Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action

S IN THE CASPIAN-IMPROVEMENTS IN NORTH AMERICAN HYDROGRAPHY-DIVERSION OF RHINE-DRAINING OF THE ZUIDERZEE-WATERS OF THE KARST-SUBTERRANEAN WATERS OF GREECE-SOIL BELOW ROCK-COVERING R

f Marine

n 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 apprehens

nd thus avoiding the necessity of doubling long capes and promontories, or even continents, 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

r sea-going ships must be much greater than those of canals of inland navigation; the height of the masts or smoke pipes of that class of vessels would often render 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 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 extremel

to a commodious channel for the largest ship that floats upon the ocean. In the remarkable gulf of Liimfjord in Jutland, nature has given a singular example of a canal which she alternately opens as a marine strait, and, by shutting again, converts into a fresh-water lagoon. The Liimfjord was doubtless originally 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

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ncidence of a high tide and a heavy south wind might produce a hydraulic force that would convert the narrow canal into an open strait. In such a case, it is impossible to estimate, or even to foresee, the consequences which might result from the unobstructed mingling of the flowing and ebbing currents of the Red Sea with the almost tideless waters of the Mediterranean. There can be no doubt, however, that they would be of a most important character as respects th

rine 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 shells 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 pave

f the organic population not already common to both seas. Destructive species, thus newly introduced, may diminish the numbers of their proper prey in either basin, and, on the other hand, the incr

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. If the canal succeeds, considerable towns wi

s the Isthm

om other canals, and would scarcely possess a geographical character-but of an open cut between the two seas. It has been by no means shown that the construction of such a channel is possible, and, if it were opened, it is highly probable that sand bars would accumulate at both entrances, so as to obstruct any powerful current through it. But if we suppose the work to be actually accomplished, there would be, in the first place, such a mixture of the animal and veg

es and then spreads out, like an expanded hand, along the eastern shores of the Atlantic, give out, as they cool, heat enough to raise the mean temperature of Western Europe several degrees. In fact, the Gulf Stream is the principal cause of the superiority of the climate of Western Europe over those of Eastern America and Eastern Asia in the corresponding latitudes. All the meteorological conditions of the former region are in a great measure regulated by it, and hence it is the grandest and most beneficent of all pure

eriod" be occasioned by the withdrawal of so important a source of warmth from the northern zones. Hence would result the extinction of vast multitudes of land and sea plants and animals, and a total revolution in the domestic and rural economy of human life in

to the

ea and the Red Sea is not less than three hundred feet above the mean 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 Mediterranean and the Jordan, near Jezreel, is believed to be little, if at all, more than one hundred feet above the sea, and the dista

astern arm of the Red Sea. The Jordan empties into its northern extremity, after having passed through the Lake of Tiberias 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 plai

e 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, under a wiser government and better civil institutions, might rise to importance, because, from i

itation and its fertility increased, the courses of its winds and the electrical 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 Mediterranean to the new home which human art had prepared for them. It is possible, too, tha

Canals

e 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 "mendacious Greece," and yet traces o

r than in their native land-have any confidence in the permanency of its institutions, a navigable channel will no doubt be opened between the gulfs of Lepanto and ?gina. The annexation of the Ionian Islands to Greece will make such a work almost a p

us far done little to interfere with her spontaneous 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 c

of S

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 Dardanelles, diminish the rapidity of that powerful

Cod C

e 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 othe

on of t

ian kings by large presents, and by some concessions to the oppressed Christians of Egypt.[484] Indeed, Arabic 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. About the beginning of the sixteenth century, Albuquerque the "Terrible" re

ow the junction of the two principal branches at Khartum, that there is no reason to believe a new channel for their united waters 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 r

es and the ferocious Portuguese warrior, and feared by the sultans of Egypt. Beyond these immediate and palpable consequences neither party then looked; but a 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 per

proportion of salt it contains would be increased, and the animal life of at least its southern borders would be consequently modified; the current which winds along its southern, eastern, and

more or less freshened, and its 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 obs

in the

t 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 sup

n North Americ

in both continents drain extensive table lands, of very moderate inclination, there is reason to suppose that important changes in the course of rivers might be accomplished. Our knowledge of the drainage of North America is m

e valley of the Genesee any desirable proportion of the water naturally discharged by the Niagara. 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 Niagara, or directly toward the Genesee, might be executed upon a scale which would exercise an important influence on the draina

of Lake Michigan would be contributed to the Gulf of Mexico, instead of to that of St. Lawrence, and the flow might be so regulated as to keep the Illinois 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, while the introducti

on of t

uggested. 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 i

of the

The seaward half, or that portion lying northwest of a line drawn from Enkhuizen to Stavoren, 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 bas

, 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 Lake of Haarlem. No safe calculations can be made as to the expenditure of time and money required for the execution of this stupendous enterprise, but I believe its practicability is

of th

eries, and those of earlier cave-hunters, have led to various proposals of physical improvement of a novel character. Many of the underground water courses of the Karst are without visible outlet, and, in some instances at least, they, no doubt, send their waters, by deep channels, to the Adriatic.[485] The city of Trieste is very insufficiently provided 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, th

an Waters

limestone caves called catavothra (καταβ?θρα). In ancient times, the entrances to the catavothra were enlarged or partially closed as the convenience of drainage or irrigation req

below

th. This rock has been broken up, and, when not practicable 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.[486] If we remember that gunpowder was unknown at the period when these re

Rock wi

y of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai is composed of Nile mud, transported on the backs of camels from the banks of that river. Parthey and older authors state that all the productive soil of the Island of Malta was brought over from Sicily.[487] 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. Muc

f Arabia

h, and reservoirs of water to irrigate it, might be formed which would convert many a square mile of desert into flourishing date gardens and cornfields. 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. Above this pass is a wide and

Effects 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 seldom exceeded a foot in thickness, rested upon common beach sand, and was found at various depths, less near the shore, greater 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 presen

ater. 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 northwest winds, it shot a jet d'eau through

upon human history. 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 advanced in c

of older cities. The castaway pottery of ancient towns in Magna Gr?cia composes strata of such extent and thickness that they have been dignified with the appellation of the ceramic formation. The Nile, as it slowly cha

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 ashe

stand is constantly elevated. The present streets of Rome are twenty feet 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

to Great Na

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 more interrupted structure. Aristotle, Pliny the elder, and Seneca believed 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 e

e carried 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 considerable area. When the borer of an ordinary artesian well strikes into a cavity in the earth, imprison

sound. The earthquake of the first of November, 1755, which was felt over a twelfth part of the earth's surface, was probably 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 remarkable 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

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 Belpasso.[492] When the opening was made, fluid lava poured forth and flowed rapidly toward Paterno; but the inhabitants of that place, not caring to sacrifice their own town to sa

s of M

nts must always be too inconsiderable in extent to deserve notice in a geographical point of view. Such excavations, however, may interfere materially with the course of subterranean waters, and it has even

ries, may be spontaneously kindled. Under favorable circumstances, a stratum of coal will burn till 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 mi

s The

cts, much ingenuity in dealing with them, remarkable insight into the laws of nature, and a ready perception of analogies and relations not obvious to minds less philosophically constituted. They have unquestionably contributed very essentially to the advancement of meteorological science. The possibility that

Sedi

antities 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, and its accumulation at a single point, may be supposed to produce other effects than those measurable by the sounding line. Now, almost all

Small in

gh our limited faculties are at present, perhaps forever, incapable of weighing their immediate, 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 for

TNO

eritance of his fathers, became the property of inflexible, ignorant, indolent 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 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 de

own to the Revolution, still so wealthy, that the personal income of the abbot was 300,000 livres. The abbey of

omitable 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

out thirty seignorial rights, the very origin and nature of some of which are now unknown, while those of some others, claimed and enforced by ecclesiastical as well as by temporal lords, are as repulsive to humanity and morality, as the worst abuses ever practised by heathen despotism. Most of these, indeed,

clothe itself again with forests, and in a few generations to recover its ancient productiveness. In the Middle Ages, worn-out fields were depopulated, in many parts of the Continent, by civil and ecclesiastical tyrannies, which insisted

parin, Becquerel, 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 m

4

wenkte van

k volk een l

e Zij een

zelven sch

me, of persevering and systematic observations bearing directly and exclusively upon the influence of human action on climate, or, to speak more accurately, on precipitation and natural drainage. The conclusions of Belgrand, however, and of Vall

G. C. to Sir Walter Rale

7

Synets Sands e

n er Redskab.

