forests of the 
Alps, and not attempted to control the natural drainage of the 
surface, the Po, it has been said, would resemble the Nile in all 
its essential characteristics, and, in spite of the difference of 
climate, perhaps be regarded as the friend and ally, not the 
enemy and the inyader, of the population which dwells upon 
its banks. 

But it has been shown by Humphreys and Abbot that the 
system of longitudinal dikes is the only one susceptible of ad- 
vantageous application to the Mississippi, and if we knew the 
primitive geography and hydrography of the basin of the Po as 
well as we do those of the valley of the great American river, 
we should very probably find that the condemnation of the 
plan pursued by the ancient inhabitants of Lombardy is a 
too hasty generalization, and that the case of the Nile is an 
exception, not an example of the normal régime and condition 
of a great river.* 

But in any event, these theoretical objections are counsels 
apres coup. The dikes of the Po and probably of some of its 
tributaries were begun before we have any trustworthy physical 
or political annals of the provinces they water. The civilization 
of the valley has accommodated itself to these arrangements, 


* Embankments have been employed on the lower course of the Po for at 
least two thousand years, and for some centuries they have been connected in 
a continuous chain from the sea tothe vicinity of Cremona. From early ages 
the Italian hydrographers have stood in the front rank of their profession, and 
the Italian literature of this branch of material improvement is exceedingly 
voluminous, exhaustive, and complete. 

‘“‘ The science of rivers after the barbarous ages,” says Mengotti, ‘‘ may be 
said to have been born and perfected in Italy.” The eminent Italian engineer 
Lombardini published in 1870, under the title of Guida allo studio del? idrolo- 
gia fluviale e del? Idraulica pratica, which serves both as asummary of the 
recent progress of that science and as an index to the literature of the subject. 
The professional student, therefore, as well as the geographer, will have very 
frequent occasion to consult Italian authorities, and in the very valuable Re- 
port of Humphreys and Abbot on the Mississippi, America has lately made a 
contribution to our potamological knowledge, which, in scientific interest and 
practical utility, does not fall short of the ablest European productions in the 
same branch of inquiry. 


LEVEES OF THE MISSISSIPPI. 511 


and the interests which might be sacrificed by a change of 
system are too vast to be hazarded by what, in the present state 
ot our knowledge, can be only considered as a doubtful exper- 
iment.* 

The embankments of the Po, though they are of vast extent 
and have employed centuries in their construction, are inferior 
in magnitude to the dikes or levées of the Mississippi, which are 
the work of scarcely a hundred years, and of a comparatively 
sparse population. On the right or western bank of the river, 
the levée extends, with only occasional interruptions from high 
bluffs and the mouths of rivers, for a distance of more than 
elevenhundred miles. The left bank is, in general, higher than 
the right, and upon that side a continuous embankment is not 
needed; but the total length of the dikes of the Mississippi, 
including those of the lower course of its tributaries and of its 
bayous or natural emissaries, is not less than 2,500 miles. They 
constitute, therefore, not only one of the greatest material 
achievements of the American people, but one of the most 
remarkable systems of physical improvement which has been 
anywhere accomplished in modern times. 

Those who condemn the system of longitudinal embankments 
have often advised that, in cases where that system cannot 
be abandoned without involving too great a sacrifice of exist- 
ing interests, the elevation of the dikes should be much re- 
duced, so as to present no obstruction to the lateral spread of 
extraordinary floods, and that they should be provided with 
sluices to admit the water without violence whenever they are 
likely to be overflowed. Where dikes haye not been erected, or 
where they have been reduced in height, it is proposed to con- 
struct, at convenient intervals, transverse embankments of mod- 


* Dupenchel advised a resort to the ‘‘ heroic remedy”’ of sacrificing, or con- 
yerting into cellars, the lower storeys of houses in cities exposed to river inun- 
dation, filling up the streets, and admitting the water of floods freely over the 
adjacent country, and thus allowing it to raise the level of the soil to that of the 
highest inundations.—Traité @ Hydraulique et de Géologie Agricoles. Paris, 
1868, p. 241. 


519 ROZET’S PLAN. 


erate height running from the banks of the river across the 
plains to the hills which bound them. These measures, it is 
argued, will diminish the violence of inundations by permitting 
the waters to extend themselves over a greater surface, and by 
thus retarding the flow of the river currents, will, at the same 
time, secure the deposit of fertilizing slime upon all the soil 
covered by the flood.* 

Rozet, an eminent French engineer, has proposed a method 
of diminishing the ravages of inundations, which aims to com- 
bine the advantages of all other systems, and at the same time 
to obviate the objections to which they are all more or less 
liable.t The plan of Rozet is recommended by its simplicity 
and cheapness as well as its facility and rapidity of execution, 
and is looked upon with favor by many persons very compe- 
tent to judge in such matters. It is, however, by no means ca- 
pable of universal application, though it would often doubtless 
prove highly useful in connection with the measures now em- 
ployed in South-eastern France. He proposes to commence with 
the amphitheatres in which mountain torrents so often rise, by 
covering their slopes and filling their beds with loose blocks of 
rock, and by constructing at their outlets, and at other narrow 
points in the channels of the torrents, permeable barriers of the 
same material promiscuously heaped up, much according to 
the method employed by the ancient Romans in their northern 
provinces for a similar purpose. By this means, he supposes, 
the rapidity of the current would be checked, and the quantity 
of transported pebbles and gravel—which, by increasing the 
mechanical force of the water, greatly aggravate the damage 
by floods—much diminished. When the stream has reached 
that part of its course where it is bordered by soil capable of 
cultivation, and worth the expense of protection, he proposes 


* The system described in the text is substantially the Egyptian method, the 
ancient Nile dikes having been constructed rather to retain than to exclude 
the water. 

+ Moyens de forcer les Torrents de rendre une partie du sol qwils ravagent, 
at @empécher les grandes Inondations. 


ROZET’S PLAN. _ 513 


to place along one or both banks, according to circumstances, a 
line of cubical blocks of stone or pillars of masonry three or 
four feet high and wide, and at the distance of about eleven 
yards from each other. The space between the two lines, or 
between a line and the opposite high bank, would, of course, 
be determined by observation of the width of the swift-water 
current at high floods. As an auxiliary measure, small ditches 
and banks, or low walls of pebbles, should be constructed from 
the line of blocks across the grounds to be protected, nearly at 
right angles to the current, but slightly inclining downwards, 
and at convenient distances from each other. Rozet thinks the 
proper interval would be 300 yards, and it is evident that, if he 
is right in his main principle, hedges, rows of trees, or even 
common fences, would in many cases answer as good a purpose 
as banks and trenches or low walls. The blocks or pillars of 
stone would, he contends, check the lateral currents so as to 
compel them to let fall all their pebbles and gravel in the main 
channel—where they would be rolled along until ground down 
to sand or silt—and the transverse obstructions would detain 
the water upon the soil long enough to secure the deposit of its 
fertilizing slime. Numerous facts are cited in support of the 
author’s views, and I imagine there are few residents of rural 
districts whose own observation will not furnish testimony con- 
firmatory of their soundness.* 


* The effect of trees and other detached obstructions in checking the flow 
of water is particularly noticed by Palissy in his essay on Waters und Foun- 
tains, p. 175, edition of 1844. ‘‘ There be,” says he, ‘‘in divers parts of 
France, and specially at Nantes, wooden bridges, where, to break the force of 
the waters and of the floating ice, which might endamage the piers of the 
said bridges, they have driven upright timbers into the bed of the rivers above 
the said piers, without the which they should abide but little. And in like 
wise, the trees which be planted along the mountains do much deaden the 
violence of the waters that flow from them.” 

Lombardini attaches great importance to the planting of rows of trees trans- 
versely to the current on grounds subject to overflow.—Hsame degli Studi sul 
Tevere, § 53, oe Appendice, $$ 33, 34, 

o 


514 REMOVAL OF OBSTRUCTIONS. 


Removal of Obstructions. 


The removal of obstructions in the beds of rivers by dredging 
the bottom or blasting rocks, the washing out of deposits and 
locally increasing the depth of water by narrowing the channel 
by means of spurs or other constructions projecting from the 
banks, and, finally, the cutting off of bends and thus shortening 
the course of the stream, diminishing the resistance of its shores 
and bottom and giving the bed a more rapid declivity, have 
all been employed not only to facilitate navigation, but as 
auxiliaries to more effectual modes of preventing inundations. 
But a bar removed from one point is almost sure to re-form at 
the same or another, spurs occasion injurious eddies and unfore- 
seen diversions of the current,* and the cutting off of bends, 
though oecasionally effected by nature herself, and sometimes 
advantageous in torrential streams whose banks are secured by 
solid walls of stone or other artificial constructions, seldom es- 
tablishes a permanent channel, and besides, the increased rapid- 
ity of the flow through the new cut often injuriously affects 
the régime of the river for a considerable distance below.t+ 


* The introduction of a new system of spurs with parabolic curves has been 
attended with great advantage in France.—Annales du Génie Civil, Mai, 1863. 

{+ This practice has sometimes been resorted to on the Mississippi with ad- 
vantage to navigation, but it is quite another question whether that advan- 
tage has not been too dearly purchased by the injury to the hanks at lower 
points. If we suppose a river to have a navigable course of 1,600 miles as 
measured by its natural channel, with a descent of 800 feet, we shall have a 
fall of six inches to the mile. If the length of channel be reduced to 1,200 
miles by cutting off bends, the fall is increased to eight inches per mile. The 
augmentation of velocity consequent upon this increase of inclination is not 
eomputable without taking into account other elements, such as depth and 
volume of water, diminution of direct resistance, and the like, but in almost 
any supposable case, it would be sufficient to produce great effects on the 
height of floods, the deposit of sediment in the channel, on the shores, and at 
the outlet, the erosion of banks and other points of much geographical import- 
ance. 

The Po, in those parts of its course where the embankments leave a wide 
space between, often cuts off bends in its channel and straightens its course. 


COMBINATION OF METHODS. 515 


Combination of Methods. 


Upon the whole, it is obvious that no one of the methods 
heretofore practised or proposed for averting the evils resulting 
from river inundations is capable of universal application. 
Each of them is specially suited to a special case. But the 
hydrography of almost every considerable river and its tribu- 
taries will be found to embrace most special cases, most 
known forms of superficial fluid circulation. For rivers, in 
general, begin in the mountains, traverse the plains, and end in 
the sea; they are torrents at their sources, swelling streams in 
their middle course, placid currents, flowing mollc flumine, at 
their termination. Hence in the different parts of their course 
the different methods of controlling and utilizing them may 
successively find application, and there is every reason to be- 
lieve that by a judicious application of all, every great river 
may, in a considerable degree, be deprived of its powers of 
evil and rendered subservient to the use, the convenience, and 
the dominion of man.* 


These short cuts are called salt, or leaps, and sometimes abridge the distance 
between their termini by several miles. In 1777, the salto of Cottaro short- 
ened a distance of 7,000 métres by 5,000, or, in other words, reduced the 
length of the river by five kilométres, or about three miles, and in 1807 and 
1810 the two salti of Mezzanone effected a still greater reduction. 

* On the remedies against inundation, see the valuable paper of Lom- 
BARDINI, Sulle Inondazioni avvenute in questi ultimi tempi in Francia. Milano, 
1858. 

There can be no doubt that in the case of rivers which receive their supply 
in a large measure from mountain streams, the methods described in a former 
chapter as recently employed in South-eastern France to arrest the formation 
and lessen the force of torrents, would prove equally useful as a preventive 
remedy against inundations. They would both retard the delivery of surface- 
water and diminish the discharge of sediment into rivers, thus operating at 
once against the two most efficient causes of destructive floods. See Chapter 
III., pp. 316 e segq. 


516 DIKES OF THE NILE. 


Dikes of the Nile. 


“ History tells us,” says Mengotti, “that the Nile became 
terrible and destructive to ancient Egypt, in consequence of 
being confined within elevated dikes, from the borders of 
Nubia to the sea. It being impossible for these barriers to resist 
the pressure of its waters at such a height, its floods burst its 
ramparts, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, and 
deluged the plains, which lay far below the level of its current. 

In one of its formidable inundations the Nile over- 
whelmed and drowned a large part of the population. The 
Egyptians then perceived that they were struggling against 
nature in vain, and they resolved to remove the dikes, and per- 
mit the river to expand itself laterally and raise by its deposits 
the surface of the fields which border its channel.’’* 

The original texts of the passages cited by Mengotti, from 
Latin translations of Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch and from 
Pliny the Elder, do not by any means confirm this statement, 
though the most important of them, that from Diodorus Siculus, 
is, perhaps, not irreconcilable with it. Not one of them speaks 
of the removal of the dikes, and I understand them all as 
relating to the mixed system of embankments, reservoirs, 
and canals which have been employed in Egypt through the 
whole period concerning which we have clear information. I 
suppose that the disastrous inundations referred to by the 
authors in question were simply extraordinary floods of the 
same character as those which have been frequent at later 
periods of Egyptian history, and I find nothing in support of 
the proposition that continuous embankments along the banks 
of the Nile ever existed until such were constructed by Me- 
hemet Ali.t 


* Tdralica Fisica e Sperimentale. 2d edizione, vol. i., pp. 131, 133. 

+ The gradual elevation of the bed of the Nile from sedimentary deposit, 
from the prolongation of the Delta and consequent reduction of the inclination 
of the river-bed, or, as has been supposed by some, though without probability, 


DIKES OF THE NILE. 517 


The object of the dikes of the Po, and, with few exceptions, 
of those of other European rivers, has always been to confine 
the waters of floods and the solid material transported by them 
within as narrow a channel as possible, and entirely to pre- 
vent them from flowing over the adjacent plains. The object 
of the Egyptian dikes and canals is the reverse, namely, to 
diffuse the swelling waters and their sediment over as wide a 
surface as possible, to store them up until the soil they cover has 
been thoroughly saturated and enriched, and then to conduct 
them over other grounds requiring a longer or a second submer- 
sion, and, in general, to suffer none of the precious fluid to escape 
except by evaporation and infiltration. 

Lake Moeris, whether wholly an artificial excavation, or a 
natural basin converted by embankments into a reservoir, was 
designed chiefly for the same purpose as the barrage built by 
Mougel Bey across the two great arms which enclose the Delta, 
namely, as a magazine to furnish a perennial supply of water 
to the thirsty soil. But these artificial arrangements alone did 
not suffice. Canals were dug to receive the water at lower 
stages of the river and conduct it far into the interior, and as 
all this was still not enough, hundreds of thousands of wells 
were sunk to bring up from the subsoil, and spread over the 
surface, the water which, by means of infiltration from the 
river-bed, pervades the inferior strata of the whole valley.* 

If asystem of lofty continuous dikes, like those of the Po, 
had really been adopted in Egypt, in the early dynasties when 
the power and the will to undertake the most stupendous ma- 
terial enterprises were so eminently characteristic of the gov- 


from a secular rise of the coast, rendered necessary some change in the 
hydraulic arrangements of Egypt. Mehemet Ali was advised to adopt a sys- 
tem of longitudinal levées, and he embanked the river from Jebel Silsileh to 
the sea with dikes six or seven feet high and twenty feet thick. Similar em- 
bankments were made around the Delta. These dikes are provided with 
transverse embankments, with sluices for admitting and canals for distributing 
the water, and they serve rather to retain the water and control its flow than 
to exclude it.—CLoT Bry, Aperceu sur ? Kgypte, ii., 437, 

* Tt is said that in the Delta alone 50,000 wells are employed for irrigation, 


518 DEPOSITS OF THE NILE. 


ernment of that country, and persevered in through later 
ages, and the waters of the annual inundation had thus been 
permanently prevented from flooding the land, it is conceiy- 
able that the productiveness of the small area of cultivable 
soil in the Nile valley might have been long kept up by 
artificial irrigation and the application of manures. But 
nature would have rebelled at last, and centuries before our 
time the mighty river would have burst the fetters by which 
impotent man had vainly striven to bind his swelling floods, 
the fertile fields of Egypt would have been converted into 
dank morasses, and then, perhaps, in some distant future, when 
the expulsion of man should have allowed the gradual restora- 
tion of the primitive equilibrium, would be again transformed 
into luxuriant garden and plough land. Fortunately, the 
saprentia Atgyptiorum, the wisdom of the Egyptians, taught 
them better things. They invited and welcomed, not repulsed, 
the slimy embraces of Nilus, and his favors have been, from 
the hoariest antiquity, the greatest material blessing that 
nature ever bestowed upon a people.* 


Deposits of the Nile. 


The Nile is larger than all the rivers of Lombardy together,t 
it drains a basin fifty, possibly even a hundred, times as exten- 


* Deep borings have not detected any essential difference in the quantity or 
quality of the deposits of the Nile for forty or fifty, or, as some compute, for 
a hundred centuries. From what vast store of rich earth does this river de- 
rive the three or four inches of fertilizing material which it spreads over the 
soil of Egypt every hundred years? Not from the White Nile, for that river 
drops nearly all its suspended matter in the broad expansions and slow 
current of its channel south of the tenth degree of north latitude. Nor does 
it appear that much sediment is contributed by the Bahbr-el-Azrek, which 
flows through forests for a great part of its course. Ihave been informed by 
an old European resident of Ezypt who is very familiar with the Upper Nile, 
that almost the whole of the earth with which its waters are charged is 
brought down by the Takazzé. 

+ From daily measurements during a period of fourteen years—1527 to 
1840—the mean delivery of the Po at Ponte Lagoscuro, below the entrance 
of its last tributary, is found to be 1,720 cubic métres, or 60,745 cubic feet, 


DEPOSITS OF THE NILE. 519 


sive, its banks have been occupied by man probably twice as 
long. But its geographical character has not been much 
changed in the whole period of recorded history, and, though 


per second. Its smallest delivery is 186 cubic métres, or 6,569 cubic feet, 
its greatest 5,156 cubic métres, or 152,094 cubic feet. The average delivery 
of the Nile being 101,000 cubic feet per second, it follows that the Po con- 
tributes tothe Adriatic rather more than six-tenths as much water as the Nile 
to the Mediterranean—a result which will surprise most readers. 

It is worth remembering that the mean delivery of the Rhone is almost 
identical with that of the Po, and that of the Rhine is very nearly the same. 
Though the Po receives four-tenths of its water from lakes, in which the 
streams that empty into them let fall the solid material they bring down from 
the mountains, its deposits in the Adriatic are at least sixty or seventy per 
cent. greater than those transported to the Mediterranean by the Rhone, which 
derives most of its supply from mountain and torrential tributaries. Those 
tributaries lodge much sediment in the Lake of Geneva and: the Lac de Bour- 
get, but the total erosion of the Po and its aflluents must be considerably 
greater than that of the Rhone system. The Rhine conveys to the sea much 
less sediment than either of the other two rivers.—LOMBARDINI, Cargia- 
menti nella condiztone del Po, pp. 29, 39. 

The mean discharge of the Mississippi is 675,000 cubic feet per second, and, 
accordingly, that river contributes to the sea about eleven times as much water 
as the Po, and more than six and a half times as much as the Nile. The dis- 
charge of the Mississippi is estimated at one-fourth of the precipitation in its 
basin—certainly a very large proportion, when we consider the rapidity of 
evaporation in many parts of the basin, and the probable loss by infiltration. 
— HUMPHREYS AND ABsBorT’s Report, p. 93. 

The basin of the Mississippi has an area forty-six times as large as that of 
the Po, with a mean annual precipitation of thirty inches, while that of the 
Po, at least according to official statistics, has a precipitation of forty inches. 
Hence the down-fall in the former is one-fourth less than in the latter. Besides 
this, the Mississippi loses little or nothing by the diversion of its waters for irriga- 
tion. Consequently the measured discharge of the Mississippiis proportionally 
much less than that of the Po, and we are authorized to conclude that the diifer- 
ence is partly due to the escape of water from the bed, or at least the basin 
of the Mississippi, by subterranean channels. 

These comparisons are interesting in reference to the supply received by 
the sea directly from great rivers, but they fail to give a true idea of the real 
volume of thelatter. To take the case of the Nile and the Po: we have 
reason to suppose that comparatively little water is diverted from the tribu- 
taries of the former for irrigation, but enormous quantities are drawn from its 
main trunk for that purpose, below the point where it receives its last afiluent. 
This quantity is now increasing in so rapid a proportion, that Hlis¢e Reclus 


520 DEPOSITS OF THE NILE. 


its outlets have somewhat fluctuated in number and position, 
its historically known encroachments upon the sea are trifling 
compared with those of the Po and the neighboring streams. 
The deposits of the Nile are naturally greater in Upper than in 
Lower Egypt. They are found to have raised the soil at 
Thebes about seven feet within the last seventeen hundred 
years, and in the Delta the rise has been certainly more than 
half as great. 

We shall, therefore, probably not exceed the truth if we 
suppose the annually inundated surface of Egypt to have been 
elevated, upon an average, ten feet,* within the last 5,000 years, 


‘foresees the day when the entire low-water current will be absorbed by new 
arrangements to meet the needs of extended and improved agriculture. On 
the other hand, while the afiluents of the Po send off a great quantity of water 
into canals of irrigation, the main trunk loses little or nothing in that way 
except at Chivasso. Trustworthy data are wanting to enable us to estimate 
how far these different modes of utilizing the water balance each other in the 
case under consideration. Perhaps the Canal Cavour, and other irrigating 
canals now proposed, may one day intercept as large a proportion of the sup- 
ply of the lower Po as Egyptian dikes, canals, shadoofs, and steam-pumps do 
of that of the Nile. 

Another circumstance is important to be considered in comparing the 
character of these three rivers. The Po runsnearly east and west, and it and its 
tributaries are exposed to no other difference of meteorological conditions than 
those which always subsist between the mountains and the plains. The 
course of the Nile and the Mississippi is mainly north andsouth. The sources 
of the Nile are in a very humid region, its lower course for many hundred 
miles in almost rainless latitudes with enormous evaporating power, while the 
precipitation is large throughout the Mississippi system, except in the basins of 
some of its western afiluents. 

* Fraas and Hyth maintain that we have no trustworthy data for calculating 
the annual or secular elevation of the soil of Egypt by the sediment of the 
Nile. The deposit, they say, is variable from irregularity of current, and 
especially from the interference of man with the operations of nature, to a 
degree which renders any probable computation of the amount quite impossible. 
—FrAAs, Aus dem Orient, pp. 212, 213. 

The sedimentary matter transported by the Nile might doubtless be esti- 
mated with approximate precision by careful observation of the proportion of 
suspended slime and water at different stations and seasons for a few succes- ° 
sive years. Figari Bey states that at low stages the water of the Nile contains 
little or no sediment, and that the greatest proportion occurs about the end of 


DEPOSITS OF THE NILE. 521 


or twice and a half the period during which the history of the 
Po is known to us.* 

As I have observed, the area of cultivated soil is much less 
extensive now than under the dynasties of the Pharaohs and 
the Ptolemies; for—though, in consequence of the elevation 
of the river-bed, the inundations now have a wider natural 
spread—the industry of the ancient Egyptians conducted the 
Nile water over a great surface which it does not now reach. 

Had the Nile been banked in, like the Po, all this deposit, 
except that contained in the water diverted by canals or other- 
wise drawn from the river for irrigation and other purposes, 


July, and, of course, while the river is still rising. Experiments at Khartum 
at that season showed solid matter in the proportion of one to a thousand by 
weight. The quantity is relatively greater at Cairo, a fact which shows that 
the river receives more earth from the erosion of its banks than it deposits at 
its own bottom, and it must consequently widen its channel unless we suppose 
a secular depression of the coast at the mouth of the Nile which produces an 
increased inclination of the bed of the river, and consequently an augmented 
velocity of flow sufficient to sweep out earth from the bottom and mix it with 
the current. 

Herschell states the Nile sediment at 1 in 633 by weight, and computes the 
entire annual quantity at 140 millions of tons.—Physical Geography, p. 231. 

The mean proportion of sedimentary material in the waters of the Missis- 
sippi is calculated at 1 to 1,500 by weight, and 1 to 2,900 in volume, and the 
total annual quantity at 812,500,000,000 pounds, which would cover one square 
mile to the depth of 241 feet.— HUMPHREYS AND ABBOT, Report, p. 149. 

* We are quite safe in supposing that the valley of the Nile has been 
occupied by man at least 5,000 years. The dates of Egyptian chronology are 
uncertain, but I believe no inquirer estimates the age of the great pyramids at 
less than forty centuries, and the construction of such works implies an al- 
ready ancient civilization. 

It is an interesting fact that the old Egyptian system of embankments and 
canals is probably more ancient than the geological changes which have con- 
verted the Mississippi from a limpid to a turbid stream, and occasioned the 
formation of the vast delta at the mouth of that river. Humphreys and Abbot 
conclude that the delta of the Mississippi began its encroachments on the 
Gulf of Mexico not more than 4,400 years ago, before which period they sup- 
pose the Mississippi to have been ‘‘a comparatively clear stream,” conveying 
very little sediment to the sea. The present rate of advance of the delta is 
262 feet a year, and there are reasons for thinking that the amount of deposit 
has long been approximately constant.—eport, pp. 485, 436. 


522 OBSTRUCTION OF RIVER MOUTHS. 


would have been carried out to sea. This would have been a 
considerable quantity ; for the Nile holds some earth in suspen- 
sion at all seasons except at the very lowest water, a much 
larger proportion during the flood, and irrigation must have 
been carried on during the whole year.. The precise amount of 
sediment which would have been thus distributed over the soil 
is matter of conjecture, but though large, it would have been 
much less than the inundations have deposited, and continuous 
longitudinal embankments would have compelled the Nile 
to transport to the Mediterranean an immense quantity over 
and above what it has actually deposited in that sea. The 
Mediterranean is shoal for some miles out to sea along the 
whole coast of the Delta, and the large bays or lagoons within 
the coast-line, which communicate both with the river and the 
sea, have little depth of water. These lagoons the river deposits 
would haye filled up, and there would still have been surplus 
earth enough to extend the Delta far into the Mediterranean.* 


Obstruction of Liver Mouths. 


The mouths of a large proportion of the streams known to 
ancient navigation are already blocked up by sand-bars or 
fluviatile deposits, and the maritime approaches to river harbors 
frequented by the ships of Phenicia and Carthage and Greece 
and Rome are shoaled to a considerable distance out to sea. 
The inclination of the lower course of almost every known river- 
bed has been considerably reduced within the historical period, 
and nothing but great volume of water, or exceptional rapidity 
of flow, now enables a few large streams like the Amazon, the 
La Plata, the Ganges, and, in a less degree, the Mississippi, to 


* The present annual extension of the Delta is, if perceptible, at all events 
very small. According to some authorities, a few hectares are added every 
year at each Nile mouth. Others, among whom I may mention Fraas, deny 
that there is any extension at all, the deposit being balanced by a secular de- 
pression of the coast. 

Elisée Reclus states that the Delta advances about 40 inches per year.—La 
Terre, i., p. 500. 


OBSTRUCTION OF RIVER MOUTHS. 593 


carry their own deposits far enough out into deep water to pre- 
vent the formation of serious obstructions to navigation. But 
the degradation of their banks, and the transportation of earthy 
matter to the sea by their currents, are gradually fillmg up the 
estuaries even of these mighty floods, and unless the threatened 
evil shall be averted by the action of geological forces, or by 
artificial contrivances more efficient than dredging-machines, 
the destruction of every harbor in the world which receives a 
considerable river must inevitably take place at no very distant 
date. 

This result would, perhaps, have followed in some incaleula- 
bly distant future, if man had not come to inhabit the earth as 
soon as the natural forces which had formed its surface had 
arrived at such an approximate equilibrium that his existence 
on the globe was possible ; but the general effect of his indus- 
trial operations has been to accelerate it immensely. Rivers, in 
countries planted by nature with forests and never inhabited by 
man, employ the little earth and gravel they transport chiefly 
to raise their own beds and to form plains in their basins. In 
their upper course, where the current is swiftest, they are most 
heavily charged with coarse rolled or suspended matter, and 
this, in floods, they deposit on their shores in the mountain val- 
leys where they rise ; in their middle course, a lighter earth is 
spread over the bottom of their widening basins, and forms 
plains of moderate extent; the fine silt which floats farther is 
deposited over a still broader area, or, if carried out to sea, is 
in great part quickly swept far off by marine currents and 
dropped at last in deep water. Man’s “improvement” of the 
soil increases the erosion from its surface; his arrangements 
for confining the lateral spread of the water in floods compel the 
rivers to transport to their mouths the earth derived from that 
erosion even in their upper course; and, consequently, the sedi- 
ment they deposit at their outlets is not only much larger in 
quantity, but composed of heavier materials, which sink more 
readily to the bottom of the sea and are less easily removed by 
marine currents. 


5O4 SEDIMENT OF THE NILE. 


The tidal movement of the ocean, deep-sea currents, and the 
agitation of inland waters by the wind, lift up the sands strewn 
over the bottom by diluvial streams or sent down by mountain 
torrents, and throw them up on dry land, or deposit them in 
sheltered bays and nooks of the coast—for the flowing is strong- 
er than the ebbing tide, the affluent than the refluent wave. 
This cause of injury to harbors it is not in man’s power to re- 
sist by any means at present available; but, as we have seen, 
something can be done to prevent the degradation of high 
grounds, and to diminish the quantity of earth which is annu- 
ally abstracted from the mountains, from table-lands, and from 
river-banks, to raise the bottom of the sea. 

This latter cause of harbor obstruction, though an active agent, 
is, nevertheless, in many cases, the less powerful of the two. The 
earth suspended in the lower course of fluviatile currents is lighter 
than sea-sand, river water lighter than sea water, and hence, if a 
land stream enters the sea with a considerable volume, its water 
flows over that of the sea, and bears its slime with it until it lets it 
fall far from shore, or, as is more frequently the case, mingles 
with some marine current and transports its sediment to a re- 
mote point of deposit. The earth borne out of the mouths of 
the Nile is in part carried over the waves which throw up sea- 
sand on the beach, aud deposited in deep water, in part drifted 
by the current, which sweeps east and north along the coasts of 
Egypt and Syria, and lodged in every nook along the shore— 
and among others, to the great detriment of the Suez Canal, in 
the artificial harbor at its northern terminus—and in part borne 
along until it finds a final resting-place in the north-eastern 
angle of the Mediterranean.* Thus the earth loosened by the 
rude Abyssinian ploughshare, and washed down by the rain 


* “The stream carries this mud, etc., at first farther to the east, and only 
lets it fall where the force of the current becomes weakened. This explains 
the continual advance of the land seaward along the Syrian coast, in conse- 
quence of which Tyre and Sidon no longer lie on the shore, but some distance 
inland. That the Nile contributes to this deposit may easily be seen, even by 
the unscientifie observer, from the stained and turbid character of the water 


DEPOSITS OF TUSCAN RIVERS. 525 


from the hills of Ethiopia which man has stripped of their pro- 
tecting forests, contributes to raise the plains of Egypt, to shoal 
the maritime channels which lead to the city built by Alexan- 
der near the mouth of the Nile, to obstruct the artificial com- 
munication between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and 
to fill up the harbors made famous by Phenician commerce. 


Deposits of the Tuscan Rivers. 


The Arno, and all the rivers rising on the western slopes 
and spurs of the Apennines, carry down immense quantities 
of mud to the Mediterranean. There can be no doubt that the 
volume of earth so transported is very much greater than it 
would have been had the soil about the headwaters of those 
rivers continued to be protected from wash by forests; and 
there is as little question that the quantity borne out to sea by 
the rivers of Western Italy is much increased by artificial em- 
bankments, because they are thereby prevented from spreading 
over the surface the sedimentary matter with which they are 


for many miles from its mouths. Ships often encounter floating masses of 
Nile mud, and Dr. Clarke thus describes a case of this sort: 

‘“ While we were at table, we heard the sailors who were throwing the lead 
suddenly cry out: ‘Three and a half!’ The ship slackened her way, and 
veered about. As she came round, the whole surface of the water was seen 
to be covered with thick, black mud, which extended so far that it appeared 
like an island. At the same time, actual land was nowhere to be seen—not 
even from the mast-head—nor was any notice of such a shoal to be found on 
any chart on board. The fact is, as we learned afterwards, that a stratum of 
mud, stretching from the mouths of the Nile for many miles out into the open 
sea, forms a movable deposit along the Egyptian coast. If this deposit is 
driven forwards by powerful currents, it sometimes rises to the surface, and 
disturbs the mariner by the sudden appearance of shoals where the charts lead 
him to expect a considerable depth of water. But these strata of mud are, in 
reality, not in the least dangerous. As soon as a ship strikes them they break 
up at once, and a frigate may hold her course in perfect safety where an inex- 
perienced pilot, misled by his soundings, would every moment expect to be 
stranded.” —B6éTTGER, Das Mittelmeer, pp. 188, 189. 

This phenomenon is not peculiar to the locality in question, and it is fre- 
quently observed in the Gulf of Bengal, and other great marine estuaries. 


526 DEPOSITS OF TUSCAN RIVERS. 


charged. The western coast of Tuscany has advanced some 
miles seawards within a very few centuries. The bed of the 
sea, for a long distance, has been raised, and of course the 
relative elevation of the land above it lessened; harbors have 
been filled up and destroyed; long lines of coast dunes have 
been formed, and the diminished inclination of the beds of the 
rivers near their outlets has caused their waters to overflow 
their banks and convert them into pestilential marshes. The 
territorial extent of Western Italy has thus been considerably 
increased, but the amount of soil habitable and cultivable by 
man has been, ina still higher propostion, diminished. The 
coast of ancient Etruria was filled with great commercial towns, 
and their rural environs were occupied by a large and pros- 
perous population. But maritime Tuscany has long been one 
of the most unhealthy districts in Christendom; the famous 
Etruscan mart of Populonia has scarcely an inhabitant; the 
coast is almost absolutely depopulated, and the malarious 
fevers have extended their ravages far into the interior. 

These results are certainly not to be ascribed wholly to 
human action. They are, in a large proportion, due to geo- 
logical causes over which man has no control. The soil of 
much of Tuscany becomes pasty, almost fluid even, as soon as 
it is moistened, and when thoroughly saturated with water, it 
flows like ariver. Such a soil as this would not be completely 
protected by woods, and, indeed, it would now be difficult to 
confine it long enough to allow it to cover itself with forest 
vegetation. Nevertheless, it certainly was once chiefly wooded, 
and the rivers which flow through it must then have been much 
less charged with earthy matter than at present, and they must 
have carried into the sea a smaller proportion of their sediment 
when they were free to deposit it on their banks than since 
they have been confined by dikes. 

It is, in general, true, that the intervention of man has 
hitherto seemed to insure the final exhaustion, ruin, and desola- 
tion of every province of nature which he has reduced to his 
dominion. Attila was only giving an energetic and _pictu- 


PHYSICAL RESTORATION IN TUSCANY. 527 


resque expression to the tendencies of human action, as per- 
sonified in himself, when he said that “no grass grew where 
his horse’s hoofs had trod.” The instances are few, where a 
second civilization has flourished upon the ruins of an ancient 
culture, and lands once rendered uninhabitable by human acts 
or neglect have generally been forever abandoned as hopelessly 
irreclaimable. It is,as I have before remarked, a question 
of vast importance, how far it is practicable to restore the 
garden we have wasted, and it is a problem on which expe- 
rience throws little light, because few deliberate attempts have 
yet been made at the work of physical regeneration, on a scale 
large enough to warrant general conclusions in any one class of 
cases. 

The valleys and shores of Tuscany form, however, a striking 
exception to this remark. The success with which human 
guidance has made the operations of nature herself available 
for the restoration of her disturbed harmonies, in the Val di 
Chiana and the Tuscan Maremma, is among the noblest, if not 
the most brilliant achievements of modern engineering, and, 
regarded in all its bearings on the great question of which I 
have just spoken, it is, as an example, of more importance to 
the general interests of humanity than the proudest work of 
internal improvement that mechanical means have yet con- 
structed. The operations in the Val di Chiana have consisted 
chiefly in so regulating the flow of the surface-waters into and 
through it, as to compel them to deposit their sedimentary 
matter at the will of the engineers, and thereby to raise 
grounds rendered insalubrious and unfit for agricultural use by 
stagnating water; the improvements in the Maremma have em- 
braced both this method of elevating the level of the soil, and 
the prevention of the mixture of salt-water with fresh in the 
coast marshes and shallow bays, which is regarded as a very 
active cause of the development of malarious influences.* 


* The fact that the mixing of salt and fresh water in coast marshes and 
lagoons is deleterious to the sanitary condition of the vicinity, has been gen- 
erally admitted, though the precise reason why a mixture of both should be 


528 THE TUSCAN MAREMMS. 


Improvements in the Tuscan Maremma. 


In the improvements of the Tuscan Maremma, formidable 
difficulties have been encountered. The territory to be re- 
claimed was extensive; the salubrious places of retreat for 
laborers and inspectors were remote; the courses of the rivers 
to be controlled were long and their natural inclination not 
rapid ; some of them, rising in wooded regions, transported 
comparatively little earthy matter,* and above all, the coast, 


more injurious than either alone, is not altogether clear. It has been sug- 
gested that the admission of sait-water to the lagoons and rivers kills many 
fresh-water plauts and animals, while the fresh water is equally fatal to many 
marine organisms, and that the decomposition of the remains originates 
poisonous miasmata. Other theories, however, have been proposed. The 
whole subject is fully and ably discussed by Dr. Salvagnoli Marchetti in the 
appendix to his valuable Rapporto sul Bonificamento delle Maremme Toscane. 
See also the Wemorie Hconomico-Statistiche sulle Maremme Toscane, of the same 
author. A different view of this subject is taken by RAFFANINI and OR- 
LANDINI in Analisi, Storico- Fisico-Economica sul? insalubrita nelle Maremme 
Toscané, Firenze, 1869. See also the important memoir of D. PANTALEONT, 
Del Miasma vegetale e delle Malattie Miasmatiche, in which the views of Sal- 
vagnoli on this point are combated. 

* This difficulty has been remedied—though with doubtful general advan- 
tage—as to one important river of the Maremma, the Pecora, by clearings 
recently executed along its upper course. ‘‘ The condition of this marsh and 
of its afiluents are now, November, 1859, much changed, and it is advisable 
to prosecute its improvement by deposits. In consequence of the extensive 
felling of the woods upon the plains, hills, and mountains of the territory of 
Massa and Scarlino, within the last ten years, the Pecora and other afllu- 
ents of the marsh receive, during the rains, water abundantly charged with 
slime, so that the deposits within the first division of the marsh are already 
considerable, and we may now hope to see the whole marsh and pond filled 
up in a much shorter time than we had a right to expect before 1850. This 
circumstance totally changes the terms of the question, because the filling of 
the marsh and pond, which then seemed almost impossible on account of the 
small amount of sediment deposited by the Pecora, has now become practica- 
ble.”—SALVAGNOLI, Rapporto sul Bonificamento delle Maremme Toscane, pp. 
li., lii. 