Dyb, og ?iet

jernens hemme

Kong René's

eye, you think

t an organ. S

inmost depths. T

rom the brain's m

inary use of the rifle, the barrel serves as a guide to the eye, but there are sportsmen who fire with the but 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 Babinet, Lectures, vii

able to calculate exactly their own muscular effort, the velocity of the stream, the distance and size of the tortoise, 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 calculations-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

ll 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

ex have been found at Pompeii, but they are too rudely fashioned and too imperfectly polished to have been of any practical use for optical purposes. But though the ancient artists may have had a microscopic vision, their astronome

f vision impaired from age, by judicious training,

uity of M

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, without a blow, but by simply breaking the sharp edges with the creased bone by the s

n more easily accessible localities, I suspect it is because eyes familiar with such objects have not sought for them. In January, 1854, I picked up an arrow head of quartz in a li

e. 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. We may easily suppose

, 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 propaga

t staples of agricultural husbandry in Europe and Asia. Is the great power of accomodation to climate possessed by them due to this circumstance? There is some reason to suppose that the character of maize

ed in the neighborhood of Avignon. Of course, it has been grown in that district for less than a century; but upon soils where it

ifferent species, or, at least, variety. "Some two years since," says Fuller, "madder was sown by Sir Nicholas Crispe at Debtford, and I hope will have good success; first because it groweth in Zeland in the same (if not a more northern) latitude. Secondly, because wild madder grows here in abun

h insect is supposed by some to be the effect of an incipient decay of the mulberry tree-may be, i

scarcely at all exposed to any local influence in the way of percolation or infiltration of water toward 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

t a similar revolution in Arabia Petr?a. 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 con

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 principal cause of their decay. In thes

ing person, that the apple trees raised there from seed sown soon after the land was cleared, bore fruit in less than half

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 atmosp

ssing 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 e

ts exactly the reverse. An easterly wind comes from the east; whereas an easterly

d many authors of the seventeenth century so write it. In Hakluyt (i, p. 2), easterly is applied to place, "easterly bounds," and means eastern. In a 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 southernely from vs, nor come more northernely towards vs." Holland, in h

erminations, nor were they known to the Anglo-Saxons, who, however, had adjectives of direction in -an or -en, -ern

he same thing. The two former expressions are old, and constant in meani

onization; but of the original colonies, and their dependencies in the territory of the present United States, and in Canada. It is, however, equally

ousand square miles, chiefly of woodland, and was of such intensity that it seemed to consume the very soil itself. But so great are the recuperative powers of natur

l soils permanently pervaded with water is K?rr. The elder L?stadius divides the K?rr into two genera: Myror (sing. myra), and Mossar (sing. mosse). "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 understood by the Latin terms into which he translates the vernacular names, for the benefit of strangers not altogether f

(sing. Tjern or Tj?rn), stagnatiles. Trāsk are pools fed by bogs, or water emanating from them, and their bottoms are slimy; Tjer

4) 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

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 tru

vel of marshy grounds, which renders them very valuab

pressing that of the water; but she proceeds more slowly. There are, in the Landes, marshes where this natural filling has a thickness of four mètres, and some of them, a

st trees-appear to have gone through this gradual process of drying, and the birch, which grows freely in very wet soils, has contributed very effectual

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

h and durability of wood. This insect, I believe, has not yet appeared in Europe, where, since the so general employment of the Robinia to clothe and protect embankments and the scarps of deep cuts on railroads, it would do incalculable mischief. As a traveller, howeve

to the animals that preyed upon them. Hence the insect and the gnawing quadruped are allowed to increase, from the expulsion of the police which, in the natural wood, prevent their excessive multiplication, 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. In a wood 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; th

, the walrus, and the narwhal for their tusks; the cetacea, and some other marine animals, for their oil and whalebone; 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.

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 Ame

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

the psychology 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, yet they nevertheless seem to cherish with brutes, and even with vegetable life, sympathi

d proverb which ascribes to the same animal "ti M?nds Styrke og tolv M?nds Vid," ten men's strength and twelve men's cunning, but they still pay to him something of the reverence 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 Iceland

d 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 hi

vation-that sheep bred where the common 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 a

an their ancestors. Scarecrows which were effectual fifty years ago are no longer respected by the plunderers

d 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 savages. The application of compressed air to the same purpose, in the blowpi

ders and afterward 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,

-exception in the case of the American bison

ve exerted upon any form of life an influence analogous to that of domestication upon plants, quadrupeds, and birds reared artificially

prevail among them, and part more and more with the Christian element of their civilization; and in declining this battle with sin, they will inevitably get embroiled 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 str

hat one of the most serious difficulties to be encountered in executing the proposed gigantic scheme of draining the Zuiderzee in Holland

all is from one and a half to two tons to the square foot, and Stevenson, i

n 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

ng the sun's rays in a nest of boxes blackened within and covered 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

sun on the roof of his house, where the water rose to the temperature of one hundred and forty degrees, and, of cour

he newly discovered countries of modern geography, the colonial, which corresponds to the era of early civilization in older lands. In more advanced states of culture, conservative influence

off the forests. The soil of the French Alps yields very readily to the force of currents, and the declivities of the northern Apennines are covered with earth which becomes itself a fluid when saturated

presenting few instrumental measurements or tabulated results, 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 meado

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 gentleman well known to me kept a thermometr

w 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,

the dangers which threaten the great moral and even political interests 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 legislative power, but have, too often, corrupted even the administration of justice. Similar

al to the prosperity of civilized commonwealths, but which individual means are inadequate to furnish, and for the due administration of which individual guaranties are insufficient. Hence public roads, canals, railroads, postal communications, the circulating medium of exchange, whether metallic or representative, armies, navies, being all matters in which the nation 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 d

ntages, and at the same time secure an exemption 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

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 evil is 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

lly said to have been brought from the Black Sea, by way of Constantinople, about the eleventh or twelfth century. No vines of such dimensions are now found in any othe

n 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 Scandinavian inscription, abound

ited States, is meant "cleared land used for grazing, grass, or tillage, or which is now fallow, connected

s 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. Cotton seed was sown in Virginia as earl

ith advantage. From Spain it was carried to the West Indies, though different varieties have since been introduced into those islands from other sources. Tea is now cultivated with a certain success in Brazil, and promises to become an

whites, and there is no doubt, I believe, that the pumpkin and several other cucurbitaceous plants are of American origin; but most, if not all

ntially vulgar to smoke or chew tobacco, and especially to take snuff; it is unbecoming a gentleman, to perform the duties of his coachman; it is indelicate in a lady to wear in the street skirts so long that she cannot walk without grossly so

laim. The orange, however, was known in Europe before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope

the branches-the colors all as fresh and lively as if painted yesterday." The writer remarks on the character of this decoration as something very unusual in Roman architecture; and if the trees in question are really orange, and not lemon trees, this circumstance may throw some doubt on the antiquity of th

he ancestor of all the mulberries in France, planted in 1500, wa

nstance-prosper nearly equally well, when planted and tended, on soils of almost any geological character; but their seeds vegetate only in artificially prepared ground, they have little self-sustaining power, and they soon perish

hat author's writings. There are seasons, indeed, when few tree seeds germinate in the meadows and the pastures, and years favorable to one species are not always propitious to an

under the same conditions in New England. I do not remember to have seen in America the scarlet wild poppy so common in European grainfields. I have heard, however, that it has lately cros

itish colony in New England, says that the settlers at Plymouth had observed mo

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

the ground when the snow melts, and are followed by the large leaves-l?gekulsukker and snake-root, which grow only

s Indvandring i de

and probable that they in some measure compensated the injury by introducing maize

t 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.

n Northern Italy, vineyards, maize fields, mulberry and fruit trees completely stripped of their foliage by hail, while the forest trees scattere

ossbar, to enable the hunter to keep the infuri

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 Mess

his case the malady resides in the mulberry or in the insect-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

excessive manuring and stimulation of the growth of the plants on which they live. They are now generally, if not universally, regarded as

oprietors 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

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. Waltershause

sulphur is applied to the vine as a remedy against the disease, and the operation is repeated from two to three or four-and even, it is said, eight or ten times-in a season. Hence there is a great demand for sulphur in all the vine-growing countries of Europe, and Walter

ndition, 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 cultiv

e 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 specifically distinguishable from the garden fig, though I do not know that it is r

little doubt that all our cultivated plants are modified forms of spontaneous vegetation, but 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 following are

would call them;" and naturalists and philosophers have shown much moral courage in setting at naught the laws of philology in the coinage of uncouth words to express scientif

n 1860, as we shall see hereafter, nearly one hundred and two millions of horses, black cattle, sheep, and swine. There are great numbers of all the same animals in the British American Provinces, 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 per

uld 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

l 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, Turks and Christians alike bury bodies but a couple of feet beneath the surface. The grave is respected as long as the tombstone remains, but the sepultures of the ignoble poor, and of those whose monuments time or accident has

n assumed that the extinction of these animals was more ancient than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it highly probable, if not certain, that this conclusion has been too hastily adopted. Lyell observes: "T

e extinction" of the large pachyderms and beasts of prey; but, as contemporaneous species of other animals, which man cannot be supposed, to ha

ce of a given extinct organism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified by the action of man, and

le 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,

one night only, as a sufficient tilth for the year. The breath of graminivorous quadrupeds does certainly enr

present day will not adopt these o

t 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. I believe as many might almost be found in a single palace in modern Rome. Rats are not less

212,871,653. This is an error of the press. Number is confounded with value. A reference to the tables of the census shows that the animals slaughtered that year were estima

in ground still full of rocks, stumps, and roots; for breaking up the new soil of the prairies with its strong matting of native grasses, and for the transportation of heavy loads over the rough roads of the interior. In all these cases, the frequent obstructions to the passage of the timber, the plough, and the sled or cart, are a source of constant danger to the animals, the vehicles, and the harness, and the slow and steady step of the ox is attended w

Italy, are never yoked or otherwise used for

falo 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

"buffalo trail," where at least 100,000

ong enough to carry up the record of his slaughtered deer to the number of one thousand, which he had fixed as the limit of his ambition. He was able to handle the rifle, for sixty years, at a period when the game was still nearly as abundant as ever, but had kil

. Asien, 1ste Abthe

t this animal had been domesticated by that people; and it is stated, I know not upon what authority, in Le Alpi che cingono l'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

nce of representations of this animal in sculptures apparently of a historical character. It will not do to argue, twenty centuries hence, that the lion and the

7

schiere, einen

iere. but einen

Auen

me of the composition of that poem. It proves too much; for, a few lines above those just quoted, Sigfrid is said

ce 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 norther

igeons, which migrated in flocks so numerous that they were whole days in passing a given point, were no doubt injurious to the grain,

reen rice in their crops, which it was thought must have been growing, a

bers 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 d

hich 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, perso

authority for this statement,

three hundred caterpillars or coleoptera in a week-I take from the Record, an English religious newspaper, of December 15

to Mr. I. Redford, Worth, having destroyed within the last year 1,467. Mr. Heayman took the second with 1,448 destr

of the twelve 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. Mr. Redford, Mr. Heayman, and Mr. Stone ought to contribut

d, cruel coxcom

ok, and a small

n or twenty feet high, which are a standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the fowlers who watch from

r 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 mole are among t

ame precise line of flight in their annual journeys, and establish themselves in the same breeding places from year to year. The stork is a strong-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 com

owed 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 fe

number of those which die every year equals the aggregate number by which the spe

he 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

untains. 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

where the flocks of wild geese which formerly passed, every spring and autumn, were very frequently lost, as it was 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 village

dmirable and exhaustive work on the Modern Egyptians. The tj?der, 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 L?stadius, "he follows a straight course, and sometimes 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,

mer Schleswig und

ng 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 abund

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 grow stronger, he made several unsatisfactory experiments at flight, and at last, by a vigorou

ing the natural history of the caves of the Karst, speaks of an eminent entomologist as "der glückliche Entdecker," the happy discoverer of a new coleopteron, in one of those dim caverns. How various are the sources of happiness! Think of a learned German professor, the bare enumeration of whose Rath-ships and sc

t 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 anywhere, 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

arkable 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 cabia?, the gallinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper, and the rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations, the vehicles of this aroma, appear to be disengaged i

lemental "salt" supposed by him to play an important part in all the operations 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

for exportation. This is an average of more than 330,000 pounds per year. The census of 1850 gave the total production of wax and honey for that year at 14,853,128 pounds. In 1860

argo of hides from the opposite extremity of the continent, was fatally poisoned by t

ect, about an inch in length, of a brown color tinged with orange, with two antenn?, not unlike a rosebug. This insect came out of a tea table, made of the boards of an apple tree." Dr. Dwight examined the table, and found the "cavity whence the insect had emerged into the light," to be "about two inches in length, nearly horizonta

termites of France are indigenous or imported. See Quatr

gon fly in an aquarium, bite off the

. 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 midnight sun, and the brothers L?stadius regard them as one of the great plagues of sub-Arctic life. "The persecutions of these insects," says Lars Levi L?stadius [Culex pipiens, Culex reptans, and Culex pulicaris], "leave not a moment's peace, by day or night, to any living creature. Not onl

lar statements in his Journ

y. Observing that the starlings, stornelli, which bred in an old tower in 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 proceedings, and found every d

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. I have, however, been assured by persons very familiar with Mount Lebanon, that cases of poisoning from the bite of snakes had

as a generic term for all the large inhabitan

tury or two afterward, though it may not be easy to disprove their earlier participation in it. In medi?val literature, Latin and Romance, very frequent mention is made of a species of vessel called in Latin, baleneria, balenerium, balenerius, balaneria, etc.; 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 descriptive of the great si

shery 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

tory of the English Lang

ont, p. 142, records a case of the increase of trout from an opposite cause. In a pond formed by damming a small 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 multiplied 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

udes et Lectures,

t taken there must have been some weeks, at least, in its waters. It was killed on the ice in the widest part of the lake, on the 23d of February, thirteen days aft

page 89, n

erring busses and nine thousand vessels engaged in the transport of these fish to market.

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 f

00,000 barrels, or enough to supply a fis

aten, is used as manure in very great quantities. Ten thousand are employed as a dressing for an

ment of the race. The savage slays no animal, not even the rattlesnake, wantonly; and the Turk, whom we call a barbarian, treats the dumb beast as gently as a child. One cannot live many weeks in Turkey without witnessin

lentless pursuit, to which they are immediately subjected, suffice to make them as timid as the wildest inhabitants of the European forest. This timidity, however, may easily be overc

chanical action of the current, and not mainly, as some have supposed, to changes of temperature occasioned by clearing. Our author states that, in 1796, a terrible inundation was produced in the Indalself, which rises in the Storsj? in Jemtland, by drawing off into it the waters of another lake near Ragunda. The flood destroyed houses

hysikalische Geo

f 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 a

at Algiers, in the Bollettino Consolare, published by the Department of Foreign Affairs, 186

be due to vital processes of living minute organisms both vegetable and animal, and consequently to physiological, as well as to chemical forces. Even alcohol is sta

ury, in his Histoire des grandes Forêts de la Gaule et de l'ancienne France, and by Becquerel, in his impor

ations etymologically indicating forest or grove, which are so common in many parts of the Eastern Continent now entirely stripped o

tated by fire not long after its colonization by European s

583," says Emsmann, in the notes to his translation of Foissac, p. 654, "it was the goats which destroyed the beautiful forests that, three hundred and fifty years ago, covered 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. Darwin observes: 'During our

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, where

hey do not spare them. * * It is calculated that the browsing of these animals, and the consequent retardation of the growth of the wood, diminishes the annual product of the forest to the amount of two hundred thousand cubic feet per year, * * and besides this, the trees thus mutilated are soon exhausted

s, 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 u

reat extent of coarse black sand, thrown out in 1669, which, for almost two centuries, la

to the years 1861-'62, "plains of volcanic 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, cre

oth, 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 1500, and some chroniclers have

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

othing, 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

he shores of rivers and lakes, and their weapons and other relics are found only in the narrow open g

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 su

subsistence. 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.

ion as inhabiting only the borders of the forest and the open grounds that skirt the wat

he growth of forests upon them was first prevented or destroyed, the trees have been since kept out of them only by the annual burning of the grass, by grazing animals, or by cultivation. The groves and belts of trees which are found upon the prairies, though their seedlings are occasionally killed by drought, or by excess of moisture, extend themselves rapidly over them when the seeds and shoots are protected against fire, cattle, and the plough. The prairies, though of vast extent, must be considered as a local, and, so far as our present knowledge extends, abnormal exception to t

nsichten der Natur, i, pp. 71-73. What authorizes us to affirm that this was simply the wild bison reclaimed, and why may

leared 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 resto

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 gra

, 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 haystacks, to which they are dangerous neighbors. The forest, indeed, rapidly recovers itself, but it is a generation or mor

Meuse, the Semoy, and the Sormonne, and villages show themselves wherever the walls of the valleys retreat sufficiently from the rivers to give room to establish them. Deprived of arable soil, since the nature of the ground permits neither regular clearing nor cultivation, the peasant of the Ardennes, by means of burning, obtains from the forest a subsistence which, without this resource, would fail him. After the removal of the di

ticable method of obtaining crops from the soil he describes, but, as we shall

t 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 disturbe

tation or alternation is not yet proved-may move in opposite directions in different countries with the same climate and at the same time. Thus in Denmark and in Holland the spike-leaved firs have given place to the broad-leaved beech, while in Northern Germany the process has been reversed, and evergreens have supplanted 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,

s by fire and lightning. Between the years 1854 and 1861, a single one of these companies, La Riunione Adriatica, paid, for

y 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 apparatus, erected at numerous points over an extent of several miles, was of some service as a protection against hail, but this opinion was

Importanza e Coltu

a sui Boschi

ls in Italy

he cingono l'It

able 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 b

cation of the atmosphere b

e 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 evaporation; 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

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, silicious 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

icious?]

calcareou

aceous e

en ear

mus

reason that ground covered with silicious pebbles cools more slowly than silicious 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

of seven millions of leaves, exposing a surface of two hundred thousand square feet, or about five acres of foliage.

the general influence of the forest on tempe

ts of metal into the shape of leaves and grasses, and found that they produced little cooling effect, and were n

es Climats, etc.,

avels, i

e cingono l'Ital

eventlovs Virkso

l, Des Climats

Ibid.,

of the valleys of Bergamo were stimulated to great activity. "The ordinary production 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

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 whi

mportanza e Coltura

nt de vue des Torrents e

Entwaldung der

el, Des Clima

sul Bonificamento delle Mar

o, Milano, Aprile e

morie sulle Maremme

ly rapid, the uniformity of temperature and of atmospheric humidity renders all fores

ervers are of opinion that the trees and other vegetables with which such grounds are planted con

ui Boschi di Lo

omie Rural

ssler, Der W

Ibid.,

metimes 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 icehouse, and sent half a dozen or more very slender roots in

Des Climats, et

s, and I do not know that any extensive series of comparisons between the temperature of the ground in the woods and the fields

Temper

asture. Tem

woods. D

23 5

57

15 64

62

16 62

65? 5

15 68

59?