Between 1830 and 1859 more than 35,000,000 cubic yards of sediment were 
deposited in the marsh and shoal-water lake of Castiglione alone.—SALVAG- 
NOLI, Ltaccolta di Documenti, pp. 74, 79. 


THE TUSCAN MAREMMA, 529 


which is a recent deposit of the waters, is little elevated above 
the sea, and admits into its lagoons and the mouths of its 
rivers floods of salt-water with every western wind, every ris- 
ing tide.* 

The western coast of Tuscany is not supposed to have been 
an unhealthy region before the conquest of Etruria by the 
Romans, but it certainly became so within a few centuries 
after that event. This was a natural consequence of the neg- 
lect or wanton destruction of the public improvements, and 
especially the hydraulic works in which the Etruscans were so 
skilful, and of the felling of the upland forests, to satisfy the 
demand for wood at Rome for domestic, industrial, and muiti- 
tary purposes. After the downfall of the Roman empire, the 
incursions of the barbarians, and then feudalism, foreign dom- 
ination, intestine wars, and temporal and spiritual tyrannies, 
ageravated still more cruelly the moral and physical evils 
which Tuscany and the other Italian States were doomed to 
suffer, and from which they have enjoyed but brief respites 
during the whole period of modern history. The Maremma 
was already proverbially unhealthy in the time of Dante, who 
refers to the fact in several familiar passages, and the petty 
tyrants upon its borders often sent criminals to places of con- 
finement in its territory, as a slow but certain mode of execu- 
tion. Ignorance of the causes of the insalubrity, and often the 
interference of private rights, + prevented the adoption of meas- 


* The tide rises ten inches on the coast of Tuscany. See Memoir by FAn- 
TONI, in the appendix to SALVAGNOLI, Rapporto, p. 189. 

On the tides of the Mediterranean, see BOTTGER, Das Mittelmeer, p. 190. 

+ In Catholic countries, the discipline of the church requires a meagre diet 
at certain seasons, and as fish is not flesh, there is a great demand for that 
article of food at those periods. For the convenience of monasteries and their: 
patrons, and as a source of pecuniary emolument to ecclesiastical establish- 
ments and sometimes to lay proprietors, great numbers of artificial fish-ponds 
were created during the Middle Ages. They were generally shallow pools 
formed by damming up the outlet of marshes, and they were among the most 
fruitful sources of endemic disease, and of the peculiar malignity of the epi- 
demics which so often ravaged Europe in those centuries. These ponds, in 
religious hands, were too sacred to be infringed upon for sanitary purposes, 


530 THE TUSCAN MAREMMA. 


ures to remove it, and the growing political and commercial 
importance of the large towns in more healthful localities 
absorbed the attention of Government, and deprived the Ma- 
remma of its just share in the systems of physical improve- 
ment which were successfully adopted in interior and Northern 
Italy. 

Before any serious attempts were made to drain or fill up 
the marshes of the Maremma, various other sanitary experi- 
ments were tried. It was generally believed that the insalu- 
brity of the province was the consequence, not the cause, of its 
depopulation, and that, if it were once densely inhabited, the 
ordinary operations of agriculture, and especially the mainte- 
nance of numerous domestic fires, would restore it to its ancient 
healthfulness.* In accordance with these views, settlers were 
invited from various parts of Italy, from Greece, and, after the 
accession of the Lorraine princes, from that country also, and 
colonized in the Maremma. To strangers coming from soils 
and skies so unlike those of the Tuscan marshes, the climate 
was more fatal than to the inhabitants of the neighboring dis- 
tricts, whose constitutions had become in some degree inured to 
the local influences, or who at least knew better how to guard 
against them. The consequence very naturally was that the 
experiment totally failed to produce the desired effects, and 
was attended with a great sacrifice of life and a heavy loss to 
the treasury of the state. 

The territory known as the Tuscan Maremma, ora maritima, 


and when belonging to powerful lay lords they were almost as inviolable. 
The rights of fishery were a standing obstacle to every proposal of hydraulic 
improvement, and to this day large and fertile districts in Southern Europe 
remain sickly and almost unimproved and uninhabited, because the draining 
of the ponds upon them would reduce the income of proprietors who derive 
large profits by supplying the faithful, in Lent, with fish, and with various 
species of waterfowl which, though very fat, are, ecclesiastically speaking, 
meagre. 

* Macchiavelli advised the Government of Tuscany ‘‘ to provide that men 
should restore the wholesomeness of the soil by cultivation, and purify the air 
by fires.”,—SALVAGNOLI, Memorie, p. 111. 


THE TUSCAN MAREMMA. 531 


or Maremme—for the plural form is most generally used— 
lies upon and near the western coast of Tuscany, and comprises 
about 1,900 square miles English, of which 500 square miles, 
or 820,000 acres, are plain and marsh including 45,500 acres 
of water surface, and about 290,000 acres are forest. One of 
the mountain peaks, that of Mount Amiata, rises to the height 
of 6,280 feet. The mountains of the Maremma are healthy, 
the lower hills much less so, as the malaria is felt at some points 
at the height of 1,000 feet, and the plains, with the exception 
of a few localities favorably situated on the seacoast, are in a 
high degree pestilential. The fixed population is about 80,000, 
of whom one-sixth live on the plains in the winter and about 
one-tenth in the summer. Nine or ten thousand laborers come 
down from the mountains of the Maremma and the neighbor- 
ing provinces into the plain, during the latter season, to culti- 
vate and gather the crops. 

Out of this small number of inhabitants and strangers, 35,- 
619 were ill enough to require medical treatment between the 
Ist of June, 1840, and the 1st of June, 1841, and more than 
one-half the cases were of intermittent, malignant, gastric, 
or catarrhal fever. Very few agricultural laborers escaped 
fever, though the disease did not always manifest itself until 
they had returned to the mountains. In the province of Gros- 
seto, which embraces nearly the whole of the Maremma, the 
annual mortality was 3.92 per cent., the average duration of life 
but 23.18 years, and 75 per cent. of the deaths were among 
persons engaged in agriculture. 

The filling up.of the low grounds and the partial separation 
of the waters of the sea and the land, which had been in pro- 
gress since the year 1827, now began to show very decided 
effects upon the sanitary condition of the population. In the 
year ending June Ist, 1842, the number of the sick was re- 
duced by more than 2,000, and the cases of fever by more than 
4,000. The next year the cases of fever fell to 10,500, and in 
that ending June Ist, 1844, to 9,200. The political events of 
1848, and the preceding and following years, occasioned the 


532 THE VAL DI CHIANA. 


suspension of the works of improvement in the Maremma, but 
they were resumed after the revolution of 1859. 

I have spoken with some detail of the improvements in the 
Tuscan Maremma, because of their great relative importance, 
and because their history is well known; but like operations 
have been executed in the territory of Pisa and upon the coast 
of the duchy of Lucca. In the latter case they were confined 
principally to prevention of the intermixing of fresh water 
with that of the sea. In 1741 sluices or lock-gates were con- 
structed for this purpose, and the following year the fevers, 
which had been destructive to the coast population for a long 
time previous, disappeared altogether. In 1768 and 1769, the 
works having fallen to decay, the fevers returned in a very 
malignant form, but the rebuilding of the gates again restored 
the healthfulness of the shore. Similar facts recurred in 1784 
and 1785, and again from 1804 to 1821. This long and repeated 
experience has at last impressed upon the people the necessity 
of vigilant attention to the sluices, which are now kept in con- 
stant repair. The health of the coast is uninterrupted, and 
Viareggio, the capital town of the district, is now much fre- 
quented for its sea-baths and its general salubrity, at a season 


when formerly it was justly shunned as the abode of disease 
and death.* 


Improvements in the Val di Chiana. 


For twenty miles or more after the remotest headwaters of 
the Arno have united to form a considerable stream, this river 
flows south-eastwards to the vicinity of Arezzo. It here sweeps 
round to the north-west, and follows that course to near its junc- 
tion with the Sieve, a few miles above Florence, from which 
point its general direction is westward to the sea. From the 
bend at Arezzo, a depression called the Val di Chiana runs — 


* GroraInI, Sur les causes de V Insalubrité de (air dans le voisinage des ma- 
rais, etc., ue dV Académie des Sciences d Paris, le 12 Juillet, 1825. Reprinted 
in SALVAGNOLI, Rapporto, etc., appendice, p. 5, ef seqq. 


THE VAL DI CHIANA. 533 


south-eastwards until it strikes into the valley of the Paglia, a 
tributary of the Tiber, and thus connects the basin of the latter 
river with that of the Arno. In the Middle Ages, and down 
to the eighteenth century, the Val di Chiana was often over- 
flowed and devastated by the torrents which poured down from 
the highlands, transporting great quantities of slime with their 
currents, stagnating upon its surface, and gradually converting 
it into a marshy and unhealthy district, which was at last very 
greatly reduced in population and productiveness. It had, in 
fact, become so desolate that even the swallow had deserted 
it.* 

The bed of the Arno near Arezzo and that of the Paglia at 
the southern extremity of the Val di Chiana did not differ 
much in level. The general inclination of the valley was there- 


* This curious fact is thus stated in the preface to Fossombroni (Memorie 
sopra la Val di Chiana, edition of 1835, p. xiii.), from which also I borrow 
most of the data hereafter given with respect to that valley: ‘‘ It is perhaps 
not universally known, that the swallows, which come from the north [south] 
to spend the summer in our climate, do not frequent marshy districts with a 
malarious atmosphere. A proof of the restoration of salubrity in the Val di 
Chiana is furnished by these aérial visitors, which had never before been seen 
in those low grounds, but which have appeared within a few years at Forano 
and other points similarly situated.” 

Is the air of swamps destructive to the swallows, or is their absence in such 
localities merely due to the want of human habitations, near which this half- 
domestic bird loves to breed, perhaps because the house-fly and other insects 
which follow man are found only in the vicinity of his dwellings ? 

In almost all European countries the swallow is protected, by popular 
opinion or superstition, from the persecution to which almost all other birds 
are subject. It is possible that this respect for the swallow is founded upon 
ancient observation of the fact just stated on the authority of Fossombroni. 
Ignorance mistakes the effect for the cause, and the absence of this bird may 
have been supposed to be the occasion, not the consequence, of the unhealthi- 
ness of particular localities. This opinion once adopted, the swallow would 
become a sacred bird, and in process of time fables and legends would be in- 
vented to give additional sanction to the prejudices which protected it. The 
Romans considered the swallow as consecrated to the Penates, or household 
gods, and according to Peretti (Le Serate del Villaggio, p. 168) the Lombard 
peasantry think it a sin to kill them, because they are le gallinelle del Signore, 
the chickens of the Lord. 


534 THE VAL DI CHIANA. 


fore small; it does not appear to have ever been divided into 
opposite slopes by a true watershed, and the position of the 
summit seems to have shifted according to the varying amount 
and place of deposit of the sediment brought down by the 
lateral streams which emptied into it. The length of its princi- 
pal channel of drainage, and even the direction of its flow at 
any given point, were therefore fluctuating. Hence, much dif- 
ference of opinion was entertained at different times with re- 
gard to the normal course of this stream, and, consequently, to 
the question whether it was to be regarded as properly an afilu- 
ent of the Tiber or of the Arno. 

The bed of the latter river at the bend has been eroded to 
the depth of thirty or forty feet, and that, apparently, at no 
very remote period.* If it were elevated to what was evidently 
its original height, the current of the Arno would be so much 
above that of the Paglia as to allow of a regular flow from its 
channel to the latter stream, through the Val di Chiana, pro- 
vided the bed of the valley had remained at the level which 
excayations prove it to have had a few centuries ago, before it 
was raised by the deposits I have mentioned. These facts, 
together with the testimony of ancient geographers which 
scarcely admits of any other explanation, are thought to prove 
that all the waters of the Upper Arno were originally dis- 
charged through the Val di Chiana into the Tiber, and that a 
part of them still continued to flow, at least occasionally, in 
that direction down to the days of the Roman empire, and per- 
haps for some time later. The depression of the bed of the 
Arno, and the raising of that of the valley by the deposits of 
the lateral torrents, finally cut off the branch of the river which 
had flowed to the Tiber, and ail its waters were turned into its 
present channel, though the drainage of the principal part of 
the Val di Chiana appears to have been in a south-eastwardly 
direction until within a comparatively recent period. 


* Able geologists infer from recent investigations, that, although the Arno 
flowed to the south within the pliocenic period, the direction of its course was 
changed at an earlier epoch than that supposed in the text. 


THE VAL DI CHIANA. 5385 


In the sixteenth century the elevation of the bed of the 
valley had become so considerable, that in 1551, at a point about 
ten miles south of the Arno, it was found to be not less than 
one hundred and thirty feet above that river; then followed a 
level of ten miles, and then a continuous descent to the Paglia. 
Along the level portion of the valley was a boatable channel, 
and lakes, sometimes a mile or even two miles in breadth, had 
formed at various points farther south. At this period the 
drainage of the summit level might easily have been deter- 
mined in either direction, and the opposite descents of the val- 
ley made to culminate at the north or at the south end of the 
Jevel. In the former case, the watershed would have been ten 
miles south of the Arno; in the latter, twenty miles, and the 
division of the valley into two opposite slopes would have been 
not very unequal. 

Various schemes were suggested at this time for drawing 
off the stagnant waters, as well as for the future regular drain- 
age of the valley, and small operations for those purposes were 
undertaken with partial success; but it was feared that the 
discharge of the accumulated waters into the Tiber would pro- 
duce a dangerous inundation, while the diversion of the drain- 
age into the Arno would increase the violence of the floods to 
which that river was very subject, and no decisive steps were 
taken. In 1606 an engineer, whose name has not been pre- 
served, proposed, as the only possible method of improvement, 
the piercing of a tunnel through the hills bounding the valley 
on the west to convey its waters to the Ombrone, but the ex- 
pense and other objections prevented the adoption of this 
scheme.* The fears of the Roman Government for the safety 
of the basin of the Tiber had induced it to construct embank- 
ments across the portion of the valley lying within its territory, 
and these obstructions, though not specifically intended for 
that purpose, naturally promoted the deposit of sediment and 
the elevation of the bed of the valley in their neighborhood. 
The effect of this measure and of the continued spontaneous 


* Morozzi, Dello stato del? Arno, ii., pp. 39, 40. 


536 THE VAL DI CHIANA. 


action of the torrents was, that the northern slope, which in 
1551 had commenced at the distance of ten miles from the 
Arno, was found in 1605 to begin nearly thirty miles south of 
that river, and in 1645 it had been removed about six miles far- 
ther in the same direction.* 

In the seventeenth century the Tuscan and Papal Govern- 
ments consulted Galileo, Torricelli, Castelli, Cassini, Viviani, 
and other distinguished philosophers and engineers, on the pos- 
sibility of reclaiming the valley by a regular artificial drainage. 
Most of these eminent physicists were of opinion that the 
measure was linpracticable, though not altogether for the same 
reasons; but they seem to have agreed in thinking that the 
opening of such channels, in either direction, as would give the 
current a flow sufticiently rapid to drain the lands properly, 
would dangerously augment the inundations of the river— 
whether the Tiber or the Arno—into which the waters should 
be turned. The general improvement of the valley was now 
for a long time abandoned, and the waters were allowed to 
spread and stagnate until carried off by partial drainage, infil- 
tration, and evaporation. ‘Torricelli had contended that the 
slope of a large part of the valley was too small to allow it to 
be drained by ordinary methods, and that no practicable depth 
and width of canal would suffice for that purpose. It could 
be laid dry, he thought, only by converting its surface into an 
inclined plane, and he suggested that this might be accom- 
plished by controlling the flow of the numerous torrents which 
pour into it, so as to force them to deposit their sediment at 
the pleasure of the engineer, and, consequently, to elevate the 
level of the area over which it should be spread.t This plan 


* Morozzi, Dello stato, etc., del? Arno, ii., pp. 39, 40. 

+ Torricelli thus expressed himself on this point: ‘‘If we content ourselves 
with what nature has made practicable to human industry, we shall endeavor 
to control, as far as possible, the outlets of these streams, which, by raising 
the bed of the valley with their deposits, will realize the fable of the Tagus 
and the Pactolus, and truly roll golden sands for him that is wise enough to 
avail himself of them.’’—FossomBroni, Memorie sopra la Val di China, p, 
219. 


THE VAL DI CHIANA. 537 


did not meet with immediate general acceptance, but it was 
soon adopted for local purposes at some points in the southern 
part of the valley, and it gradually grew in public favor and 
was extended in application until its final triumph a hundred 
years later. 

In spite of these encouraging successes, however, the fear 
of danger to the valley of the Arno and the Tiber, and the 
difficulty of an agreement between Tuscany and Rome—the 
boundary between which states crossed the Val di Chiana not 
far from the half-way point between the two rivers—and of 
reconciling other conflicting interests, prevented the resump- 
tion of the projects for the general drainage of the valley until 
after the middle of the eighteenth century. In the meantime 
the science of hydraulics had become better understood, and 
the establishment of the natural law according to which the 
velocity of a current of water, and of course the proportional 
quantity discharged by it in a given time, are increased by 
increasing its mass, had diminished if not dissipated the fear 
of exposing the banks of the Arno to greater danger from 
inundations by draining the Val di Chiana into it. 

The suggestion of Torricelli was finally adopted as the basis 
of a comprehensive system of improvement, and it was decided 
to continue and extend the inversion of the original flow of the 
waters, and to turn them into the Arno from a point as far to 
the south as should be found practicable. The conduct of the 
works was committed to a succession of able engineers who, 
for a long series of years, were under the general direction of 
the celebrated philosopher and statesman Fossombroni, and the 
success has fully justified the expectations of the most sanguine 
advocates of the scheme. The plan of improvement embraced 
two branches: the one, the removal of obstructions in the bed 
of the Arno, and, consequently, the further depression of the 
channel of that river, in certain places, with the view of in- 
creasing the rapidity of its current; the other, the gradual 
filling up of the ponds and swamps, and raising of the lower 
grounds of the Val di Chiana, by directing to convenient 


538 THE VAL DI CHIANA. 


points the flow of the streams which pour down into it, and 
there confining their waters by temporary dams until the sedi- 
ment was deposited where it was needed. The economical 
result of these operations has been, that in 1835 an area of 
more than four hundred and fifty square miles of pond, marsh, 
and damp, sickly low grounds had been converted into fer- 
tile, healthy, and well-drained soil, and, consequently, that so 
much territory has been added to the agricultural domain of 
Tuscany. 

But in our present view of the subject, the geographical 
revolution which has been accomplished is still more interest- 
ing. The climatic influence of the elevation and draining of 
the soil must have been considerable, though I do not know 
that an increase or a diminution of the mean temperature or 
precipitation in the valley has been established by meteorologi- 
cal observation. There is, however, in the improvement of the 
sanitary condition of the Val di Chiana, which was formerly 
extremely unhealthy, satisfactory proof of a beneficial climatic 
change. The fevers, which not only decimated the population 
of the low grounds but infested the adjacent hills, have ceased 
their ravages, and are now not more frequent than in other 
parts of Tuscany. The strictly topographical effect of the 
operations in question, besides the conversion of marsh into dry 
surface, has been the inversion of the inclination of the valley 
for a distance of thirty-five miles, so that this great plain which, 
within a comparatively short period, sloped and drained its 
waters to the south, now inclines and sends its drainage to the 
north. The reversal of the currents of the valley has added to 
the Arno a new tributary equal to the largest of its former 
afiiuents, and a most important circumstance connected with 
this latter fact is, that the increase of the volume of its waters 
has accelerated their velocity in a still greater proportion, and, 
instead of augmenting the danger from its inundations, has 
almost wholly obviated that source of apprehension.* Between 


* Arrian observes that at the junction of the Hydaspes and the Acesines, 
both of which are described as wide streams, ‘‘ one very narrow river is form- 


THE VAL DI CHIANA. 539 


the beginning of the fifteenth century and the year 1761, thirty- 
one destructive floods of the Arno are recorded ; between 1761, 
when the principal streams of the Val di Chiana were diverted 
into that river, and 1835, not one.* 


ed of two confluents, and its current is very swift.”—Anrrian, Alex. Anad., 
vi., 4. 

A like example is observed in the Anapus near Syracuse, which, below the 
junction of its two branches, is narrower, though swifter than either of them, 
and such cases are by no means unfrequent. The immediate effect of the 
confluence of two rivers upon the current below depends upon local circum- 
stances, and especially upon the angle of incidence. If the two nearly coin- 
cide in direction, so as to include a small angle, the joint current will have a 
greater velocity than the slower confluent, perhaps even than either of them. 
If the two rivers run in transverse, still more if they flow in more or less op- 
posite, directions, the velocity of the principal branch will be retarded both 
above and below the junction, and at high water it may even set back the cur- 
rent of the afiluent. 

On the other hand, the diversion of a considerable branch from a river 
retards its velocity below the point of separation, and here a deposit of earth 
in its channel immediately begins, which has a tendency to turn the whole 
stream into the new bed. ‘‘ Theory and the authority of all hydrographical 
writers combine to show that the channels of rivers undergo an elevation of 
bed below a canal of diversion.”—Letter of FOSSOMBRONI, in SALVAGNOLI, 
Raccolta di Documenti, p. 32. See the early authorities and discussions on 
the principle stated in the text, in Frist, Del modo di regolare ¢ Fiumi e 7 
Torrenti, libro iii., capit. i., and Moneorrt, /draulica, ii., pp. 88 et seqq., and 
see p. 498, note, ante. 

In my account of these improvements I have chiefly followed Fossombroni, 
under whose direction they were principally executed. Many of Fossombroni’s 
statements and opinions have been controverted, and in comparatively unim- 
portant particulars they have been shown to be erroneous.—See LOMBARDINT, 
Guida allo studio dell’ Idrologia, cap. xviii., and same author, Hsame degli 
Studi sul Tevere, § 33. 

* FossoMBRONI, Memorie Idrautico-storiche, Introduzione, p. xvi. Between 
the years 1700 and 1799 the chroniclers record seventeen floods of the Arno, and 
twenty between 1800 and 1870, but none of these were of a properly destruc- 
tive character except those of 1844, 1864, and 1870, and the ravages of this 
latter were chiefly confined to Pisa, and were occasioned by the bursting of a 
dike or wall, They are all three generally ascribed to extraordinary, if not 
unprecedented, rains and snows, but many inquirers attribute them to the 
felling of the woods in the valleys of the upper tributaries of the Arno since 
1855. See a paper by GRIFFINI, in the [talia Nuova, 18 Marzo, 1871. 


540 RESULTS OF OPERATIONS. 


Lesults of Operations. 


It is now a hundred years since the commencement of the 
improvements in the Val di Chiana, and those of the Maremma 
have been in more or less continued operation for above a gen- 
eration. They have, as we have seen, produced important geo- 
graphical changes in the surface of the earth and in the flow of 
considerable rivers, and their effects have been not less conspicu- 
ous in preventing other changes, of a more or less deleterious 
character, which would infallibly have taken place if they had 
not been arrested by the improvements in question. 

The sediment washed into the marshes of the Maremma is 
not less than 12,000,000 cubic yards per annum. The escape 
of this quantity into the sea, which is now almost wholly pre- 
vented, would be sufficient to advance the coast-line fourteen 
yards per year, for a distance of forty miles, computing the 
mean depth of the sea near the shore at twelve yards. It is 
true that in this case, as well as in that of other rivers, the 
sedimentary matter would not be distributed equally along the 
shore, and much of it would be carried out into deep water, or 
perhaps transported by the currents to distant coasts. The im- 
mediate effects of the deposit in the sea, therefore, would not 
be so palpable as they appear in this numerical form, but they 
would be equally certain, and would infallibly manifest them- 
selves, first, perhaps, at some remote point, and afterwards more 
energetically at or near the outlets of the rivers which produced 
them. The elevation of the bottom of the sea would diminish 
the inclination of the beds of the rivers discharging themselves 
into it on that coast, and of course their tendency to overflow 
their banks and extend still further the domain of the marshes 
which border them would be increased in proportion. 

It has been already stated that, in order to prevent the over- 
flow of the valley of the Tiber by freely draining the Val di 
~ Chiana into it, the Papal authorities, long before the commence- 
ment of the Tuscan works, constructed strong barriers near the 


COAST OF THE NETHERLANDS. 541 


southern end of the valley, which detained the waters of the 
wet season until they could be gradually drawn off into the 
Paglia. They consequently deposited most of their sediment 
in the Val di Chiana and carried down comparatively little 
earth to the Tiber. The lateral streams contributing the largest 
quantities of sedimentary matter to the Val di Chiana original- 
ly flowed into that valley near its northern end ; and the change 
of their channels and outlets in a southern direction, so as to 
raise that part of the valley by their deposits and thereby 
reverse its drainage, was one of the principal steps in the pro- 
cess of improvement. 

We have seen that the north end of the Val di Chiana near 
the Arno had been raised by spontaneous deposit of sediment 
to such a height as to interpose a sufficient obstacle to all flow 
in that direction. If, then, the Roman dam had not been 
erected, or the works of the Tuscan Government undertaken, 
the whole of the earth, which has been arrested by those works 
and employed to raise the bed and reverse the declivity of the 
valley, would have been carried down to the Tiber and thence 
into the sea. The deposit thus created would, of course, have 
contributed to increase the advance of the shore at the mouth 
of that river, which has long been going on at the rate of three 
metres and nine-tenths (twelve feet and nine inches) per 
annum.* It is evident that a quantity of earth, sufficient to 
effect the immense changes I have described in a wide valley 
more than thirty miles long, if deposited at the outlet of the 
Tiber, would have very considerably modified the outline of 
the coast, and have exerted no unimportant influence on the 
flow of that river, by raising its point of discharge and length- 
ening its channel. 


The Coast of the Netherlands. 


It has been shown in a former section that the dikes of the 


*See the careful estimates of Rozet, Moyens de forcer les Torrents, etc., 
pp. 42, 44. 


549, COAST OF THE NETHERLANDS. 


Netherlands and the adjacent states have protected a consider- 
able extent of coast from the encroachments of the sea, and 
have won a large tract of cultivable land from the dominion of 
the ocean waters. The immense results obtained from the 
operations of the Tuscan engineers in the Val di Chiana, and 
the Maremma have suggested the question, whether a different 
method of accomplishing these objects might not have been 
adopted with advantage. It has been argued, as in the case of 
the Po, that a system of transverse inland dikes and canals, wpon 
the principle of those which have been so successfully em- 
ployed in the Val di Chiana and in Egypt, might have elevated 
the low grounds above the ocean tides, by spreading over them 
the sediment brought down by the Rhine, the Maes, and the 
Scheld. If this process had been introduced in the Middle 
Ages, and constantly pursued to our times, the superficial and 
coast geography, as well as the hydrography of the countries in 
question, would undoubtedly have presented an aspect very 
different from their present condition; and by combining the 
process with a system of maritime dikes, which would have 
been necessary, both to resist the advance of the sea and to 
retain the slime deposited by river overflows, it is, indeed, possi- 
ble that the territory of those states would have been as exten- 
sive as it now is, and, at the same time, somewhat elevated 
above its natural level. 

The argument in favor of that method rests on the assump- 
tion that all the sea-washed earth, which the tides have let fall 
upon the shallow coast of the Netherlands, has been brought 
down by the rivers which empty upon those shores, and could 
have been secured by allowing those rivers to spread over the 
flats aud deposit their sediment in still-water pools formed by 
cross-dikes like those of Egypt. 

But we are ignorant of the proportions in which the marine 
deposits that form the soil of the polders have been derived 
from materials brought down by these rivers, or from other 
more remote sources. Much of the river slime has, no doubt, 
been transported by marine currents quite beyond the reach 


COAST OF THE NETHERLANDS. 543 


of returning streams, and it is uncertain how far this loss has 
been balanced by earth washed by the sea from distant shores 
and let fall on the coasts of the Netherlands and other neigh- 
boring countries. 

We know little or nothing of the quantity of solid matter 
brought down by the rivers of Western Europe in early ages, 
but, as the banks of those rivers are now generally better 
secured against wash and abrasion than in former centuries, 
the sediment transported by them must be less than at periods 
nearer the removal of the primitive forests of their valleys, 
though certainly greater than it was before those forests were 
felled. laden informs us that the sedimentary matter trans- 
ported to the sea by the Rhine would amount to a cubic geo- 
graphical mile in five thousand years.* 

‘The proportion of this suspended matter which, with our 
present means, could be arrested and precipitated upon the 
ground, is almost infinitesimal, for only the surface-water, which 
carries much less sediment than that at the bottom of the chan- 
nel, would flow over the banks, and as the movement of this 
water, if not checked altogether, would be greatly retarded by 
the proposed cross-dikes, the quantity of solid matter which 
would be conveyed to a given portion of land during a single 
inundation would be extremely small. Inundations of the 
Rhine occur but once or twice a year, and high water continues 
but a few days, or even hours; the flood-tide of the sea hap- 
pens seven hundred times ina year,and at the turn of the 
tide the water is brought to almost absolute rest. Hence, small 
as is the proportion of suspended matter in the tide-water, the 
deposit probably amounts to far more in a year than would be 
let fall upon the same area by the Rhine. 

This argument, except as to the comparison between river 
and tide water, applies to the Mississippi, the Po, and most other 
great rivers. Hence, until that distant day when man shall de- 


* Hrdhunde, vol. i., p. 884. The Mississippi—a river ‘‘ undercharged with 
sediment”—with a mean discharge of about ten times that of the Rhine, 
deposits a cubic geographical mile in thirty-three years. 


544 COAST OF THE NETHERLANDS. 


vise means of extracting from rivers at flood, the whole volume 
of their suspended material and of depositing it at the same 
time on their banks, the system of cross-dikes and colmatage 
must be limited to torrential streams transporting large propor- 
tions of sediment, and to the rivers of hot countries, like the 
Nile, where the saturation of the soil with water, and the secur- 
ing of a supply for irrigation afterwards, are the main objects, 
while raising the level of the banks is a secondary consider- 
ation. 


CHAPTER V. 
THE SANDS. 


Origin of Sand—Sand now Carried to the Sea—Beach Sands of Northern 
Africa—Sands of Egypt—Sand Dunes and Sand Plains—Coast Dunes— 
Sand Banks—Character of Dune Sand—Interior Structure of Dunes— 
Geological Importance of Dunes—Dunes on American Coasts—Dunes 
of Western Europe—Age, Character, and Permanence of Dunes—Dunes 
as a Barrier against the Sea—Encroachments of the Sea—Liimfjord— 
Coasts of Schleswig-Holstein, Netherlands, and France—Movement of 
Dunes—Control of Dunes by Man—Inland Dunes—Inland Sand Plains. 


Origin of Sand. 


Sanp, which is found in beds or strata at the bottom of the 
sea or in the channels of rivers, as well as in extensive de- 
posits upon or beneath the surface of the dry land, appears to 
consist essentially of the detritus of rocks. It is not always by 
any means clear through what agency the solid rock has been 
reduced to a granular condition; for there are beds of quart- 
zose sand, where the sharp, angular shape of the particles ren- 
ders it highly improbable that they have heen formed by 
gradual abrasion and attrition, and where the supposition of a 
crushing mechanical force seems equally inadmissible. In 
common sand, the quartz grains are the most numerous; but 
this is not a proof that the rocks from which these particles 
were derived were wholly, or even chiefly, quartzose in charac- 
ter; for, in many composite rocks, as, for example, in the gran- 
itic group, the mica, felspar, and hornblende are more easily 
decomposed by chemical action, or disintegrated, comminuted, 
and reduced to an impalpable state by mechanical force, than 
the quartz. In the destruction of such rocks, therefore, the 


quartz would survive the other ingredients, and remain un- 
35 


546 ORIGIN OF SAND. 


mixed, when they had been decomposed and recomposed into 
new mineralogical or chemical combinations, or been ground 
to slime and washed away by water currents. 

The greater or less specific gravity of the different constitu- 
ents of rock doubtless aids in separating them into distinct 
masses when once disintegrated, though there are veined and 
stratified beds of sand where the difference between the upper 
and lower layers, in this respect, is too slight to be supposed 
capable of effecting a complete separation.* In cases where 
rock has been reduced to sandy fragments by heat, or by ob- 
scure chemical and other molecular forces, the sand-beds may 
remain undisturbed, and represent, in the series of geological 
strata, the solid formations from which they were derived. 
The large masses of sand not found in place have been trans- 
ported and accumulated by water or by wind, the former being 
generally considered the most important of these agencies; for 
‘the extensive deposits of the Sahara, of the Arabian peninsulas, 
-of the Llano Estacado and other North and South American 
deserts, of the deserts of Persia, and of that of Gobi, are sup- 
posed to have been swept together or distributed by marine cur- 
rents, and to have been elevated above the ocean by the same 
means as other upheaved strata. 

Meteoric and mechanical influences are still active in the re- 
duction of rocks to a fragmentary state; + but the quantity of 


*Tn the curiously variegated sandstone of Arabia Petraea—which is certain- 
ly a reagegregation of loose sand derived from disaggregation of older rocks— 
the contiguous veins frequently differ very widely in color, but not sensibly in 
specific gravity or in texture; and the singular way in which they are now al- 
ternated, now confusedly intermixed, must be explained otherwise than by 
the weight of the respective grains which compose them. They seem, in fact, 
.to have been let fall by water in violent ebullition or tumultuous mechanical 
agitation, or deposited by a succession of sudden aquatic or aérial currents 
flowing in different directions and charged with differently colored matter. 

+ A good account of the agencies now eperative in the reduction of rock to 
sand will be found in WINKLER, Zand en Duinen, Dockarm, 1865, pp. 4-20. 
I take this occasion to acknowledge my obligations to this author for assuming 
the responsibility of many of the errors I may have committed in this chapter, 
by translating a large part of it from a former edition of the present work 
and publishing it as his.own, 


ACTION OF RIVERS. 5AT 


sand now transported to the sea seems to be comparatively 
inconsiderable, because—not to speak of the absence of diluvial 
action—the number of torrents emptying directly into the sea 
is much less than it was at earlier periods. The formation of 
alluvial plains in maritime bays, by the sedimentary matter 
brought down from the mountains, has lengthened the flow of 
such streams and converted them very generally into rivers, or 
rather afiluents of rivers of later geographical origin than them- 
selves. The filling up of the estuaries has so reduced the slope 
of all large and many small rivers, and, consequently, so 
checked the current of what the Germans call their Unterlauf, 
or lower course, that they are much less able to transport heavy 
material than at earlier epochs. The slime deposited by rivers 
at their junction with the sea, is usually found to be composed 
of material too finely ground and too light to be denominated 
sand, and it can be abundantly shown that the sand-banks at the 
outlet of most large streams are of tidal, not of fluviatile, accu- 
mulation, or, in lakes and tideless seas, a result of the concur- 
rent action of waves and of wind. 

Large deposits of sand, therefore, must in general be consid- 
ered as of ancient, not of recent formation, and many eminent 
geologists ascribe them to diluvial action. Staring has discussed 
this question very fully, with special reference to the sands of 
the North Sea, the Zuiderzee, and the bays and channels of the 
Dutch coast.* His general conclusion is, that the rivers of the 


* De Bodem van Nederland, i., pp. 243, 246-377 et segg. See also the ar-— 
guments of Brémontier as to the origin of the dune-sands of Gascony, Annales 
des Ponts et Chaussées, 1833, ler sémestre, pp. 158, 161. Brémontier estimates 
the sand annually thrown up on that coast at five cubic toises and two feet to 
the running toise (ubi supra, p. 162), or rather more than two hundred and 
twenty cubic feet to the running foot. Laval, upon observations continued 
through seven years, found the quantity to be twenty-five mctres per running 
m¢tre, which is equal to two hundred and sixty-eight cubic feet to the running 
foot.—Annates des Ponts et. Chaussées, 1842, 2me scmestre, p. 229. These 
computations make the proportion of sand deposited on the coast of Gascony 
three or four times as great as that observed by Andresen on the shores of Jut- 
land. Laval estimates the total quantity of sand annually thrown up on the 
coast of Gascony at 6,000,000 cubic métres, or more than 7,800,000 cubic yards. 


548 SAND CARRIED DOWN TO THE SEA. 


Netherlands “move sand only by a very slow displacement of 
sand-banks, and do not carry it with them as a suspended or 
floating material.” The sands of the German Ocean he holds 
to be a product of the “ great North German drift,’ deposited 
where they now lie before the commencement of the present 
geological period, and he maintains similar opinions with regard 
to the sands thrown up by the Mediterranean at the mouths of 
the Nile and on the Barbary coast.* 


Sand now carried to the Sea. 


There are, however, cases where mountain streams still bear 
to the sea perhaps relatively small, but certainly absolutely 
large, amounts of disintegrated rock.t The quantity of sand 


* De Bodem van Nederland, i., p. 339. 

+ The conditions favorable to the production of sand from disintegrated 
rock, by causes now in action, are perhaps nowhere more perfectly realized 
than in the Sinaitic Peninsula. The mountains are steep and lofty, unpro- 
tected by vegetation or even by a coating of earth, and the rocks which com- 
pose them are in a shattered and fragmentary condition. They are furrowed 
by deep and precipitous ravines, with beds sufficiently inclined for the rapid 
flow of water, and generally without basins in which the larger blocks of stone 
rolled by the torrents can be dropped and left in repose; there are severe 
frosts and much snow on the higher summits and ridges, and the winter rains 
are abundant and heavy. The mountains are principally of igneous formation, 
but many of the less elevated peaks are capped with sandstone, and on the 
eastern slope of the peninsula you may sometimes see, at a single glance, 
several lofty pyramids of granite, separated by considerable intervals, and all 
surmounted by horizontally stratified deposits of sandstone often only a few 
yards square, which correspond to each other in height, are evidently contem- 
poraneous in origin, and were once connected in continuous beds, The degra- 
dation of the rock on which this formation rests is constantly bringing down 
masses of it, and mingling them with the basaltic, porphyritic, granitic, and 
calcareous fragments which the torrents carry down to the valleys, and, through 
them, in a state of greater or less disintegration, to the sea. The quantity of 
sand annually washed into the Red Sea by the larger torrents of the Lesser 
Peninsula, is probably at least equal to that contributed to the ocean by any 
streams draining basins of no greater extent. Absolutely considered, then, the 
mass may be said to be large, but it is apparently very small as compared with 
the sand thrown up by the German Ocean and the Atlantic on the coasts of 
Denmark and of France. There are, indeed, in Arabia Petraea, many torrents 


SAND IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 549 


and gravel carried into the Mediterranean by the torrents of the 
Maritime Alps, the Ligurian Apennines, the islands of Corsica, 
Sardinia, and Sicily, and the mountains of Calabria, is appa- 
rently great. In mere mass, it is possible, if not probable, that 
as much rocky material, more or less comminuted, is contributed 
to the basin of the Mediterranean by Europe, even excluding 
the shores of the Adriatic and the Euxine, as is washed up from 
it upon the coasts of Northern Africa and Syria. A great part 
of this material is thrown out again by the waves on the Euro- 
pean shores of that sea. The harbors of Luni, Albenga, San 
Remo, and Savona west of Genoa, and of Porto Fino on the 
other side, are filling up,and the coast near Carrara and Massa 
is said to have advanced upon the sea to a distance of 475 feet 
in thirty-three years.* Besides this, we have no evidence of the 
existence of deep-water currents in the Mediterranean, extensive 
enough and strong enough to transport quartzose sand across 


with very short courses, for the sea-waves in many parts of the peninsular 
coast wash the base of the mountains. In these cases, the debris of the rocks 
do not reach the sea in a sufficiently comminuted condition to be entitled to 
the appellation of sand, or even in the form of well-rounded pebbles. The 
fragments retain their annular shape, and, at some points on the coast, they be- 
come cemented together by lime or other binding substances held in solution 
or mechanical suspension in the sea-water, and are so rapidly converted into 
a singularly heterogeneous conglomerate, that one deposit seems to be con- 
solidated into a breccia before the next winter’s torrents cover it with an- 
other. 