15 59?

1 59?

49

1 4

43?

e 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 groun

ers an area, excluding its islands, of about 500 square miles. It extends from lat. 43° 30' to 45° 20', in very nearly a meridian line, has a mean width of four and a half miles, with an extreme breadth, excluding bays almost land-locked, of thirteen miles. Its mean depth is not well known. It is, however, 400 feet deep in some places, and from 100 to 200 in many, and has few shoals or f

Days closed. Year. Closi

9 1836 January

ril 16 78 1837 Jan

ril 15 72 1838 Feb

l 17 44 1839 Janu

bruary } 4 1840 Janu

2 1841 February

5 April 21 95

rch 30 75 1843 Feb

ril 5 57 1844 Janu

ruary 11 20 1845 Fe

9 1846 Februar

rch 24 51 1847 Feb

ch 31 68 1848 Febru

d 1849 Februar

31 April 18

ril 17 70 1851 Feb

ril 6 63 1852 Janu

ary 13 Feb

uary 10 Ja

y 7 Apr

d of April, it remained frozen much later at the North, and steamers

vaporated, 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 higher r

e forest, by dead or by living action, raises or lowers the temperature of the air within it, so far it creates upward or downward currents in the atmosphere above it, and, conseq

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, ob

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 established his home i

ibutes 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 o

light breeze had sprung up from the north, the sea was of glassy smoothness 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 northward, and between sunrise and twelve

les. I apply the epithet silent to γ?λασμα advisedly. I am convinced that ?schylus meant the audible laugh of the waves, which is indeed of countless multiplicity, not

rious soluble bodies which are presented to them. The inhalation of humidity is carried on by the leaves upon a large scale; the dew of a cold summer night revives t

t be ascribed to moisture absorbed by the ground from the air and supplied to the roots. In some recent experiments by Dr. Sachs, a porous flower-pot, with a plant growing in it, was left unwatered until the earth was dry, and the plant began to languish. The pot was then placed in a glass case containing air, which wa

erest; but observations on sunflowers, cabbages, hops, and single branches of isolated trees, growing in artificially prepared soils and

s to allow much room for ground mosses. In the more open woods of Europe, this form of vegetation is more frequent-as, indeed, are many other small p

merican 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. This tree was of the original forest growth,

ped 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 co

close of the sugar season. As soon as they begin to swell, the sap seems less sweet, and t

ches. In the smaller trees, one incision only is made, two in those of eighteen inches in diameter, and four in trees of larger

tapped is lighter and less dense than that of trees which have not been tapped, and gives less heat in burning.

xed with other trees; but in second growth, composed of maples alone, the number greatly exceeds this. I 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

6 pounds; in 1860, it was 38,863,884 pounds, besides 1,944,594 gallons of molasses. The cane sugar made in 1

n 1863, chap. iv, the sugar product of Louisiana

s: "A large birch, tapped in the spring, ran at the rate of five gallons an hour when first tapped. Eight 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 fif

n is connected with the variation in atmospheric pressure; for the atmospheric conditions above mentioned as those most favorable to a free flow of sap are also those in which the barometer usually indicates pressure considerably above the mean. With a south or southeast wind, and in lowering weather, which causes a fall in the barometer, the flow generally ceases, though the sa

etimes congeals the strata from which the rootlets suck in water. From the facts already mentioned, however, and from other well-known circumstances-such, for example, as the more liberal flow of sap from

her soon after the buds begin

given area, the proportion of assimilable matter contained in the fluids of the tree at different seasons of the year, the ages of the trees respectively, and the quantity of leaf and seed annually shed by them. The

stimates in New England, the marketable wood only, the trunks and larger branches, does not appear. Next to the pine, the maple would probably yield a larger amount to a given area than any of the other trees mentioned by Dr. Williams, but mixed wood, in general, measures most. In a good deal of observation on this subject, the largest quantity of marketable wood I have ever known cut on an acre of virgin forest was one hundred and four cords, or 493 cubic yards, and half that amount is considered a very fair yield. The smalle

at the age of seventy-five years. At that age, in the sandy earth of Prussia, it produces annually about 5 cubic mètres, with a total volume of 311 cubic mètres per hectare [166 cubic yards per acre]. After this age the volume increases, but the mean rate of growth diminishes. At eighty years, for ins

t one pound wet sugar to three gallons of sap, and wet sugar is to dry sugar in about the proportion of nineteen to sixteen. Besides the sugar, there is a small residuum of "sand," composed of phosphate of lime, with a little silex, and

ong diffused laterally into the stem, where it meets and mingles with the ascending crude sap or raw material. So there is no separate circulation of the two kinds of sap; and no

n, 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 gaseous 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 nutriment contained in the earth in which they are planted. After this, they continue for a long time in a

r suspended in the air and from dew, is large. The annual fall of dew in England is estimated at five inches, but this quantity is much exceeded in many countries with a clearer sky. "In many of our Algerian campaigns," says Babinet, "when it was wished to puni

n the vicinity of the poles, and allowing for yet undiscovered land (which, however, can only exist in small quantity), if we assign 51,000,000 to the land,

eography, fifth edition, p. 30. On the following page, Mrs. Somerville, in a note, cites Mr. Gardner as her authority, and says that, "according to his computation, the extent of land is about 37,673,000 square British miles, independently of Victoria Continent; and the sea occupies 110,849,000. Hence the land is to the sea as 1 to 4 nearly

ts where the forests have been cleared off, now comes on a fortnight

e 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 wind being more variable, snow is less permanent, and perhaps the same remark may be applicable to the ice of the rivers

es, in the month of November, when in the forest earth no frost was discoverable; and later in the winter, I have

1

de Str?g

xe kan, da e

ingen Regn

ntet

ler, Adam H

1

brausen u

Land, vom La

t, Song of t

l'économie Forest

certainly have possessed no forests since a very remote period. In Sandys's time, 1611, there were no woods in the island, and it produced little cotton. He describes it as "a country altogether champion, being no other than a rocke couered ouer with

ht, Les Arb

be learned from

er Wald

es Forhold til National

om et ordnet Skovb

et Lectures

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. Havi

, and the evidence collected by him in 1836. His conclusions have been disputed, if not confuted, by Jom

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 quantities of wheat stored at Boulak, in uncovered yards through the winte

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 vnt

aux au point de vue d

ii, chap. xx, § 4, pp.

dda, the Oglio, the Mincio, filters through the silicious strata which underlie the hills, and follows subterranean channels to the plain, where it collec

German translation

er Physischen Ge

pp. 21 et seqq. See the comments of Vallès on these observ

consumebant, sicut in H?mo, obsidente Gallos Cassandro, quum valli gratia cecidissent. Plerumque vero damnosi

s, not to be found in the extant works of that author; but he adds that the stories are incredible, because shaded gr

rdered 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

udes sur les Ino

omie Rural

twaldung der Gebir

sche Geogra

es of America

n's Vermont,

s of Ameri

me 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, qu? insula est non magna,

his testimony as to the habitual condition of the Seine, at a period when t

is presented with more or less detail in most of the special works on the forest which I have occasion to cite. I may refer particularly to Hohenstein, Der Wald, 1860, as full of im

ns a remarkable Jewish tradition of uncertain but unquestionably ancient date, which is among the oldest ev

tle, of a smaller kind, were to be allowed to graze in thick woods, not in thin woods; in woods, no kind of cattle without the owner's consent. Sticks and branches might be gathered by any Hebrew, b

grossness, and barbarism of their oppressors-in the Recepte 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 t

se of strength. The old modes of ship building have been, to a considerable extent, handed down to the present day in the Mediterranean, and an American or an Englishman looks with astonishment at the huge beams and thick planks so often employed in the construction of very small vessels navigating that sea. According to Hummel, the desolation of the Karst, the high plateau lying north of Trieste,

he cingono l'It

cnico, published at Milan, for

ltura, Industria e Com

ustible 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 acquainted 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, from a manu

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 C?sar intended by abies. The popular designations of spike-leaved trees are always more vague and uncertain in their application than those of broad-leaved trees. Pinus, pine, has been very loosely employed even in botanical nomenclature, and

ld parke is the finest for ioiners craft: for oftentimes haue I seene of their workes made of that oke so fine and faire, as most of the wainescot that is brought hither out of Danske; for our wainescot is not made in England. Yet diuerse h

that soaking in salt water, as a mode of s

ation-mention 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 cartload. But in the chapter on the "Customs of Billyngesgate," pp. 208, 209, relating to goods imported from foreign

we inquire into its cause. 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 ou

s; but this rapidity of flow would be greatly diminished if the roofs were carpeted with mosses and grasses; more still, if they were covered

n Holland and in some parts of the British Islands. This system consists in driving down three or four thousand stakes upon a hectare; the rain water filter

y 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, is as great an 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

long series of royal ordinances and decrees of parliaments, proclaimed from the days of Charlemagne to our own, with a view of securing for

of time, and a few imprudent cuttings, a few abuses of the right of pasturage, suffice to destroy a forest in spi

uate to save 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

sale of a communal wood in Berlepsch

s. 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 Beschreibung neuerer Wasserbauwerke, K?nigsberg,

that "the waters which rush violently down from the heights of the mountain 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 b

gle [man's] load of wood;" and he remarks on another page, that "the justice of peace of that canton had, in the cour

art de Thury said of it: "In this magnificent valley nature had been prodigal of her gifts. Its inhabitants have bl

r, with a commerce so important that the boatmen upon it formed a dist

nd pebbles not less than 130,000 acres, "which, but for its inundations, would have b

as 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, o

. See the description in Berlepsch, Die Alpen, pp

cia has greatly enlarged the sale of them, and very naturally stimulated 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 inu

hich is interesting as showing accurate observation of the action of the torrent: "Mons cadens definit, et sa

much less striking, and

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

ocky walls on both sides, rises to a very great height, and of course acquires an immense velocity and transporting power in its rapid descent to its outlet from the mountain. In the winter of 1842-'3, the valley of the

from the mouth of the valley, 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 an

mparatively small heaps of its own debris brought down by ancient glaciers or recent torrents. The torrents do not wind down valleys gradually widening to the rivers or the sea, but leap at once from the flanks of the mountains upon the plains below.

of the Agricultural Society of Lyons, 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 ra

tom of the valley, which no known agency but glacier ice is capable of producing, and of course they can have undergone no sensible change at those points for a vast length of time. The beds of the rivers which flow through those valleys

iacenza, 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 remov

of their woods. It would be interesting to know whether any sensible change has be

Many towns on the banks of the river, and of course within the system of parallel embankments, were formerly secure from flood by the height of the artificial mounds on wh

(Dell' Influenza delle Selve, i, p. 58, note), they took place in May. The much more violent inundations of the present century 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 alm

f old buildings-as, for instance, the church of San Vitale and the tomb of Theodoric at Ravenna

s; but as both of them omit the gravel and silt rolled, if not floated, down at ordinary and low w

i, 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

h assuming less than one fi

s Ponts et Chaussées, 18

a point where it has received all its affluents-is 6,938,200 hectares, that is, 4,105,

spectively to 10,145,348, and 6,999,638

nt argument, is quantitative exactness important. I employ numerical statements simply as a means of aiding the imagination to form a general and ce

s impossible. 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 observation and measurement are much more perfected than they now are, we must content ourselves with general approximations. I s

lows 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 gen

"fifteen thousand" steps, though the difference of level is barely two thousand feet, and the "Forty" Thieves, the "forty" martyr monks of the convent of El Arbain-not to 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 exact truth, that, including closets large enough for a bed, the Vatican

r he uses the word salle, which cannot be applied to closets barely large enough to contain a bed. According to him, there are in that "presbyt

estimation by competent observers, but on the report of persons who have no particular interest in knowing, but often have a

English literature, thus remarks on the pretentious exactness of historical and statistical w

and ve

ved man

we may observe that the Spirit of Truth itself, where Numbers and Measures are concerned, in Times, Places, and Persons, useth the

In Places.

Luke, 24:13.

John, 6:19

o cleave the pin, do sometimes misse the But. Thus, one reporteth, how in the Persecution under Dioeletian, there were neither under nor over, but just nine hundred ninety-nine martyrs. Yea, generally those that trad

hus, on the left bank of the Durance, a wooded declivity had been formed by the debris brought down by torrents, which had extinguished themselves after having swept off much of the superficial strata of the mountain of Morgon. "All this district was cove

ion soon starts up and prospers, if protected from encroachment. In Provence, "several communes determined, about ten years ago, to reserve the soils thus

ofter 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 a

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

ers incurred by the adventurous explorers of those regions-the direct action of the sun upon the stone, the expansion of

ral other more or less similar occurrences in the Austrian Alps. Some of them, certainly, are not to

alian translation of Mrs. Somervi

elt of forest, by the fall of rocks in consequence of cutting a few large trees. Cattle are very often killed in Switzerland by

dung der Geb

ow 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 as a further security, small trees are cut down along the upper line of the f

wind, it flows with almost irresistible violence. Rafts containing several hundred thousand cubic feet

hirty or forty years ago, measured 5,000 tons. They were little else than rafts, being almost solid mass

tated, 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 specific gravity o

applied in America to temporary huts or habitations erected for the conve

aps the most delicate tree of the American forest, while its congener, the Northern pitch pine, Pinus rigida, is less injured by fire than any other tree of that country. I have heard experienced lumbermen maintain that the growth of this pine was even accelerated 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 actu

the wood almost entirely, burning the leaves and combustible portion of the mould, and in many places cracking and disintegrating the rock beneath. The rains of the following autumn carried off much of the remaining soil, and the mountain side was nearly bare of wood for two or three years afterward. At length, a new crop of trees sprang up and grew vigorously, and the mountain is now thickly covered again.

hat 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 f

a house in a town in Vermont. It was occasionally watered, but received no other special treatment. I measured this tree in 1860, and found it, at four feet from the ground, and entirely above the sprea

avels, iv, p. 21, and iii, p. 36. Emerson, Trees of Massac

ree hundred and fifty or four hundred years, though he quotes a friend who thought he had noticed trees considerably older. The oak lives longer than the pine, and the hemlock spruce is perhaps

y; 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

s 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 developed or enlarged upon the outer

caused damages alleged to amount to more than $800,000, and actually ap

in the middle of the channel, so that a river presents always a convex surface. The lumbermen deny this. They affirm that, while rivers are rising, the water is highest in the middle of the channel, and tends to throw floating objects shoreward; while they are falling, it is lowest i

ave 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 scepticism 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 s

ired, a 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 kept of the numbers of each species of tree, the docum

th. Antonio Ponz (Viage de Espa?a, i, prólogo, p. lxiii), says: "Nor would this be so great an evil, were not some of them declaimers against trees, thereby proclaiming themselves, in

, 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 suppositio

occasioned the sale of the forests of the unhappy Protestants, who fled to seek in foreign lands the liberty of conscience which was refused to th

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 kings afforested th

its real character, and not in the hope of finding apparent facts to sustain a false and dangerous theory. Bonnemère is one of the few writers who, like

e of the European states, by a prince of a family now dethroned. In this case, however, the p

Joinville, Nouvelle Collection des Mémoires, etc.,

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 m

e des Paysans

isturbed. It was unlawful to fence-in any grounds in the plains where royal residences were situated; thorns were ordered to be planted in all fields of wheat, barley, 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, le

e 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 f

ppears that, as there are "beggars on horseback" in So

rposes; the peasants would cut down two firs to make a single pa

ame cause. In St. Pierre's time, the planks brought to St. Petersburg were

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 Silvi? prefer the Pinus Larix to other trees. In my garden this Pinus is never without them, but I never saw a bird perch on Thuja occidenialis 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 Thuja and the Juniperus i

with particular trees, without being, as is popularly supposed, parasites deriving their nutriment from the dying or dead roots of those trees. The success of Rousseau's experiments seem decisive on this point, for he obta

, 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 remaining half an hour, taken out and again washed. Gérard, to prove that "crumpets is wholesome," ate one hundred and seventy-fiv

here else regarded as very poisonous. Is it not probable that the secret of rendering them harmle

lische Geogra

Species, America

eds have grown after lying dormant for ages. The following cases, mentio

rich and fine growth of hickory [Carya porcina]. Of this wood there is not, I believe, a single tree in any original forest within

likely to be carried fifty miles by birds, and besides, I

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 figure 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, suffici