In the northern part of the peninsula there are extensive deposits of sand 
intermingled with agate pebbles and petrified wood, but these are evidently 
neither derived from the Sinaitic group, nor products of local causes known 
to be now in action. 

I may here notice the often repeated but mistaken assertion, that the petri- 
fied wood of the Western Arabian desert consists wholly of the stems of palms, 
or at least of endogenous vegetables. This is an error. I have myself 
picked up in that desert, within the space of a very few square yards, frag- 
ments apparently of fossil palms, and of at least two petrified trees distinctly 
marked as of exogenous growth both by annular structure and by knots. In 
ligneous character, one of these almost precisely resembles the grain of the 
extant beech, and this specimen was worm-eaten before it was converted into 
silex. 

* BorrcER, Das Mittelmeer, p. 128. 


550 SANDS OF NORTHERN AFRICA. 


the sea. It may be added that much of the rock from which 
the torrent sands of Southern Europe are derived contains little 
quartz, and hence the general character of these sands is such 
that they must be decomposed or ground down to an impalpa- 
ble slime, long before they could be swept over te the African 
shore. 


Sands of Northern Africa. 


The torrents of Europe, then, do not at present furnish the 
material which composes the beach sands of Northern Africa, 
and it is equally certain that those sands are not brought down 
by the rivers of the latter continent. They belong to a remote 
geological period, and have been accumulated by causes which 
we cannot at present assign. The wind does not stir water to 
great depths with sufficient force to disturb the bottom,* and 


* The testimony of divers and of other observers on this point is conflicting, 
as might be expected from the infinite variety of conditions by which the 
movement of water is affected. It is generally believed that the action of 
the wind upon the water is not perceptible at greater depths than from fifteen 
feet in ordinary to eighty or ninety in extreme cases; but these estimates are 
probably very considerably below the truth. Andresen quotes Brémontier as 
stating that the movement of the waves sometimes extends to the depth of five 
hundred feet, and he adds that others think it may reach to six or eyen seven 
hundred feet below the surface.—ANDRESEN, Om Klitformationen, p. 20. 

Many physicists now suppose that the undulations of great bodies of water 
reach even deeper. But a movement of undulation is not necessarily a move- 
ment of translation, and besides, there is very frequently an undertow, which 
tends to carry suspended bodies out to sea as powerfully as the superficial 
waves to throw them on shore. Sand-banks sometimes recede from the coast, 
instead of rolling towards it. Reclus informs us that the Mauvaise, a sand-bank 
near the Point de Grave, on the Atlantic coast of France, has moved five 
miles to the west in less than a century.—Revue des Deux Mondcs for Decem- 
ber, 1862, p. 905. 

The action of currents may, in some cases, have been confounded with that 
of the waves. Sea-currents, strong enough, possibly, to transport sand for 
some distance, flow far below the surface in parts of the open ocean, and in 
narrow straits they have great force and velocity. The divers employed at 
Constantinople in 1853 found in the Bosphorus, at the depth of twenty-five 
fathoms and ata point much exposed to the wash from Galata and Pera, a 


SANDS OF NORTHERN AFRICA. 551 


the sand thrown upon the coast in question must be derived 
from a narrow belt of sea. It must hence, in time, become ex- 
hausted, and the formation of new sand-banks and dunes upon 
the southern shores of the Mediterranean will cease at last for 
want of material. * 

But even in the cases where the accumulations of sand in 
extensive deserts appear to be of marine formation, or rather 
ageregation, and to have been brought to their present position 
by upheaval, they are not wholly composed of material collect- 
ed or distributed by the currents of the sea; for, in all such 
regions, they continue to receive some small contributions from 
the disintegration of the rocks which underlie, or crop out 
through, the superficial deposits. In some instances, too, as in 


number of bronze guns supposed to have belonged to a ship-of-war blown up 
about a hundred and fifty years before. These guns were not covered by sand 
or slime, though a crust of earthy matter, an inch in thickness, adhered to 
their upper surfaces, and the bottom of the strait appeared to be wholly free 
from sediment. The current was so powerful at this depth that the divers 
were hardly able to stand, and a keg of nails, purposely dropped into the 
water, in order that its movements might serve as a guide in the search for a 
bag of coin accidentally lost overboard from a ship in the harbor, was rolled 
by the stream several hundred yards before it stopped. 

* Few seas have thrown up so much sand as the shallow German Ocean ; 
but there is some reason to think that the amount of this material now cast 
upon its northern shores is less than at some former periods, though no exten- 
sive series of observations on this subject has been recorded. On the Spit of 
Agger, at the present outlet of the Liimfjord, Andresen found the quantity 
during ten years, on a beach about five hundred and seventy feet broad, equal 
to an annual deposit of an inch and a half over the whole surface.—Om Alit- 
formationen, p. 56. 

This gives seventy-one and a quarter cubic feet to the running foot—a 
quantity certainly much smaller than that cast up by the same sea on the shores 
of the Dano-German duchies and of Holland, and, as we have seen, scarcely 
one-fourth of that deposited by the Atlantic on the coast of Gascony. 

+ See, on this subject, an article in Aws der Natur, vol. xxx., p. 590. 

The Florentine Frescobaldi, who visited the Sinaitic peninsula five hundred 
years ago, observed the powerful action of the solar heat in the disintegration 
of the desert rocks. ‘‘ This place,” says he, ‘‘ was a ridge of rocks burnt to 
powder by the sun, and this powder is blown away from the rock by the wind 
and is the sand of the desert; and there be many hills which are pure bare 


552 SANDS OF EGYPT. 


Northern Africa, additions are constantly made to the mass by 
the prevalence of sea-winds, which transport, or, to speak more 
precisely, roll the finer beach-sand to considerable distances 
into the interior. But this is a very slow process, and the ex- 
ageerations of travellers have diffused a vast deal of popular 
error on the subject. 


Sands of Egypt. 


In the narrow valley of the Nile—which, above its bifurea- 
tion near Cairo, is, throughout Egypt and Nubia, generally 
bounded by precipitous cliffs—wherever a ravine or other con- 
siderable depression occurs in the wall of rock, one sees what 
seems a stream of desert sand pouring down, and common 
observers have hence concluded that the whole valley is in 
danger of being buried under a stratum of infertile soil. The 
ancient Egyptians apprehended this, and erected walls, often 
of unburnt brick, across the outlet of gorges and lateral val- 
leys, to check the flow of the sand-streams. In later ages, 
these walls have mostly fallen into decay, and no preventive 
measures against such encroachments are now resorted to. But 
the extent of the mischief to the soil of Egypt, and the future 
danger from this source, have been much overrated. The sand 
on the borders of the Nile is neither elevated so high by the 
wind, nor transported by that agency in so great masses, as is 
popularly supposed; and of that which is actually lifted or 
rolled and finally deposited by air-currents, a considerable 


rock, and when the sun parcheth them, the wind carries off the dust, and 
other sand is there none in that land.” — Viaggio, pp. 69, 70. 

In Arabia Petrza, when a wind, powerful enough to scour down below the 
ordinary surface of the desert and lay bare a fresh bed of stones, is followed 
by a sudden burst of sunshine, the dark agate pebbles are often cracked and 
broken by the heat ; and this is the true explanation of the occurrence of the 
fragments in situations where the action of fire is not probable. If the frag- 
ments are small enough to be rolled by the winds, they are in time ground 
down to sand and contribute to the stock of that material which covers the 
face of the desert, though the sand thus formed is but an infinitesimal pro- 
portion of the whole. 


SANDS OF EGYPT. de 


proportion is either calcareous, and, therefore, readily decom- 
posable, or in the state of a very fine dust, and so, in neither 
vase, injurious to the soil. There are, indeed, both in Africa 
and in Arabia, considerable tracts of fine, silicious sand, which 
may be carried far by high winds, but these are exceptional ca- 
ses, and in general the progress of the desert sand is by a rolling 
motion along the surface.* So little is it lifted, and so incon- 


* Sand heaps, three and evensix hundred feet high, are indeed formed by 
the wind, but this is effected by driving the particles up an inclined plane, not 
by lifting them. Brémontier, speaking of the sand-hills on the western 
coast of France, says: ‘‘ The particles of sand composing them are not large 
enough to resist wind of a certain force, nor small enough to be taken up by 
it, like dust; they only roll along the surface from which they are detached, 
and, though moving with great velocity, they rarely rise to a greater height 
than three or four inches.” — Mémoire sur les Dunes, Annales des Ponts et Chaus- 
sées, 1833, ler sémestre, p. 148. 

Andresen says that a wind, having a velocity of forty feet per second, is 
strong enough to raise particles of sand as high as the face and eyes of a man, 
but that, in general, it rolls along the ground, and is scarcely ever thrown 
more than to the height of a couple of yards from the surface. Even in 
these cases, it is carried forward by a hopping, not a continuous, motion; for 
a very narrow sheet or channel of water stops the drift entirely, all the sand 
dropping into it until it is filled up. 

Blake observes, Pacific Railroad Report, vol. v., p. 242, that the sand of the 
Colorado desert does not rise high in the air, but bounds along on the surface 
or only a few inches above it. 

The character of the motion of sand drifts is well illustrated by an inter- 
esting fact not much noticed hitherto by travellers in the East. In situa- 
tions where the sand is driven through depressions in rock-beds, or over de- 
posits of silicious pebbles, the surface of the stone is worn and smoothed 
much more effectually than it could be by running water, and I have picked 
up, in such localities, rounded, irregularly broken fragments of agate, which 
had received from the attrition of the sand as fine a polish as could be given 
them by the wheel of the lapidary. 

Very interesting observations, by Blake, on the polishing of hard stones by 
drifting sand will be found in the Pacific Railroad Report, vol. v., pp. 92, 
230, 2351. 

The grinding and polishing power of sand has lately received a new and most 
ingenious application in America. Jets of sand, and even of small particles 
of softer substances, thrown with a certain force, are found capable of cutting 
the hardest minerals and metals. A block of corundum, some inches thick, 
has been bored through in a few minutes by this process, and it promises to 
be highly useful in glass-cutting and other similar operations, 


554 SANDS OF EGYPT. 


siderable is the quantity yet remaining on the borders of 
Egypt, that a wall four or five feet high suffices for centuries 
to check its encroachments. This is obvious to the eye of 
every observer who prefers the true to the marvellous; but 
the old-world fable of the overwhelming of caravans by the 
fearful simoom—which even the Arabs no longer repeat, if 
indeed they are the authors of it—is so thoroughly rooted in 
the imagination of Christendom that most desert travellers, of 
the tourist class, think they shall disappoint the readers of 
their journals if they do not recount the particulars of their 
escape from being buried alive by a sand-storm, and the 
popular demand for a “sensation” must be gratified accord- 
ingly. * 

Another circumstance is necessary to be considered in esti- 
mating the danger to which the arable lands of Egypt are 
exposed. The prevailing wind in the valley of the Nile and 
its borders is from the north, and it may be said without 
exaggeration that the north wind blows for three-quarters of 
the year.t The effect of winds blowing up the valley is to 
drive the sands of the desert plateau which border it, in a 
direction parallel with the axis of the valley, not transversely 
to it; and if it ran in a straight line, the north wind would 


* Wilkinson says that, in much experience in the most sandy parts of the 
Libyan desert, and much inquiry of the best native sources, he never saw 
or heard of any instance of danger to man or beast from the mere accumu- 
lation of sand transported by the wind. Chesney’s observations in Arabia, 
and the testimony of the Bedouins he consulted, are to the same purpose. 
The dangers of the simoom are of a different character, though they are 
certainly aggravated by the blinding effects of the light particles of dust 
and sand borne along by it, and by that of the inhalation of them upon the 
respiration. 

+ In the narrow valley of the Nile, bounded as it is, above the Delta, by 
high cliffs, all air-currents from the northern quarter become north winds, 
though of course varying in partial direction, in conformity with the sinu- 
osities of the valley. Upon the desert plateau they incline westwards, 
and have already borne into the valley the sands of the eastern banks, 
and driven those of the western quite out of the Egyptian portion of the 
Nile basin. 


SANDS OF EGYPT. 55a 


carry no desert sand into it. There are, however, both curves 
and angles in its course, and hence, wherever its direction de- 
viates from that of the wind, it might receive sand-drifts from 
the desert plain through which it runs. But, in the eourse of 
ages, the winds have, in a great measure, bared the projecting 
points of their ancient deposits, and no great accumulations 
remain in situations from which either a north or a south wind 
would carry them into the valley.* 

The sand let fall in Egypt by the north wind is derived, not 
from the desert, but from a very different source—the sea. 
Considerable quantities of sand are thrown up by the Mediter- 
ranean, at and between the mouths of the Nile, and indeed along 
almost the whole southern coast of that sea, and drifted into 
the interior to distances varying according to the force of the 
wind and the abundance and quality of the material. The 
sand so transported contributes to the gradual elevation of the 
Delta, and of the banks and bed of the river itself. But just 
in proportion as the bed of the stream is elevated, the height 
of the water in the annual inundations is increased also, and as 


* These considerations apply, with equal force, to the supposed danger of 
the obstruction of the Suez Canal by the drifting of the desert sands. 
The winds across the isthmus are almost uniformly from the north, and 
they swept it comparatively clean of flying sands long ages since. The 
traces of the ancient canal between the Red Sea and the Nile are easily 
followed for a considerable distance from Suez. Had the drifts upon the 
isthmus been as formidable as some have feared and others have hoped, those 
traces would have been obliterated, and Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes 
filled up, many centuries ago. The few particles driven by the rare east and 
west winds towards the line of the canal, will easily be arrested by planta- 
tions or other simple methods, or removed by dredging. The real dangers 
and difficulties of this magnificent enterprise—and they have been great— 
consisted in the nature of the soil to be removed in order to form the line, 
and especially in the constantly increasing accumulation of sea-sand at the 
southern terminus by the tides of the Red Sea, and of sand and Nile slime at 
the northern, by the action of the winds and currents. Both seas are shallow 
for miles from the shore, and the excavation and maintenance of deep chan- 
nels, and of capacious harbors with easy and secure entrances, in such locali- 
ties, is doubtless one of the hardest problems offered to modern engineers for 
practical solution. See post, Geological Importance of Dunes, note, 


556’ SANDS OF EGYPT. 


the inclination of the channel is diminished, the rapidity of the 
current is checked, and the deposition of the slime it holds in 
suspension consequently promoted. Thus the winds and the 
water, moving in contrary directions, join in producing a com- 
mon effect. 

The sand, blown over the Delta and the cultivated land 
higher up the stream during the inundation, is covered or 
mixed with the fertile earth brought down by the river, and 
no serious injury is sustained from it. That spread over the 
same ground after the water has subsided, and during the 
short period when the soil is not stirred by cultivation or coy- 
ered by the flood, forms a thin pellicle over the surface as far 
as it extends, and serves to divide and distinguish the succes- 
sive layers of slime deposited by the annual inundations. The 
particles taken up by the wind on the sea-beach are borne on- 
ward, by a hopping motion, or rolled along the surface, until 
they are arrested by the temporary cessation of the wind, by 
vegetation, or by some other obstruction, and they may, in 
process of time, accumulate in large masses, under the lee of 
rocky projections, buildings, or other barriers which break the 
force of the wind. 

In these facts we find an important element in the explanation 
of the sand drifts, which have half buried the Sphinx and so 
many other ancient monuments in that part of Egypt. These 
drifts, as I have said, are not wholly from the desert, but in 
large proportion from the sea; and, as might be supposed from 
the distance they have travelled, they have been long in gather- 
ing. While Egypt was a great and flourishing kingdom, 
measures were taken to protect its territory against the encroach- 
ment of sand, whether from the desert or from the Mediter- 
ranean; but the foreign conquerors, who destroyed so many of 
its religious monuments, did not spare its public works, and the 
process of physical degradation undoubtedly began as early as 
the Persian invasion. The urgent necessity, which has com- 
pelled all the successive tyrannies of Egypt to keep up some of 
the canals and other arrangements for irrigation, was not felt 


SANDS OF EGYPT. Bot 


with respect to the advancement of the sands; for their pro- 
gress was so slowas hardly to be perceptible in the course of a 
single reign, and long experience has shown that, from the na- 
tural effect of the inundations, the cultivable soil of the valley 
is, on the whole, trenching upon the domain of the desert, not 
retreating before it. 

The oases of the Libyan, as well as of many Asiatic deserts, 
have no such safeguards. The sands are fast encroaching upon 
them, and threaten soon to engulf them, unless man shall 
resort to artesian wells and plantations, or to some other ef- 
ficient means of checking the advance of this formidable 
enemy, in time to save these islands of the waste from final de- 
struction. 

Accumulations of sand are, in certain cases, beneficial as a 
protection against the ravages of the sea; but, in general, the 
vicinity, and especially the shifting of bodies of this material, 
are destructive to human industry, and hence, in civilized 
countries, measures are taken to prevent its spread. This, 
however, can be done only where the population is large and 
enlightened, and the value of the soil, or of the artificial erec- 
tions and improvements upon it, is considerable. Hence in 
the deserts of Africa and of Asia, and the inhabited lands 
which border on them, no pains are usually taken to check the 
drifts, and when once the fields, the houses, the springs, or the 
canals of irrigation are covered or choked, the district is aban- 
doned without a struggle, and surrendered to perpetual deso- 
lation.* 


* In parts of the Algerian desert, some efforts are made to retard the ad- 
vance of sand dunes which threaten to overwhelm villages. ‘‘ At Debila,” 
says Laurent, ‘‘ the lower parts of the lofty dunes are planted with palms, 

. « but they are constantly menaced with burial by the sands. The only 
remedy employed by the natives consists in little dry walls of crystallized 
gypsum, built on the crests of the dunes, together with hedges of dead palm- 
leaves. These defensive measures are aided by incessant labor ; for every 
day the people take up in baskets the sand blown over to them the night 
before and carry it back to the other side of the dune.”—Mémoires sur le 
Sahara, p. 14, 


Or 
Or 
co 


SAND DUNES AND PLAINS. 


Sand Dunes and Sand Plains. 


Two forms of sand deposit are specially important in Eu- 
ropean and American geography. The one is that of dune or 
shifting hillock upon the coast, the other that of barren plain 
in the interior. The coast-dunes are composed of sand washed 
up from the depths of the sea by the waves, and heaped in 
more or less rounded knolls and undulating ridges by the winds. 
The sand with which many plains are covered appears some- 
times to have been deposited upon them while they were yet 
submerged beneath the sea, sometimes to have been drifted 
from the seacoast, and scattered over them by wind-currents, 
sometimes to have been washed upon them by running water. 
In these latter cases, the deposit, though in itself considerable, 
is comparatively narrow in extent and irregular in distribution, 
while, in the former, it is often evenly spread over a very wide 
surface. In all great bodies of either sort, the silicious grains 
are the principal constituent, though, when not resulting from 
the disintegration of silicious rock and still remaining in place, 
they are generally accompanied with a greater or less admix- 
ture of other mineral particles, and of animal and vegetable re- 
mains,* and they are, also, usually somewhat changed in con- 

* Organic constituents, such as comminuted shells, and silicious and cal- 
careous exuvie of infusorial animals and plants, are sometimes found mingled 
in considerable quantities with mineral sands. These are usually the remains 
of aquatic vegetables or animals, but not uniformly so, for the microscopic 
organisms, whose flinty cases enter so largely into the sand-beds of the Mark 
of Brandenburg, are still living and prolific in the dry earth. See WITTWER, 
Physikalische Geographie, p. 142. 

The desert on both sides of the Nile is inhabited by a land-snail—of which 
I have counted eighty, in estimation, on a single shrub barely a foot high—and 
thousands of its shells are swept along and finally buried in the drifts by every 
wind. Every handful of the sand contains fragments of them. ForcHmAM- 
MER, in LEONHARD und BRONN’s Jahrbuch, 1841, p. 8, says of the sand-hills 
of the Danish coast: ‘‘It is not rare to find, high in the knolls, marine shells, 
and especially those of the oyster. They are due to the oyster-eater | Jwmalopus 
ostralegus|, which carries his prey to the top of the dunes to devour it.”’ See 
also STARING, De Bodem van Nederland, i., p. 321. 


COAST DUNES. 559 


sistence by the ever-varying conditions of temperature and 
moisture to which they have been exposed since their deposit. 
Unless the proportion of these latter ingredients is so large as 
to create a considerable adhesiveness in the mass—in which case 
it can no longer properly be called sand—it is infertile, and, if 
not charged with water, partially agglutinated by iron, lime, or 
other cement, or confined by alluvion resting upon it, it is much 
inclined to drift, whenever, by any chance, the vegetable net- 
work which, in most cases, thinly clothes and at the same time 
confines it, is broken. 

Human industry has not only fixed the flying dunes by plan- 
tations, but, by mixing clay and other tenacious earths with the 
superficial stratum of extensive sand plains, and by the applica- 
tion of fertilizing substances, it has made them abundantly pro- 
ductive of vegetable life. These latter processes belong to agri- 
culture and not to geography, and, therefore, are not embraced 
within the scope of the present subject. But the preliminary 
steps, whereby wastes of loose, drifting barren sands are trans- 
formed into wooded knolls and plains, and finally, through the 
‘accumulation of vegetable mould, into arable ground, constitute 
a conquest over nature which precedes agriculture—a geogra- 
phical revolution—and, therefore, an account of the means by 
which the change has been effected belongs properly to the 
history of man’s influence on the great features of terrestrial 
surface. I proceed, then, to examine the structure of dunes, 
and to describe the warfare man wages with the sand-hills, 
striving on the one hand to maintain and even extend them, as 
a natural barrier against encroachments of the sea, and, on the 
other, to check their moving and wandering propensities, and 
prevent them from trespassing upon the fields he has planted 
and the habitations in which he dwells. 


Coast Dunes. 


Coast dunes are oblong ridges or round hillocks, formed by 
the action of the wind upon sands thrown up by the waves on the 


560 COAST DUNES. 


low beaches of seas, and sometimes of fresh-water lakes. On 
most coasts, the supply of sand for the formation of dunes is 
derived from tidal waves. The flow of the tide is more rapid, 
and consequently its transporting power greater, than that of 
the ebb; the momentum, acquired by the heavy particles in 
rolling in with the water, tends to carry them even beyond the 
flow of the waves; and at the turn of the tide, the water is ina 
state of repose long enough to allow it to let fall much of the 
solid matter it holds in suspension. Hence, on all low, tide- 
washed coasts of seas with sandy bottoms, there exist several 
conditions favorable to the formation of sand deposits along 
high-water mark.* If the land-winds are of greater frequency, 
duration, or strength than the sea-winds, the sands left by the 
retreating wave will be constantly blown back into the water ; 
bat if the prevailing air-currents are in the opposite dimocuae 


* There are various reasons why the formation of dunes is confined to low 
shores, and this law is so universal, that when bluffs are surmounted by them, 
there is always cause to suspect upheaval, or the removal of a sloping beach in 
front of the bluff, after the dunes were formed. Bold shores are usually with- 
out a sufficient beach for the accumulation of large deposits ; they are com- — 
monly washed by a sea too deep to bring up sand from its bottom ; their abrupt 
elevation, even if moderate in amount, would still be too great to allow ordi- 
nary winds to lift the sand above them; and their influence in deadening the 
wind which blows towards them would even more effectually prevent the rais- 
ing of sand from the beach at their foot. 

Forchhammer, describing the coast of Jutland, says that, in high winds, 
“* one can hardly stand upon the dunes, except when they are near the water 
line and have been cut down perpendicularly by the waves. Then the wind 
is little or not at all felt—a fact of experience very common on our coasts, 
observed on all the steep shore bluffs of 200 feet height, and, in the Faroe 
Islands, on precipices 2,000 feet high. In heavy gales in those islands, the 
cattle fly to the very edge of the cliffs’'for shelter, and frequently fall over. 
The wind, impinging against the vertical wall, creates an ascending current 
which shoots somewhat past the crest of the rock, and thus the observer or 
the animal is protected against the tempest by a barrier of air.”—LEONTARD 
und Bronn, Jahrbuch, 1841, p. 3. 

The calming, or rather diversion, of the wind by cliffs extends to a considera- 
ble distance in front of them, and no wind would have sufficient force to raise 
the sand vertically, parallel to the face of a bluff, even to the height of twenty 
feet. 


FORM OF DUNES. 561 


the sands will soon be carried out of the reach of the highest 
waves, and transported continually farther and farther into the 
interior of the land, unless obstructed by high grounds, vegeta- 
tion, or other obstacles. 

The laws which govern the formation of dunes are substan- 
tially these. We have seen that, under certain conditions, sand 
is accumulated above high-water mark on low sea and lake 
shores. So long as the sand is kept wet by the spray or by 
capillary attraction, it is not disturbed by air-currents, but as 
soon as the waves retire sufficiently to allow it to dry, it becomes 
the sport of the wind, and is driven up the gently sloping 
beach until it is arrested by stones, vegetables, or other obstruc- 
tions, and thus an accumulation is formed which constitutes the 
foundation of a dune. However slight the elevation thus cre- 
ated, it serves to stop or retard the progress of the sand-grains 
which are driven against its shoreward face, and to protect 
from the further influence of the wind the particles which are 
borne beyond it, or rolled over its crest, and fall down behind 
it. Jf the shore above the beach line were perfectly level and 
straight, the grass or bushes upon it of equal height, the sand 
thrown up by the waves uniform in size and weight of particles 
as well as in distribution, and if the action of the wind were 
steady and regular, a continnous bank would be formed, every- 
where alike in height and cross section. But no such constant: 
conditions anywhere exist. The banks are curved, broken, un- 
equal in elevation ; they are sometimes bare, sometimes clothed 
with vegetables of different structure and dimensions ; the sand 
thrown up is variable in quantity and character; and the winds 
are shifting, gusty, vortical, and often blowing in very narrow 
currents. Irom all these causes, instead of uniform hills, there 
rise irregular rows of sand-heaps, and these, as would naturally 
be expected, are of a pyramidal, or rather conical shape, and 
connected at bottom by more or less continuous ridges of the 
same material. 

Elisée Reclus, in describing the coast dunes of Gascony, ob- 


serves that when, as sometimes happens, the sands are not heaped 
» 
36 


562 HEIGHT OF DUNES. 


in a continuous, irregular bulwark, but deposited in isolated 
hillocks, they have a tendency to assume a crescent shape, the 
convexity being turned seawards, or towards the direction from 
which the prevailing winds proceed. This fact, the geological 
bearing of which is obvious, is not noticed by previous French 
writers or even by Andresen, though a semi-lunar outline has 
been long generally ascribed to inland dunes. It is, however, 
evident that such a form would naturally be produced by the 
action of a wind blowing long in a given direction upon a mass 
of loose sand with a fixed centre—such as is constituted by the 
shrub or stone around which the sand is first deposited—and 
free extremities. 

On a receding coast, dunes will not attain so great a height 
as on more secure shores, because they are undermined and 
carried off before they have time to reach their greatest dimen- 
sions. Hence, while at sheltered points in South-western 
France, there are dunes three hundred feet or more in height, 
‘those on the Frisic Islands and the exposed parts of the coast of 
‘Schleswig-Holstein range only from twenty to one hundred feet. 
‘On the western shores of Africa, it is said that they sometimes 
‘attain an elevation of six hundred feet. This is one of the 
very few points known to geographers where desert sands are 
‘advancing seawards,* and here they rise to the greatest altitude 
‘to which sand-grains can be carried by the wind. 

The hillocks, once deposited, are held together and kept in 
‘shape, partly by mere gravity, and partly by the slight cohesion 
of the lime, clay, and organic matter mixed with the sand ; and 
it is observed that, from capillary attraction, evaporation from 
lower strata, and retention of rain-water, they are always moist 
-a little below the surface.t By successive accumulations, they 
gradually rise to the height of thirty, fifty, sixty, or a hundred 


*“° On the west coast of Africa the dunes are drifting seawards, and always 
receiving new accessions from the Sahara, They are constantly advancing 
out into the sea,”’—NAUMANN, Geognosie, ii., p. 1172. 

+ ‘‘ Dunes are always full of water, from the action of capillary attraction. 
Upon the summits, one seldom needs to dig more than a foot to find the 


FORMATION OF DUNES. 563 


feet, and sometimes even much higher. Strong winds, instead 
of adding to their elevation, sweep off loose particles from their 
surface, and these, with others blown over or between them, 
build up asecond row of dunes, and so on according to the 
character of the wind, the supply and consistence of the sand, 
and the face of the country. In this way is formed a belt of 
sand-dunes, irregularly dispersed and varying much in height 
and dimensions, and sometimes many miles in breadth. On 
the Island of Sylt, in the German Sea, where there are several 
rows, the width of the belt is from half a mile toa mile. There 
are similar ranges on the coast of Holland, exceeding two miles 


sand moist, and in the depressions, fresh water is met with near the surface.” 
-—_FORCHHAMMER, in LEONHARD und Brony, for 1841, p. 5, note. 

On the other hand, Andresen, who has very carefully investigated this as 
well as all other dune phenomena, maintains that the humidity of the sand 
ridges cannot be derived from capillary attraction. He found by experiment 
that a heap of drift-sand was not moistened to a greater height than eight 
and a half inches, after standing with its base a whole night in water. He 
states the minimum of water contained by the sand of the dunes, one foot 
below the surface, after a long drought, at two per cent., the maximum, after 
a rainy month, at four per cent. At greater depths the quantity is larger. 
The hygroscopicity of the sand of the coast of Jutland he found to be thirty- 
three per cent. by measure, or 21.5 by weight. The annual precipitation 
on that coast is twenty-seven inches, and, as the evaporation is about the 
same, he argues that rain-water does not penetrate far beneath the surface of 
the dunes, and concludes that their humidity can be explained only by evap- 
oration from below.—Om Klitformationen, pp. 106-110. 

In the dunes of Algeria, water is so abundant that wells are constantly dug 
in them at high points on their surface. They are sunk to the depth of three 
or four métres only, and the water rises to the height of a métre in them.— 
LAURENT, Mémoire surle Sahara, pp. 11, 12, 13. 

The same writer observes (p. 14) that the hollows in the dunes are planted 
with palms which find moisture enough a little below the surface. It would 
hence seem that the proposal to fix the dunes which are supposed to threaten 
the Suez Canal, by planting the maritime pine and other trees upon them, is 
not altogether so absurd as it has been thought to be by some of those disin- 
terested philanthropists of other nations who were distressed with fears that 
French capitalists would lose the money they had invested in that great 
undertaking. 

Ponds of water are often found in the depressions between the sand-hills of 
the dune chains in the North American desert. 


564 DUNES ON SHORES OF TIDELESS WATERS. 


in breadth, while at the mouths of the Nile they form a zone not 
less than ten miles wide. 

The base of some of the dunes in the Delta of the Nile is 
reached by the river during the annual inundation, and the in- 
filtration of the water, which contains lime, has converted the 
lower strata into a silicious limestone, or rather a calcareous 
sandstone, and thus afforded an opportunity of studying the 
structure of that rock in a locality where its origin and mode of 
ageregation and solidification are known. 

The tide, though a usual, is by no means a necessary condi- 
tion for the accumulations of sand out of which dunes are 
formed. The Baltic and the Mediterranean are almost tideless 
seas, but there are vast ranges of dunes on the Russian and 
Prussian coasts of the Baltic and at the mouths of the Nile and 
many other points on the shores of the Mediterranean. The 
vast shoals in the latter sea, known to the ancients as the Great- 
er and Lesser Syrtis, are of marine origin. They are still fill- 
ing up with sand, washed up from greater depths, or sometimes 
drifted from the coast in small quantities, and will probably be 
converted, at some future period, into dry land covered with 
sand-hills. There are also extensive ranges of dunes upon the 
eastern shores of the Caspian, and at the southern, or rather 
south-eastern, extremity of Lake Michigan.* There is no doubt 
that this latter lake formerly extended much farther in that 
direction, but its southern portion has gradually shoaled and at 
last been converted into solid land, in consequence of the preva- 
lence of the north-west winds. These blow over the lake a large 
part of the year, and create a southwardly set of the currents, 
which wash up sand from the bed of the lake and throw it on 
shore. Sand is taken up from the beach at Michigan City by 
every wind from that quarter, and, after a heavy blow of some 


* The careful observations of Colonel J. D. Graham, of the United States 
Army, show a tide of about three inches in Lake Michigan. See ‘‘A Lunar 
Tidal Wave in the North American Lakes,’’ demonstrated by Lieut.-Colonel J. 
D. Graham, in the fourteenth volume of the Proceedings of the American Asso- 
ciation for the Advancement of Science. 


FORMATION OF DUNES—SAND BANKS. 565 


hours’ duration, sand ridges may be observed on the north side 
of the fences, like the snow wreaths deposited by a drifting 
wind in winter. Some of the particles are carried back by con- 
trary winds, but most of them lodge on or behind the dunes, or 
in the moist soil near the lake, or are entangled by vegetables, 
and tend permanently to elevate the level. Like effects are 
produced by constant sea-winds, and dunes will generally be 
formed on all low coasts where such prevail, whether in tide- 
less or in tidal waters. 

Jobard thus describes the modus operandi, under ordinary 
circumstances, at the mouths of the Nile, where a tide can 
scarcely be detected: “When a wave breaks, it deposits an 
almost imperceptible line of fine sand. The next wave brings 
also its contribution, and shoves the preceding line a little 
higher. As soon as the particles are fairly out of the reach of 
the water they are dried by the heat of the burning sun, and 
immediately seized by the wind and rolled or borne farther in- 
land. The gravel is not thrown out by the waves, but rolls 
backwards and forwards until it is worn down to the state of 
fine sand, when it, in its turn, is cast upon the land and taken 
up by the wind.” * This description applies only to the com- 
mon every-day action of wind and water; but just in propor- 
tion to the increasing force of the wind and the waves, there is 
an increase in the quantity of sand, and in the magnitude of 
the particles carried off from the beach by it, and, of course, 
every storm in a landward direction adds sensibly to the accu- 
mulation upon the shore. 


Sand Banks. 


Although dunes, properly so called, are found only on dry 
land and above ordinary high-water mark, and owe their eleva- 
tion and structure to the action of the wind, yet, upon many 
shelving coasts, accumulations of sand much resembling dunes 
are formed under water at some distance from the shore by the 


* STARING, De Boden van Nederland, i., p. 827, note. 


566 SAND BANKS. 


oscillations of the waves, and are well known by the name of 
sand banks. They are usually rather ridges than banks, of 
moderate inclination, and with the steepest slope seawards,* 
and their form differs little from that of dunes except in this 
last particular and in being lower and more continuous. Upon 
the western coast of the island of Amrum, for example, there 
are three rows of such banks, the summits of which are at a 
distance of perhaps a couple of miles from each other ; so that, 
including the width of the banks themselves, the spaces between 
them, and the breadth of the zone of dunes upon the land, the 
belt of moving sands on that coast is probably not less than 
eight miles wide. 

Under ordinary circumstances, sand banks are always rolling 
landwards, and they compose the magazine from which the 
material for the dunes is derived.t The dunes, in fact, are but 
aquatic sand banks transferred to dry land. The laws of their 
formation are closely analogous, because the action of the two 
fluids, by which they are respectively accumulated and built up, 
is very similar when brought to bear upon loose particles of 
solid matter. It would, indeed, seem that the slow and com- 
paratively regular movements of the heavy, unelastic water 
ought to affect such particles very differently from the sudden 
and fitful impulses of the light and elastic air. But the velo- 
city of the wind currents gives them a mechanical force approx- 
imating to that of the slower waves, and, however difficult it 
may be to explain all the phenomena that characterize the 


* Kou, Jnseln und Marschen Schleswig Holsteins, ii., p. 33. From a draw- 
ing in ANDRESEN, Om Klitformationen, p. 24, it would appear that on the 
Schleswig coast the surf-formed banks have the steepest slope landwards, 
those farther from the shore, as stated in the text. 

+ Sand banks sometimes connect themselves with the coast at both ends, 
and thus cut off a portion of the sea. In this case, as well as when salt water 
is enclosed by sea-dikes, the water thus separated from the ocean gradually 
becomes fresh, or at least brackish. The Haffs, or large expanses of fresh 
water in Eastern Prussia—which are divided from the Baltic by narrow sand 
banks called Nehrungen, or, at sheltered points of the coast, by fluviatile 
deposits called Werders—all have one or more open passages, through which 
the water of the rivers that supply them at last finds its way to the sea. 


oe ee ee 


CHARACTER OF DUNE SAND. 567 


structure of the dunes, observation has proved that it is nearly 
identical with that of submerged sand banks.* The differences 
of form are generally ascribable to the greater number and 
variety of surface accidents of the ground on which the sand 
hills of the land are built up, and to the more frequent changes, 
and wider variety of direction, in the courses of the wind. 


Character of Dune Sand. 


“Dune sand,” says Staring, “ consists of well-rounded grains 
of quartz, more or less colored by iron, and often mingled with 
fragments of shells, small indeed, but still visible to the naked 
eye.+ These fragments are not constant constituents of dune 


* Forchhammer ascribes the resemblance between the furrowing of the dune 
sands and the beach ripples, not to the similarity of the effect of wind and 
water upon sand, but wholly to the action of the wind; in the first instance, 
directly, in the latter, through the water. ‘‘ The wind-ripples on the surface 
of the dunes precisely resemble the water-ripples of sand flats occasionally 
overflowed by the sea; and with the closest scrutiny, I have never been able 
to detect the slightest difference between them. This is easily explained by 
the fact, that the water-ripples are produced by the action of light wind on 
the water which only transmits the air-waves to the sand.”—LEONHARD und 
Bronn, 1841, pp. 7, 8. 

+ According to the French authorities, the dunes of France are not always 
composed of quartzose sand. ‘‘ The dune sands” of different characters, says 
Brémontier, ‘‘ partake of the nature of the different materials which compose 
them. At certain points on the coast of Normandy they are found to be purely 
calcareous ; they are of mixed composition on the shores of Brittany and 
Saintonge, and generally quartzose between the mouth of the Gironde and 
that of the Adour.”— Mémoire sur les Dunes, Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, t. 
vii., 1833, ler sémestre, p. 146. 

In the dunes of Long Island and of Jutland, there are considerable veins 
composed almost wholly of garnet. For a very full examination of the 
mechanical and chemical.composition of the dune sands of Jutland, see 
ANDRESEN, Om Klitformationen, p. 110. 

Fraas informs us, Aus dem Orient, pp. 176, 177, that the dune sands of the 
Egyptian coast arise from the disintegration of the calcareous sandstone of the 
same region. This sandstone, composed in a large proportion of detritus of 
both land and sea shells mingled with quartz sand, appears to have been con- 
solidated under water during an ancient period of subsidence. A later up- 
heayal brought it to or near the surface, when it was more or less disintegra- 


568 CHARACTER OF DUNE SAND. 


sand. They are sometimes found at the very summits of the 
hillocks, as at Overveen ; in the King’s Dune, near Egmond, 
they form a coarse, calcareous gravel very largely distributed 
through the sand, while the interior dunes between Haarlem 
and Warmond exhibit no trace of them. It is yet undecided 
whether the presence or absence of these fragments is deter- 
mined by the period of the formation of the dunes, or whether it 
depends on a difference in the process by which different dunes 
have been accumulated. Land shells, such as snails, for exam- 
ple, are found on the surface of the dunes in abundance, and 
iany of the shelly fragments in the interior of the hillocks may 
be derived from the same source.” * 

Sand concretions form within the dunes and especially in the 
depressions between them. These are sometimes so extensive 
and impervious as to retain a sufficient supply of water to feed 
perennial springs, and to form small permanent ponds, and 
they are a great impediment to the penetration of roots, and 
consequently to the growth of trees planted, or germinating 
from self-sown seeds, upon the dunes.t 


ted by the action of the waves and by meteoric influences—a process still going 
ou—and it is now again subsiding with the coast it rests on. 

The calcareous sand arising from the comminution of corals forms dunes 
on some of the West India Islands.—AGaAssiz, Bulletin of the Museum of Com- 
parative Zodlugy, vol. i. 

* De Bodem van Nederland, i., p. 3238. 

+Srarmne, De Bodem van Nederland, i., p. 317. See also BERGSOR, 
Reventiov’s Virksomhed, ii., p. 11. 

‘*TIn the sand-hill ponds mentioned in the text, there is vigorous growth of 
bog plants accompanied with the formation of peat, which goes on regularly 
as long as the dune sand does not drift. Butif the surface of the dunes is 
broken, the sand blows into the ponds, covers the peat, and puts an end to its 
formation. When, in the course of time, marine currents cut away the coast, 
the dunes move landwards and fill up the ponds, and thus are formed the 
remarkable strata of fossile peat called Martérv, which appears to be un- 
known to the geologists of other parts of Europe.”—ForRCHMAMMER, in 
LEONHARD und Bronn, 1841, p. 13. Martérvy has a specific gravity thrice 
as great as that of ordinary peat in consequence of the pressure of the sand. 
—ASBJORNSEN, Tory og Torvdrift, p. 26. 


INTERIOR STRUCTURE OF DUNES. 569 


Interior Structure of Dunes. 


The interior structure of the dunes, the arrangement of their 
particles, is not, as might be expected, that of an unorganized, 
confused heap, but they show a strong tendency to stratifica- 
tion. This is a point of much geological interest, because it 
indicates that sandstone may owe its stratified character to the 
action of other forces as well as of water. The origin and 
peculiar character of these layers are due to a variety of causes. 

For example, a south-west wind and current may deposit upon 
a dune a stratum of a given color and mineral composition, and 
this may be succeeded by a north-west wind and current, bring- 
ing with them particles of a different hue, constitution, and 
origin. Again, if we suppose a violent tempest to strew the 
beach with sand-grains very different in magnitude and specific 
gravity, and, after the sand is dry, to be succeeded by a gentle 
breeze, it is evident that only the lighter particles will be taken 
up and carried to the dunes. If, after some time, the wind 
freshens, heavier grains will be transported and deposited on 
the former, and a still stronger succeeding gale will roll up yet 
larger kernels. Each of these deposits will form a stratum. If 
we suppose the tempest to be followed, after the sand is dry, 
not by a gentle breeze, but by a wind powerful enough to lift 
at the same time particles of very various magnitudes and 
weights, the heaviest will often lodge on the dune while the 
lighter will be carried farther. This would produce a stratum 
of coarse sand, and the same effect might result from the 
blowing away of light particles out of a mixed layer, while 
the heavier remained undisturbed.* Still another cause of 
apparent stratification may be found in the occasional interpo- 


* The lower strata must be older than the superficial layers, and the parti- 
cles which compose them may in time become more disintegrated, and there- 
fore finer than those deposited later and above them. 

Hull ingeniously suggests that, besides other changes, fine sand intermixed 
with or deposited above a coarser stratum, as well as the minute particles 


570 STRATIFICATION OF DUNES. 


sition of a thin layer of leaves or other vegetable remains 
between successive deposits, and this I imagine to be more 
frequent than has been generally supposed. Some geologists 
have thought that the sand strata of dunes are of annual forma- 
tion; * but the autumnal deposit of foliage from neighboring 
trees and shrubs furnishes a more probable explanation of the 
division of the sand-heaps into regular layers. 

A late distinguished American admiral communicated to 
me an interesting observation made by him at San I’rancisco, 
which has an important bearing on the arrangement of the 
particles of sand in dunes and other irregular accumulations of 
that substance. In laying out a navy-yard at that port, a large 
quantity of earthy material was removed from the dunes and 
other hillocks and carted to a low piece of ground which 
required filling up. Sand of various characters, fine and coarse 
gravel, and common earth were dropped promiscuously by 
the carts as accident or convenience dictated, and of course 
they were all confusedly intermixed. Some time after, when 
the new ground was consolidated, various excavations were 
made in it, and the different materials of which the filling was 
composed were found to be stratified with considerable regu- 
larity, according to their specific gravity. 

Two explanations of this remarkable fact suggest themselves 
to me, which, however, do not perhaps exclude others. San 
Francisco is subject to earthquakes, and though violent or even 
sensible shocks are not very frequent, it is highly probable that, 
as is shown to be the case in many other countries, by late seis- 
mological observations, there are, in the course of the year, a 
great number of slight shocks which escape unscientific obser- 
vation. A frequent repetition of slight tremblings of the earth 


resulting from the disintegration of the grains of the latter, may be carried 
by rain in the case of dunes, or by the ordinary action of sea-water in that 
of sand-banks, down through the interstices in the coarser layer, and thus the 
relative position of sand and gravel may be changed.— Oorsprong der Holland- 
sche Duinen, p. 105. 

*ScHOMANN, Geologische Wanderungen durch die Preussischen Ost-See 
Provinzen, 1869, p. 81. 


STRATIFICATION OF DUNES. Ly ¢l 


would, like any other moderate mechanical agitation, proba- 
bly produce the separation of a miscellaneous mass, like that 
described, into distinct layers. Again, the Pacific coast, like 
all others upon an open sea, is exposed to incessant concussion 
from the shock of the waves, which is repeated many thousand 
times a day. This concussion is often sensibly felt by the 
observer, and it seems not in the least improbable that the agita- 
tion may have tended to produce a stratified arrangement in 
the case at San Francisco, as well as in all coast dunes and 
other accumulations of loose mineral material in similar situa- 
tions. Kohl observes that the shore on the landward side of 
the files of dunes often trembles from the shock of the waves on 
the beach, * and Villeneuve established by careful experiment 
that at Dunkerque the ground is sensibly agitated by the same 
cause, in stormy weather, to a distance of more than a mile 
from the sea. 

The eddies of strong winds between the hillocks must also 
occasion disturbances and re-arrangements of the sand layers, 
and it seems possible that the irregular thickness and the 
strange contortions of the strata of the sandstone at Petra may 
be due to some such cause. A curious observation of Professor 
Forchhammer suggests an explanation of another peculiarity 
in the structure of the sandstone of Mount Seir. He describes 
dunes in Jutland, composed of yellow quartzose sand inter- 
mixed with black titanian iron. When the wind blows over 
the surface of the dunes, it furrows the sand with alternate 
ridges and depressions, ripples, in short, like those of water. 
The swells, the dividing ridges of the system of sand ripples, are 
composed of the light grains of quartz, while the heavier iron 
rolls into the depressions between, and thus the whole surface 
of the dune appears as if covered with a fine black network. 

The sea side of dunes, being more exposed to the caprices 
of the wind, is more irregular in form than the lee or land 
side, where the arrangement of the particles is affected by 
fewer disturbing and conflicting influences. Hence, the strati- 


* Inscln und Marschen, etc., ii., p. 34. 


572 GEOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF DUNES. 


fication of the windward slope is somewhat confused, while the 
sand on the lee side is found to be disposed in more regular 
beds, inclining landwards, and with the largest particles lowest, 
where their greater weight would naturally carry them. The 
lee side of the dunes, being thus formed of sand deposited 
according to the laws of gravity, is very uniform in its slope, 
which, according to Forchhammer, varies little from an angle 
of 30° with the horizon, while the more exposed and irregular 
weather side lies at an inclination of from 5° to 10°. When, 
however, the outer tier of dunes is formed so near the water- 
line as to be exposed to the immediate action of the waves, it 
is undermined, and the face of the hill is very steep and some- 
times nearly perpendicular. 


Geological Importance of Dunes. 


These observations, and other facts which a more attentive 
study on the spot would detect, might furnish the means of 
determining interesting and important questions concerning 
geological formations in localities very unlike those where 
dunes are now thrown up. For example, Studer supposes that 
the drifting sand-hills of the African desert were originally 
coast dunes, and that they have been transported to their present 
position far in the interior, by the rolling and shifting leeward 
movement to which all dunes not covered with vegetation are 
subject. The present general drift of the sands of that desert 
appears to be to the south-west and west, the prevailing winds 
blowing from the north-east and east; but it has been doubted 
whether the shoals of the western coast of Northern Africa, 
and the sands upon that shore, are derived from the bottom of 
the Atlantic, in the usual manner, or, by an inverse process, 
from those of the Sahara. The latter, as has been before re- 
marked, is probably the truth, though observations are wanting 
to decide the question.* There would be nothing violently im- 


* “©The North African desert falls into two divisions : the Sahel, or western, 
and the Sahar, or eastern, The sands of the Sahar were, at a remote period, 


GEOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF DUNES. 573 


probable in the a priort supposition that they may have been in 
part first thrown up by the Mediterranean on its Libyan coast, 
and thence blown south and west over the vast space they now 
cover. But inasmuch as it is now geologically certain that the 
Sahara is an uplifted bed of an ancient sea, we may suppose 
that, while submerged, it was, like other sea-bottoms, strewn with 
sand, and that its present supply of that material was, in great 
proportion, brought up with it. Laurent observed, some years 
ago, that marine shells of still extant species were found in the 
Sahara, far from the sea, and even at considerable depths below 
the surface.* These observations have been confirmed past all 
question by Desor, Martins, and others, and the facts and the 
obvious conclusion they suggest are at present not disputed. 
But whatever has been the source and movement of these 
sands, they can hardly fail to have left on their route some sand- 
stone monuments to mark their progress, such, for example, as 
we have seen are formed from the dune sand at the mouth of 
the Nile; and it is conceivable that the character of the drift- 
ing sands themselves, and of the conglomerates and sandstones 
to whose formation they have contributed, might furnish satis- 
factory evidence as to their origin, their starting-point, and the 
course by which they have wandered so far from the sea.t 


drifted to the west. In the Sahel, the prevailing east winds drive the sand- 
ocean with a progressive westward motion. The eastern half of the desert is 
swept clean.”—NAUMANN, Geognosie, ii., p. 1173. 

* Mémoires sur le Sahara Oriental p. 62. 

+ Forchhammer, after pointing out the coincidence between the inclined 
stratification of dunes and the structure of ancient tilted rocks, says: ‘‘ But 
I am not able to point out a sandstone formation corresponding to the dunes, 
Probably most ancient dunes have been destroyed by submersion before the 
loose sand became cemented to solid stone, but we may suppose that circum- 
stances have existed somewhere which have preserved the characteristics of 
this formation.”—LEONHARD und Bron, 1841, p. 8, 9. 

Such formations, however, certainly exist. Laurent (Mémoire sur le Sahara, 
etc., p. 12) tells us that in the Algerian desert there are ‘‘ sandstone formation” 
not only ‘‘ corresponding to the dunes,” but actually consolidated within them. 
‘* A place called El-Mouia-Tadjer presents a repetition of what we saw at El- 
Baya; one of the funnels formed in the middle of the dunes contains wells 
from two metres to two and a half in depth, dug ina sand which pressure, 


574 GEOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF DUNES. 


Tf the sand of coast dunes is, as Staring describes it, com- 
posed chiefly of well-rounded quartzose grains, fragments of 
shells, and other constant ingredients, it would often be recog- 
nizable as coast sand, in its agglutinate state of sandstone. The 
texture of this rock varies from an almost imperceptible fine- 
ness of grain to great coarseness, and affords good facilities for 
microscopic observation of its structure. There are sandstones, 
such, for example, as are used for grindstones, where the grit, 
as it is called, is of exceeding sharpness; others where the 
angles of the grains are so obtuse that they scarcely act at all 
on hard metals. The former may be composed of grains of 
rock, disintegrated indeed, and re-cemented together, but not, in 
the meanwhile, much rolled ; the latter, of sands long washed 
by the sea, and drifted by land-winds. There is, indeed, so 
much resemblance between the effects of driving winds and of 
rolling water upon light bodies, that there might be difliculty 
in distinguishing them; but after all, it is not probable that 
sandstone, composed of grains thrown up from the salt sea, and 
long tossed by the winds, would be identical in its structure 
with that formed from fragments of rock crushed by mechani- 
cal force, or disintegrated by heat, and again agglutinated with- 
out much exposure to the action of moving water. 


and probably the presence of certain salts, have cemented so as to form true 
sandstone, soft indeed, but which does not yield except to the pickaxe. These 
sandstones exhibit an inclination which seems to be the effect of wind; for 
they conform to the direction of the sands which roll down a scarp occasioned 
by the primitive obstacle.” 

‘“ At New Quay the dune sands are converted to stone by an oxide of iron held 
in solution by the water which pervades them. This stone, which is formed, so 
to speak, under our eye, has been found solid enough to be employed for build- 
ing.”—Esquiros, L’ Angleterre, etc., in Revue des Deux Mondes, 1864, pp. 
44, 45. 

The dunes near the mouth of the Nile, the lower sands of which have been 
cemented together by the infiltration of Nile water, would probably show a 
similar stratification in the sandstone which now forms their base. 

Dana describes a laminated rock often formed by the infiltration of water 
into the sand dunes on the Hawaian islands.— Corals and Coral Islands, 1872, 
p- 155, 


DUNES OF AMERICAN COASTS. 575 


Dunes of American Coasts. 


Upon the Atlantic coast of the United States, the prevalence 
of western or off-shore winds is unfavorable to the formation of 
dunes, and, though marine currents lodge vast quantities of 
sand, in the form of banks, on that coast, its shores are propor- 
tionally more free from sand-hills than some others of lesser 
extent. There are, however, very important exceptions. The ac- 
tion of the tide throws much sand upon some points of the New 
England coast, as well as upon the beaches of Long Island and 
other more southern shores, and here dunes resembling those of 
Europe are formed. ‘There are also extensive ranges of dunes 
on the Pacific coast of the United States, and at San Francisco 
they border some of the streets of the city. 

The dunes of America are far older than her civilization, and 
the soil they threaten or protect possesses, in general, too little 
value to justify any great expenditure in measures for arresting 
their progress or preventing their destruction. Hence, great as 
is their extent and their geographical importance, they have, at 
present, no such intimate relations to human life as to render 
them objects of special interest in the point of view I am 
taking, and I do not know that the laws of their formation and 
motion have been made a subject of original investigation by 
any American observer. 


Dunes of Western Europe. 


Upon the western coast of Europe, on the contrary, the 
ravages occasioned by the movement of sand dunes, and the 
serious consequences often resulting from the destruction of 
them, have long engaged the earnest attention of Governments 
and of scientific men, and for nearly a century persevering and 
systematic effort has been made to bring them under human 
control. The subject has been carefully studied in Denmark 
and the adjacent duchies, in Western Prussia, in the Nether- 


576 DUNES OF GASCONY. 


lands, and in France; and the experiments in the way of 
arresting the drifting of the dunes, and of securing them, and 
the lands they shelter, from the encroachments of the sea, have 
resulted in the adoption of a system of coast improvement sub- 
stantially the same in all these countries. The sands, like the 
forests, have now their special literature, and the volumes and 
memoirs, which describe them and the processes employed to 
subdue them, are full of scientific interest and of practical 
instruction. 


Dunes of Gascony. 


In the small kingdom of Denmark, inclusive of the duchies 
of Schleswig and Holstein, the dunes cover an area of more 
than two hundred and sixty square miles. The breadth of the 
chain is very various, and in some places it consists only of a 
single row of sand-hills, while in others, it is more than six 
miles wide.* The dunes of the Prussian coast are vaguely esti- 
mated to cover from eighty-five to one hundred and ten thou- 
sand acres; those of Holland one hundred and forty thousand 
acres ; and those of Gascony more than two hundred thousand 
acres. Ido not find any estimate of their extent in other pro- 
vinces of France, or in the Baltic provinces of Russia, but it is 
probable that the entire quantity of dune land upon the Atlantic 
and Daltic shores of Europe does not fall much short of a 
million of acres.t This vast deposit of sea-sand extends along 

* ANDERSEN, Om Klitformationen, pp. 78, 262, 275. 

+ In an article on the dunes of Europe, in vol. 29 (1864) of Aus der Nata, 
p. 590, the dunes are estimated to cover, on the islands and coasts of Schles- 
wig Holstein, in North-west Germany, Denmark, Holland, and France, one 
hundred and eighty-one German, or nearly four thousand English square 
miles ; in Scotland, about ten German, or two hundred and ten English miles ; 
in Ireland, twenty German, or four hundred and twenty English miles; and 
in England, one hundred and twenty German, or more than twenty-five hun- 
dred English miles. Pannewitz (Anleitung zum Anbau der Sandflichen), as 
cited by Andresen (Om Klitformationen, p. 45), states that the drifting sands 


of Europe, including, of course, sand plains as well as dunes, cover an extent 
of 21,000 square miles. This is, perhaps, an exaggeration, though there is, 


AGE, CHARACTER, AND PERMANENCE OF DUNES. 577 


the coasts for a distance of several hundred miles, and from the 
time of the destruction of the forests which covered it, to the 
year 1789, the whole line was rolling inwards and burying the 
soil beneath it, or rendering the fields unproductive by the sand 
which drifted from it. At the same time, as the sand-hills 
moved landwards, the ocean was closely following their retreat 
and swallowing up the ground they had covered, as fast as 
their movement left it bare. 


Age, Character, and Permanence of Dunes. 


The origin of most great lines of dunes goes back past all 
history. There are on many coasts several distinct ranges of 
sand-hills which seem to be of very different ages, and to have 
been formed under different relative conditions of land and 
water.* In some cases there has been an upheaval of the coast 
line since the formation of the oldest hillocks, and these have 


undoubtedly, much more desert-land of this description on the Huropean con- 
tinent than has been generally supposed. There is no question that most of 
this waste is capable of reclamation by simple planting, and no mode of physi- 
cal improvement is better worth the attention of civilized Governments than 
this, 

There are often serious objections to extensive forest planting on soils capa- 
ble of being otherwise made productive, but they do not apply to sand wastes, 
which, until covered by woods, are not only a useless incumbrance, but a 
source of serious danger to all human improvements in the neighborhood of 
them. 

* Krause, speaking of the dunes on the coast of Prussia, says: ‘‘ Their 
origin belongs to three different periods, in which important changes in the 
relative level of sea and land have unquestionably taken place. . . . Except 
in the deep depressions between them, the dunes are everywhere sprinkled, to 
a considerable height, with brown oxydulated iron, which has penetrated into 
the sand to the depth of from three to eighteen inches, and colored it red. 

. Above the iron is a stratum of sand differing in composition from 
ordinary sea-sand, and on this, growing woods are always found. . . . The 
gradually accumulated forest soil occurs in beds of from one to three feet 
thick, and changes, proceeding upward, from gray sand to black humus.” 
Even on the third or seaward range, the sand grasses appear and thrive 
luxuriantly, at least on the west coast, though Krause doubts whether the 
dunes of the east coast were ever thus protected.—Der Diinenbau, pp. 8, 11. 


ot 


578 AGE, CHARACTER, AND PERMANENCE OF DUNES. 


become inland dunes, while younger rows have been thrown 
up on the new beach laid bare by elevation of the sea-bed. 
Our knowledge of the mode of their first accumulation is de- 
rived from observation of the action of wind and water in the 
few instances where, with or without the aid of man, new 
coast dunes have been accumulated, and of the influence of 
wind alone in elevating new sand-heaps inland of the coast 
tier, when the outer rows are destroyed by the sea, as also 
when the sodded surface of ancient sands has been broken, and 
the subjacent strata laid open to the air. 

It is a question of much interest, in what degree the naked 
condition of most dunes is to be ascribed to the improvidence 
and indiscretion of man. There are, in Western France, ex- 
tensive ranges of dunes covered with ancient and dense forests, 
while the recently formed sand-hills between them and the sea 
are bare of vegetation, and in some cases are rapidly advancing 
upon the wooded dunes, which they threaten to bury beneath 
their drifts. Between the old dunes and the new there is no 
‘discoverable difference in material or in structure; but the 
modern sand-hills are naked and shifting, the ancient, clothed 
with vegetation and fixed. It has been conjectured that arti- 
ficial methods of confinement and plantation were employed by 
the primitive inhabitants of Gaul; and Laval, basing his calcu- 
lations on the rate of annual movement of the shifting dunes, 
assions the fifth century of the Christian era as the period when 
these processes were abandoned.* 

There is no historical evidence that the Gauls were ac- 
quainted with artificial methods of fixing the sands of the 
coast, and we have little reason to suppose that they were ad- 
vanced enough in civilization to be likely to resort to such 
processes, especially at a period when land could have had but 
‘a moderate value. 

In other countries, dunes haye spontaneously clothed them- 


* LAVAL, Mémoire sur les Dunes de Gascogne, Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 
1847, 2me sémestre, p. 231. The same opinion had been expressed by 
BrimMontier, Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1833, ler sémestre, p. 185. 


DUNES NATURALLY WOODED. 579 


selves with forests, and the rapidity with which their surface is 
covered by various species of sand-plants, and finally by trees, 
where man and cattle and burrowing animals are excluded 
from them, renders it highly probable that they would, as a 
general rule, protect themselves, if left to the undisturbed ac- 
tion of natural causes. The sand-hills of the Frische Nehrung, 
on the coast of Prussia, were formerly wooded down to the 
water’s edge, and it was only in the last century that, in conse- 
' quence of the destruction of their forests, they became moving 
sands.* There is every reason to believe that the dunes of the 
Netherlands were clothed with trees until after the Roman in- 
yasion. The old geographers, in describing these countries, 
speak of vast forests extending to the very brink of the sea; but 
drifting coast dunes are first mentioned by the chroniclers of 
the Middle Ages, and so far as we know they have assumed a 
destructive character in consequence of the improvidence of 
man. t+ The history of the dunes of Michigan, so far as I have 


* “In the Middle Ages,” says Willibald Alexis, as quoted by Miiller, Das 
Buch der Pflanzenwelt, i., p. 16, ‘‘the Nehrung was extending itself further, 
and the narrow opening near Lochstadt had filled itself up with sand. A 
great pine forest bound with its roots the dune sand and the heath uninter- 
ruptediy from Danzig to Pillau. King Frederick William I. was once in want 
of money. A certain Herr von Korff promised to procure it for him, without 
loan or taxes, if he could be allowed to remove something quite useless. He 
thinned out the forests of Prussia, which then, indeed, possessed little pecu- 
niary value; but he felled the entire woods of the Frische Nehrung, so far 
as they lay within the Prussian territory. The financial operation was a suc- 
cess. The king had money, but in the material effects which resulted from 
it, the state received irreparable injury. The sea-winds rush over the bared 
hills; the Frische Haff is half-choked with sand; the channel between El- 
bing, the sea, and Kénigsberg is endangered, and the fisheries in the Haff in- 
jured. The operation of Herr von Korff brought the king 200,000 thalers. 
The state would now willingly expend millions to restore the forests again.” 

+ Srarine, Voormaals en Thans, p. 231. Had the dunes of the Nether- 
landish and French coasts, at the period of the Roman invasion, resembled 
the moving sand-hills of the present day, it is inconceivable that they could 
have escaped the notice of so acute a physical geographer as Strabo; and the 
absolute silence of Cesar, Ptolemy, and the encyclopedic Pliny, respecting 
them, would be not less inexplicable, 


580 PERMANENCE OF DUNES. 


been able to learn from my own observation, or that of others, 
is the same. Thirty years ago, when that region was scarcely 
inhabited, they were generally covered with a thick growth of 
trees, chiefly pines, and underwood, and there was little ap- 
pearance of undermining and wash on the lake side, or of shift- 
ing of the sands, except where the trees had been cut or turned 
up by the roots.* 

Nature, as she builds up dunes for the protection of the sea- 
shore, provides, with similar conservatism, for the preservation 
of the dunes themselves; so that, without the interference of 
man, these hillocks would be, not perhaps absolutely perpetual, 
but very lasting in duration, and very slowly altered in form or 
position. When once covered with the trees, shrubs, and her- 
baceous growths adapted to such localities, dunes undergo no 
apparent change, except the slow occasional undermining of 
the outer tier, and accidental destruction by the exposure of the 
interior, from the burrowing of animals, or the upturning of 
trees with their roots, and all these causes of displacement are 
very much less destructive when a vegetable covering exists in 
the immediate neighborhood of the breach. 


Protection of Dunes. 


Before the occupation of the coasts by man, dunes, at all 
points where they have been observed, seem to have been pro- 
tected in their rear by forests, which served to break the force 


* The sands of Cape Cod were partially, if not completely, covered with 
vegetation by nature. Dr. Dwight, describing the dunes as they were in 1800, 
says: ‘‘Some of them are covered with beach grass; some fringed with 
whortleberry bushes; and some tufted with a small and singular growth of 
oaks. . . . The parts of this barrier which are covered with whortleberry 
bushes and with oaks, have been either not at all or very little blown. The 
oaks, particularly, appear to be the continuation of the forests originally 
formed on thisspot. . . . They wore all the marks of extreme age ; were, 
in some instances, already decayed, and in others decaying ; were hoary with 
moss, and were deformed by branches, broken and wasted, not by violence, 
but by time.” —7Travels, iii., p. 91. 


USE OF DUNES AS A BARRIER AGAINST THE SEA. 581 


of the winds in both directions,* and to have spontaneously 
clothed themselves with a dense growth of the various plants, 
grasses, shrubs, and trees, which nature has assigned to such 
soils. It is observed in Europe that dunes, though now without 
the shelter of a forest country behind them, begin to protect 
themselves as soon as human trespassers are excluded, and graz- 
ing animals denied access to them. Herbaceous and arborescent 
plants spring up almost at once, first in the depressions, and 
then upon the surface of the sand-hills. Every seed that 
sprouts, binds together a certain amount of sand by its roots, 
shades a little ground with its leaves, and furnishes food and 
shelter for still younger or smaller growths. A succession of a 
very few favorable seasons suflices to bind the whole surface to- 
gether with a vegetable network, and the power of resistance 
possessed by the dunes themselves, and the protection they 
afford to the fields behind them, are just in proportion to the 
abundance and density of the plants they support. 

The growth of the vegetable covering can, of course, be much 
accelerated by judicious planting and watchful care, and this 
species of improvement is now carried on upon a vast scale on 
the sandy coasts of Western Europe, wherever the value of land 
is considerable and the population dense. 


Use of Dunes as a@ Barrier against the Sea. 


Although the sea throws up large quantities of sand on flat 
lee-shores, there are many cases where it continually encroaches 
on those same shores and washes them away. At all points of 
the shallow North Sea where the agitation of the waves extends 
to the bottom, banks are forming and rolling eastwards. Hence 


* Bergsde (Reventlovs Virksomhed, ii., 3) states that the dunes on the west 
coast of Jutland were stationary before the destruction of the forests to the 
east of them. The felling of the tall trees removed the resistance to the lower 
currents of the westerly winds, and the sands have since buried a great extent 
of fertile soil, See also same work, ii., p. 124. 


582 USE OF DUNES AS A BARRIER AGAINST THE SEA. 


the sea-sand tends to accumulate upon the coast of Schleswig- 
Holstein and Jutland, and were there no conflicting influences, 
the shore would rapidly extend itself westwards. But the 
same waves which wash the sand to the coast undermine the 
beach they cover, and still more rapidly degrade the shore at 
points where it is too high to receive partial protection by the 
formation of dunes upon it. The earth of the coast is general- 
ly composed of particles finer, lighter, and more transportable 
by water than the sea-sand. While, therefore, the billows 
raised by a heavy west wind may roll up and deposit along the 
beach thousands of tons of sand, the sane waves may swallow 
up even a larger quantity of fine shore-earth. This earth, with 
a portion of the sand, is swept off by northwardly and south- 
wardly currents, and let fall at other points of the coast, or 
earried off, altogether, out of the reach of causes which might 
bring it back to its former position. 

Although, then, the eastern shore of the German Ocean here 
and there advances into the sea, it in general retreats before it, 
and but for the protection afforded it by natural arrangements 
seconded by the art and industry of man, whole provinces 
would soon be engulfed by the waters. This protection con- 
sists in an almost unbroken chain of sand banks and dunes, ex- 
tending from the northernmost point of Jutland to the Elbe, a 
distance of not much less than three hundred miles, and from 
the Elbe again, though with more frequent and wider interrup- 
tions, to the Atlantic borders of France and Spain. So long 
as the dunes are maintained by nature or by human art, they 
serve, like any other embankment or dike, as a partial or a 
complete protection against the encroachments of the sea; and 
on the other hand, when their drifts are not checked by natural 
processes, or by the industry of man, they become a cause of as 
certain, if not of as sudden, destruction as the ocean itself 
whose advance they retard. On the whole, the dunes on the 
coast of the German Sea, notwithstanding the great quantity of 
often fertile land they cover, and the evils which result from 
their movement, are a protective and beneficial agent, and 


ENCROACHMENTS OF THE SEA. 583 


their maintenance is an object of solicitude with the Govern- 
ments and people of the shores they defend.* 

The eastward progress of the sea on the Danish, Netherlandish, 
and French coasts depends so much on local geological structure, 
on the force and direction of tidal and other marine currents, 
on the volume and rapidity of coast rivers, on the contingencies 
of the weather and on other varying circumstances, that no 
general rate can be assigned to it. 

At Agger, near the western end of the Liimfjord, in Jutland, 
the coast was washed away, between the years 1815 and 1839, 
at the rate of more than eighteen feet a year. The advance of 
the sea appears to haye been something less rapid for a century 
before; but from 1840 to 1857, it gained upon the land no less 
than thirty feet a year. At other points of the shore of 
Jutland the loss is smaller, but the sea is encroaching generally 
upon the whole line of the coast. 


The Liimfijord. 


The irruption of the sea into the fresh-water lagoon of 
Liimfjord in Jutland, in 1825—one of the most remarkable 
encroachments of the ocean in modern times—is expressly as- 
cribed to “mismanagement of the dunes” on the narrow neck 
of land which separated the fjord from the North Sea. At 
earlier periods the sea had swept across the isthmus, and even 
burst through it, but the channel had been filled up again, 


* “We must, therefore, not be surprised to see the people here deal as 
gingerly with their dunes as if treading among eggs. He who is lucky enough 
to own a molehill of dune pets it affectionately, and spends his substance in 
eherishing and fattening it. That fair, fertile, rich province, the peninsula of 
Hiderstiidt in the south of Friesland, has, on the point towards the -ea, only a 
tiny row of dunes, some six miles long or so ; but the people talk of their fringe 
of sand hills, as if it were a border set with pearls. They look upon it as their 
best defence against Neptune. They have connected it with their system of 
dikes, and for years have kept sentries posted to protect it against wanton in- . 
jury."—J. G. Konu, Die Lnseln u. Marschen Schleswig-Holsteins, ii., p. 115. 

+ ANDRESEN, Om Khitformationen, pp. 68-72. 


584 ENCROACHMENTS OF THE SEA, 


sometimes by artificial means, sometimes by the operation of 
natural causes, and on all these occasions effects were produced 
very similar to those resulting from the formation of the new 
channel in 1825, which still remains open.* Within compara- 
tively recent historical ages, the Liimfjord has thus been several 
times alternately filled with fresh and with salt water, and man 
has produced, by neglecting the dunes, or at least might have 
prevented by maintaining them, changes identical with those 
which are usually ascribed to the action of great geological 
causes, and sometimes supposed to have required vast periods 
of time for their accomplishment. 

“This breach,” says Forchhammer, “which converted the 
Liimfjord into a sound, and the northern part of Jutland into 
an island, occasioned remarkable changes. The first and most 
striking phenomenon was the sudden destruction of almost all 
the fresh-water fish previously inhabiting this lagoon, which 
was famous for its abundant fisheries. Millions of fresh-water 
fish were thrown on shore, partly dead and partly dying, and 
were carted off by the people. A few only survived, and still 
frequent the shores at the mouth of the brooks. The eel, 
however, has gradually accommodated itself to the change of 
circumstances, and is found in all parts of the fjord, while to 
all other fresh-water fish, the salt-water of the ocean seems to 
have been fatal. It is more than probable that the sand washed 
in by the irruption covers, in many places, a layer of dead fish, 
and has thus prepared the way for a petrified stratum similar 
to those observed in so many older formations. 

“As it seems to be a law of nature that animals whose life 
is suddenly extinguished while yet in full vigor, are the most 
likely to be preserved by petrification, we find here one of the 
conditions favorable to the formation of such a petrified stratum. 
The bottom of the Liimfjord was covered with, a vigorous 


*Id., pp. 231, 232. Andresen’s work, though printed in 1861, was finished 
in 1859. Lyell (Antiquity of Man, 1863, p, 14) says: ‘‘ Even in the course of 
the present century, the salt-waters have made one eruption into the Baltic 
by the Liimfjord, although they have been now again excluded.” 


ENCROACHMENTS OF THE SEA. 585 


growth of aquatic plants, belonging both to fresh and to salt 
water, especially Zostera marina. This vegetation totally 
disappeared after the irruption, and, in some instances, was 
buried by the sand; and here again we have a familiar phe- 
nomenon often observed in ancient strata—the indication of 
a given formation by a particular vegetable species—and when 
the strata deposited at the time of the breach shall be accessi- 
ble by upheaval, the period of eruption will be marked by a 
stratum of Zostera, and probably by impressions of fresh-water 
fishes. 

“It is very remarkable that the Zostera marina, a sea-plant, 
was destroyed even where no sand was deposited. This was 
probably in consequence of the sudden change from brackish to 
salt water. . . It is well established that the Liimfjord 
communicated with the German Ocean at some former period. 
To that era belong the deep beds of oyster shells and Cardium 
edule, which are still found at the bottom of the fjord. And 
now, after an interval of centuries, during which the lagoon 
contained no salt-water shell fish, it again produces great num- 
bers of Dytilus edulis. Could we obtain a deep section of the 
bottom, we should find beds of Ostrea edulis and Cardiwm 
edule, then a layer of Zostera marina with fresh-water fish, 
and then a bed of Mytilus edulis. If, in course of time, the 
new channel should be closed, the brooks would fill the lagoon 
again with fresh water; fresh-water fish and shell fish would 
reappear, and thus we should have a repeated alternation 
of organic inhabitants of the sea and of the waters of the 
land. 

“These events have been accompanied with but a com- 
paratively insignificant change of land surface, while the for- 
mations in the bed of this inland sea have been totally revo- 
lutionized in character.” * 


* FORCHHAMMER, Greognostische Studien am Meeres-Ufer, LEONHARD und 
Buronn, Jahrbuch, 1841, pp. 11, 13. 


586 ENCROACHMENTS OF THE SEA. 


Coasts of Schleswig-Holstein, Holland, and France. 


On the islands on the coast of Schleswig-Holstein, the ad- 
vance of the sea has been more unequivocal and more rapid. 
Near the beginning of the last century, the dunes which had 
protected the western coast of the island of Sylt began to roll 
to the east, and the sea followed closely as they retired. In 
1757, the church of Rantum, a village upon that island, was 
obliged to be taken down in consequence of the advance of the 
sand-hills; in 1791, these hills had passed beyond its site, the 
waves had swallowed up its foundations, and the sea gained so 
rapidly, that, fifty years later, the spot where they lay was 
seven hundred feet from the shore.* 

The most prominent geological landmark on the coast of 
Holland is the Huis te Britten, Arz Rritannica, a fortress 
built by the Romans, in the time of Caligula, on the main 
land near the mouth of the Rhine. At the close of the seven- 
teenth century, the sea had advanced sixteen hundred paces 
beyond it. The older Dutch annalists record, with much pa- 
rade of numerical accuracy, frequent encroachments of the sea 
upon many parts of the Netherlandish coast. But though the 
general fact of an advance of the ocean upon the land is es- 
tablished beyond dispute, the precision of the measurements 
which have been given is open to question. Staring, however, 
who thinks the erosion of the coast much exaggerated by popu- 
lar geographers, admits a loss of more than a million and a 
half acres, chiefly worthless morass; + and it is certain that 
but for the resistance of man, but for his erection of dikes and 
protection of dunes, there would now be left of Holland little 
but the name. It is, as has been already seen, still a debated 
question among geologists whether the coast of Holland now 
is, and for centuries has been, subsiding. I believe most in- 
vestigators maintain the affirmative ; and if the fact is so, the 


* ANDRESEN, Om Klitformationen, pp. 68, 72. 
+ Voormaals en Thans, pp. 126, 170. 


MOVEMENT OF DUNES. 587 


advance of the sea upon the land is, in part, due to this cause. 
But the rate of subsidence is at all events very small, and 
therefore the encroachments of the ocean upon the coast are 
mainly to be ascribed to the erosion and transportation of the 
soil by marine waves and currents. 