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, wea

have just quoted, "In my many journeys through this vall

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 plough l

large estates long undivided and in the same line of inheritance, the wealth of the landholders, and the difficulty of finding safe and profitable investments of capital, combine to afford encouragements for the plantation of forests, which nowhere else exist in the same degree. The climate of England, too

tural abattis, is also recognized by the Government of that country as an important me

choolboys say, "this sum does not prove;" for 16,000 + 8,000 for the double track halfway = 24,000, and 24,000 × 1,200 = 28,800,000. According to Bigelow (Les états Unis en 1863, p. 439), the United States had in operation or construction on the first of January, 1862, 51,000 miles, or about 81,000 kilomètres of railroad, and the military operations of the present civil war are rapidly extending the system. All

ral instances where tracts of pine forest, hundreds and even thousands of acres i

states the export of such objects from the town of Sonneberg alone to have amounted, in 185

degree, to the supplies of wood and other material for building and equipping ships, received from the forests of her colonies and of other countries with which she has maintained close commercial relations, and he adds: "Spain, which by her position seemed destined for universal power, and once, in fact

e, in years when maize is cheap, the woodcutters can provide themselves with corn meal enough for a week by three days' labor, and they refuse to work the remaining four. Hence the dealers in wood, not being able to supply the demand, for want of laborers, are obliged to raise the price for the following season, both for timber and for firewood; so that a low price of grain occasions a high price of building lumber and of fuel. The consequen

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, by the simple pressure of a column of the fluid in a small pipe connected with the end of the piece of timber subjected to the treatment. Clavé (études Forestières,

ettled, and the best modes of air, water, and steam seasoning are not yet fully ascertained. Experiments on these subjects would be well worth the patronage of governm

of Vitruvius, but is much less followed than it deserves, partly because the timber of trees so treated incl

y 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

f fire wood for the city required 1,200,000 stères, or cubic mètres; in 1859, it had fallen to 501,805, while, in the

s of tons, a quantity which it is difficult to suppose could be consumed in the city of Paris. The price of fire w

d States, twenty-eight thousand walnut trees were felled to supply

there are now neither wolves nor woods to shelter them. Arthur Young more than once speaks of the "innumerable multitudes" of these animals which infested France in 1789, and George Sand states, in the Hi

t. 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 all 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. I have 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

tion 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 evapora

or any growth but that of wood, because the form and geological character of her mountains expose her territory to much greater injur

he north they form immense masses, and cover whole provinces, while in the south they are so completely wanting that the inhabitants have no other fuel than straw, dung

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

at country as already most disastrous, and as threatening still more ruinous evils. The river Volga, the life artery of Russian internal com

that sea, and the rivers which once maintained its ancient equilibrium ought to raise it to its former level, if their own flow had not been diminished. It is, indeed, not proved that the laying bare of a wooded country diminishes the total annual precipitation upon it; but it is certain that the summer evaporation from the surface of a champaign region, like that through which the Volga, its tributaries, a

124) states the proportions of woodland i

. Acres

. Per cent. A

opul

0.6638 Switzer

n 5. 0.1 Hol

0.3766 Belgiu

0 4.28 Spai

8.55 Portug

4.61 Sardini

0 0.22 Napl

ecure an abundance of atmospheric moisture, and the general inclination of surface is not such as to expose it to special injury from torrents. The due proportion of woodland in

tensive British forest plantations have now been formed. But although the inclination of surface in Scotland is rapid, the geological constitution of the soil is not of a character to promote such destructive

. In the different German States, there are more than twenty different land measures known by the name of Morgen, varying from about one third of an acre to more than three acres in value. When will the world be wise enough to unite in adopting the French metrical and monetary s

ts observed a more sparing economy in the treatment of their woods, a new code of customary 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 th

nd "bee hunting" was so profitable that it became almost a regular profession. The "bee hunter" sallied forth with a small box containing honey and a little vermilion. The bees which were attracted by the honey marked themselves with the vermilion, and hence were more readily followed in their homeward flight, and recognized when they returned a second time for booty. When loaded with spoil, this insect returns to his hive by the shortest route, and hence a straight line is popularly called in

e Reboisement des

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 countries abounding in good forests, and thinly peopled, elementary and cheap methods must be pursued; in civilized regi

ether it is in 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 b

hey informs us, in "Espriella's Letters," that when a small quantity of mahogany was brought to England, early in the last century, the cabinetmakers were unable to use it, from the defective temper of their tools, until the demand for furniture from the new wood compelled them to improve the quality of their implements. In America, the cheapness of wood long made it the preferable materi

es Foresti

es Foresti

ution, consult papers on the subject by Dr. J. G. Cooper, in the Report of the Smithsonian Institu

"Fa?ry Queene"-the only canto of that exquisite poem actually read by most students of English

I

ke some covert

e not farr aw

yde the tempes

ees, yelad with

ad, that heavens

e with power

were pathes a

orne, and lead

t them seems; so

I

passe, with plea

e the birdes s

hrouded from th

song to scorne

aise the trees s

ne; the cedar

p elm; the po

ke, sole king

for staves; the

X

meed of might

the firre that

orne of forlo

dient to the

haftes; the sal

te-bleeding in

ech; the ash f

olive; and the

; the maple seel

and the oleaginous seeds of the north. A hectare (about two and a half acres), will produce nuts to the value of five hundred francs a year, which cost nothing but the gathering. Unfortunately, its maturi

y 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 pro

terial, especially when the large knots are employed. The timber of the European species, when straight grained, and clear, or free from knots, is, for ordinary purposes, better than that of the American black walnut, but

oil, which, without it, would yield only ferns and heaths, an abunda

less numerous in the walnut than in the chestnut, w

pt 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, sometimes for a century, to receive nourishment from the radicles of the surrounding trees, and a dome of w

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

possessions, and states, what I do not remember to have seen noticed elsewhere, that Russia is the best customer for cork. T

a given country. From some peculiarity in the sky of Europe, cultivated 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 wou

rue that the extremities of the topmost branches are rarely lopped, but the lateral boughs are almost uniformly

e spectator, or a long study, in order to master its relief, its plans, its salient and retreating angles. In summer, the universal greenery confounds light and shade, distance and foreground; and though the impression upon a traveller, who journeys

certain periods of immature growth, and allowed to shoot up again from the roots; but it has come to signify, ver

operty 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 "mountains," of which the hero of Abou

and experience has shown that oaks and other broad-leaved trees, planted as arti

o 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

ve than any other broad-leaved tree-were composed of birches, oaks, firs, aspens, willows, hazel, and maple, the first

es Foresti

n 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 decliv

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 winte

und, 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 the ea

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 tree

es, which, in four years from the seed, had grown to the height of sixteen and twenty feet, and the diameter of ten and twelve inches. Chevandier experimented with various manures, and found that some of them might be profitably applied to young

ach of the cattle are stripped of their buds and leaves, and soon 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 Ruskin somewhere calls the "cattle line." This always runs parallel to the surface of the ground, and is determined by the height to which domestic quadrupeds can reach to feed upon the leaves. In describing a vi

ool the ground, and of course injuriously affects the growth of the wood. But this is not all. The tread of quadrupeds exposes and bruise

sit upon its trunk, within a week after it has been felled, but the windfalls 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 uniformit

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 encr

rees 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

er trees, and particularly because it appears not to exhaust, but on the contrary to enrich the soil; for by shedding its leaves it returns to it most

tent with the poorest soils, and vice versa. The trees which first appear are also those which propagate themselves farthest to the north. The birch, the larch, and the fir bear a severer climate than the oak, t

umber of very thick-leaved shoots, which arrange themselves in a globular head, so unlike the natural crown

ood diminishes the amount of vegetable aliment required for human use, yet the animals themselves consume a great

htered the same year, occupied an extent of ground which, cultivated by hand labor and with Chinese industry and skill, would probably have produced a quantity of vegetable food equal in alimentary power t

n half a dollar. This low rate in Prussia is partly explained by the fact that a considerable proportion of the annual product of 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 adding interest upon it, Pressler calculates that a pine wood, managed with a view to felling it when eighty years old, would yield only one eigh

of the capital expended in them. It requires a very generous spirit in a landholder 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 having 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 be

ve found no ancient authority in support of this allegation, nor can I refer to any passage in Roman literature in which sea dikes are expressly mentioned othe

sale of gunpowder in the United States, he informs me, is smaller since the commencement of the present rebellion than before, because the war

rimean war, and that, in general, not ten per cent. of the powder manuf

in the contrivance of engines for the destruction of his fellow man. The military material employed by the first Napoleon has become, 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

intellectual life in a people that achieves great moral and political results through great heroism and endurance and perseverance. D