The sea is fast advancing at several points of the western 
coast of France, and unknown causes have given a new impulse 
to its ravages since the commencement of the present century. 
Between 1830 and 1842, the Point de Grave, on the north side 
of the Gironde, retreated one hundred and eighty metres, or 
fifty feet per year; from the latter year to 1846, the rate was 
increased to more than three times that quantity, and the loss 
in those four years was about six hundred feet. All the 
buildings at the extremity of the peninsula have been taken 
down and rebuilt farther landwards, and the lighthouse of the 
Grave now occupies its third position. The sea attacked the 
base of the peninsula also, and the Point de Grave and the ad- 
jacent coasts have been for thirty years the scene of one of the 
most obstinately contested struggles between man and the ocean 
recorded in the annals of modern engineering. 


Movement of Dunes. 


Besides their importance as a barrier against the inroads of 
the ocean, dunes are useful by sheltering the cultivated ground 
behind them from the violence of the sea-wind, from salt spray, 
and from the drifts of beach sand which would otherwise over- 
whelm them. But the dunes themselves, unless their surface 
sands are kept moist, and confined by the growth of plants, or 
at least by a crust of vegetable earth, are constantly rolling 
inwards, and thus, while, on one side, they lay bare the traces 
of ancient human habitations or other evidences of the social 
life of primitive man, they are, on the other, burying fields, 
houses, churches, and converting populous districts into barren 
and deserted wastes. 

Especially destructive are they when, by any accident, a 


2) 


58% 


TF 


MOVEMENT OF DUNES. 


cavity is opened into them toa considerable depth, thereby 
giving the wind access to the interior, where the sand is thus 
first dried, and then scooped out and scattered far over the 
neighboring soil ‘The dune is now a magazine of sand, no 
longer a rampart against it, and mischief from this source seems 
more difficult to resist than from almost any other drift, be- 
cause the supply of material at the command of the wind is 
more abundant and more concentrated than in its original thin 
and widespread deposits on the beach. The burrowing of 
conies in the dunes is, in this way, not unfrequently a cause of 
their destruction and of great injury to the fields behind them. 
Drifts, and even inland sand-hills, sometimes result from 
breaking the surface of more level sand deposits, far within 
the range of the coast dunes. Thus we learn from Staring, 
that one of the highest inland dunes in Friesland owes its 
origin to the opening of the drift sand by the uprooting of a 
large oak.* 

Great as are the ravages produced by the encroachment of 
the sea upon the western shores of continental Europe, they 
have been in some degree compensated by spontaneous marine 
deposits at other points of the coast, and we have seen in @ 
former chapter that the industry of man has reclaimed a large 
territory from the bosom of the ocean. These latter tri- 
umphs are not of recent origin, and the incipient victories 
which paved the way for them date back perhaps as far as ten 
centuries. In the meantime, the dunes had been left to the 
operation of the laws of nature, or rather freed, by human 
imprudeuce, from the fetters with which nature had bound 
them, and it is scarcely three generations since man first 
attempted to check their destructive movements. As they 
advanced, he unresistingly yielded and retreated before them, 
and they have buried under their sandy billows many hun- 
dreds of square miles of luxuriant cornfields and vineyards and 
forests. 

On the west coast of France a belt of dunes, varying in 


* De Lodem van Nederland, i., p. 425. 


MOVEMENT OF DUNES. 589 


width from a quarter of a mile to five miles, extends from the 
Adour to the estuary of the Gironde, and covers an area of nine 
hundred and seventy square kilometres, or two hundred and 
forty thousand acres. When not fixed by vegetable growths, 
these dunes advance eastwards at a mean rate of about 
one rod, or sixteen and a half feet, a year. We do not know 
historically when they began to drift, but if we suppose their 
motion to have been always the same as at present, they would 
have passed over the space between the sea coast and their 
present eastern border, and covered the large area above men- 
tioned, in fourteen hundred years. We know, from written 
records, that they have buried extensive fields and forests and 
thriving villages, and changed the courses of rivers, and that 
the lighter particles carried from them by the winds, even 
where not transported in sufficient quantities to form sand-hills, 
have rendered sterile much land formerly fertile.* They have 
also injuriously obstructed the natural drainage of the maritime 
districts by choking up the beds of the streams, and forming 
lakes and pestilential swamps of no inconsiderable extent. In 
fact, so completely do they embank the coast, that between the 
Gironde and the village of Mimizan, a distance of one hundred 
miles, there are but two outlets for the discharge of all the 
waters which flow from the land to the sea; and the eastern 
front of the dunes is bordered by a succession of stagnant 


pools, some of which are more than six miles in length and 
breadth.+ 


* The movement of the dunes has been hardly less destructive on the north 
side of the Gironde. See the valuable articles of ELtssk REcLus in the [e- 
oue des Deux Mondes for December, 1862, and several later numbers, entitled 
‘* Le Littoral dela France.” 

+ LavaL, Mémoire sur les Dunes du Golfe de Gascogne, Annales des Ponts 
et Chaussées, 1847, p. 223. The author adds, as a curious and unexplained 
fact, that some of these pools, though evidently not original formations but 
mere accumulations of water dammed up by the dunes, have, along their 
western shore, near the base of the sand-hills, a depth of more than one hun- 
dred and thirty feet, and hence their bottoms are not less than eighty feet, 
below the level of the lowest tides. Their western banks descend steeply, 


590 DUNES OF PRUSSIA. 


A range of dunes extends along the whole western coast of 
Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein, and the movement of these 
sand-hills was formerly, and at some points still is, very de- 
structive. The rate of eastward movement of the drifting 
dunes varies from three to twenty-four feet per annum. If we 
adopt the mean of thirteen feet and a half for the annual mo- 
tion, these dunes have traversed the widest part of the belt in 
about twenty-five hundred years. Historical data are wanting 
as to the period of the formation of these dunes and of the 
commencement of their drifting; but there is recorded evi- 
dence that they have buried a vast extent of valuable land 
within three or four centuries, and further proof is found in 
the fact that the movement of the sands is constantly uncover- 
ing ruins of ancient buildings, and other evidences of human 
occupation, at points far within the present limits of the 
uninhabitable desert. Andresen estimates the average depth 
of the sand deposited over this area at thirty feet, which would 
give a cubic mile and a half for the total quantity.* 

The drifting of the dunes on the coast of Prussia commenced 
not much more thana hundred years ago. The Frische Neh- 
rung is separated from the mainland by the Frische Haff, and 
there is but a narrow strip of arable land along its eastern bor- 
ders. Hence its rolling sands have covered a comparatively 
small extent of dry land, but fields and villages have been 
buried and valuable forests laid waste by them. The loose 


conforming nearly to the slope of the dunes, while on the north-east and 
south the inclination of their beds is very gradual. The greatest depth of 
these pools corresponds to that of the sea ten miles from the shore. Is it 
possible that the weight of the sands has pressed together the soil on which 
they rest, and thus occasioned a subsidence of the surface extending beyond 
their base ? 

A more probable explanation of the fact stated in the note is suggested 
by Elisée Reclus, in an article entitled Le Littoral de la France, in the Revue 
des Deux Mondes for September 1, 1864, pp. 193, 194. This able writer be- 
lieves such pools to be the remains of ancient maritime bays, which haye been 
cut off from the ocean by gradually accumulated sand banks raised by the 
waves and winds to the character of dunes. 

* ANDRESEN, Om Klitformationen, pp. 56, 79, 82. 


ARTIFICIAL DUNES. 591 


coast-row has drifted over the inland ranges, which, as was no- 
ticed in the description of these dunes on a former page, were 
protected by a surface of different composition, and the sand 
has thus been raised to a height which it could not have 
reached upon level ground. This elevation has enabled it to 
advance upon and overwhelm woods, which, upon a plain, 
would have checked its progress, and, in one instance, a forest 
of many hundred acres of tall pines was destroyed by the drifts 
between 1804 and 1827. 


Control of Dunes by Man. 


There are three principal modes in which the industry of 
man is brought to bear upon the dunes. First, the creation of 
them, at points where, from changes in the currents or other 
causes, new encroachments of the sea are threatened ; second, 
the maintenance and protection of them where they have 
been naturally formed; and third, the removal of the inner 
rows where the belt is so broad that no danger is to be appre- 
hended from the loss of them. 

In describing the natural formation of dunes, it was said that 
they began with an accumulation of sand around some vegeta- 
ble or other accidental obstruction to the drifting of the par- 
ticles. A high, perpendicular cliff, which deadens the wind 
altogether, prevents all accumulation of sand; but, up to a cer- 
tain point, the higher and broader the obstruction, the more 
sand will heap up in front of it, and the more will that which 
falls behind it be protected from drifting farther. This familiar 
observation has taught the inhabitants of the coast that an arti- 
ficial wall or dike will, in many situations, give rise to a broad 
belt of dunes. Thus a sand dike or wail, of three or four miles 
in length, thrown in 1610 across the Koegras, a tide-washed flat 
between the Zuiderzee and the North Sea, has occasioned the 
formation of rows of dunes a mile in breadth, and thus excluded 
the sea altogether from the Koegras. A similar dike, called 
the Zijperzeedijk, has produced another scarcely less extensive 
belt in the course of two centuries. 


592 PROTECTION OF DUNES. 


A few years since, the sea was threatening to cut through 
the island of Ameland, and, by encroachment on the southern 
side and the blowing off of the sand from a low flat which con- 
nected the two higher parts of the island, it had made such 
progress, that in heavy storms the waves sometimes rolled quite 
across the isthmus. The construction of a breakwater and a 
sand dike have already checked the advance of the sea, and a 
large number of sand-hills has been formed, the rapid growth 
of which promises complete future security against both wind 
and wave. Similar effects have been produced by the erection 
of plank fences, and even of simple screens of wattling and 
reeds.* 

The dunes of Holland are sometimes protected from the 
dashing of the waves by a revétement of stone, or by piles; and 
the lateral high-water currents, which wash away their base, are 
occasionally checked by transverse walls running from the foot 
of the dunes to low-water mark; but the great expense of such 
constructions has prevented their adoption on a large scale.t 
The principal means relied on for the protection of the sand- 
hills are the planting of their surfaces and the exclusion of bur- 
rowing and grazing animals. There are grasses, creeping plants, 
and shrubs of spontaneous growth, which flourish in loose sand, 
and, if protected, spread over considerable tracts, and finally 
convert their face into a soil capable of cultivation, or, at least, 
of producing forest trees. Krause enumerates one hundred 
and seventy-one plants as native to the coast sands of Prussia, 


* Srarine, De Bodem van Nederland, i., pp. 829-331. Id., Voormaals en 
Thans, p. 163. ANDRESEN, Om Kiitformationen, pp. 280, 295. 

The creation of new dunes, by the processes mentioned in the text, seems 
to be much older in Europe than the adoption of measures for securing them 
by planting. Dr. Dwight mentions a case in Massachusetts, where a beach 
was restored, and new dunes formed, by planting beach grass. ‘‘ Within the 
memory of my informant, the sea broke over the beach which connects Truro 
with Province Town, and swept the body of it away for some distance. The 
beach grass was immediately planted on the spot; in consequence of which 
the beach was again raised to a sufficient height, and in various places into 
hills.” —77avels, iii., p. 93. 

+ STARING, i., pp. 310, 332. 


PROTECTION OF DUNES. 598 
and the observations of Andresen in Jutland carry the number 
of these vegetables up to two hundred and thirty-four. 

Some of these plants, especially the Arwndo arenaria or 
arenosa, or Psamma or Psammophila arenaria—Klittetag, or 
Hjelme in Danish, helm in Dutch, Diinenhalm, Sandschilf, 
or Hiigelrohr in German, gourbet in French, and marram in 
English—are exclusively confined to sandy soils, and thrive well 
only in a saline atmosphere.* The arundo grows to the height 
of about twenty-four inches, but sends its strong roots with 
their many rootlets to a distance of forty or fifty feet. It has 
the peculiar property of flourishing best in the loosest soil, and 
a sand-shower seems to refresh it as the rain revives the thirsty 
plants of the common earth. Its roots bind together the dunes, 
and its leaves protect their surface. When the sand ceases 
to drift, the arundo dies, its decaying roots fertilizing the sand, 
and the decomposition of its leaves forming a layer of vege- 
table earth over it. Then follows a succession of other plants 
which gradually fit the sand-hills by growth and decay, for 
forest planting, for pasturage, and sometimes for ordinary agri- 
cultural use. 

But the protection and gradual transformation of the dunes 
is not the only service rendered by this valuable plant. Its 
leaves are nutritious food for sheep and cattle, its seeds for 
poultry ; + cordage and netting twine are manufactured from 
its fibres, it makes a good material for thatching, and its dried 
roots furnish excellent fuel. These useful qualities, unfortu- 
nately, are too often prejudicial to its growth. The peasants 
feed it down with their cattle, cut it for rope-making, or dig it 
up for fuel, and it has been found necessary to resort to severe 
legislation to prevent them from bringing ruin upon themselves 


* There is some confusion in the popular use of these names, and in the 
scientific designations of sand-plants, and they are possibly applied to different 
plants in different places. Some writers style the gourbet Calamagrostis ere- 
naria, and distinguish it from the Danish Klittetag or Hjelme. 

+ Bread, not indeed very palatable, has been made of the seeds of the 
arundo, but the quantity which can be gathered is not sufficient to form an 
important economical resource.—ANDRESEN, Om Klitformationen, p. 160. 


08 


594 DUNES OF DENMARK. 


by thus improvidently sacrificing their most effectual safeguard 
acainst the drifting of the sands.* 

In 1589 a decree of Christian III., king of Denmark, im- 
posed a fine upon persons convicted of destroying certain spe- 
cies of sand-plants upon the west coast of Jutland. This ordi- 
nance was renewed and made more comprehensive in 1558, 
and in 1569 the inhabitants of several districts were required, 
by royal rescript, to do their best to check the sand-drifts, 
though the specific measures to be adopted for that purpose 
are not indicated. Various laws against stripping the dunes 
of their vegetation were enacted in the following century, but 
no active measures were taken for the subjugation of the 
sand-drifts until 1779, when a preliminary system of operation 
for that purpose was adopted. ‘This consisted in little more 
than the planting of the Arundo arenaria and other sand- 
plants, and the exclusion of animals destructive to these vege- 
tables.t Ten years later, plantations of forest trees, which have 
since proved so valuable a means of fixing the dunes and ren- 
dering them productive, were commenced, and have been con- 
tinued ever since.t During this latter period, Brémontier, 
without any knowledge of what was doing in Denmark, exper- 
imented upon the cultivation of forest trees on the dunes of Gas- 
cony, and perfected a system, which, with some improvements 
in matters of detail, is still largely pursued on those shores. 


* BERGSIE, Reventlovs Virksomhed, ii., p. 4. 

+ Measures were taken for the protection of the dunes of Cape Cod, in 
Massachusetts, during the colonial period, though I believe they are now sub- 
stantialy abandoned. A hundred years ago, before the valley of the Missis- 
sippi, or even the rich plains of Centraland Western New York, were opened 
to the white settler, the value of land was relatively much greater in New 
England than it is at present, and consequently some rural improvements 
were then worth making, which would not now yield sufficient returns to 
tempt the investment of capital. ‘The money and the time required to sub- 
due and render productive twenty acres of sea-sand on Cape Cod, would buy 
a ‘‘section” and rear a family in Illinois. The son of the Pilgrim, therefore, 
abandons the sand-hills, and seeks a better fortune on the fertile prairies of 
the West. See Dwieut, 7Z’ravels, i., pp. 92, 93. 

¢ ANDRESEN, Om Klitformationen, pp. 237, 240. 


DUNES OF DENMARK. 595 


The example of Denmark was soon followed in the neighbor- 
ing kingdom of Prussia, and in the Netherlands; and, as we 
shall see hereafter, these improvements have been everywhere 
crowned with most flattering success. 

Under the administration of Reventloy, a little before the 
close of the last century, the Danish Government organized a 
regular system of improvement in the economy of the dunes. 
They were planted with the arundo and other vegetables of 
similar habits, protected against trespassers, and at last partly 
covered with forest trees. By these means much waste soil has 
been converted into arable ground, a large growth of valuable 
timber obtained, and the further spread of the drifts, which 
threatened to lay waste the whole peninsula of Jutland, to a 
considerable extent arrested. 

In France, the operations for fixing and reclaiming the dunes 
—which began under the direction of Brémontier about the 
same time as in Denmark, and which are, in principle and in 
many of their details, similar to those employed in the latter 
kingdom—have been conducted on a far larger scale, and with 
greater success, than in any other country. This is partly ow- 
ing to a climate more favorable to the growth of suitable forest 
trees than that of Northern Europe, and partly to the liberality 
of the Government, which, having more important landed 
interests to protect, has put larger means at the disposal of 
the engineers than Denmark and Prussia have found it con- 
venient to appropriate to that purpose. The area of the dunes 
already secured from drifting, and planted by the processes in- 
vented by Brémontier and perfected by his successors, is about 
100,000 acres.* This amount of productive soil, then, has been 
added to the resources of France, and a still greater quantity 
of valuable land has been thereby rescued from the other- 
wise certain destruction with which it was threatened by the 
advance of the rolling sand-hills. 

The improvements of the dunes on the coast of West Prussia 


* “« These plantations, perseveringly continued from the time of Brémontier, 
now cover more than 40,000 hectares, and compose forests which are not 


596 TREES SUITED TO DUNE PLANTATIONS. 


began in 1795, under Séren Bjorn, a native of Denmark, and, 
with the exception of the ten years between 1807 and 1817, 
they have been prosecuted ever since. The methods do not 
differ essentially from those employed in Denmark and France, 
though they are modified by local circumstances, and, with 
respect to the trees selected for planting, by climate. In 1850, 
between the mouth of the Vistula and Kahlberg, 6,500 acres, 
including about 1,900 acres planted with pines and birches, 
had been secured from drifting; between Kahlberg and the 
eastern boundary of West Prussia, 8,000 acres; and important 
preliminary operations had been carried on for subduing the 
dunes on the west coast.* 

The tree which has been found to thrive best upon the 
sand-hills of the French coast, and at the same time to confine 
the sand most firmly and yield the largest pecuniary returns, 
is the maritime pine, Pinus maritima, a species valuable both 
for its timber and for its resinous products. It is always grown 
from seed, and the young shoots require to be protected for 
several seasons, by the branches of other trees, planted in rows, 
or spread over the surface and staked down, by the growth of 
the Arundo arenaria and other small sand-plants, or by wat- 
tled hedges. The beach, from which the sand is derived, has 
been generally planted with the arundo, because the pine does 
not thrive well so near the sea; but it is thought that a species 
of tamarisk is likely to succeed in that latitude even better 
than the arundo. The shade and the protection offered by the 
branching top of this pine are favorable to the growth of decid- 
uous trees, and, while still young, of shrubs and smaller plants, 
which contribute more rapidly to the formation of vegetable 
mould, and thus, when the pine has once taken root, the re- 
demption of the waste is considered as effectually secured. 

In France, the maritime pine is planted on the sands of the 


only the salvation of the department, but constitute its wealth.”—CLAVE, 
Etudes Forestiéres, p. 254. 

Other authors have stated the plantations of the French dunes to be much 
more extensive. 

* Kruse, Diinenbau, pp. 34, 38, 40. 


THE MARITIME PINE. 597 


interior as well as on the dunes of the seacoast, and with equal 
advantage. This tree resembles the pitch pine of the Southern 
Ainerican States in its habits, and is applied to the same uses. 
The extraction of turpentine from it begins at the age of about 
twenty years, or when it has attained a diameter of from nine 
to twelve inches. Incisions are made up and down the trunk, 
to the depth of about half an inch in the wood, and it is insist- 
ed that if not more than two such slits are cut, the tree is not 
sensibly injured by the process. The growth, indeed, is some- 
what checked, but the wood becomes superior to that of trees 
from which the turpentine is not extracted. Thus treated, the 
pine continues to flourish to the age of one hundred or one 
hundred and twenty years, and up to this age the trees on an 
acre yield annually 300 pounds of essence of turpentine, and 250 
pounds of resin, worth together not far from ten dollars. The 
expense of extraction and distillation is calculated at about four 
dollars, and a clear profit of more than five dollars per acre is 
left.* This is exclusive of the value of the timber, when finally 
cut, which, of course, amounts to a very considerable sum. 

In Denmark, where the climate is much colder, hardier 
conifers, as well as the birch and other northern trees, are 
found to answer a better purpose than the maritime pine, and 
it is doubtful whether this tree would be able to resist the win- 
ter on the dunes of Massachusetts. Probably the pitch-pine of 


* These processes are substantially similar to those employed in the pineries 
of the Carolinas, but they are better systematized and more economically 
conducted in France. In the latter country, all the products of the pine, even 
to the cones, find a remunerating market, while, in America, the price of resin 
is so low, that in the fierce steamboat races on the great rivers, large quantities 
of it are thrown into the furnaces to increase the intensity of the fires. Ina 
carefully prepared article on the Southern pineries published in an American 
magazine—I think Harper’s—a few years ago, it was stated that the resin 
from the turpentine distilleries was sometimes allowed to run to waste; and 
the writer, in one instance, observed a mass, thus rejected as rubbish, which 
was estimated to amount to two thousand barrels. Olmsted saw, near a dis- 
tillery which had been in operation but a single year, a pool of resin estimated 
to contain three thousand barrels, which had been allowed to run off as waste. 
—A Journey in the seaboard Slave States, 1853, p. 345. 


598 PROTECTION OF DUNES. 


the Northern States, in conjunction with some of the American 
oaks, birches, and poplars, and especially the robinia or locust, 
would prove very suitable to be employed on the sand-hills of 
Cape Cod and Long Island. The ailanthus, now coming into 
notice as a sand-loving tree, some species of tamarisk, and 
perhaps the Aspressus macrocarpa, already found useful on 
the dunes in California, may prove valuable auxiliaries in re- 
sisting the encroachment of drifting sands, whether in America 
or in Europe, and the intermixing of different species would 
doubtless be attended with as valuable results in this as in other 
branches of forest economy. 

It cannot, indeed, be affirmed that human power is able to 
arrest altogether the incursions of the waves on sandy coasts, 
by planting the beach, and clothing the dunes with wood. On 
the contrary, both in Holland and on the French coast, it has 
been found necessary to protect the dunes themselves by piling 
and by piers and sea-walls of heavy masonry. But experience 
has amply shown that the processes referred to are entirely 
successful in preventing the movement of the dunes, and the 
drifting of their sands over cultivated lands behind them; and 
that, at the same time, the plantations very much retard the 
landward progress of the waters.* 

Besides the special office of dune plantations already noticed, 
these forests have the same general uses as other woods, and 
they have sometimes formed by their droppings so thick a layer 
of vegetable mould that the sand beneath has become sufficiently 
secured to allow the wood to be felled, and the surface to be 
ploughed and cultivated with ordinary field crops. 

In some cases it has been found possible to confine and 
cultivate coast sand-hills, even without preliminary forestal 
plantation. Thus, in the vicinity of Cap Breton in France, a 
peculiar process is successfully employed, both for preventing 
the drifting of dunes, and for rendering the sands themselves 

* See a very interesting article entitled ‘‘Le Littoral de la France,” by 
ELIShE RECLUS, in the Revue des Deux Mondes for December, 1862, pp. 901, 
936, 


DUNE VINEYARDS—REMOVAL OF DUNES. 599 


immediately productive; but this method is applicable only in 
exceptional cases of favorable climate and exposure. It consists 
in planting vineyards upon the dunes, and protecting them by 
hedges of broom, “rica scoparia, so disposed as to form 
rectangles about thirty feet by forty. The vines planted in 
these enclosures thrive admirably, and the grapes produced by 
them are among the best grown in France. The dunes are so 
far from being an unfavorable soil for the vine, that fresh sea- 
sand is regularly employed as a fertilizer for it, alternating 
every other season with ordinary manure. The quantity of 
sand thus applied every second year, raises the surface of the 
vineyard about four or five inches. The vines are cut down 
every year to three or four shoots, and the raising of the soil 
rapidly covers the old stocks. As fast as buried, they send out 
new roots near the surface, and thus the vineyard is constantly 
renewed, and has always a youthful appearance, though it may 
have been already planted a couple of generations. This 
practice is ascertained to have been followed for two centuries, 
and is among the oldest well-authenticated attempts of man to 
resist and vanquish the dunes.* 

The artificial removal of dunes, no longer necessary as a 
protection, does not appear to have been practised upon a large 
scale except in the Netherlands, where the numerous canals 
furnish an easy and economical means of transporting the 
sand, and where the construction and maintenance of sea and 
river dikes, and of causeways and other embankments and 
fillings, create a great demand for that material. Sand is also 
employed in Holland, in large quantities, for improving the con- 
sistence of the tough clay bordering upon or underlying diluvial 
deposits, and for forming an artificial soil for the growth of 
certain garden and ornamental vegetables. When the dunes 
are removed, the ground they covered is restored to the domain 
of industry; and the quantity of land recovered in the Neth- 
erlands by the removal of the barren sands which encumbered 
it, amounts to hundreds and perhaps thousands of acres. 


* BoOITEL, Mise en valeur des Terres pauvres, pp. 212, 218. 


600 INLAND DUNES. 


Inland Dunes. 


Vast deposits of sand, both in the form of dunes and of 
plains, are found far in the interior of continents, in the Old 
World and inthe New. The deserts of Gobi, of Arabia, and 
of Africa have been rendered familiar by the narratives of 
travellers, but the sandy wildernesses of America, and even of 
Europe, have not yet been generally recognized as important 
elements in the geography of the regions where they occur. 
‘here are immense wastes of drifting sands in Poland and 
other interior parts of Europe, in Peru, and in the less known 
regions of our own Western territory, where their extent is 
greater than that of all the coast dunes together which have 
hitherto been described by European and American geogra- 
phers.* 

The inland sand-hills of both hemispheres are composed of 
substantially the same material and aggregated by the action 
of the same natural forces as the dunes of the coast. There 
is, therefore, a general resemblance between them, but they 
appear, nevertheless, to be distinguished by certain differences 
which a more attentive study may perhaps enable geologists 
to recognize in the sandstone formed by them. The sand of 
which they are composed comes in both principally from the 
bed of the sea being brought to the surface in one case by the 
action of the wind and the waves, in the other by geological 
upheaval.t The sand of the coast dunes is rendered, to a 


* On the Niobrara river alone, the dunes cover a surface of twenty thousand 
square miles.—HAYDEN, Report on Geological Survey of Wyoming, 1870, p. 108. 

{+ American observers do not agree in their descriptions of the form and 
character of the sand-grains which compose the interior dunes of the North 
American desert. C. C. Parry, geologist to the Mexican Boundary Com- 
mission, in describing the dunes near the station at a spring thirty-two miles 
west from the Rio Grande at El Paso, says: ‘‘ The separate grains of the sand 
composing the sand-hills are seen under a lens to be angular, and not rounded, 
as would be the case in regular beach deposits.”—U. S. Mexican Boundary 
Survey, Report of, vol. i., Geological Report of C. C. Parry, p. 10. 

In the general description of the country traversed, same volume, p. 47, 


INLAND DUNES. 601 


certain extent, cohesive by moisture and by the saline and 
other binding ingredients of sea-water, while long exposure to 
meteoric influences has in a great measure deprived the inland 
sands of these constituents, though there are not wanting 
examples of large accumulations of sand far from the sea, and 
yet agglutinated by saline material. Hence, as might be ex- 
pected, inland dunes, when not confined by a fixed nucleus, are 
generally more movable than those of the coast, and the form 
of such dunes is more or less modified by their want of con- 
sistence. Thus, the crescent or falciform shape is described by 
all observers as more constant and conspicuous in these sand- 
hills than in those of littoral origin; they tend less to unite in 
continuous ridges, and they rarely attain the height or other di- 
mensions of the dunes of the seashore. 

Meyer describes the sand-hills of the Peruvian desert as 
perfectly falciform in shape and from seven to fifteen feet high, 
the chord of their arc measuring from twenty to seventy paces. 
The slope of the convex face is described as very small, that of 
the concave as high as 70° or 80°, and their surfaces were 
rippled. No smaller dunes were observed, nor any in the 
process of formation. The concave side uniformly faced the 


Colonel Emory says that on an ‘‘ examination of the sand with a microscope 
of sufficient power,” the grains are seen to be angular, not rounded by rolling 
in water. 

On the other hand, Blake, in Geological Report, Pacific Railroad Rep., vol. 
v., p. 119, observes that the grains of the dune sand, consisting of quartz, 
chalcedony, carnelian, agate, rose quartz, and probably chrysolite, were much 
rounded; and on page 241, he says that many of the sand grains of the 
Colorado desert are perfect spheres. 

On page 20 of a report in vol. ii. of the Pacific Railroad Report, by the same 
observer, it is said that an examination of dune sands brought from the Llano 
Estacado by Captain Pope, showed the grains to be ‘‘much rounded by 
attrition,” 

The sands described by Mr. Parry and Colonel Emory are not from the same 
localities as those examined by Mr. Blake, and the difference in their character 
may be due to a difference of origin or of age. 

In New Mexico, sixty miles south of Fort Stanton, there are inland dunes 
composed of finely granulated gypsum.—Americun Naturalist, Jan, 1871, 
p- 695. 


602 INLAND DUNES. 


north-west, except towards the centre of the desert, where, for a 
distance of one or two hundred paces, they gradually opened 
to the west, and then again gradually resumed the former 
position. 

Tschudi observed, in the same desert, two species of dunes, 
fixed and movable, and he ascribes a falciform shape to the 
movable, a conical to the fixed dunes, or medanos. “The me- 
danos,” he observes, “are hillock-like elevations of sand, some 
having a firm, others a loose base. The former [latter], which 
are always crescent-shaped, are from ten to twenty feet high, 
and have an acute crest. The inner side is perpendicular, and 
the outer or bow side forms an angle with a steep inclination 
downwards.* When driven by violent winds, the medanos pass 
rapidly over the plains. The smaller and lighter ones move 
quickly forward, before the larger; but the latter soon overtake 
and crush them, whilst they are themselves shivered by the 
collision. These medanos assume all sorts of extraordinary 
figures, and sometimes move along the plain in rows forming 
most intricate labyrinths. . . . <A plain often appears to be 
covered with a row of medanos, and some days afterwards it is 
again restored to its level and uniform aspect. . . . 

“The medanos with immovable bases are formed on the 
blocks of rocks which are scattered about the plain. The sand 
is driven against them by the wind, and as soon as it reaches 
the top point, it descends on the other side until that is likewise 
covered ; thus gradually arises a conical-formed hill.t Entire 
hillock chains with acute crests are formed in a similar manner. 
. . . On their southern declivities are found vast masses 
of sand, drifted thither by the mid-day gales. The northern 
declivity, though not steeper than the southern, is only spar- 


* The dunes of the plains between Bokhara and the Oxus are all horse-shoe 
shaped, convex towards the north, from which the prevailing wind blows. On 
this side they are sloping, inside precipitous, and from fifteen to twenty feet 
high.—Burnes, Journal in Bokhara, ii., pp. 1, 2. 

+ The sand-hills observed by Desor in the Algerian desert were fixed, chang- 
ing their form only on the surface as sand was blown to and from them,— 
Sahara und Atlas, 1865, p. 21. 


INLAND SAND PLAINS. 603 


ingly covered with sand. If a hillock chain somewhat distant 
from the sea extends in a line parallel with the Andes, namely, 
from 8. 8S. E. to N. N. W., the western declivity is almost en- 
tirely free of sand, as it is driven to the plain below by the 
south-east wind, which constantly alternates with the wind from 
the south.” * 

It is difficult to reconcile this description with that of Meyen, 
but if confidence is to be reposed in the accuracy of either 
observer, the formation of the sand-hills in question must be 
governed by very different laws from those which determine 
the structure of coast dunes. Captain Gilliss, of the American 
navy, found the sand-hills of the Peruvian desert to be in 
general crescent-shaped, as described by Meyen, and a similar 
structure is said to characterize the inland dunes of the Llano 
Estacado and other plateaus of the North American desert, 
though these latter are of greater height and other dimensions 
than those described by Meyen. There is no very obvious 
explanation of this difference in form between maritime and 
inland sand-hills, and the subject merits investigation. It is, 
however, probable that the great mobility of the flying dunes 
of the Peruvian desert is an effect of their dryness, no rain 
falling in that desert, and of the want of salt or other binding 
material to hold their particles together. 


Inland Sand Plains. 


The inland sand plains of Europe are either derived from 
the drifting of dunes or other beach sands, or consist of dilu- 
vial deposits, or are ancient sea-beds uplifted by geological 
upheaval. As we have seen, when once the interior of a dune 
is laid open to the wind, its contents are soon scattered far and 
wide over the adjacent country, and the beach sands, no longer 
checked by the rampart which nature had constrained them to 
build against their own encroachments, are also carried to con- 
siderable distances from the coast. Few regions have suffered 


* Travels in Peru, New York, 1848, chap. ix. 


604 INLAND SAND PLAINS. 


so much from this cause, in proportion to their extent, as the 
peninsula of Jutland. So long as the woods, with which nature 
had planted the Danish dunes, were spared, they seem to have 
been stationary, and we have no historical evidence, of an 
earlier date than the sixteenth century, that they had become in 
any way injurious. From that period there are frequent noti- 
ces of the invasions of cultivated grounds by the sands; and 
excavations are constantly bringing to light proof of human 
habitation and of agricultural industry, in former ages, on soils 
now buried beneath deep drifts from the dunes and beaches of 
the seacoast.* 

Extensive tracts of valuable plain land in the Netherlands 
and in France have been covered in the same way with a layer 
of sand deep enough to render them infertile, and they can be 
restored to cultivation only by processes analogous to those 
employed for fixing and improving the dunes.t Diluvial sand 
plains, also, have been reclaimed by these methods in the 
Duchy of Austria, between Vienna and the Semmering ridge, 
in Jutland, and in the great champaign country of Northern 
Germany, especially the Mark Brandenburg, where artificial 
forests can be propagated with great ease, and where, conse- 
quently, this branch of industry has been pursued on a great 
scale, and with highly beneficial results, both as respects the 
supply of forest products and the preparation of the soil for 
agricultural use. 

As has been already observed, inland sands are generally 
looser, dryer, and more inclined to drift, than those of the 
seacoast, where the moist and saline atmosphere of the ocean 
keeps them always more or less humid and cohesive. The 
sands of the valley of the Lower Euphrates—themselves 
probably of submarine origin, and not derived from dunes— 


* For details, consult ANDRESEN, Om Klitformationen, pp. 223, 236. 

+ When the deposit is not very deep, and the adjacent land lying to the lee- 
ward of the prevailing winds is covered with water, or otherwise worthless, 
the surface is sometimes freed from the drifts by repeated harrowings, which 
loosen the sand, so that the wind takes it up and transports it to grounds 
where accu~ tions of it are less injurious. 


INLAND SAND PLAINS. 605 


are advancing to the north-west with a rapidity which seems 
fabulous when compared with the slow movement of the sand- 
hills of Gascony and the Low German coasts. Loftus, speak- 
ing of Niliyya, an old Arab town a few miles east of the ruins 
of Babylon, says that, “in 1848, the sand began to accumulate 
around it, and in six years, the desert, within a radius of six 
miles, was covered with little, undulating domes, while the ruins 
of the city were so buried that it is now impossible to trace 
their original form or extent.” * Loftus considers this sand- 
flood as the “ vanguard of those vast drifts which advancing from 
the south-east, threaten eventually to overwhelm Babylon and 
Baghdad.” 

An observation of Layard, cited by Loftus, appears to me 
to furnish a possible explanation of this irruption. He “ passed 
two or three places where the sand, issuing from the earth like 
water, is called ‘ Aioun-er-rummal, sand springs.” These 
“springs ” are very probably merely the drifting of sand from 
the ancient subsoil, where the protecting crust of aquatic de- 
posit and vegetable earth has been broken through, as in the 
case of the drift which arose from the upturning of an oak 
mentioned on a former page. When the valley of the Ku- 
phrates was regularly irrigated and cultivated, the underlying 
sands were bound by moisture, alluvial slime, and vegetation ; 
but now, that all improvement is neglected, and the surface, no 
longer watered, has become parched, powdery, and naked, a 


* Travels and Researches in Chaldea, chap. ix. 

Dwight mentions (Z’ravels, vol. iii., p. 101) an instance of great mischief 
from the depasturing of the beach grass which had been planted on a sand 
plain in Cape Cod: ‘‘ Here, about one thousand acres were entirely blown 
away to the depth, in many places, of ten feet. . . . Nota green thing was 
visible except the whortleberries, which tufted a few lonely hillocks rising to 
the height of the original surface and prevented by this defence from being 
blown away also. These, although they varied the prospect, added to the 
gloom by their strongly picturesque appearance, by marking exactly the origi- 
nal level of the plain, and by showing us in this manner the immensity of 
the mass which had been thus carried away by the wind. The beach grass 
had been planted here, and the ground had been formerly enclosed ; but the 
gates had been left open, and the cattle had destroyed this invaluable plant.” 


606 THE LANDES OF GASCONY. 


mere accidental fissure in the superficial stratum may soon be 
enlarged to a wide opening, that will let loose sand enough to 
overwhelm a province. 


The Landes of Gascony. 


The most remarkable sand plain of France lies at the south- 
western extremity of the empire, and is generally known as 
the Landes, or heaths, of Gascony. Clavé thus describes it: 
“ Composed of pure sand, resting on an impermeable stratum 
called alzos, the soil of the Landes was, for centuries, consid- 
ered incapable of cultivation.* Parched in summer, drowned 
in winter, it produced only ferns, rushes, and heath, and 
scarcely furnished pasturage for a few half-starved flocks. To 
crown its miseries, this plain was continually threatened by 
the encroachments of the dunes. Vast ridges of sand, thrown 
up by the waves, for a distance of more than fifty leagues along 
the coast, and continually renewed, were driven inland by the 
west wind, and, as they rolled over the plain, they buried the 
soil and the hamlets, overcame all resistance, and advanced 
with fearful regularity. The whole province seemed devoted 
to certain destruction, when Brémontier invented his method 
of fixing the dunes by plantations of the maritime pine.”+ 

Although the Landes had been almost abandoned for ages, 
they show numerous traces of ancient cultivation and pros- 
perity, and it is principally by means of the encroachments of 
the sands that they have become reduced to their present deso- 
late condition. The destruction of the coast towns and harbors, 
which furnished markets for the products of the plains, the 
damming up of the rivers, and the obstruction of the smaller 
channels of natural drainage by the advance of the dunes, 

* The alios, which from its color and consistence was supposed to be a 
ferruginous formation, appears from recent observations to contain little iron 
and to owe most of its peculiar properties to vegetable elements carried down 
into the soil by the percolation of rain-water. See Revue des Haux et Fortis 


for 1870, p. 301. 
+ tudes Forestiéres, p. 250. See, also, Rectus, La Terre, i., 105, 106. 


THE BELGIAN CAMPINE. 607 


were no doubt very influential causes; and if we add the drift- 
ing of the sea-sand over the soil, we have at least a partial ex- 
planation of the decayed agriculture and diminished population 
of this great waste. When the dunes were once arrested, and 
the soil to the east of them was felt to be secure against inva- 
sion by them, experiments, in the way of agricultural improve- 
ment, by drainage and plantation, were commenced, and they 
have been attended with such signal success, that the complete 
recoyery of one of the dreariest and most extensive wastes in 
Europe may be considered as both a probable and a near 
event.” 

In the northern part of Belgium, and extending across the 
confines of Holland, is another very similar heath plain, called 
the Campine. This is a vast sand flat, interspersed with marshes 
and inland dunes, and, until recently, considered almost wholly 
incapable of cultivation. Enormous sums had been expended 
in reclaiming it by draining and other familiar agricultural pro- 
cesses, but without results at all proportional to the capital 


* LAVERGNE, Economie Rurale de la France, p. 300, estimates the area of 
the Landes of Gascony at 700,000 hectares, or about 1,700,000 acres. The 
same author states (p. 304), that when the Moors were driven from Spain by 
the blind cupidity and brutal intolerance of the age, they demanded permission 
to establish themselves in this desert; but political and religious prejudices 
prevented the granting of this liberty. At this period the Moors were a far 
more cultivated people than their Christian persecutors, and they had carried 
many arts, that of agriculture especially, to a higher pitch than any other 
European nation. But France was not wise enough to accept what Spain had 
cast out, and the Landes remained a waste for three centuries longer. 

For a brilliant account of the improvement of the Landes, see Edmond 
About, Le Progrés, chap. vii. 

The forest of Fontainebleau, which contains above 40,000 acres, is not a 
plain, but its soil is composed almost wholly of sand, interspersed with ledges 
ofrock. The sand forms not less than ninety-eight per cent. of the earth, and, 
as it is almost without water, it would be a drifting desert but for the artificial 
propagation of forest trees upon it. 

The Landes of Sologne and of Brenne are less known than those of Gas- 
cony, because they are not upon the old great lines of communication. They 
once composed a forest of 1,200,000 acres, but by clearing the woods have 
relapsed into their primitive condition of a barren sand waste. Active efforts 
are now in progress to reclaim them. 


608 SANDS OF EASTERN EUROPE. 


invested. In 1849, the unimproved portion of the Campine 
was estimated at little less than three hundred and fifty thou- 
sand acres. The example of I'rance prompted experiments 
in the planting of trees, especially the maritime pine, upon 
this barren waste, and the results have now been such as to show 
that its sands may both be fixed and made productive, not only 
without loss, but with positive pecuniary advantage.* 

There are still unsnbdued sand wastes in many parts of in- 
terior Europe not familiarly known to tourists or even geo- 
graphers. “Olkuez and Schiewier in Poland,” says Naumann, 
“lie in true sand deserts, and a boundless plain of sand stretches 
around Ozenstockau, on which there grows neither tree nor 
shrub. In heavy winds, this plain resembles a rolling sea, and 
the sand-hills rise and disappear like the waves of the ocean. 
The heaps of waste from the Olkuez mines are covered with 
sand to the depth of four fathoms.” + No attempts have yet 
been made to subdue the sands of Poland, but when peace and 
prosperity shall be restored to that unhappy country, there is 
no reasonable doubt that the measures, which have proved so 
successful on similar formations in Germany and near Odessa, 
may be employed with advantage in the Polish deserts.{ 


* Economie Rurale de la Belgique, par EMILE DE LAVELEYB, Revue des 
Deux Mondes, Juin, 1861, pp. 617-644. The quantity of land annually re- 
claimed on the Campine is stated at about 4,000 acres. Canals for navigation 
and irrigation have been constructed through the Campine, and itis said that 
its barren sands, improved at an expense of one hundred dollars per acre, 
yield, from the second year, a return of twenty-five dollars to the acre. 

+ Geognosie, ii., p. 1173. 

t ‘“‘ Sixteen years ago,” says an Odessa landholder, ‘‘I attempted to fix the 
sand of the steppes, which covers the rocky ground to the depth of a foot, 
and forms moving hillocks with every change of wind. I tried acacias and 
pines in vain; nothing would grow in such a soil. At length I planted the 
varnish tree, or ailanthus, which succeeded completely in binding the sand.” 
This result encouraged the proprietor to extend his plantations over both 
dunes and sand steppes, and in the course of sixteen years this rapidly grow- 
ing tree had formed real forests. Other landholders have imitated his ex- 
ample with great advantage.—RENTscH, Der Wald, pp. 44, 45. 


CHAPTER VI. 


GREAT PROJECTS OF PHYSICAL CHANGE ACCOMPLISHED OR PRO- 
POSED BY MAN. 

Cutting of Isthmuses—Canal of Suez—Maritime Canals in Greece —Canals to 
Dead Sea—Canals to Libyan Desert—Maritime Canals in Europe—Cape 
Cod Canal—Changes in Caspian—Diversion of the Nile—Diversion of the 
Rhine—improvements in North American Hydrography—Soil below 
Rock—Covering Rock with Harth—Desert Valleys—Effects of Mining— 
Duponchel’s Plans of Improvement—Action of Man on the Weather— 
Resistance to Great Natural Forces—Incidental Effects of Human Action 
—Nothing small in Nature. 


Ty a former chapter I spoke of the influence of human ac- 
tion on the surface of the globe as immensely superior in 
degree to that exerted by brute animals, if not essentially dif- 
ferent from it in kind. The eminent Italian geologist, Stop- 
pani, goes further than I had ventured to do, and treats the 
action of man as a new physical element altogether svz generis. 
According to him, the existence of man constitutes a geological 
period which he designates as the anthropozoic era. “'The 
creation of man,” says he, “was the introduction of a new ele- 
ment into nature, of a force wholly unknown to earlier 
periods.” “It is a new telluric force which in power and uni- 
versality may be compared to the greater forces of the earth.” * 
It has already been abundantly shown that, though the unde- 
signed and unforeseen results of man’s action on the geogra- 
phical conditions of the earth have perhaps been hitherto 
greater and more revolutionary than the effects specially aimed 
at by him, yet there is scarcely any assignable limit to his 


* Corso di Geologia, Milano, 1873, vol. ii., cap. xxxi., $ 1327. 


39 


610 CUTTING OF MARINE ISTHMUSES. 


present and prospective voluntary controlling power over ter- 
restrial nature. 


Cutting of Marine Isthmuses. 


Besides the great enterprises of physical transformation of 
which I have already spoken, other works of internal improve- 
ment or change have been projected in ancient and modern 
times, the execution of which would produce considerable, and, 
in some cases, extremely important, revolutions in the face of 
the earth. Some of the schemes to which I refer are evidently 
chimerical ; others are difficult, indeed, but cannot be said to 
be impracticable, though discouraged by the apprehension of 
disastrous consequences from the disturbance of existing natu- 
ral or artificial arrangements ; and there are still others, the 
accomplishment of which is ultimately certain, though for the 
present forbidden by economical considerations. 

Nature sometimes mocks the cunning and the power of man 
by spontaneously performing, for his benefit, works which he 
shrinks from undertaking, and the execution of which 'by him 
she would resist with unconquerable obstinacy. A dangerous 
sand bank, that all the enginery of the world could not dredge 
out in a generation, may be carried off in a night by a strong 
river-flood, or by a current impelled by a violent wind from an 
unusual quarter, and a passage scarcely navigable by fishing- 
boats may be thus converted into a commodious channel for the 
largest ship that floats upon the ocean. In the remarkable gulf 
of Liimfjord in Jutland, referred to in the preceding chapter, 
nature has given a singular example of a canal which she alter- 
nately opens as a marine strait, and, by shutting again, converts 
into a fresh-water lagoon. The Liimfjord was doubtless origi- 
nally an open channel from the Atlantic to the Baltic between 
two islands, but the sand washed up by the sea blocked up the 
western entrance, and built a wall of dunes to close it more 
firmly. This natural dike,as we have seen, has been more than 
once broken through, and it is perhaps in the power of man, 


CUTTING OF MARINE ISTIMUSES. 611 


either permanently to maintain the barrier, or to remove it and 
keep a navigable channel constantly open. If the Liimfjord 
becomes an open strait, the washing of sea-sand through it 
would perhaps block some of the belts and small channels 
now important for the navigation of the Baltic, and the direct 
introduction of a tidal current might produce very perceptible 
effects on the hydrography of the Cattegat. 

When we consider the number of narrow necks or isthmuses 
which separate gulfs and bays of the sea from each other, or 
from the main ocean, and take into account the time and cost, 
and risks of navigation which would be saved by executing 
channels to connect such waters, and thus avoiding the neces- 
sity of doubling long capes and promontories, or even conti- 
nents, it seems strange that more of the enterprise and money 
which have been so lavishly expended in forming artificial 
rivers for internal navigation should not have been bestowed 
upon the construction of maritime canals. Many such have 
been projected in early and in recent ages, and some trifling 
cuts between marine waters had been actually made; but before 
the construction of the Suez Canal, no work of this sort, pos- 
sessing real geographical or even commercial importance, had 
been effected. . 

These enterprises are attended with difficulties and open to 
objections which are not, at first sight, obvious. Nature guards 
well the chains by which she connects promontories with main- 
lands, and binds continents together. Isthmuses are usually 
composed of adamantine rock or of shifting sands—the latter 
being much the more refractory material to deal with. In all 
such works there is a necessity for deep excavation below low- 
water mark—always a matter of great difficulty; the dimen- 
sions of channels for sea-going ships must be much greater 
than those of canals of inland navigation; the height of the 
masts or smokepipes of that class of vessels would often ren- 
der bridging impossible, and thus a ship-canal might obstruct a 
communication more important than that which it was intended 
to promote; the securing of the entrances of marine canals 


612 ISTHMUS OF DARIEN—SUEZ CANAL. 


and the construction of ports at their termini would in general 
be difficult and expensive, and the harbors and the channel 
which connected them would be extremely liable to fill up by 
deposits washed in from sea and shore. LJesides all this there 
is, in many cases, an alarming uncertainty as to the effects of 
joining together waters which nature has put asunder. A new 
channel may deflect strong currents from safe courses, and thus 
occasion destructive erosion of shores otherwise secure, or pro- 
mote the transportation of sand or slime to block up important 
harbors, or it may furnish a powerful enemy with dangerous 
facilities for hostile operations along the coast. 

The most colossal project of canalization ever suggested, 
whether we consider the physical difficulties of its execution, 
the magnitude and importance of the waters proposed to be 
united, or the distance which would be saved in navigation, is 
that of a channel between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, 
across the Isthmus of Darien. Ido not now speak of a lock- 
canal, by way of the Lake of Nicaragua or any other route— 
for such a work would not differ essentially from other canals, 
and would scarcely possess a geographical character—but of an 
open cut between the two seas. The late survey by Captain 
Selfridge, showing that the lowest point on the dividing ridge is 
763 feet above the sea-level, must be considered as determining 
in the negative the question of the possibility of such a cut, by 
any means now at the control of man; and both the sanguine 
expectations of benefits, and the dreary suggestions of danger, 
from the realization of this great dream, may now be dismissed 
as equally chimerical. 


Suez Canal. 


The cutting of the Isthmus of Suez—the grandest and most 
truly cosmopolite physical improvement ever undertaken by 
man—threatens none of these dangers, and its only immediate 
geographical effect will probably be that interchange between 


MARITIME CANALS IN GREECE. 613 


the aquatic animal and vegetable life of two seas and two zones 
to which I alluded in a former chapter.* 

A collateral feature of this great enterprise deserves notice as 
possessing no inconsiderable geographical importance. I refer 
to the conduit or conduits constructed from the Nile to the 
isthmus, primarily to supply fresh water to the laborers on the 
great canal, and ultimately to serve as aqueducts for the city 
of Suez and other towns on the line of the canal, and for the 
irrigation and reclamation of a large extent of desert soil. In 
the flourishing days of the Egyptian empire, the waters of the 
Nile were carried over important districts east of the river. In 
later ages, most of this territory relapsed into a desert, from 
the decay of the canals which once fertilized it. There is no 
difficulty in restoring the ancient channels, or in constructing 
new, and thus watering not only all the soil that the wisdom 
of the Pharaohs had improved, but much additional land. 
Hundreds of square miles of arid sand waste would thus be 
converted into fields of perennial verdure, and the geography 
of Lower Egypt would be thereby sensibly changed. Con- 
siderable towns are growing up at both ends of the channel, 
and at intermediate points, all depending on the maintenance 
of aqueducts from the Nile, both for water and for the irrigation 
of the neighboring fields which are to supply them with bread. 
Important interests will thus be created, which will secure the 
permanence of the hydraulic works and of the geographical 
changes produced by them, and Suez, or Port Said, or Ismailich, 
may become the capital of the government which has been so 
long established at Cairo. 


Maritine Canals in Greece. 


A maritime canal executed and another projected in ancient 
times, the latter of which is again beginning to excite attention, 


* According to an article by Ascherson, in Petermann’s Mittheilungen, vol. 
xvii., p. 247, the sea-grass floras of the opposite sides of the Isthmus of Suez 
are as different as possible. It does not appear whether they have yet in- 
termixed. 


614 MARITIME CANALS IN GREECE. 


deserve some notice, though their importance is of a com- 
mercial rather than a geographical character. The first of 
th@se is the cut made by Xerxes through the rock which 
connects the promontory of Mount Athos with the mainland; 
the other, a navigable canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. 
In spite of the testimony of Herodotus and Thucydides, the 
Romans classed the canal of Xerxes among the fables of “ men- 
dacious Greece,” and yet traces of it are perfectly distinct at 
the present day through its whole extent, except at a single 
point where, after it had become so choked as to be no longer 
navigable, it was probably filled up to facilitate communica- 
tion by land between the promontory and the country in the 
rear of it. 

The emperor Nero commenced the construction of a canal 
across the Isthmus of Corinth, solely to facilitate the importa- 
tion of grain from the Kast for distribution among the citizens 
of Rome—for the encouragement of general commerce was no 
part of the policy either of the republic or the empire, and 
though the avidity of traders, chiefly foreigners, secured to the 
luxury of the imperial city an abundant supply of far-fetched 
wares, yet Rome had nothing to export in return. The line of 
Nero’s excavations is still traceable for three-quarters of a mile, 
or more than a fifth of the total distance between gulf and gulf. 

If the fancy kingdom of Greece shall ever become a sober 
reality, escape from its tutelage and acquire such a moral as 
well as political status that its own capitalists—who now pre- 
fer to establish themselves and employ their funds anywhere 
else rather than in their native land—have any confidence in 
the permanency of its institutions, a navigable channel may be 
opened between the gulfs of Lepanto and Aigina. The annex- 
ation of the Ionian Islands to Greece will make such a work 
almost a political necessity, and it would not only furnish 
valuable facilities for domestic intercourse, but become an im- 
portant channel of communication between the Levant and the 
countries bordering on the Adriatic, or conducting their trade 
through that sea. 


MARITIME CANALS IN GREECE. 615 


Short as is the distance, the work would be a somewhat for- 
midable undertaking, for the lowest point of the summit ridge 
of the isthmus is stated to be 246 feet above the water, and 
consequently the depth of excavation must be not less than 275 
feet. 

As I have said, the importance of this latter canal and of a 
navigable channel between Mount Athos and the continent 
would be chiefly commercial, but both of them would be con- 
spicuous instances of the control of man over nature in a field 
where he has thus far done little to interfere with her sponta- 
neous arrangements. If they were constructed upon such a 
scale as to admit of the free passage of the water through them, 
in either direction, as the prevailing winds should impel it, 
they would exercise a certain influence on the coast currents, 
which are important as hydrographical elements, and also as 
producing abrasion of the coast and a drift at the bottom of 
seas, and hence they would be entitled to rank higher than 
simply as artificial means of transit. 

It has been thought practicable to cut a canal across the 
peninsula of Gallipoli from the outlet of the Sea of Marmora 
into the Gulf of Saros. It may be doubted whether the me- 
chanical difficulties of such a work would not be found insu- 
perable ; but when Constantinople shall recover the important 
political and commercial rank which naturally belongs to her, 
the execution of such a canal will be recommended by strong 
reasons of military expediency, as well as by the interests of 
trade. An open channel across the peninsula would divert a 
portion of the water which now flows through the Darda- 
nelles, diminishing the rapidity of that powerful current, and 
thus in part remove the difficulties which obstruct the naviga- 
tion of the strait. It would considerably abridge the distance 
by water between Constantinople and the northern coast of 
the Aigean, and it would have the important advantage of 
obliging an enemy to maintain two blockading fleets instead 
of one. 


616 CANALS TO THE DEAD SEA. 


Canals communicating with Dead Sea. 


The project of Captain Allen for opening a new route to 
India by cuts between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, 
and between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea, presents many 
interesting considerations.* The hypsometrical observations of 
Bertou, Roth, and others, render it highly probable, if not cer- 
tain, that the watershed in the Wadi-el-Araba between the 
Dead Sea and the Red Sea is not less than three hundred 
feet above the main level of the latter, and if this is so, the 
execution of a canal from the one sea to the other is quite out 
of the question. But the summit level between the Mediter- 
ranean and the Jordan, near Jezreel, is believed to be little, if 
at all, more than one hundred feet above the sea, and the dis- 
tance is so short that the cutting of a channel through the 
dividing ridge would probably be found by no means an im- 
practicable undertaking. Although, therefore, we have no 
reason to believe it possible to open a navigable channel to 
India by way of the Dead Sea, there is not much doubt that the 
basin of the latter might be made accessible from the Medi- 
terranean. 

The level of the Dead Sea lies 1,316.7 feet below that of 
the ocean. It is bounded east and west by mountain ridges, 
rising to the height of from 2,000 to 4,000 feet above the 
ocean. From its southern end, a depression called the Wadi- 
el-Araba extends to the Gulf of Akaba, the eastern arm of the 
Red Sea. The Jordan empties into the northern extremity of 
the Dead Sea, after having passed through the Lake of Tibe- 
rias at an elevation of 663.4 feet above the Dead Sea, or 653.3 
below the Mediterranean, and drains a considerable valley north 
of the lake, as well as the plain of Jericho, which lies between 
the lake and the sea. If the waters of the Mediterranean were 
admitted freely into the basin of the Dead Sea, they would 
raise its surface to the general level of the ocean, and con- 


* The Dead Sea a new Route to India, 2 vols, 12mo0, London, 1855. 


CANALS TO THE DEAD SEA. 617 


sequently flood all the dry land below that level within the 
basin. . 

I do not know that accurate levels have been taken in the 
valley of the Jordan above the Lake of Tiberias, and our infor- 
mation is very vague as to the hypsometry of the northern 
part of the Wadi-el-Araba. As little do we know where a 
contour line, carried around the basin at the level of the Medi- 
terranean, would strike its eastern and western borders. We can- 
not, therefore, accurately compute the extent of now dry land 
which would be covered by the admission of the waters of the 
Mediterranean, or the area of the inland sea which would be 
thus created. Its length, however, would certainly exceed one 
hundred and fifty miles, and its mean breadth, including its 
gulfs and bays, could scarcely be less than fifteen, perhaps 
even twenty. It would cover very little ground now occupied 
by civilized or even uncivilized man, though some of the soil 
which would be submerged—for instance, that watered by the 
Fountain of Elisha and other neighboring sources—is of great 
fertility, and, undera wiser government and better civil insti- 
tutions, might rise to importance, because, from its depression, 
it possesses a very warm climate, and might supply South-east- 
ern Europe with tropical products more readily than they can 
be obtained from any other source. Such a canal and sea 
would be of no present commercial importance, because they 
would give access to no new markets or sources of supply ; 
but when the fertile valleys and the deserted plains east of 
the Jordan shall be reclaimed to agriculture and civilization, 
these waters would furnish a channel of communication which 
might become the medium of a very extensive trade. 

Whatever might be the economical results of the opening 
and filling of the Dead Sea basin, the creation of a new evap- 
orable area, adding not less than 2,000 or perhaps 3,000 
square miles to the present fluid surface of Syria, could not 
fail to produce important meteorological effects. The climate 
of Syria would probably be tempered, its precipitation and 
its fertility increased, the courses of its winds and the elec- 


618 CANAL TO LIBYAN DESERT. 


trical condition of its atmosphere modified. The present 
organic life of the valley would be extinguished, and many 
tribes of plants and animals would emigrate from the Medi- 
terranean to the new home which human art had prepared 
for them. It is possible, too, that the addition of 1,300 feet, 
or forty atmospheres, of hydrostatic pressure upon the bottom 
of the basin might disturb the equilibrium between the inter- 
nal and the external forces of the crust of the earth at this 
point of abnormal configuration, and thus produce geological 
convulsions the intensity of which cannot be even conjectured. 

It is now established by the observations of Rohlf and others 
that Strabo was right in asserting that a considerable part of 
the Libyan desert, or Sahara, lay below the level of the Medi- 
terranean. At some points the depression exceeds 325 feet, 
and at Siwah, in the oasis of Jupiter Ammon, it is not less 
than 130 feet. It has been proposed to cut a canal through 
the coast dunes, on the shore south of the Syrtis Major, or 
Dschun el Kebrit of the Arabs, and another project is to re- 
open the communication which appears to have once existed 
between the Palus Tritonis, or Sebcha el Nandid, and the 
Syrtis Parva. As we do not know the southern or eastern 
limits of this depression, we cannot determine the area which 
would thus be covered with water, but it would certainly be 
many thousands of square miles in extent, and the climatic 
effects would doubtless be sensible through a considerable part 
of Northern Africa, and possibly even in Europe. The rapid 
evaporation would require a constant influx of water from 
the Mediterranean, which might perhaps perceptibly influence 
the current through the Straits of Gibraltar. 


Maritime Canals in Europe. 


A great navigable cut across the peninsula of Jutland, form- 
ing a new and short route between the North Sea and the 
Baltic, if not actually commenced, is determined upon. The 
motives for opening such a communication are perhaps rather to 


CANAL BETWEEN NORTH SEA AND ZUIDERZEE. 619 


be found in political than in geographical or even commercial 
considerations, but it will not be without an important bear- 
ing on the material interests of all the countries to whose peoples 
it will furnish new facilities for communication and trafie. 

The North Holland canal between the Helder and the port 
of Amsterdam, a distance of fifty miles, executed a few years 
since at a cost of $5,000,000, and with dimensions admitting 
the passage of a frigate, was a magnificent enterprise, but it is 
thrown quite into the shade by the shorter channel now in pro- 
cess of construction for bringing that important city into al- 
most direct communication with the North Sea, and thus re- 
storing to it something at least of its ancient commercial im- 
portance. The work involves some of the heaviest hydraulic 
operations yet undertaken, including the construction of great 
dams, locks, dikes, embankments, and the execution of drain- 
ing works and deep cuttings under circumstances of extreme 
difficulty. In the course of these labors many novel problems 
have presented themselves for practical solution by the inge- 
nuity of modern engineers, and the new inventions and _ pro- 
cesses thus necessitated are valuable contributions to our means 
of physical improvement. 


Cape Cod Canal. 


The opening of a navigable cut through the narrow neck 
which separates the southern part of Cape Cod Bay in Massa- 
chusetts from the Atlantic, was long ago suggested, and there 
are few coast improvements on the Atlantic shores of the United 
States which are recommended by higher considerations of 
utility. It would save the most important coasting trade of 
the United States the long and dangerous navigation around 
Cape Cod, afford a new and safer entrance to Boston harbor 
for vessels from Southern ports, secure a choice of passages, 
thus permitting arrivals upon the coast and departures from it 
at periods when wind and weather might otherwise prevent 
them, aud furnish a most valuable internal communication in 


620 — CHANGES IN THE CASPIAN. 


case of coast blockade by a foreign power. The difficulties of 
the undertaking are no doubt formidable, but the expense of 
maintenance and the uncertainty of the effects of currents set- 
ting through the new strait are still more serious objections.* 


Changes in the Caspian. 


The Russian Government has contemplated the establish- 
ment of a nearly direct water communication between the Cas- 
pian Sea and the Sea of Azoff, partly by natural and partly by 
artificial channels, and there are now navigable canals between 


* The opening of a channel across Cape Cod would have, though perhaps to 
a smaller extent, the same effects in interchanging the animal life of the 
southern and northern shores of the isthmus, as in the case of the Suez Canal; 
for although the breadth of Cape Cod does not anywhere exceed twenty miles, 
and is in some places reduced to one, it appears from the official reports on the 
Natural History of Massachusetts, that the population of the opposite waters 
differs widely in species. 

Not having the original documents at hand, I quote an extract from the 
Report on the Invertebrate Animals of Mass., given by Thoreau, Hacursions, p. 
69: ‘‘The distribution of the marine shells is well worthy of notice as a 
geological fact. Cape Cod, the right arm of the Commonwealth, reaches out 
into the ocean some fifty or sixty miles. It is nowhere many miles wide; but 
this narrow point of land has hitherto proved a barrier to the migration of 
many species of mollusca. Several genera and numerous species, which are 
separated by the intervention of only a few miles of land, are effectually pre- 
vented from mingling by the Cape, and do not pass from one side to the other. 

. . . Of the one hundred and ninety-seven marine species, eighty-three do 
not pass to the south shore, and fifty are not found on the north shore of the 
Cape.” 

Probably the distribution of the species of mollusks is affected by unknown 
local conditions, and therefore an open canal across the Cape might not make 
every species that inhabits the waters on one side common to those of the 
other; but there can be no doubt that there would be a considerable migration 
in both directions. 

The fact stated in the report may suggest an important caution in drawing 
conclusions upon the relative age of formations from the character of their 
fossils. Had a geological movement or movements upheaved to different levels 
the bottoms of waters thus separated by a narrow isthmus, and dislocated the 
connection between those bottoms, naturalists, in after ages, reasoning from 
the character of the fossil faunas, might have assigned them to different, and 
perhaps very widely distant, periods. 


DIVERSION OF THE NILE. 621 


the Don and the Volga; but these works, though not wanting 
in commercial and political interest, do not possess any geo- 
graphical importance. It is, however, very possible to pro- 
duce appreciable geographical changes in the basin of the Cas- 
pian by the diversion of the great rivers which flow from Central 
Russia. The surface of the Caspian is eighty-three feet below 
the level of the Sea of Azoff, and its depression has been ex- 
plained upon the hypothesis that the evaporation exceeds the 
supply derived, directly and indirectly, from precipitation, 
though able physicists now maintain that the sinking of this 
sea is due to a subsidence of its bottom from geological causes. 
At Tsaritsin, the Don, which empties into the Sea of Azoff, 
and the Volga, which pours into the Caspian, approach each 
other within ten miles. Near this point, by means of open or 
subterranean canals, the Don might be turned into the Volga, 
or the Volga into the Don. If we suppose the whole or a 
large proportion of the waters of the Don to be thus diverted 
from their natural outlet and sent down to the Caspian, the 
equilibrium between the evaporation from that sea and its 
supply of water might be restored, or its level even raised 
above its ancient limits. If the Volga were turned into the 
Sea of Azoft, the Caspian would be reduced in dimensions 
until the balance between loss and gain should be re-estab- 
lished, and it would occupy a much smaller area than at pres- 
ent. Such changes in the proportion of solid and fluid surface 
would have some climatic effects in the territory which drains 
into the Caspian, and on the other hand, the introduction of a 
greater quantity of fresh water into the Sea of Azoff would 
render that gulf less saline, affect the character and numbers 
of its fish, and perhaps be not wholly without sensible influence 
on the water of the Black Sea. 


Diversion of the Nile. 


Perhaps the most remarkable project of great physical 
change, proposed or threatened in earlier ages, is that of the 


622 DIVERSION OF THE NILE. 


diversion of the Nile from its natural channel, and the turning 
of its current into either the Libyan Desert or the Red Sea. 
The Ethiopian or Abyssinian princes more than once menaced 
the Memlouk sultans with the execution of this alarming pro- 
ject, and the fear of so serious an evil is said to have induced 
the Moslems to conciliate the Abyssinian kings by large pres- 
sents, and by some concessions to the oppressed Christians of 
Egypt. Indeed, Arabian historians affirm that in the tenth 
century the Ethiopians dammed the river, and, for a whole year, 
cut off its waters from Egypt.* The probable explanation of 
this story is to be found in a season of extreme drought, such 
as have sometimes occurred in the valley of the Nile. 

The Libyan Desert, above the junction of the two principal 
branches of the Nile at Khartum, is so much higher than the 
level of the river below that point, that there is no reason to 
believe a new channel for the united waters of the two streams 
could be found in that direction; but the Bahr-el-Abiad flows 
through, if it does not rise in, a great table-land, and some of 
its tributaries are supposed to communicate in the rainy season 
with branches of great rivers flowing in quite another direction. 
Hence it is probable that a portion at least of the waters of 
this great arm of the Nile—and perhaps a quantity the ab- 
straction of which would be sensibly felt in Egypt—might be 
sent to the Atlantic by the Congo or Niger, lost in inland lakes 
and marshes in Central Africa, or employed to fertilize the Lib- 
yan sand wastes. 

About the beginning of the sixteenth century, Albuquerque 
the “Terrible” revived the scheme of turning the Nile into 
the Red Sea, with the hope of destroying the transit trade 


* “Some haue writté, that by certain kings inhabiting aboue, the Vilus 
should there be stopped; & at a time prefixt, let loose vpona certaine tribute 
payd them by the Aegyptians. The error springing perhaps froa truth (as 
all wandring reports for the most part doe) in that the Sultan doth pay a 
certaine annuall summe to the Adiéssin Emperour for not diverting the course 
of the Riuer, which (they say) he may, or impouerish it at the least.” 
GroraEr Sanpys, A Relation of a Journey, etc., p. 98. See, also, VANSLEB, 
Voyage en Egypte, p. 61. 


DIVERSION OF THE NILE. 623 


through Egypt by way of Kosseir. In 1525 the King of Por. 
tugal was requested by the Emperor of Abyssinia to send him 
engineers for that purpose ; a successor of that prince threat- 
ened to attempt the project about the year 1700, and even as late 
as the French occupation of Egypt, the possibility of driving 
out the intruder by this means was suggested in England. 

It cannot be positively affirmed that the diversion of the wa- 
ters of the Nile to the Red Seais impossible. In the chain of 
mountains which separates the two valleys, brown found a deep 
depression or wadi, extending from the one to the other, appa- 
rently at no great elevation above the bed of the river, but the 
height of the summit level was not measured. 

Admitting the possibility of turning the whole river into the 
Red Sea, let us consider the probable effect of the change. 
First and most obvious is the total destruction of the fertility of 
Middle and Lower Egypt, the conversion of that part of the 
valley into a desert, and the extinction of its imperfect ¢iviliza- 
tion, if not the absolute extirpation of its inhabitants. This is 
the calamity threatened by the Abyssinian princes and the 
ferocious Portuguese warrior, and feared by the Sultans of 
Egypt. Beyond these immediate and palpable consequences 
neither party then looked; buta far wider geographical area, 
and far more extensive and various human interests, would be 
affected by the measure. The spread of the Nile during the 
annual inundation covers, for many weeks, several thousand 
square miles with water, and at other seasons of the year 
pervades the same and even a larger area with moisture by infil- 
tration. The abstraction of so large an evaporating surface 
from the southern shores of the Mediterranean could not 
but produce important effects on many meteorological phe- 
nomena, and the humidity, the temperature, the electrical con- 
dition and the atmospheric currents of North-eastern Africa 
might be modified toa degree that would sensibly affect the cli- 
mate of Europe. 

The Mediterranean, deprived of the contributions of the Nile, 
would require a larger supply, and of course a stronger cur- 


624 DIVERSION OF THE RHINE. 


rent, of water from the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibral- 
tar; the proportion of salt it contains would be increased, and 
the animal life of at least its southern borders would be conse- 
quently modified ; the current which winds along its southern, 
eastern, and north-eastern shores would be diminished in force 
and volume, if not destroyed altogether, and its basin and its 
harbors would be shoaled by no new deposits from the high- 
lands of inner Africa. 

In the much smaller Red Sea, more immediately perceptible, 
if not greater, effects, would be produced. The deposits of 
slime would reduce its depth, and perhaps, in the course of 
ages, divide it into an inland and an open sea, the former of 
which, receiving no supply from rivers, would, as in the case of 
the northern part of the Gulf of California, soon be dried up 
by evaporation, and its whole area added to the Africo-Arabian 
desert ; the waters of the latter would be more or less fresh- 
ened, and their immensely rich marine fauna and flora changed 
in character and proportion, and, near the mouth of the river, 
perhaps even destroyed altogether; its navigable channels 
would be altered in position and often quite obstructed ; the 
flow of its tides would be modified by the new geographical con- 
ditions; the sediment of the river would form new coast-lines 
and lowlands, which would be covered with vegetation, and pro- 
bably thereby produce sensible climatic changes. 


Diversion of the Rhine. 


The interference of physical improvements with vested 
rights and ancient arrangements, is a more formidable obstacle 
in old countries than in new, to enterprises involving anything 
approaching to a geographical revolution. Hence such pro- 
jects meet with stronger opposition in Europe than in America, 
and the number of probable changes in the face of nature in 
the former continent is proportionally less. I have noticed 
some important hydraulic improvements as already executed or 
in progress in Europe, and I may refer to some others as con- 


IMPROVEMENTS IN NORTH AMERICAN HYDROGRAPHY. 625 


templated or suggested. One of these is the diversion of the 
Rhine from its present channel below Ragatz, by a cut through 
the narrow ridge near Sargans, and the consequent turning of 
its current into the Lake of Wallenstadt. This would be an 
extremely easy undertaking, for the ridge is but twenty feet 
above the level of the Rhine, and hardly two hundred yards 
wide. There is no present adequate motive for this diversion, 
but it is easy to suppose that it may become advisable within no 
long period. The navigation of the Lake of Constance is 
rapidly increasing in importance, and the shoaling of the east- 
erm end of that lake by the deposits of the Rhine may require 
a remedy which can be found by no other so ready means as the 
discharge of that river into the Lake of Wallenstadt. The na- 
vigation of this latter lake is not important, nor is it ever likely 
to become so, because the rocky and precipitous character of 
its shores renders their cultivation impossible. It is of great 
depth, and its basin is capacious enough to receive and retain 
all the sediment which the Rhine would carry into it for thou- 
sands of years.* 


Improvements in North American Hydrography. 
y 


We are not yet well enough acquainted with the geography 
of Central Africa, or of the interior of South America, to con- 
jecture what hydrographical revolutions might there be 
wrought ; but from the fact that many important rivers in 
both continents drain extensive table-lands, of moderate eleva- 
tion and inclination, there is reason to suppose that important’ 
changes in the course of those rivers might be accomplished. 
Our knowledge of the drainage of North America is much 


* Many geographers suppose that the dividing ridge between the Lake of Wal- 
lenstadt and the bed of the Rhine at Sargans is a fiuviatile deposit, which 
has closed a channel through which the Rhine anciently discharged a part or 
the whole of its waters into the lake. In the flood of 1868, the water of the 
Rhine rose to the level of the railway station at Sargans, and for some days 
there was fear of the giving way of the barrier and the diversion of the cur- 
rent of the river into the lake. 

40 


626 IMPROVEMENTS IN NORTH AMERICAN HYDROGRAPHY. 


more complete, and it is certain that there are numerous points 
within our territory where the courses of great rivers, or the 
discharge of considerable lakes, might be completely diverted, 
or at least partially directed into different channels. 

The surface of Lake Erie is 565 feet above that of the Hud- 
son at Albany, and it is so near the level of the great plain 
lying east of it, that it was found practicable to supply the 
western section of the canal, which unites it with the Hudson, 
with water from the lake, or rather from the Niagara which 
flows out of it. The greatest depth of water yet sounded in 
Lake Erie is but two hundred and seventy feet, the mean depth 
one hundred and twenty. Open canals parallel with the Nia- 
gara, or directly towards the Genesee, might be executed upon a 
scale which would exercise an important influence on the drain- 
age of the lake, if there were any adequate motive for such an 
undertaking. Still easier would it be to enlarge the outlet for 
the waters of Lake Superior at the Saut St. Mary—where the 
river which drains the lake descends twenty-two feet in a single 
mile—and thus to produce incalculable effects, both upon that 
lake and upon the great chain of inland waters which com- 
municate with it. 

The summit level between the surface of Lake Michigan at 
its mean height and that of the River Des Plaines, a tributary 
of the Illinois, at a point some ten miles west of Chicago, is 
but ten and a half feet above the lake. The lake once dis- 
charged a part or the whole of its waters into the valley of the 
Des Plaines. <A slight upheaval, at an unknown period, eleva- 
ted the bed of the Des Plaines, and the prairie between it and 
the lake, to their present level, and the outflow of the lake was 
turned into a new direction. The bed of the Des Plaines is 
higher than the surface of the lake, and in recent times the 
Des Plaines, when at flood, has sent more or less of its waters 
across the ridge into the bed of the South Branch of Chicago 
River, and so into Lake Michigan. 

A navigable channel has now been cut, admitting a constant 
flow of water from the lake, by the valley of the Des Plaines, 


IMPROVEMENTS IN NORTH AMERICAN HYDROGRAPHY. 627 


into the Illinois. The mean discharge by this channel does not 
much exceed 23,000 cubic feet per minute, but it would be 
quite practicable to enlarge its cross-section indefinitely, and 
the flow through it might be so regulated as to keep the Llinois 
and the Mississippi at flood at all seasons of the year. The 
increase in the volume of these rivers would augment their 
velocity and their transporting power, and, consequently, the 
erosion of their banks and the deposit of slime in the Gulf of 
Mexico, whilethe opening of a communication between the lake 
and the affluents of the Mississippi, unobstructed except by 
locks, and the introduction of a large body of colder water 
into the latter, would very probably produce a considerable 
effect on the animal life that peoples them. The diversion of 
water from the common basin of the great lakes through a new 
channel, in a direction opposite to their present discharge, 
would not be absolutely without influence on the St. Lawrence, 
though probably this effect might be too small to be readily 
perceptible.* 

In an able and interesting article in a California magazine, 
Dr. Widney has suggested a probable cause and a possible 
remedy for the desiccation of south-eastern California referred 
to in a former chapter. The Colorado Desert which lies con- 
siderably below the level of the waters of the Gulf of Califor- 
nia, and has an area of about 4,000 square miles, evidently 


* From Reports of the Canal Commissioners of the State of Illinois, and 
especially from a very interesting private letter from William Gooding, Esq., 
an eminent engineer, which I regret I have not space to print in full, I learn 
that the length of the present canal, from the lake to the River Illinois, is 
101 miles, with a total descent of a trifle more than 145 feet, and that it is 
proposed to enlarge this channel to the width of one hundred and sixty feet, 
with a minimum depth of seven, and to create a slack-water navigation in the 
Illinois by the construction of five dams, one of which is already completed. 
The descent for the outlet of the canal at La Salle on the Illinois to the 
Mississippi is twenty-eight feet, the distance being 230 miles. The canal thus 
enlarged would cost about $16,000,000, and it would establish a navigation for 
vessels of 1,206 to 1,500 tons burden between Lake Michigan and the Mis- 
sissippi, and consequently, by means of the great lakes and the Welland canal, 
between the St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico. 