Voormaals en

for the most part lying above low-water tidemark, are at a lower level than the

en der Herzogthümer Schlesw

10,000 acres, annually expends for the maintenance of its dikes not less than ￡6,000 sterlin

of the dikes of Pe

h costs, in ordinary years, more than a million guilders [above $400,000]. * * * The annual expenditure for dikes and hydr

rt 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

Voormaals en

ls en Thans,

d, at the close of the last century, of several islands measuring together less than five thousand acres. In 1837 they

nteresting information on the dikes of the Low German seacoast, in his Inseln und Marschen der Herzogthümer Schleswig und Holstein. I am acquainted with no popular wo

ne foot rise in four of base to one

terstices 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 protection. 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 a good road. It slopes down two

rved 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 ev

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

rguments 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, arrives at the same conclusion. The eminent

ound is once enclosed, 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 b

500 horse power, and drove eleven pumps making six strokes per minute. Each pump raised six cubic mètres, or nearly eight cubic yards

, iii, p. 309) reminds us that Pliny mentions among the wonders of Germany the floating islands, covered with trees, which met the Roman fleets at the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser. Our author speaks also of having visited, in the territory of Bremen, floating moors, bearing not only houses but whole villa

eft undisturbed, aquatic plants of various genera, such us Nuphar, Nymph?a, 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, Spir?a, Polystichum, Comarum, Caltha, &c., &c. 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 st

cal agency, and, as I 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, "whi

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

above. Their roots do not become detached from the bottom in such shallow water, but form ordinary turf or peat. These processes are so rapid that a thickness of from t

ether to a thickness of from four to six feet, and with trees of medium size growing upon them. These islands floated before the

n improvement of such a nature. The Lake Taguataga was partially drained by cutting through a narrow ridge of land, not at the natural outlet, but upon one side of

Rurale de la

ion must depend much upon the hydrostatic pressure on the walls of the lake basins, and, of course, the lowering of the surface of these lakes, by diminishing that pressure, would diminish also the infiltration. It is now proposed to l

soil seemed to have designed for the most abundant harvests. 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

driving down stakes, mentioned in a note in a chapte

of bogs and marshes. Why is a crop near the borders of a marsh cut off by frost, while a field upon a hill

or some years. It has been a special object to dry and fertilize marshy grounds. My opinion has always been t

hese tribes, by the ignorance and bigotry of the so-called Christian barbarians 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 where continued pro

in torrents at a remote epoch. The water of the surface soil drains rapidly down into these loose beds, and passes off by subterranean channels to some unknown point of discharge; but this circumstance alone is not a sufficient solution. Is it not possible

native 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 at the 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 compa

es 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 t

once. Upon the Nile, you hear the creaking of the water wheels, and sometimes the movement 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

a, but some moisture percolates down and oozes through the banks into the river again, while a larger quantity sinks till it joins the slow c

laces, and they are often referred to by way of illustration, as familiar objects. "Wood" is twice spoken of as a mate

Old Testament and the New were respectively composed; for the scriptural writers, and the speakers introduced into their narratives, are remarkable for t

st trees: "I made me pools of water, to water therewith

ht, is still in such preservation that I found not less

he 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 unequivocal remains of a sluice by

infiltration is such that water is generally found by digging to a small depth in the channel. Observing these facts in a visit to Petra in the summer, 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 fro

putation includes the river and lakes as well as sundry tracts which can be inundated, and the whole space either cultivated or fit for cultivation is no more than about 5,626 square miles." By geographical mile is here meant, I suppose, the nautical mile of sixty to an equatorial degree, or about 2,025 yards. The whole area, then, by this estimate, is 12,682 square statute or English miles, that of the space "cultivated or fit for cultivation," 7,447. Smith's Dictionary of Greek and

areas computed. Upper Egypt (above Cairo) is said (p. 11) to contain 4,000,000 feddan of culturfl?che, or cultivable land. The feddan is stated (p. 37) to contain 7,333 square piks, the pik being 75 centimètres, and it therefore corresponds almost exactly to the English acre. Hence, according to Kremer, the cultivable soil of Upper Egypt is 6,250 square statute miles, or twice as much as the whole area of the valley between Syene and the bifurcation of the Nile, accordi

in the days of the Pharaohs and the Ptolomies carried the Nile-water to large provinces which have now been long abandoned and have relapsed into the condition of a desert. "Anciently," observes the writer of the article "Egypt" in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, "2,735 square miles more [about 3,700 square

canal, with the double purpose of supplying fresh water to the inhabitants and laborers, and of irrigating the adjacent soil. The area of land which may be thus

polis is only a thread of water inf

aroub, the sycamore, and other trees, grow well in Egypt without irrigat

859 at 5,125,000 souls; but this must be a great exaggeration, even supposing the estimate to include the inhabitants of Nubia, and of much other territory not geographically belonging to Egypt. In general, the population of that country has been estimated at something more than thr

n, which two hundred years ago was estimated at 4,000,000, amounted till lately only

ab, still are. But the civilized people of Egypt transformed, by canals, the 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 wi

al 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 t

ensione dell' Irrigazione, etc., il

iculture des état

are, which, supposing the season of irrigation to be one hundred days, is equal to a precipitation of thirty-two inches. But in Lombardy

rrigated twenty-five or thirty times, and if the full quantity of twenty-one centimètres is applied, it receives about two hundred inches of water, or six times the total amount of precipitation. Puvis, quoted by Boussingault, after much research comes

partly by the different character of the substances held in solution or suspension by the waters of the earth and of the sky, partly by the higher temperature of the latter,

is cut from it in January or February. The Canal Cavour, just now commenced-which is to take its supply from the Po at Chivasso, fourteen or fifteen miles below Turin-will furnish water of much higher fertilizing power than that derived from the Dora Baltea and the Sesia, both because it is warmer, and

ng are superior in flavor and in nutritive power to those grown by the aid of irrigation. Garden vegetables, particularly, profusely watered, are so insipid as to be hardly eatable. Wherever irrigation is practised, there is an almost irresistible tendency, especially

ld. 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 doe

holding in solution ammonia, potash, and phosphoric and silicic acids, be brought in contact with soil, these substances disappear almost immediately from the solution; the soil with

e 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 far more valuable for irrigation than water from the same source, which has not been impregnated with fertilizing substan

tivation; the flow of the water being limited by the abundance of the source or the capacity of the canals, the individual 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 conform 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, l

, économie Rurale,

re that nothing but the necessities of a dense population can just

burg market for some years past has been grown exclusively by white labor. There is no reason why the cultivation of cotton should be a more unhealthy occupation in America than it is in other countries where it

ropos de l'Exposit

been translated into French or English. These works, and other sources of information equally inaccessible out of Italy, have been freely used by Baumgarten, in a memoir entitled Notice sur les Rivières de la Lombardie, in the Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1847,

, citing Talabot as his autho

gh water, 705,514,667,440 cubic mètres. Taking the mean of these two numbers, the average daily delivery of the Nile would be 428,081,059,808 cubic mètres, or more than 550,000,000,000 cubic yards. There is some enormous mistake, probably a typographical

e Isère, which receives it, 7,800 cubic yards, and the Durance an equal quantity, per second.-Montl

uare miles, or about twice and a half the area of that of the Ardèche. In some of its inundations it has delivered above 9,500 c

se. In an article inserted in the Annales Forestières for 1843, 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 d

the Rhone, all the known inundations of the former having taken place when the latter

s I make respecting the floods of the Ardèche, except the comparison of the volume of its waters with that of t

s the valley of the 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

g 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, a

di regolare i Fiumi

ude sur les Torr

Inondations en Franc

e inundation of 1840 in the valley of the Rhone was estimated at seventy

millions of francs. "What if," says Dumont, "instead of happening in October, that is between harvest and seedtime, they had occu

le Reboisement des M

see Vallée, Mémoire sur les Reservoirs d'Alimentation des Cana

s; others, with more etymological propriety, use it to express the division of great rivers into branches

re sur les Inondation

the Po, the embankments often leave a very wide space between them. The dikes of the Po are sometimes three o

een much exaggerated by earlier writers, and in some parts of its course the change is so slow that its leve

near the coast may both tend to prevent the deposit of sediment in the river bed by increasing the velocity of its current, and compens

ds, 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

through the bursting of the dikes, by crossing the river when the danger became imminent and opening a cut in the opposite bank, thus saving their own property by flooding their neighbors'. He adds, that at high water the navigation of the river was

hrough and inundated 116,000 acres, or 181 square miles, of the plain, to the depth of from twenty

rendre une partie du sol qu'ils ravagen

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

nd 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, according 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

iver 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 improvements 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 watermills have been erected within a few years, and there is scarcely a stream in the settled portion of the country which has

y of limestone districts, and serve to explain how, in the low peninsula of Florida, rivers, which must have their sources in mountains a hundred or more miles distant, can pour out of the earth in currents large enough to admit of steamboat navigation to their very basins of eruption.