628 SOIL BELOW ROCK. 


once formed a part of that gulf. This northern extension of 
the gulf appears to have been cut off from the main body by 
deposits brought down by the great river Colorado, at no very 
distant period. These deposits at the same time turned the 
course of the river to the south, and it now enters the gulf at a 
point twenty miles distant from its original outlet. 

When this northern arm of the gulf was cut off from the 
sea, and the river which once discharged itself into it was di- 
verted, it was speedily laid dry by evaporation, and now yields 
no vapor to be condensed into fog, rain, and snow on the neigh- 
boring mountains, which are now parched and almost bare of 
vegetation. 

The ancient bed of the river may still be traced, and in 
floods the Colorado still sends a part of its overflowing supply 
into its old channel, and for a time waters a portion of the 
desert. It is believed that the river might easily be turned 
back into its original course, and indeed nature herself seems 
to be now tending, by various spontaneous processes, to accom- 
plish that object. The waters of the Colorado, though perhaps 
not sufficient to fill the basin and keep it at the sea-level in 
spite of the rapid evaporation in that climate,* would at least 
create a permanent lake in the lower part of the depression, the 
evaporation from which, Dr. Widney suggests, might sensibly 
increase the humidity and lower the temperature of an exten- 
sive region which is now an arid and desolate wilderness. 


Soil below Lock. 


One of the most singular changes of natural surface effected 
by man is that observed by Beechey and by Barth at Lin 
Tefla, and near Gebel Gentines, in the district of Ben Gasi, in 
Northern Africa. In this region the superficial stratum origi- 
nally consisted of a thin sheet of rock covering a layer of fer- 
tile earth. This rock has been broken up, and, when not prac- 


* The thermometer sometimes rises to 120° F, at Fort Yuma, at the S. E. 
angleof Californiain N. L. 33°. 


COVERING ROCK WITH EARTH. 629 


ticable to find use for it in fences, fortresses, or dwellings, 
heaped together in high piles, and the soil, thus bared of its 
stony shell, has been employed for agricultural purposes.* If 
we remember that gunpowder was unknown at the period 
when these remarkable improvements were executed, and of 
course that the rock could have been broken only with the 
chisel and wedge, we must infer that land had at that time a 
very great pecuniary value, and, of course, that the province, 
though now exhausted, and almost entirely deserted by man, 
had once a dense population. 


Covering Lock with Earth. 


If man has, in some cases, broken up rock to reach produc- 
tive ground beneath, he has, in many other instances, covered 
bare ledges, and sometimes extensive surfaces of solid stone, 
with fruitful earth, brought from no inconsiderable distance. 
Not to speak of the Campo Santo at Pisa, filled, or at least 
coated, with earth from the Holy Land, for quite a different 
purpose, it is affirmed that the garden of the monastery of St. 
Catherine at Mount Sinai is composed of Nile mud, transport- 
ed on the backs of camels from the banks of that river. Par- 
they and older authors state that all the productive soil of the 
Island of Malta was brought over from Sicily.t The accuracy 
of the information may be questioned in both cases, but similar 
practices, on a smaller scale, are matter of daily observation in 
many parts of Southern Europe. Much of the wine of the 
Moselle is derived from grapes grown on earth carried high up 
the cliffs on the shoulders of men, and the steep terraced slopes 
of the Island of Teneriffe are covered with soil painfully 
scooped out from fissures in and between the rocks which have 


* Bartu, Wanderungen durch die Kiisten des Mittelmeeres, i., p. 353. Ina 
note on page 380, of the same volume, Barth cites Strabo as asserting that a 
similar practice prevailed in Iapygia; but the epithet rpayeta, applied by 
Strabo to the original surface, does not necessarily imply that it was covered 
with a continuous stratum of rock. 

+ Parruey, Wanderungen durch Sicilien und die Levante, i., p. 404. 


630 DESERT VALLEYS. 


been laid bare by the destruction of the native forests.* In 
China, too, rock has been artificially covered with earth to an 
extent which gives such operations a real geographical import- 
ance, and the accounts of the importation of earth at Malta, 
and the fertilization of the rocks on Mount Sinai with slime 
from the Nile, may be not wholly without foundation. 


Valleys in Deserts. 


In the latter case, indeed, river sediment might be very use- 
ful as a manure, but it could hardly be needed as a soil; for 
the growth of vegetation in the wadies of the Sinaitic Penin- 
sula shows that the disintegrated rock of its mountains requires 
only water to stimulate it to considerable productiveness. The 
wadies present, not unfrequently, narrow gorges, which might 
easily be closed, and thus accumulations of earth, and reser- 
voirs of water to irrigate it, might be formed which would 
convert many a square mile of desert into flourishing date 
gardens and cornfields. Tor example, not far from Wadi 
Feiran, on the most direct route to Wadi Esh-Sheikh, is a very 
narrow pass called by the Arabs El] Bueb (El Bab) or, The 
Gate, which might be securely closed to a very considerable 
height, with little labor or expense. Aboye this pass is a wide 
and nearly level expanse, filled up to a certain regular level 
with deposits brought down by torrents before the Gate, or 
Bueb, was broken through, and they have now worn down a 
channel in the deposits to the bed of the wadi. If a dam were 
constructed at the pass, and reservoirs built to retain the winter 
rains, a great extent of valley might be rendered cultivable. 


Lifects of Mining. 


The excavations made by man, for mining and other pur- 
poses, may occasion disturbance of the surface by the subsi- 
dence of the strata above them, as in the case of the mine of 
Fahlun, in Sweden, but such accidents have generally been too 


* MANTEGAZZA, Lio de la Plata e Tenerijfa, p. 567. 


EFFECTS OF MINING. 631 


inconsiderable in extent to deserve notice in a geographical 
point of view.* It is said, however, that in many places in the 
mining regions of England alarming indications of a tendency 
to a wide dislocation of the superficial strata have manifested 
themselves. Indeed, when we consider the measure of the un- 
derground cavities which miners have excavated, we cannot 
but be surprised that grave catastrophes have not often resulted 
from the removal of the foundations on which the crust of our 
earth is laid. The 100,000,000 tons of coal yearly extracted 
from British mines require the withdrawal of subterranean 
strata equal to an area of 20,000 acres one yard deep, or 2,000 
acres ten yards deep. These excavations have gone on for several 
years at this rate, and in smaller proportions for centuries. 
Hence, it cannot be doubted that by these and other like opera- 
tions thee arth has been undermined and honey-combed in many 
countries to an extent that may well excite serious apprehen- 
sions as to the stability of the surface. In any event such ex- 
cavations may interfere materially with the course of subterra- 
nean waters, and it has even been conjectured that the removal 
of large bodies of inetallic ore from their original deposits 
might, at least locally, affect in a sensible degree the magnetic 
and electrical condition cf the earth’s erust.t+ 


* In March, 1873, the imprudent extension of the excavations ina slate mine 
near Morzine, in Savoy, occasioned the fall of a mass of rock measuring more 
than 700,000 yards in cubical contents. A forest of firs was destroyed, and a 
hamlet of twelve houses crushed and buried by the slide. 

+ The exhaustion of the more accessible deposits of coal and other mine- 
rals has compelled the miners in Belgium, England, and other countries, to carry 
their operations to great depths below the surface. At the colliery Des Vi- 
viers, at Cilly near Charleroi, in Belgium, coal is worked at the depth of 2,820 
feet, and one pit has been sunk to the depth of 3,411 feet. It is supposed 
that the internal heat of the earth will render mining impossible below 4,000 
feet. At Clifford Amalgamated Mines, in Cormwall, the temperature at 1,590 
feet stood at 100°, but after the shaft had remained a year open it fell to 83°, 
In another Cornish mine men work at from 110° to 120°, but only twenty min- 
utes at a time, and with cold water thrown frequently over them.—-The lust 
Thirty Yearsin Mining Districts, p. 95. 

Stoppani mentions an abandoned mine at Huttenberg, in Bohemia, of the 
d-pth of 3,775 feet.—Corso di Geologia, i., p. 258, 


632 HYDRAULIC MINING. 


LITydraulie Mining. 


What is called hydraulic mining—a system substantially 
identical with that described in an interesting way by Pliny 
the elder, in Book XX XV. of his Natural History, as practised 
in his time in the gold mines of Spain*—is producing important 
geographical effects in California. Artificially directed cur- 
rents of water have been long employed for washing down and 
removing masses of earth, but in the Californian mining the 
process is resorted to on a vastly greater scale than in any other 
modern engineering operations, and with results proportioned 
to the means. Brooks of considerable volume are diverted 
from their natural channels and conducted to great distances 
in canals or wooden aqueducts,t and then directed against 
hills and large level surfaces of ground which it is necessary 
to remove to reach the gold-bearing strata, or which them- 
selves contain deposits of the precious mineral.t Naked 
hills and fertile soils are alike washed away by the artificial 
torrent, and the material removed—vegetable mould, sand, 
gravel, pebbles—is carried down by the current and often spread 
over ground lying quite out of the reach of natural inunda- 
tions, and burying it to the depth sometimes of twenty-five feet. 
An orchard valued at $60,000, and another estimated at not less 


* Thave little doubt that the hydraulic mining in Gaul, alluded to by Dio- 
dorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, v. 27, as merely a mode of utilizing the 
effects of water flowing in its natural channels, was really the artificial method 
described by Pliny. 

+ In 1867 there were 6,000 miles (including branches) of artificial water- 
courses employed for mining purposes in California. The flumes of these 
canals are often of shect-iron, and in some places are carried considerable 
distances at a height of 250 feet above the ground.—Raynmonp, Mineral Sta- 
tistics west of the Rocky Mountains, 1870, p. 476. 

} The water is sometimes driven through iron tubes under a hydrostatic 
pressure of several hundred feet, with a force which cuts away rock of con- 
siderable solidity almost as easily as hard earth. In this way of using water, 
the cutting force might, doubtless, be greatly augmented by introducing sand 
or gravel into the current, 


FIRES IN MINES. 633 
than $200,000, are stated to have been thus sacrificed, and a re- 
port from the Agricultural Bureau at Washington computes 
the annual damage done by this mode of mining at the incredi- 
ble sum of $12,000,000. 

Accidental fires in mines of coal or lignite sometimes lead to 
consequences not only destructive to large quantities of valua- 
ble material, but which may, directly or indirectly, produce 
results important in geography. The coal is occasionally ig- 
nited by the miners’ lights or other fires used by them, and 
certain kinds of this mineral, if long exposed to air in deserted 
galleries, may be spontaneously kindled. Under favorable cir- 
cumstances, a stratum of coal will burn until it is exhausted, 
and a cavity may be burnt out in a few months which human 
labor could not excavate in many years. Wittwer informs us 
that a coal mine at St. Etienne in Dauphiny has been burning 
ever since the fourteenth century, and that a mine near Dutt- 
weiler, another near Epterode, and a third at Zwickau, have 
been on fire for two hundred years. Such conflagrations not 
only produce cavities in the earth, but communicate a per- 
ceptible degree of heat to the surface, and the author just 
quoted cites cases where this heat has been advantageously 
employed in forcing vegetation. 


Projects of Agricultural Improvements by Duponchel. 


Duponchel’s schemes of agricultural improvement are so 
grandiose in their nature, so vast in their sphere of operation, 
and so important in their possible effects upon immense tracts 
of the earth’s surface, that they must be considered as projects 
of geographical revolution, and they therefore merit more 
than a passing notice. In a memoir already quoted, and in a 
later work,* this engineer proposes to construct artificial tor- 
rents for the purpose of grinding up calcareous rock, by roll- 
ing and attrition along their beds, and thus reducing it into a 
fine slime; and at the same time these torrents are to transport 


* Traité @ Hydraulique et de Géologie Agricoles, 1868. 


634 DUPONCHEL’S PROPOSALS. 


an argillaceous deposit which is to be mingled with the eal- 
careous slime, and distributed over the Landes by watercourses 
constructed for the purpose. By this means, he supposes that 
a very fertile soil may be formed, and so graded in depositing 
as to secure for it a good drainage. 

In order that nothing may be wanting to recommend the 
project, Duponchel suggests that, as some rivers of Western 
France are gold-bearing, it is probable that gold enough may 
be collected by washing the sands to reduce materially the ex- 
pense of such operations. 

In the Landes of Gascony alone, he believes that 3,000,000 
acres, now barren, might be made productive at a moderate ex- 
pense, and that similar methods might be advantageously em- 
ployed in France over an extent of not less than 80,000,000 
acres now almost wholly valueless. 

The successful execution of the plan would increase the fer- 
tile territory of France by an area of four or five times the ex- 
tent of Sicily or of Sardinia. 

There seems to be no reason why the same method, applied 
for such different purposes, should necessarily be destructive in 
the one case while it is so advantageous in the other. A wiser 
economy might bring about a harmony of action between the 
miners and the agriculturists of California, and the soil which 
is removed by the former as an incumbrance, judiciously de- 
posited, might become for the latter a source of wealth more 
solid and enduring than the gold now obtained by such a sacri- 
fice of agricultural interests. 


Action of Man on the Weather. 


Espy’s well-known suggestion of the possibility of causing 
rain artificially, by kindling great fires, is not likely to be turned 
to practical account, but the speculations of this able meteor- 
ologist are not, for that reason, to be rejected as worthless. His 
labors exhibit great industry in the collection of facts, much 
ingenuity in dealing with them, remarkable insight into the 


ACTION OF MAN ON THE WEATHER. 635 


laws of nature, and a ready perception of analogies and rela- 
tions not obvious to minds less philosophically constituted. 
They have unquestionably contributed essentially to the ad- 
vancement of meteorological science. 

The possibility that the distribution and action of electricity 
may be considerably modified by long lines of iron railways 
and telegraph wires, is a kindred thought, and in fact rests 
much on the same foundation as the belief in the utility of light- 
ning-rods, but such influence is too obscure and too uncertain 
to have been yet demonstrated, though many intelligent obser- 
vers believe that sensible meteorological effects have been pro- 
duced by it. 

It is affirmed that battles and heavy cannonades are generally 
followed by rain and thunder-storms, and Powers has collected 
much evidence on this subject,* but the proposition does not 
seem to be by any means established. 


Resistance to Great Nutural Forces. 


I have often spoken of the greater and more subtile natural 
forces, and especially of geological agencies, as powers beyond 
human guidance or resistance. This is no doubt at present 
true in the main, but man has shown that he is not altogether 
impotent to struggle with even these mighty servants of na- 
ture, and his unconscious as well as his deliberate action may 
in some cases have increased or diminished the intensity of 
their energies. It is a very ancient belief that earthquakes are 
more destructive in districts where the crust of the earth is solid 
and homogeneous, than where it is of a looser and inore inter- 
rupted structure. Aristotle, Pliny the elder, and Seneca be- 


* War and the Weather, or the Artificial Production of Rain, Chicago, 1871. 
Paifer proposed, as early as 1814, arrangements for producing rain by 
firing cannon and exploding shells in the air. Hin wunderbarer Traum die 
Frucht, barkei durch willkirlichen Regen zu befordern, Metz, 1814. See, on the 
question of the possibility of influencing the weather by artificial means, Lon- 
don Quarterly Journal of Science, xxix., p. 126, and Nature, Feb. 16, 1871, 
p. 306, 


636 EARTHQUAKES. 


lieved that not only natural ravines and caves, but quarries, 
wells, and other human excavations, which break the continuity 
of the terrestrial strata and facilitate the escape of elastic va- 
pors, have a sensible influence in diminishing the violence and 
preventing the propagation of the earth-waves. In all coun- 
tries subject to earthquakes this opinion is still maintained, and 
it is asserted that, both in ancient and in modern times, build- 
ings protected by deep wells under or near them have suffered 
less from earthquakes than those the architects of which have 
neglected this precaution.* 

If the commonly received theory of the cause of earthquakes 
is true—that, namely, which ascribes them to the elastic force 
of gases accumulated or generated in subterranean reservoirs— 
it is evident that open channels of communication between 
such reservoirs and the atmosphere might serve as a harmless 
discharge of gases that would otherwise acquire destructive 
energy. The doubt is whether artificial excavations can be car- 
ried deep enough to reach the laboratory where the elastic fluids 
are distilled. There are, in many places, small natural crevices 
through which such fluids escape, and the source of them 
sometimes lies at so moderate a depth that they pervade the 
superficial soil and, as it were, transpire from it, over a consid- 
erable area. When the borer of an ordinary artesian well 
strikes into a cavity in the earth, imprisoned air often rushes 
out with great violence, and this has been still more frequently 
observed in sinking mineral-oil wells. In this latter case, the 
discharge of a vehement current of inflammable fluid some- 
times continues for hours and even longer periods. These facts 
seem to render it not wholly improbable that the popular belief 
of the efficacy of deep wells in mitigating the violence of earth- 
quakes is well founded. 

In general, light, wooden buildings are less injured by earth- 
quakes than more solid structures of stone or brick, and it is 
commonly supposed that the power put forth by the earth-wave 
is too great to be resisted by any amount of weight or solidity 


* LANDGREBE, Geschichte der Vulkane, ii., pp. 19, 20. 


RESISTANCE TO VOLCANIC ACTION. 637 


of mass that man can pile up upon the surface. But the fact 
that in countries subject to earthquakes many very large and 
strongly constructed palaces, temples, and other monuments 
have stood for centuries, comparatively uninjured, suggests a 
doubt whether this opinion is sound. The earthquake of the 
first of November, 1755, which is asserted, though upon doubt- 
ful evidence, to have been felt over a twelfth part of the earth’s 
surface, was among the most violent of which we have any 
clear and distinct account, and it seems to have exerted its most 
destructive force at Lisbon. It has often been noticed as a re- 
markable fact, that the mint, a building of great solidity, was 
almost wholly unaffected by the shock which shattered every 
house and church in the city, and its escape from the common 
ruin can hardly be accounted for except upon the supposition 
that its weight, compactness, and strength of material enabled 
it to resist an agitation of the earth which overthrew all weaker. 
structures. On the other hand, a stone pier in the harbor of 
Lisbon, on which thousands of people had taken refuge, sank 
with its foundations to a great depth during the same earth- 
quake; and it is plain that where subterranean cavities exist, 
at moderate depths, the erection of heavy masses upon them 
would tend to promote the breaking down of the strata which 
roof them over. 

No physicist, I believe, has supposed that man can avert the 
eruption of a volcano or diminish the quantity of melted rock 
which it pours out of the bowels of the earth; but it is not 
always impossible to divert the course of even a large current 
of lava. “The smaller streams of lava near Catania,” says 
Ferrara, in describing the great eruption of 1669, “ were turned. 
from their course by building dry walls of stone as a barrier 
against them. . . . It was proposed to divert the main current 
from Catania, and fifty men, protected by hides, were sent with 
hooks and iron bars to break the flank of the stream near Bel- 
passo.* When the opening was made, fluid lava poured forth 


* Soon after the current issues from the volcano, it is covered above and at 
its sides, and finally in front, with scoriz, formed by the cooling of the ex- 


638 RESISTANCE TO VOLCANIC ACTION. 


and flowed rapidly towards Paterno; but the inhabitants of 
that place, not caring to sacrifice their own town to save Cata- 
nia, rushed out in arms and put a stop to the operation.”* In 
the eruption of Vesuvius in 1794, the viceroy saved from im- 
pending destruction the town of Portici, and the valuable col- 
lection of antiquities then deposited there but since removed to 
Naples, by employing several thousand men to dig a ditch 
above the town, by which the lava current was carried off in 
another direction. 


posed surface, which bury and conceal the fluid mass. The stream rolls on 
under the coating, and between the wails of scorie, and it was the lateral crust 
which was broken through by the workmen mentioned in the text. 

The distance to which lava flows, before its surface begins to solidify, de- 
pends on its volume, its composition, its temperature and that of the air, the 
force with which it is ejected, and the inclination of the declivity over which it 
runs. In most cases it is difficult to approach the current at points where it is 
still entirely fluid, and hence opportunities of observing it in that condition are 
not very frequent. In the eruption of February, 1850, on the east side of 
Vesuvius, I went quite up to one of the outlets. The lava shot out of the 
orifice upwards with great velocity, like the water from a fountain, in a stream 
eight or ten feet in diameter, throwing up occasionally volcanic bombs three or 
four feet in diameter, which exploded at the height of eight or ten yards, but 
it immediately spread out on the declivity down whichit flowed, to the width 
of several yards. It continued red-hot in broad daylight, and without a par- 
ticle of scorize on its surface, for a course of at least one hundred yards. At 
this distance, the suffocating, sulphurous vapors became so dense that I could 
follow the current no farther. The undulations of the surface were like those 
of a brook swollen by rain. I estimated the height of the waves at five or 
six inches by a breadth of eighteen or twenty. To the eye, the fluidity of the 
lava seemed as perfect as that of water, but masses of cold lava weighing ten 
or fifteen pounds floated upon it like cork. 

The heat emitted by lava currents seems extremely small when we consider 
the temperature required to fuse such materials and the great length of time 
they take in cooling. I saw at Nicolosi ancient oil-jars, holding a hundred 
gallons or more, which had been dug out from under a stream of old lava 
above that town. They had been very slightly covered with volcanic ashes 
before the lava flowed over them, but the lead with which holes in them had 
been plugged was not melted. The current that buried Mompiliere in 1669 
was thirty-five feet thick, but marble statues, in a church over which the lava 
formed an arch, were found uncalcined and uninjured in 1704. See ScROPE, 

Volcanoes, chap. vi. § 6. 
* T’eERRARA, Descrizione dell? Etna, p. 108. 
+ LANDGRELE, Naturgeschichte der Vuikane, ii., p. 82. 


INCIDENTAL EFFECTS OF HUMAN ACTION. 639 


Incidental Effects of Human Action. 


I have more than once alluded to the collateral and unsought 
consequences of human action as being often more momentous 
than the direct and desired results. There are cases where 
such incidental, or, in popular speech, accidental, consequen- 
ces, though of minor importance in themselves, serve to illus- 
trate natural processes; others, where, by the magnitude and 
character of the material traces they leave behind them, they 
prove that man, in primary or in more advanced stages of 
social life, must have occupied particular districts for a longer 
period than has been supposed by popular chronology. “On 
the coast of Jutland,’ says Forchhammer, “wherever a bolt 
from a wreck or any other fragment of iron is deposited in 
the beach sand, the particles are cemented together, and form 
a very solid mass around the iron. A remarkable formation 
of this sort was observed a few years ago in constructing the 
sea-wall of the harbor of Elsineur. This stratum, which sel- 
dom exceeded a foot in thickness, rested upon common beach 
sand, and was found at various depths, less near the shore, 
ereater at some distance from it. It was composed of pebbles 
and sand, and contained a great quantity of pins, and some 
coins of the reign of Christian IV., between the beginning and 
the middle of the seventeenth century. Here and there, a 
coating of metallic copper had been deposited by galvanic 
action, and the presence of completely oxydized metallic iron 
was often detected. Investigation made it in the highest 
degree probable that this formation owed its origin to the street 
sweepings of the town, which had been thrown upon the beach, 
and carried off and distributed by the waves over the bottom 
of the harbor.”* ‘These and other familiar observations of the 
like sort show that a sandstone reef, of no inconsiderable mag- 
nitude, might originate from the stranding of a ship with a 


* Geognostische Studien am Meeres Ufer, LEONHARD und BRONN, Jahrbuch, 
1841, pp. 25, 26. 


640 INCIDENTAL EFFECTS OF HUMAN ACTION. 


cargo of iron,* or from throwing the waste of an establishment 
for working metals into ranning water which might carry it to 
the sea. 

Parthey records a singular instance of unforeseen mischief 
from an interference with the arrangements of nature. A land- 
owner at Malta possessed a rocky plateau sloping gradually 
towards the sea, and terminating in a precipice forty or fifty 
feet high, through natural openings in which the sea-water 
flowed into a large cave under the rock. The proprietor at- 
tempted to establish salt-works on the surface, and cut shallow 
pools in the rock for the evaporation of the water. In order to 
fill the salt-pans more readily, he sank a well down to the cave 
beneath, through which he drew up water by a windlass and 
buckets. The speculation proved a failure, because the water 
filtered through the porous bottom of the pans, leaving little 
salt behind. But this was a small evil, compared with 
other destructive consequences that followed. When the 
sea was driven into the cave by violent west or north-west winds, 
it shot a jet @’eau through the well to the height of sixty feet, 
the spray of which was scattered far and wide over the neigh- 
boring gardens and blasted the crops. The well was now 
closed with stones, but the next winter’s storms hurled them 
out again, and spread the salt spray over the grounds in the 
vicinity as before. Repeated attempts were made to stop the 
orifice, but at the time of Parthey’s visit the sea had thrice 
burst through, and it was feared that the evil was without 
remedy.t 

I have mentioned the great extent of the heaps of oyster and 
other shells left by the American Indians on the Atlantic coast 
of the United States. Some of the Danish kitchen-middens, 
which closely resemble them, are a thousand feet long, from 
one hundred and fifty to two hundred wide, and from six to 
ten high. These piles have an importance as geological wit- 
nesses, independent of their bearing upon human history. 


* Kou, Schleswig-Holstein, ii., p. 45. 
+ Wanderungen durch Sicilien und die Levante, i., p. 406. 


INCIDENTAL EFFECTS OF HUMAN ACTION. 641 


Wherever the coast line appears, from other evidence, to have 
remained unchanged in outline and elevation since they were 
accumulated, they are found near the sea, and not more than 
about ten feet above its level. In some cases they are at a 
considerable distance from the beach, and in these instances, 
so far as yet examined, there are proofs that the coast has ad- 
vanced in consequence of upheaval or of fluviatile or marine 
deposit. Where they are altogether wanting, the coast seems 
to have sunk or been washed away by the sea. The constancy 
of these observations justifies geologists in arguing, where 
other evidence is wanting, the advance of land or sea respect- 
ively, or the elevation or depression of the former, from the 
position or the absence of these heaps alone. 

Every traveller in Italy is familiar with Monte Testaccio, the 
mountain of potsherds, at Rome ;* but this deposit, large as it 
is, shrinks into insignificance when compared with masses of 
similar origin in the neighborhood of older cities. The castaway 
pottery of ancient towns in Magna Greecia composes strata of 
such extent and thickness that they have been dignified with 
the appellation of the ceramic formation. The Nile, as it 
slowly changes its bed, exposes in its banks masses of the same 
material, so vast that the population of the world during the 
whole historical period would seem to have chosen this valley as 
a general deposit for its broken vessels. 

The fertility imparted to the banks of the Nile by the 
water and the slime of the inundations, is such that manures 
are little employed. Hence much domestic waste, which 
would elsewhere be employed to enrich the soil, is thrown out 
into vacant places near the town. Hills of rubbish are thus 
piled up which astonish the traveller almost as much as the 
solid pyramids themselves. The heaps of ashes and other 


* Until recently this hillock was supposed to consist of sherds of household 
pottery broken in using, but it now appears to be ascertained that it is com- 
posed of fragments of earthenware broken in transportation from the place 
of manufacture to the emporium on the Tiber where such articles were 
landed, 

41 


642 RUBBISH HEAPS. 


household refuse collected on the borders and within the limits 
of Cairo were so large, that the removal of them by Ibrahim 
Pacha has been looked upon as one of the great works of the 
age. 

These heaps formed almost a complete rampart around the 
city, and impeded both the circulation of the air and the com- 
munication between Cairo and its suburbs. At two points 
these accumulations are said to have risen to the incredible 
height of between six and seven hundred feet; and these two 
heaps covered two hundred and fifty acres.* During the occu- 
pation of Cairo by the French, the invaders constructed re- 
doubts on these hillocks which commanded the city. They 
were removed by Mehemet Ali, and the material was employed 
in raising the level of low grounds in the environs.*t 

In European and American cities, street sweepings and other 
town refuse are used as manure and spread over the neighbor- 
ing fields, the surface of which is perceptibly raised by them, 
by vegetable deposit, and by other effects of human industry, 
and in spite of all efforts to remove the waste, the level of the 
ground on which large towns stand is constantly elevated. The 
present streets of Rome are twenty feet, and in many places 
much more, above those of the ancient city. The Appian Way 
between Rome and Albano, when cleared out a few years ago, 
was found buried four or five feet deep, and the fields along 
the road were elevated nearly or quite as much, The floors of 
many churches in Italy, not more than six or seven centuries 
old, are now three or four feet below the adjacent streets, though 
it is proved by excavations that they were built as many feet 
above them.t 


* OLoT Bry, Egypte, i., p. 277. 

+ Egypt manufactures annually about 1,200,000 pounds of nitre, by lixivi- 
ating the ancient and modern rubbish-heaps around the towns. 

{ Rafinesque maintained many years ago that there was a continual deposi- 
tion of dust on the surface of the earth from the atmosphere, or from cosmical 
space, sufficient in quantity to explain no small part of the elevation referred 
to in the text. Observations during the eclipse of Dec. 22, 1870, led some 
astronomers to believe that the appearance of the corona was dependent upon 


NOTHING SMALL IN NATURE. 643 


Nothing Small in Nature. 


It is a legal maxim that “the law concerneth not itself with 
trifles,’ de minimis non curat lex; but in the vocabulary of 
nature, little and great are terms of comparison only; she 
knows no trifles, and her laws are as inflexible in dealing with 
an atom as with a continent or a planet.* The human opera- 


or modified by cosmical dust or matter in a very attenuated form diffused 
through space. 

Tyndall has shown by optical tests that the proportion of solid matter sus- 
pended or floating in common air is very considerable, and there is abundant 
other evidence to the same purpose. Ehrenberg has found African and even 
American infusoria in dust transplanted by winds and let fall in Europe, and 
Schhemann asserts that the quantity of dust brought by the scirocco from 
Africa is so great, that by cutting holes in the naked rocks of Malta enough 
of Libyan transported earth can be caught and retained, in the course of four- 
teen years, to form a soil fit for cultivation.—Beilage zur Aligemeinen Zeitung, 
Mar, 24, 1870. 

* One of the sublimest, and at the same time most fearful suggestions that 
haye been prompted by the researches of modern science, was made by 
Babbage in the ninth chapter of his Winth Bridgewater Treatise. I have 
not the volume at hand, but the following explanation will recall to the 
reader, if it does not otherwise make intelligible, the suggestion I refer to: 

No atom can be disturbed in place, or undergo any change of temperature, 
of electrical state, or other material condition, without affecting, by attrac- 
tion or repulsion or other communication, the surrounding atoms. These, 
again, by the same law, transmit the influence to other atoms, and the im- 
pulse thus given extends through the whole material universe. Every human 
movement, every organic act, every volition, passion, or emotion, every intel- 
lectual process, is accompanied with atomic disturbance, and hence every 
such movement, every such act or process, affects all the atoms of universal 
matter. Though action and reaction are equal, yet reaction does not restore 
disturbed atoms to their former place and condition, and consequently the 
effects of the least material change are never cancelled, but in some way 
perpetuated, so that no action can take place in physical, moral, or intel- 
lectual nature, without leaving all matter in a different state from what it 
would have been if such action had not occurred. Hence, to use language 
which I have employed on another occasion: there exists, not alone in the 
human conscience or in the omniscience of the Creator, but in external 
rature, an ineffaceable, imperishable record, possibly legible even to 
created intelligence, of every act done, every word uttered, nay, of every 


644 NOTHING SMALL IN NATURE. 


tions mentioned in the last few paragraphs, therefore, do act 
in the ways ascribed to them, though our limited faculties are 
at present, perhaps forever, incapable of weighing their imme- 
diate, still more their ultimate consequences. But our inability 
to assign definite values to these causes of the disturbance of 
natural arrangements is not a reason for ignoring the existence 
of such causes in any general view of the relations between 
man and nature, and we are never justified in assuming a force 
to be insignificant because its measure is unknown, or even 
because no physical effect can now be traced to it as its origin. 
The collection of phenomena must precede the analysis of 
them, and every new fact, illustrative of the action and reac- 
tion between humanity and the material world around it, is 
another step towards the determination of the great question, 
whether man is of material nature or above her. 


wish and purpose and thought conceived by mortal man, from the birth of 
our first parent to the final extinction of our race; so that the physical 
traces of our most secret sins shall last until time shall be merged in that 
eternity of which not science, but religion alone. assumes to take cogni- 
zance, 


oN Dy Wx 


ABSORPTION of moisture by earth, amount of, 
uncertain, 22 
AprRonpDACcKS, forest, geographical importance 
of, 327 
lakes of, 493 
Arrica, Northern, artesian wells in, 478-482 
desert of, atmosphere and scenery in, 572 
AGRICULTURE of the United States, products of, 
%3 
AKABA, fresh water on sea-beach at, 477, ote 
ALBANO, iake of, artificial lowering of, 427 
AMERICA, NORTH, primitive physical condition 
of, 17. 
scientific observation of its physical changes, 
44 
forests of, 326 et seqq. 
forest trees of, compared with European, 
334-342 
dunes of, 575 
hydrographical improvements in, 625-627 
ANIMALCUL, or infusorial life, importance of, 
145-147 
ANIMALS, WILD, sympathy of ruder races with, 
38, note 
wild, instinct, modification of, 39, note 
large marine, unimportant in geography, 96 
extinction of, 105 
domestic, origin and transfer of, 86 
ANIMAL LIFE, as geographical agency, 80 
remains of, volume of, 80, note 
extirpation of, by man, 91, note 
APENNINES, effects of felling woods of, 153 
APPIAN Way, the level of, raised, 642 
AQUATIO PLANTS, action of, in raising level of 
marshes, 30, ote 
AQUEDUCTS. geographical and climatic effects 
of, 446 
ARABIA PETRA, sandstone of, 483, note ; 546, 
note 
sands and petrified wood of, 548, note 
ARAGUA, valley of, 220 


ARDECHE river, floods of, 256-262 
ARGOSTOLI, subterranean marine currents at, 
470, note 
ARMIES, introduction of foreign vegetables by, 
69 
ARNO, floods of, 539, note 
ARTESIAN WELLS, ascent of fluids in, 476 e 
seqq. 
ancient, 478, note 
in Algeria, 478-481 
at St. Louis, 480, note 
deepest, 480, 220te 
Auk, the wingless, extirpation of, 122 
AUSTRALIA, as field of physical observation, 51 
AVALANCHES, trees as protection against, 290 


BaBINET’s plan for artificial springs, 485, 486 
BAVARIA, scarcity of fuel in, 323, note 
BEAVER, action of, in producing bogs, 83 
constructs canals, 83, note 
cause of increased numbers of, 92 
BEE-HONEY, introduction of, into the United 
States, 136 
BEE-HUSBANDRY in Italy, 136, note 
BERGAMO, change of climate in the vicinity of, 
164, note 
Birps, geographical importance of, 111 
introduction of foreign, 113 
destruction of, 115-125 
how far useful or injurious by preying on 
insects, 119, note 
migration of, 120, 121 
seek shelter from cold under snow, 212, note 
Bison, domestication of, 88, 399, note 
numbers of, in the United States, 90, note 
numbers of, annually destroyed, 95 ; 
BuastTs, powder, remarkable, 403, note 
Bogs, floating, 29 
quantity of, 28, note 
how formed, 29 
formation of, by beavers, 88 


646 


BourceEt Lake, importance of, as a basin of re- 
ception, 495 

BREMONTIER’s system of dune plantations, 
594 

BRETON, Cap, dune vineyards of, 598 

BusBEQuIvs’s letters, value of, 65 


CAMEL, introduction of, into Europe and Ameri- 
ca, 87, 88 ? 
injurious to vegetation in desert, 151 
CaMPINE in Belgium, 607 
CANADA THISTLE, 70 
Canats, effects of, in interchanging organic 
life, 97 
excavations for, 403, note 
and aqueducts, climatic and geographical 
effects of, 446 
of Tuscany, injurious effects of, 447, note 
of the Ganges, 452, note 
marine, 610 
across Isthmus of Darien, 612 
Suez, 78, 612 
across Isthmus of Corinth, 614 
between Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Dead 
Sea, 616 
between North Sea and Baltic, 618 
between North Sea and Zuiderzee, 619 
across Cape Cod, 619 
between Don and Volga, 621 
between Erie and Genesee, 626 
between Lake Michigan and the Illinois, 
626 
CAPE Cop, sand dunes of, 580, ote 
CAPPERCAILZIE, extinction and reintroduction 
of, in Great Britain, 123 
habits of, 123, ote 
CAPRIFICATION, whether useful, 129, ote 
CaRNIOLA, caves of, 490, note 
CasPIAN, natural and artificial changes in, 325, 
note ; 620 
CATANIA, lava streams at, 637 
CAULIFLOWERS, fresh, supplied by Algeria to 
Northern Germany, 65, note 
CELANO Lake, draining of, by Prince Torlonia, 
429 
CHERBOURG, breakwater at, 402 
CrerEats, self-propagating in California, 60, 
note 
CEVENNES, effects of clearing the, 166 
CxHaAmotIs, numbers of killed, 95 
CHESTNUT crop in France and Tuscany, value 
of, 887, note 
Cutan, Val di, character of, 532 
improvements in, 553, 534 
C1cER0, his opinion of merchants, 7, 20t6 


INDEX. 


his opinion of the mechanical arts, 427, 
note 
CrxcHona, introduction of, into India, 60, ote 
improved by cultivation, 60, note 
CLIMATES, ancient, character of, uncertain, 15 
causes producing change in New England, 
21, note 
Coat, early use of, for fuel, 308, note 
increased use of, in Paris, 359, note 
extracted in England, quantity of, 631 
Coast-LINE, change of, from natural causes, 399 
subject to human guidance, 400, 401 
CocHINEAL insect transferred to Spain, 136 
CoMMERCE, discouraged and despised by ancient 
Romans, 7, 65, note ; 614 
modern, objects of, 63 
Como, Lake of, proposed lowering of, 433, note 
effect of lowering on stability of shores and 
percolation, 433, 20te 
percolation of water from, 433 
importance of, as basin of reception, 494 
ConsTANCE, Lake of, diversion of Rhine from, 
625 
CONSTANTINOPLE, water supply of, 349, note ; 
446, n0te 
Copats Lake, draining of, 427 
Cork Tree, yield of, 838, note 
CorPoRATIONS, industrial and financial, corrup- 
tion and demoralizing effects of, 53, note 
Corron-8SEED, value of, 36, 20te 
introduction of, into U. S., 74, note 
Crav, reclamation of, 162, note 
Cypress Tree, its beauty, 342 


' 


DARIEN Isthmus, proposed canal across, 612 
DEAD SEA, projected canal to, 616 
DEER, tame, injurious to trees, 383, note 
number of, in the United States, 91 
Dera, of the Mississippi, 503, note 
of the Ganges, 503, ote 
of the Hoang-ho, 503, note 
DENMARK, peat mosses of, 31, note 
Deposits of rivers, geological importance of, 399 
marine, on coast of Netherlands, 410 
of rivers of Tuscany, 525 
DeEspRT Trees, propagation of, 151 
Arabian, scenery of, 483, note 
DFESPOTISM a cause of physical decay, 5 
DESICCATION, secular, of soil, 20, note 
DixEs, Sea, origin of, 405 
of Netherlands, 407 e¢ seqq. 
construction of, 413 
in Egypt, 455 
of Mississippi, 511 _ 
See Embankments, 


INDEX. 


647 


Dryornis or Moa, recent extirpation of, in | EARTHQUAKES, resistance to, 635 


New Zealand, 122 
DISEASES, contagious, propagation of, 
germs, 147, note 
Dono, extirpation of, 122 
Down River, proposed diversion of, 621 
DRAINAGE of Lakes, 417 
of Lake of Haarlem, 418 
of Lake of Albano, 427 
of Lake of Fucinus or Celano, 429 
of Lake of Copais, 569 
of Lake of Lungern, 433 
of bogs and swamps, 485 e¢ seqq. 
its necessity in lands newly reclaimed from 
forest, 487 
surface and subterranean, and their effects, 
438 
by boring, 439 
of surface waters, climatic effects of, 440 
unforeseen effects of, 445 
effect of, on inundations, 489 
DRANCE, glacier lake of, 500 
DUGDALE on sea dikes, 406, note 
Dunes, coast, how formed, 559 e¢ seqq. 
height of, 562 
sands of, character and composition of, 567, 
600, note 
interior structure of, 569 
stratification of, 570 
geological importance of, 572 
of American coasts, 575 
of Western Europe, 575 ’ 
age, character, and permanence of, 577 
naturally wooded, 579 
protection of, 580, 592 
uses of, asa barrier against the sea, 551 
movement of, 587 
control of, by man, 591 
artificial, 591 
plantation of, 594 et seqq. 
vineyards upon, 595 
artificial removal of, 599 
inland, 600 
of North American Desert, 600 
of South American Desert, 601 
DUPONCHEL, proposals for agricultural improve- 
ment, 633 
DuRANCE, fertilizing slime of, 245, 20te 
Dust, cosmical, deposit of, 642, note 
DwicHT, Dr., travels in the United States 
characterized, 51, note 


by 


EanrtH, habitable, generally wooded, 148 
displacement of, in engineering, 403, note 
transported to cover rocky surface, 62 


EARTHWORMS, utility of, 129-131 
EEzs, destruction of, 107, note 
Eeypr, introduction of foreign plants and ani- 
mals into, 67, 20te 
catacombs of, 51, note 
papyrus and water-lily of, 77, 20¢e 
poisonous snakes of, 126, note 
supposed increase of rain in, 197, note 
productiveness of, 244, note 
original condition of, 449 
amount of water used for irrigation, 450 
cultivated soil of, 453 
population of, 454 
driginally morass, 455, note 
saline deposits of, 468 
sands of, 552 
their prevalence and extent, 555, note 
action on the Delta and cultivated land, 
554 
source of sands, 555 
effect of diversion of the Nile upon, 622 
refuse heaps near Cairo, 641, note 
ELEPHANT, numbers of, killed, 94 
ELsINEUR, artificial formation in harbor of, 
639 
EMBANEMENTS, river, uses and evils of, 5(1 et 
seqd. 
imitation of nature, 531, note 
Lombardini’s views of, 502, note 
of Mississippi, magnitude of, 511 
ENGINEERS and Artisans, not respected by 
ancients or in Middle Ages, 426 
ENGLAND, forest economy of, 507 
forests of, described by Czesar, 309, note 
large extent of ornamental plantation, 309 
private enterprises in sylviculture, 311 
ENGUERRAND de Concy, cruelty of, 350 
Erna, eruptive matter of, infertile, 150 
EucALyPtvus, growth and height of, 334, note ; 
394, note 
EUPHRATES, sand plains in the valley of, 604 
EVAPORATION, amount of, uncertain, 24 
from forest earth, 176 
relative, from earth and water, 441, note 
EVERGREEN Trees, properties of, 175, 20¢e ; 
205, 207 
Eye, cultivation of, 11 
sympathy between, and other organs, 11, 
note 


Fens of Lincolnshire, draining of, 403 

FEUDALISM, abuses of, 5, 20¢é 

FrrgE, action of, on wood-land, 361, 362 
protection of woods against, 384 


645 


forest, of 1871, 385 
measures against, 386 
Fir-TREE, cicatrization of stump, 338, note 
FIRE-WEED in burnt forests of the United 
States, 295 
Fisx, introduction and breeding of, 97-101 
naturalization of, 97 
destruction of, 101 e¢ seqg. 
spawn consumed by water-fowl, 101 
inferiority of artificially fattened, 108 
fresh water, growing scarcity of, in United 
States, 108, note 
shell, extensive heaps of remains of in 
United States, 97 
shell, extensive heaps of remains of, Indian 
origin, 97 
Fisu Ponps, in Catholic countries, 529, note 
FIsHERIES of the world, annual yield of, 103 
et seqq., note 
Foe rare in woods, 192, note 
FONTAINEBLEAD, forest of, 105 
forest of, its renovation, 373, note 
soil of, 607, note 
Forces, natural, accumulation of, 37 
Forests, royal, 349-354 
See Woods, 
Forest Laws, Jewish, 348, note 
severity of, in France and England, 350 
under Louis TX., 351 
medieval character of, 386 
of America, created by circumstances, 388 
FRANCE, the peasantry of, described by La 
Bruyére, 6, 2o0te 
the peasantry of, described by Arthur Young, 
6, note 
forests of, 312 
imports timber largely, 314, note 
sale of forest lands by, 315 
recent forest legislation of, highly useful, 
317 
royal forests and forest laws, 849 
inundations of, 489 
remedies against inundations, 490 
FRESCOBALDI on sands of desert, 551, note 
FRIESLAND, sand dunes of, 588 
Frost, action of, on soil, 416, note 
Fucrnvs, draining of Lake of, by Prince Tor- 
lonia, 429 et seqq. 
Fur Animals, destruction of, 106, note 


GAME Laws, effects of, 96, rote ; 117, 311, 352 
GANGES, effect of clearing valley of, 399, note 
canal, 452, nole 
Gascony, coast sands of, 576 
dunes, 576 


INDEX. 


dunes, extent and advance of, 576 
landes of, 606 
their reclamation, 606 
their area, 611 
GERMAN Ocean, sands of, 548, note 
GEOGRAPHY, modern, embraces organic life, 
56 
GLACIER lakes in Switzerland, 500 
Goat, Angora, habits of, 89, ote 
introduction of, into America, 89, note 
GOLDAU, Switzerland, mountain slide at, 287 
Goup FisH, the introduction of, from China, 97 
GRAPE disease, its economic effects in France, 
Italy, Sicily, 79 
GRASS-LAND, meteorological action of, 55 
GRAVE-DIGGER beetle, habits of, 131 
GREECE, subterranean waters of, 470, note 
proposed canal through Isthmus of Corinth, 
613 
proposed canal across Mt. Athos, 615 
GULLS, sea, habits of, 114, note 
GUNPOWDER, chiefly used for industrial pur- 
poses, 406, ote 


HAARLEM, Lake of, drained, 418 
climatic effect of drainage, 443 
Hatt, whether prevented by woods, 155, note 
HAnbors, artificial, rarity of, 401, note 
Havuravn, the productions of its soil, 60, note 
Heat, solar, utilization of, 46, note 
action of, on rock, 551, node 
HEILBRONY, springs of, 226 
HERRING, fishery of, 107, move 
HESSIAN FLY, introduction of, into the United 
States, 134 
HOANG-HO, delta of, 277 
change of mouth of, 5038, ote 
Human action, incidental effects of, 639 et seqq. 
Humpsreys & ABBOT’sS Report on the Missis- 
sippi, value of, 510, note 
HyprOGRAPHY of North America, 625 


Inrx, the Alpine, 94 
IJSSEL river, 423 
IMPROVEMENT, works of, remarkable for volume 
and difficulty, 402, note 
InDIA, devastation of forests in, 311, note 
INDIAN Corn, acclimation of, 18, mote 
INDIANS on Amazon, their skill in the use of the 
bow, 138, note 
INFILTRATION of water from lakes, 433, note 
of fresh water in Gulf of Akaba, 477, note 
of Nile water, 475, note 
InFusorim, importance of, 141-147 


INDEX. 


INsEcTs and worms, utility of, 134 
useful in fertilization of plants, 125 e¢ seqq. 
influence of, on vegetation, 132-187 
carnivorous, useful to man, 135 
how far injurious to forest trees, 132 
introduction of, 1384-135 
ravages of, 136 
tenacity of life in, 137 et seqq. 
destruction of, by fish, 138 
abundance of, in Northern Europe, 138, note 
destruction of, by birds, 113 
quadrupeds, 140 
confine themselves to dead trees, 140, 381, 
note 
do not multiply in the forest, 343 
INSTINCT, animal, modification of, 39, note 
INSURANCE against fall of rocks, 292, note 
forest fires, 386 
INUNDATIONS, recent measures against, 509 
aggravated by deposits in bed of streams, 
237 
occasioned by thaws, 239 
in France, history of, 243, note 
economical evils of, 244 
action of, on river bed, 261 
in Netherlands, 404 
and torrents, 488 e¢ seqq. 
of 1856 in France, 489 
measures against, in France, 491 
where they originate, 491 
remedies against, 499 
from ice barriers, 500 
of banks of river Po, 509, note 
Rozet’s remedy against, 512 
IRRIGATION, antiquity of, 448 
among Mexicans and Peruvians, 448, note 
its necessity in hot climates, 449 
in Northern Italy, 456, note 
in Turkish Empire, 450 
in India, 452 
in Egypt, 453 
in the United States, 457, note 
in Italy, 458, note 
in Spain, 459, note 
quantity of water used in, 456, 465, note 
difficulties of, 459, note 
effects of, on vegetable crops, 459, note 
climatic effects of, 460 
recovery of water employed in, 465 
effects of, on river supply, 465 
deposit of salt by, 467 
ISLANDS, floating, 419, note 
Iraty. beauty of its winter scenery, 215 
effect of the denudations of its forests, 263, 
note 


649 


extent of irrigation in, 457 
sky of, 464, note 


JOHNSTRUP’S Observation on absorption of 
moisture by earth, 216, note 
JUPITER, satellites of, visible to the naked eye, 
14, note 
JUTLAND, destruction of forests in, 348, 70¢e 
encroachments of the sea on, 583 


KANDER river, artificial course of, 499 
Karst, plantations on, 324, note 

subterranean waters of, 470, note 
KsOKKENMODDINGER, heaps of kitchen refuse, 16 


LAKES, draining of, 417 
natural process of filling up, by aquatic vege- 
tation, 419, note 
lowering of, in ancient and modern times, 
428 et seqq. 
draining of, in Switzerland, 432, note 
effects of, 432, note 
mountain, their disappearance, 433 
their utility, 485 
LAND won from the waters, 398 e¢ seqq. 
LmsTaADIvs, account of Swedish Laplanders, 123, 
note 
Lirg, American, instability of, 396 
balance of animal and vegetable, 145 
LIIMFIJORD, irruption of sea into, 583 et seqq. 
aquatic vegetation of, 584 
original state of, 610 
Lima and Sestajone rivers compared, 288, note 
Lion, an inhabitant of Europe, 92, note 
LIsBoN, earthquake of, 637 
Locusz does not breed in woods. 299 
LOMBARDINI on precipitation, 463, mote 
on Tiber, 474 
on river embankments, 562, note 
on elevation of bed of Po, 507, note 
Guida allo Studio dell’ Idrologia, 510, note 
on inundations, 515, note 
on Val di Chiana, 534 
LomBArpy, climate of, 456 
statistics of irrigation in, 459 
Louts IX. of France, misguided clemency of, 351 
LUMBER trade of Quebec, 3860, note 
the United States, 360, note 
augmented consumption of, 356, note! 
LUNGERN, Lake of, lowering, 433 


MADAGASCAR, gigantic bird of, 123 
MADDER, cultivation of, in France, 19, note - 


650 


MaGGIorE, Lake of, importance of, as basin of 
reception, 495 
MAGNITUDE, unit of, nature has none, 145 
MAtmzeE, acclimation of, 18, note 
Mara, transported soil of, 629 
Man, reaction of, on nature, 8 
action of, on organic life, 10, note 
measurement of influence of, uncer- 
tain, 14 
destructiveness of, 33, 35. note; 36-41 
first conquests over nature, 38, note 
geographical action of, compared with that 
of brutes, 41 
physical improvement by, 44 
limits of his physical power, 45 
Temains of, contemporary with mammoth, 
82, note 
agency of, in extirpation of fish, 101 
of aquatic animals, 105 
of birds, 116-129 
possible control of minute organisms by, 
140 et seqq. 
possible geographical changes by, 609 et seqq. 
incidental effects of his action, 639 et seqq. 
action of, illimitable and never-ending ef- 
fects of, 648, 644 
MankcIteE of Lombardy, 461, note 
Maremma, Tuscan, improvements in, 
seq. 
MarsuHes, how far unhealthy, 158, note 
draining of, in Italy, 436 
United States, 437 
climatic action of, 440 
insalubrity of mixture of salt and fresh water 
in, 527, note 
MatcuHeEs, Lucifer, 856, note 
MECHANIC ARTS, illustration of their mutual 
interdependence, 870, note 
despised by ancient Romans and in Middle 
Ages, 427, 20te 
not respected in Modern Italy, 427, note 
MEDANOS or dunes of the South American Des- 
ert, 601, 602 
MEDITERRANEAN SEA, not rich in organic life, 
98 
sands of, 549 
tides of, 564 
MELLA river, change in character of, 264, note 
MeEnGorrTi on Nile, 516 
METEOROLOGY, uncertainty of this science, 22 
nomenclature of, vague and equivocal, 23, 
note 
METRICAL SYSTEM, French, objections to, 146, 
note 
Mexico, Desaguadero at, 402, note 


528 et 


INDEX. 


MICHIGAN, Lake, sand dunes of, 564 
sand dunes of, originally wooded, 579 et segq. 
diversion of its waters, 626 
MINES, adits of, 403, note 
excavations for, 630 
depth of greatest, 631, note 
™ fires in, 633 
Minin, effects of, 630 
hydraulic, 632 
practised by ancients, 632 
MIRaMIcHI, great fire of, 27, note 
MissIssiepi, alleged increase in volume of, 229, 
note 
discharge of, 472, 519, note 
delta of, 501, note 
levées of, 511 
cut-offs and their effects, 514 
sediment of, 521, note ; 548, note 
precipitation in the valley of, 519, note 
MISTRAL, noticed by Diodorus Siculus, 165, note, 
MONASTERIES, evil effects of, 5, ote 
MOOSE DEER, the American, rapid multiplica- 
tion of, 388, note 
MorGAn, L. H., on the American beaver, 84, note 
Monre Testaccio, 641 
Mr. CENIs, excavations for, 403, note 
gunpowder used in, 403, note 
Mosses and fungi, uses of, 233, note 
MOUNTAINS as reservoirs of water, 215 
MOUNTAIN SLIDES, their cause, 284 
woods, as protection against, 290 
MUSHROOMS, poisonous, how to render harmless, 
294, note 


NATURAL BRIDGE in Virginia, disappearance of 
river at, 473, note 
NATURAL FORCES, accumulation of, 43 
resistance to, 685 
NATURE, its action on man, 7 
man’s reaction on, 8 
observation of, 11 
geographical stability of, 26-31 
restoration of disturbed harmonies of, 48 
nothiug insignificant in, 643 
NETHERLANDS, ancient inundations of, 404 
recovery of land by diking in, 404, 405 
extent of land gained from sea, 407 
lost by incursion of sea, 408 
character of land gained by, 409 
natural process of recovery, 410-412 
method of construction of dikes, 413 
modes of protection of coasts in, 414, note 
effect of diking on the level of the land, 
415 , 
drainage, 415, note, et seqg. 


INDEX. 


effects on the social, moral, and eco- 


651 


disastrous effects of its neglect, 451 


nomic interests of the people, 424 | Paxissy on artificial springs, 484 et seqq. 


coast improvements in, 542 
sand dunes of, 581 
encroachments of the sea on, 583 e¢ segq. 
artificial dunes in, 591 
remoyal of dunes in, 587 
Nite, its ancient state, 453, 454 
infiltration of water of, 476, note 
artificial mouths of, 599 
inundations of, 516 
embankments of, 516 e¢ seqq. 
mud banks caused by its deposits, 517 
discharge of, 519, note 
sediment of, 478, note ; 524, note 
sand dunes at its mouth, 564 
proposed diversicn of, 621 
effects of, 623 
ceramic banks of, 641 
No.3 torrent, 264, ote 
Norway, exports lumber to India, 305, note 
NUMBERS, misleading effects of too definite 
statement of, 288, note 
NutMee transported by birds, 112, note 


Oak, the English, early uses in the arts, 310, note 

openings in North America, 345, note 
OBSERVATION, power of, cultivated, 51-55 
Ouro, mounds of, 18 

remains of a primitive people in, 363, note 
O1s, importance of, in modern commerce, 63 
Oxup Wor LD, physical decay of, 3 

former populousness of, 4 

present desolation of, 4 

its causes, 5 

ancient climate of, 15 

physical restoration of, 48 et seqqg. 
OLIVE TREE, the wild, 61, note 

importance of, 339, note 

cultivation of, in Italy, 340, note 
ORANGE, when first known in Europe, 66 
OrcuHips, fertilization of, by insects, 132 
ORGANIC LIFE embraced in modern geography, 

56 et seqq. 

its geological agency, 80 et seqq. 

geographical importance of, 82 
ORGANISMS, minute, importance of, 140-144 
Osrricu, the, diminution of its numbers, 123 
OTTAQUECHEE river, Vermont, transporting 

power of, 275 

OTTER, the American, voracity of, 106 
OysTER, the, transplantation of, 100 


PALESTINE, ancient terrace culture and irriga- 
tion of, 450 


PaRAGRANDINI, Of Lombardy, 154, note 
PARAMELLE, the Abbé of, on fountains, 474 
PAULOWNIA, rapid growth of, 395, note 
PEaT unknown as fuel to Greeks, Romans, and 
High German tribes, 29, note 
used anciently by Low German tribes, 29, 
note 
PEAT MOSSES of North Sjaelland, fossil wood 
in, 31, note 
PEcoRA, river of the Maremma, its deposits, 528, 
note 
PENGUIN, destruction of, 124, node 
PERU, ancient progress in the arts, 448 
basins of reception in, 496 
PETRA, water at, 466, mole 
PETROLEUM, quantity of, 49, 323, note 
ascent of, in artesian wells, 478, note 
PHOSPHORESCENCE Of the sea, not noticed by 
ancients, 104 
PHYSICAL DECAY of the earth’s surface, 3 et segq. 
its causes, 5 
forms and formations predisposing to, 31 
arrest of, in new countries, 44 
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY, study of, recommended, 


13 
PHyYsICAL IMPROVEMENTS, important, chapter 
on. 609-642 


PHYSICAL RESTORATION of disturbed harmonies, 
Bl 
of the earth, 44 et seqq. 
of the Old World, 44 
Pink, the American, former ordinary dimensions 
of, 3380 
the white, rapidity of its growth, 330, note 
umbrella, the most elegant of trees, 336 
the maritime, on dune sands in France, 337, 
596, 606 
how affected by accidents of its growth, 369 
PINUS CEMBRA of Switzerland, 336 
PISCICULTURE, its valuable results, 99 
See Fish. 
PLANTS, cultivated, uncertain identity of ancient 
and modern, 19 
changes of habits of, by domestication, 21 
geographical influences of, 56 
domestic, origin of, 58, 59 
modes of introduction of, 65 
accidental introduction of, 68 
how affected by transfer, 69 
tenacity of life in wild species, 69 
power of accommodation of, 70 
foreign, grown in United States, 71 
American, grown in Europe, 76 


652 


extirpation of, 76 
wild American, extirpation of, 7§ 
Po, sediment of, 276-284 
floods of, in 1872, 279, note 
embankments of, 507 et segg. 
geographical character of, 507, note 
inundations of, 509, note 
discharge of, 519, note 
Ponps, objections to draining, in Catholic coun- 
tries, 529, note 
POWDER, consumption and uses of, 406, note 
PRAIRIES, character and origin of, 390, note 


INDEX. 


RIvERs, fertilizing slime of, 244, note 
origin of, 268, 505, note 
transporting power of, 274 
sediment of, its extent, 275 
injury to their banks by lumbermen, 364 
underground and submarine, 472, note 
intercommunication of, 497, nove 
diversion of water from, effects of, 498, note 
effect of obstructions in, 505, note 
confluence of, effect on the current below, 

505, note 

great, proposed diversion of, 624 


PRECIPITATION, absorption of, by earth, 21, 215, | RrvER BEDS, natural change of, 498 


note 

in the United States, 217, note 

in Lombardy, 456, note 

extraordinary, at Genoa in October, 1872, 
279, note 

how much lost by evaporation, 472 

plans for economizing, 487 


QUADRUPEDS, domestic, origin and transfer of, 
86, 87 

domestic, number of, in the United States, §8 
wild, number of, in the United States, 88 
extirpation of, 92-96 

QUARRIES, extent of, 403, note 

QUEBEC, high tides at, 360, note 
lumber trade of, 360, note 


RaBBIT, injurious in Australia, 89, note 
RaILways, scientific uses of, 53, note 
consumption of timber by, 355 
Rarn, summer, how far lost by evaporation, 216 
RAIN WATER, its absorption and infiltration, 474 
economizing its precipitation, 487 
RAVENNA, cathedral of, 62, note 
Rep SEA, richness in organic life, 98 
diversion of the Nile to, its effect, 621 
REPTILES, utility and destruction of, 125 
RESERVOIRS, natural subterranean, 474 
as remedies against inundations, 492 
natural, 494 
REVENTLOV’s organization of dune economy in 
Denmark, 595 
REVOLUTION, French, influence of, on woods, 354 
RHINE, discharge of, in flood, 237, note 
- ordinary discharge of, 519, note 
sediment of, 543 
diversion of, 624 
RuHONE, Gischarge of, 519, note 
Rice, cultivation of, unhealthy, 467 
climatic limits of, 468, note 
introduced into Europe by Moors, 468, note 
RiTTER’s opinion on Egypt erroneous, 455, note 


artificial change of, 498 
in Egypt, 498 
in Italy, 499 
in Switzerland, 500 
RIVER DEpPostts, 504 
of the Po, 279, 506, note 
of the Nile, 525 
of the Tuscan rivers, 525 
RIVER EMBANEMENTS, 501 
their effects, 502 
RIVER MOUTHS, obstructions of, 522 
accelerated by man’s influence, 523 
effect of tidal movements, 524 
RoBIn, the American, voracity of, 121, note 
Rock, generally permeable by water, 285, note 
cuttings in England, 403, note 
soit beneath, 628 
covering with earth, 629 
ROMAN CAMPAGNA, insalubrity of. 447, note 
RoMAN EMPIRE, physical advantages of its ter- 
ritory, 1 
physical decay of its territory, 3, 5 
causes of this decay, 5, 7 
Rome, commerce of, passive, 65, note 
objects of, 65, ote 
insalubrity of, 158, note 
Romans and Greeks, great material works of, 426 
contempt for artisans and engineers, 426 
Roots of trees, influence of, on drainage, 242 
Rozzr’s plan for diminishing inundations, 512 
RUBBISH HEAPS in Egypt, 641 
of Monte Testaccio, 641 
RUDE TRIBES, continuity of arts among, 17 
commerce of, 18 
relations to organic life and nature, 38, note 
Russia, diminution of forests in, 824 
diminution of forests in, effect of, on rivers 
and lakes, 325, note 
attempts to reclaim the sands, 608, note 


SACRAMENTO City, effect of river dike at, 
508, note 


INDEX. 


Saut, waste of, 37, note 
possibility of washing out from land, 436, 
note 
Sanp, chapter on, 545-605 
quartz grains most abundant im, 545 
of desert, generally derived from upheaval 
of sea-bottom, 546 
how formed at present, 546 
generally of ancient formation, 547 
of coast of France and Denmark, 547, note ; 
551, note 
how carried to the sea, 548 
of Sinaitic Peninsula, 548, note 
of Northern Africa, 550 
of Egypt, 552 
drifting, movement of, 553, ote 
polishing action of, 553, note 
storms, exaggerations respecting, 554 
dunes and sand plains, 558 
plains, inland, 603 
of Belgium, 607 
of eastern Europe, 608 . 
SANDAL-WOOD, extirpation of, in Juan Fernan- 
dez, 383, note 
SAND-BANES, structure of, 565 
marine, 565 
SAND-SPRINGS, 605 
SANDSTONE of Arabia Petreea, 546, note 
originating in dunes, 574 
Sap of maple and birch, 184 
Sanos, projected canal of, 615 
SAVAGE TRIBES, arts of, 17 
commerce of, 18 
interfere little with nature, 38, note 
first domesticate wild animals, 38, note 
sympathy of, with animals, 38, note 
SAWMILLS, whether action of their machinery 
more rapid by night, 366, note 
ScHELK, the extirpation of, 93 
SCHLEIDEN, on exhalation of aqueous vapor by 
trees, 188 
SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN, encroachments of sea on, 
586 
SEA, exclusion of, by dikes in Lincolnshire, 403 
encroachments of, 583 et seqq, 
the Liimfjord, 583 
in Schleswig-Holstein, Hol- 
land, and France, 586 
SeA-cow, Steller’s extirpation of, 105 
SEAL found far from the sea, 99 
voracity of, 106 
SEDIMENT, river, geological importance of, 399, 
note 
SEEDS, transportation of, by birds, 111 
Vitality of, 293-296 , 


653 


SEINE, ancient uniformity of volume of, 236, note 
ordinary and flood discharge of, 236, 20te 
affluents of, 471, note 
supply and discharge of, 472, note 

SERPENTS, multiplication of, in France,126, note 
human lives destroyed by, in India, 126, note 

SHaRk, fishery of, 105, note 

SHELTER afforded by forests, 156-159 

SHIP-BUILDING of the Middle Ages, 321 

SIBERIA, ice ravines in, 174 

SrcmLy, sulphur mines of, 79, note 
olive-oil crop of, 339, note 

SILKWORM, new, introduction into America, 136 

SILPHIUM, extirpation of, 77, note 

Srnal, Mount, rain torrents at, 477, note 
production of sand in peninsula of, 548 
garden of monastery at, 629 

SIEMONI, on action of woods on springs, 225 

SLIDES, mountain, 284-289 

SLIME, river, fertilizing qualities of, 244, note 

SmiTH, Baird, on irrigation, 460, note ; 463, note 

SNAKES destructive to insects, 125 
tenacity of species, 126 
number of, 126, note 

Snow in the woods in winter, 208, 215, 216 
and ice, condensation of moisture by, 210 
crust of, how formed, 210, zote 
thaws the ground beneath it, 210, 231 
plants grow under, 212, note 
temperature of, 212, note 
quantity of, in woods, 213 
and ice, accumulation of, in mountains, 215, 

note 
Som, secular desiccation of, 20, note 
new, favorable to growth, 20, note 
amount of thermoscopic action on various, 
167 

mechanical effect of shaking,in Netherlands, 
415, note 

effect of frost on, in United States, 416, ote 

SoLaR HEAT, utilization of, 46, note 
action of, on stone, 551, note 

SounD, transmissibility of, 160, zote 

Spay, neglect of forest culture in, 306 

SPRINGS, artificial, 482 

SQUIRREL, destructiveness of, in forests, 85, note 

STARLING, habits of, in Piedmont, 125, note 

St. HELENA, flora of, 66 
destruction of its forests, 383, note 

STONE implements, modern use of, 17 

Srork, anecdote of a, 114, note 
geographical range of, 112, note 

SUBTERRANEAN WATERS, their origin, 469 
of the Karst, 470, ote 
of Greece, 470, note 


654 


sources of supply, 472 
reservoirs and currents of, 474 
diffusion of, in soil, 474 
SUEZ CANAL, effect of, on the Mediterranean and 
Red Sea, 97 
excavations for, 403, note 
danger from sand drifts, 554 
SUGAR-CANE, introduction of, into Europe and 
America, 75, note 
SUGAR-MAPLE TREE, produce of, 184 
SUNFLOWER, effect of plantation of, 157 
SWALLOW, popular superstition respecting, 533 
SWITZERLAND, ancient lacustrine habitations, 
16, 77 
Syxir Island, sand dunes of, 563 
encroachment of the sea upon, 563 
SYLVICULTURE, best manuals of practice of, 
368, note 
its methods, 372 
the ¢aillis treatment, 374 
the futaie treatment, 374 
beneficial effects of irrigation in, 876 
removal of leaves in, 279 
exclusion of animals, 382, note 


TAGUATAGA LAKE, Chili, draining of, 432, note 
TEMPERATURE, how affected by elevation, 52, 
note 
TEREDO, the general diffusion of, 137 
TERMITE, or white ant. ravages of, 137 
TTHRESHING MACHINES, saving by, 36, note 
TIBER, subterranean reservoirs in valley of, 474 
Tick, wood, disappearance of, in North-eastern 
States, 154, note 
TIMBER, increased demand for, 355 
of natural growth, inferiority of, 369 
TORRENTS, destructive action of, 245 
in South-eastern France, 246-256 
deposits of, in beds of rivers, 237, note 
in the Himalayas, 263, note 
excavations by, 263 
action of, in elevating the bed of streams, 264 
of the Nautzenthal, 267 
of the Litznerthal, 267 
whether origin of rivers, 268 
extinguished, 269 
crushing force of, 271-274 
danger of, in the United States, 328 
Toys, children’s, consumption of wood for, 358, 
note 
TRANSPORTATION, facilities of, effect of, on com- 
merce, 65, 20te 
TREES, forest, succession of species in, 18, note 
how far injured by small animals, 83, note 
improvement of, by cultivation, 59, note 


INDEX. 


evergreen, power of resisting frost, 175, note 
how far they interrupt precipitation, 181, 
note 
absorption of vapor by. 186 
absorption of moisture from the earth by, 186 
exhalation of moisture by, 189-191 
drainage of soil by roots of, 203 
evergreen, alleged desiccatory action of, 207, 
208, note 
names of, vaguely applied, 308, note 
rapid growth of, in Italy, 318 
forest, American, 330-334 
their dimensions, 331 
change in relative proportion of height and 
diameter, 331 
comparative longevity of, 333, note 
American compared with European, 334-342 
destruction of evergreen, for decorative pur- 
poses, 357, note 
hill plantations of, 379 
powers of resisting action of fire, 384, note 
planting of, on sea-coast, 389 
TRIESTE, proposed supply of water to, 470, note 
Trout, the American, 99, 108 
TUNNEL of Mt. Cenis, statistics of, 403, note; 
406, note 
of Lake Copais, 427 
TURTLES’ eggs, destruction of, 108, note 
TUSCANY, rivers of, their deposits, 525 
physical restoration in, 527 
improvements in the Maremma, 528 
Val di Chiana, 5382 
TYROLESE rivers, elevation of their beds, 265, 
note 


UNDULATIONS of water, 550 
UniIrep States, foreign plants grown in, 68 
weight of annual harvest in, 73 
number of quadrupeds in, 87 
birds in, 118 ‘ 
forests of, 327 
instability of life in, 396 
URvUs or auerochs, domesticated by man, 93 
extirpation of, 95 


VAL DI CHIANA, improvements in, 532 et seqq. 
Varor prevents escape of heat by radiation, 172 

condensation of, by snow and ice, 209 

and cloud attracted by mountains, 216, note 
VEGETABLE LIFE, how affected by animals, 83 
VEGETABLES, cultivated European, not indige- 

nous, 2 

acclimation of, 16 

geographical importance of, 42, 44 

meteorological action of, 62, note 


INDEX. 


domestic origin of, 59, 60, note 
modification of, 60, note 
improvement of, by cultivation, 59, note 
early garden, sent from Algeria and Naples 
to Northern Europe, 65, note 
transfer cf, 64, note 
foreign, how introduced, 65-67 
power of accommodation, 70-73 
American, grown in Europe, 76 
extirpation of, 76 
indigenous, dying out in America, 79 
VESUVIUS crater, wooded inside, 150 
VrNE, in what countries indigenous, 71, note 
dimensions of, 71, note 
European, introduction of, into America, 71 
injury to, by parasites not economically in- 
jurious to vine-grower, 79, note 
VIPER, multiplication of, in France, 126, note 
VOLCANOES, eruptive matter of, not infertile, 150 
resistance to action of, 637 
VoLeGa, proposed diversion of, 621 


WALCHEREN, formation of the island of, 411 
WALLENSTADT, lake of, diversion of Rhine into, 
624 
WALNUT TREE, oil yielded by, 337, note 
consumption of, for gunstocks, 356, note 
Warb’'s cases for plants, 188 
Wark, instrumentalities of, applied to social and 
civil purposes, 406, note 
WASTE, modern mode of economizing, 35, note 
WATER, chapter on, 398 e¢ segq. 
land won from, 598 
subterranean, 459 e¢ seqq. 
infiltration of, 463, note 
fresh on sea-beaches, 477, note 
not found at great depths in boring, 480, 20¢¢ 
WEATHER, action of man upon, 634 
WEEDS, common to Old and New World, 72 
extirpation of, in China, 78 
Wertts. See Artesian Wells. 
tubular, 476, note 
WHALE, food of, 103 
destruction of, 104 
WHALE-FISHERY, when first practised, 102, note 
American, 103 
WHEAT, its asserted origin, 59 
how introduced into America, 68, note 
WILD ANIMALS, numbers of, 82 
WILD ORGANIC LIFE, superior hardiness of, 73 
WINELER, work on dunes, 546, 2o0¢e 
WoOL.rF, increase of the, 91 
prevalence of, in forests of France, 313, note 
Woops, native American, permanent character 


of, 26 
42 


655 


generally, Chap. III., 148 

general meteorological action of, 152 

electrical influence of, 153 

whether preventive of hail, 153 

chemical influence of, 155 

of Australia and New Zealand, 155, note 

as protection against malaria, 156 

in Southern Hemisphere evergreen, 159, note 

as a shelter of ground to the leeward, 159 

as inorganic matter, influence of, on tem- 
perature, 167-171 

specific temperature of, 172-177 

evaporation from earth of, 181, note 

exhalation of vapor by, 176 

intercepting rain by foliage of, 180 

organic action of, 182 

balance of conflicting influences of, 191 

influence on precipitation, 193-197 

on humidity of soil, 203 

in winter, 208-215 

influence of, on flow of springs, 218 

on inundations and torrents, 231-236 

mechanical resistance of, to flow of water, 
235 

effect of, in disintegration of soil, 241 

influence of, on drainage, 242 

protection against avalanches, 29C 

minor uses of, 292 

utility of, in preserving small plants, 293 

protection against locusts, 299 

summary of influences of, 299 

general consequences of destruction of, 300 

proper proportion of, 302 

in different countries, 304 et segq. 

in Great Britain, 307-312 

in France, 312-318 

in Scotland and Egypt, 311 

Southern France, 313 

legislation on, in France, 816 

in Italy, 318-32 

in Russia, 324 

in American States, 326 

do not furnish food for man, 343 

first removal of, 344 

burning over for agricultural purposes, 345 

principal causes for destruction of, 346 

affected by game laws and French revolu- 
tion, 349-352 

restoration of, 366 

management of, 367 

cultivation of, 871-379 

injured by removal of leaves from ground, 
381 

destructive action of cattle on, 382, note 

fires in, 384-886 


656 INDEX. 


plantation of, in United States, 388 facilities for working, 370, note 

legislation on, 386-390 WoODPECKER, red-headed, disappearance of, 
rules for planting in, 392 from Eastern States, 140 

economical results of, 393 e¢ seqq. destruction of insects by, 136 

profits of, 894 Worms, earth, useful to agriculturists, 130 
increased demand for, 355 

consumption of, as fuel, 857, note ; 857 YEw TREE, geographical range of, 78 


replaced by iron in the arts, 357 
means of increasing its durability, 358, note | Zu1pERzEE, proposed draining of, 422 
quality of, how affected by rapid growth, geographical results, 425 

870, note 


{ 
vy 

| ol 
i d 


"WY 
‘ 


i 
wy 


Rihic ee inion 


* ; 4 ' evap ear ey aa ae <4 ee ar 4 at 

ae Wy apa AK, f bn PE: ekubhiaedl 
“hei anbewnn, ‘ae chide ; : teal wetleee tal . i 
hi > auc lt ae ek ee Ceci sk alos ok ae if 


‘ ; 

cada ete? i Yate IAS ib a wage ty, 

NM Pala a ae ae ne aL, - 
; Peer te, oS Ran. t minty t s Te 
7 pr Ar WA Ly A fi ! aX, ‘eo ee eee en ; 


wy? id sky Oa a ad Te te Dh vc 
shan i veeee.t q bart. a iy 4 aed mt ea i: a io beds ‘ ater one 


1 y a 
hh bis 5. apa cdi Bala ii. ghney Vopiae : dg i. 
41 r i i - 'v 
a 
‘ ra = 
nl aes 
s 
' , a 
fi 
} i 
a 7 ’ 
) 
y y 
4 ‘3 
n * if 
’ \ 
“=y er 
4 
A 
ie 
Hn 
‘ 
i uy i 
rh 2 
sf “ Bs 
i, on ne 
ery 
om, i 
J — 
; S 
. 
y ; 
. é aed 
» ve 
f j = ; ; 
is TMy ¢ 


= uF 
0a 
' . ; ea 
; i Bog 
i] 
A ‘ er 


IAIULIM NN 


3 2044 107 355 828 


oT 


pm ~ we Th 


RDA SR kee aE Aenea oR a em Ea I aa et 


os 


Ane 


wi 


. 


4 


HZ 


Of 
ring 


eens : SEAS : 
/ SSS ETA OEE ANIL Rs SO GEREN ROR REE St SNS SRR Nee SS ey eee 

ent es OE RO ea ‘ ~ < = Be nee Pte SoS —! » : meg Sheet) : . : 

PRI ; : : BSS 


Sao 


Panes a Sees 
SSeS ae 


Smt