rom 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 t

l 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 contr

ned, its deposits would have raised its banks as fast as its bed, and there is no obvious reason why this plain should be more marshy than other alluvial flats traversed by great rivers. Its

ance of its last tributary, is found to be 1,720 cubic mètres, or 60,745 cubic feet, per second. Its smallest delivery is 186 cubic mètres,

follows that the Po contributes to the Adriatic six tenths as much water

. The dates of Egyptian chronology are uncertain, but I believe no inquirer estimates the age of the great pyr

il it shall have deposited its sediment or been drawn out for irrigation; and they serve also as causeways for interior communication during the floods. The Egyptian dikes, therefore, instead of forcing the river, like t

thoms, which is beyond the truth, would have been sufficient to extend the coast line about three miles farther seaward, and thus, including the land gained by the filling up of the lagoons, to add more than five hundred square miles to the area of Egypt. N

of course, rapidity to the current, bends in rivers are sometimes cut off and winding channels made straight. Thi

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 computable without taking into account other elements, suc

ps, and sometimes reduce the distance between their termini by several miles. In 1777, the salto of Cottaro shortened a distance of 7,000 mètres by 5,000, or, in other words, reduced the lengt

ogether clear. It has been suggested that the admission of salt water to the lagoons and rivers kills many fresh water plants and animals, while the fresh water is equally fatal to many marine organisms, and that the decomposition of the remains originates poisonous miasmata. Oth

"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

to the want of human habitations, near which this half-domestic bird loves to breed, perhaps becau

istakes the effect for the cause, and the absence of this bird may have been supposed to be the occasion, not the consequence, of the unhealthiness of particular localities. This opinion once adopted, the swallow would become a sacred bird, and in process of time fables and legends would be invented to give additi

di (Racconti Popolari, p. 33) well expresses

la che pas

ro, vo' dirt

nna delle tu

'na lettera

vrò scritta '

la penna, o

vrò scritta '

la penna ch

vrò scritta i

a penna al t

hat fliest b

uld fain have a

rant, from thy

eetheart a let

is written o

O swallow, that

hite, and I'll

low, the pen

gold, and the

l pinion the fe

a foreign land, they seldom survive a second generation. The swallow, however, is still protected in New England by prejudices of

ato antico e moderno de

stato, etc., dell'

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 Ta

both of which are described as wide streams, "one very narrow river is formed

lains, hills, and mountains of the territory of Massa and Scarlino, within the last ten years, the Pecora and other affluents 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 sh

ds, or enough to raise an area of four square miles one yard. Between 1830 and 1859 more than three times that quanti

st of Tuscany. See Memoir by Fantoni, in t

al Smyth's Mediterranean-on which B?ttger's work is founded-at hand, I do not know how f

y 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 epidemics which so often ravaged Europe in those centuries. These ponds, in religious hands, were too sacred to be infringed upon for sanitary purposes, and when belonging to powerful lay lords they were almost as inviolable. The rights of fishery were a

that men should restore the wholesomeness of the soil by cultiv

e des marais, etc., lue à l'Académie des Sciences à Paris, le 12 Juillet,

s of Roset, Moyens de forcer l

The prairie rivers of the West 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 tr

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 unscientific observer, from the stained and turbid character of the water for many miles from its mou

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 masthead-nor was any notice of such a shoal to be found on any chart on board. The fact is, as we learned afterward, 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 forward by powerful c

arth, which cannot, in all cases, be identified with streams flowing out of them

nia. 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, sixt

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

de, 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 24.8

and, which seems confirmed by other circumstances, 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

principally to springs rising in its bed. This is a point of which engineers now take notice, and M. Belgrand, the able officer charged with th

ourse, from the falls of the Oise, the Seine receives so few important affluents, that evapo

mputed, but I believe it is well settled that the Seine conveys to the sea

is are absolutely stagnant. See their report on drainage by artesian wel

ll-known fact that the very first eruption of water from a boring often brings up leaves

appear whether this inference is Mariotte's or Wit

of the Sea. Tenth editi

enkunde, mit einem Vor

et Lectures

eral, carried off more rapidly than before. Will not this fact exert an influence on the condition of many springs, whose basin of supply thus undergoes a partial or complete transformation? I am

, Schriften zur allgemeinen Erdkunde, cap. iii, § 6, and especia

ves, that many wells are dug in the bed of the river in the dry season, and that the subterranean current thus reached appears to extend itself laterally, at about the sa

be undrinkable, 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

selves 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

be partly supported by it. In such case the weight of the earth would be an additional, if not the sole, cause of the ascen

ons at different depths, or of raising it, unmixed, from two or more of them at once. It consists in employing concentric tubes, one

nales 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 arte

g away of much soil; but in those cases the partial exhaustion of the supply, or the relief of hydrostatic or elastic pressure, has gen

t, Mémoire sur le Sahara Oriental, etc., pp. 19, et seqq. Some of the men remained under water from two minutes to two minutes and forty seconds. Several officers are quoted as having observed immersions of three minutes' duration, and M. Berbru

im, a French engineer, that these aqueducts are connected with old artesian wells, the restoration of which would render it practicable to extend cultivation much beyond its present limits. This agrees with ancient testimony. It is asserted

roves the execution of a work of this sort in the Nubian desert, at the period indicated in the title to his paper. The interpretation of the inscription is a question for Egyptologists; but if wells were actually bored through the rock by the Egyptians after the Chinese or the Europ

urope with advantage. Some of the Chinese wells are said to be 3,000 feet deep; that of Neusalzwerk in Silesia-the deepest in Europe-is 2,300. A well was bored at St. Louis, in Missouri, a few years ago, to supply a sugar refinery, to the

planted twelve hundred date palms, renouncing their wandering life to attach themselves 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

color to it, but depict it to their imagination as wearing a neutral tint not assimilable to any of the hues with which nature tinges her atmospheric or paints her organic creations. There are certainly extensive 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 wearisome monotony of tint. But the chemistry

uth of representation absolutely indistinguishable 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, whi

lissy, Des Eaux et

166. See App

se 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,

s, La Science de

in specific gravity or in texture; and the singular way in which they are now alternated, now confusedly intermixed, must be explained otherwise than by the weight of the respective grains which compose them. They seem, in f

i 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 mètres per running mètre, which is equal to two hundred and sixty-eight cubic feet to the running foot.-Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1842, 2me

m van Nederla

ingle 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 contemporaneous in origin, and were once connected in continuous beds. The degradation 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 l

ngled with agate pebbles and petrified wood, but these are evidently neither deriv

n error. I have myself picked up in that desert, within the space of a very few square yards, fragments both of fossil palms, and of at least two petrified trees distinctly marked as of exogenous growt

r, Das Mitte

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 Brémont

an undertow, which tends to carry suspended bodies out to sea as powerfully as the superficial waves to throw them on shore. Sandbanks sometimes recede from the coast, instead of rolling toward it. Reclus

-five fathoms and at a point much exposed to the wash from Galata and Pera, a 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

an at some former periods, though no extensive series of observations on this subject has been recorded. On the Spit of Agger, at the present outlet of the Liimfjord, Andresen found t

n that cast up by the same sea on the shores of the Dano-German duchies and of Holland, and, as we have s

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

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 for

epressions in rock beds, or over deposits of silicious pebbles, the surface of the stone is worn and smoothed much more effectually than it could be by running water, and you may pick up,

f William P. Blake: Pacific Railroad Report, vol. v, pp. 92, 230, 231. The same geologist observes, p. 242, that the sa

from the mere accumulation 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

s, though, of course varying in partial direction, in conformity with the sinuosities of the valley. Upon the desert plateau they incline westward, and

of the Sahar were, at a remote period, drifted to the west. In the Sahel, the prevailing east winds drive the sand-oce

* 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 leave

able quantities with mineral sands. These are usually the remains of aquatic vegetables or animals, but not uniformly so, for the microscopic organisms, whose flint

s fragments of them. Forchhammer, 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 espe

the bluff, after the dunes were formed. Bold shores are usually without a sufficient beach for the accumulation of large deposits; they are commonly washed by a sea too deep to bring up sand from its bottom; their abrupt elevation, even if mode

very common on our coasts, observed on all the steep shore bluffs of two hundred feet in height, and, in the Faroe Islands, on precipices two thousand feet high. In heavy gales in those islands, the cattle fly to the very edge of the cliffs for shelter, and frequently

distance in front of them, and no wind would have sufficient force to raise the sa

ifficult to protect trees from the mechanical effect of the wind, by screens much lower than the height to which they are expected to grow. Recent experiments confirm this, and it is found that, t

n 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 ocea

ches in Lake Michigan. See "A Lunar Tidal Wave in the North American Lakes," demonstrated by Lieut.-Colonel J. D

Bodem van Nederlan

al works and essays on th

1790, reprinted in Annales des Ponts et C

de M. Brémontier, par Laumont et aut

ion des Dunes, Annales des Ponts et Cha

am Meeres Ufer, in Leonhard und Bro

er Herzogthümer Schleswig und Holstei

de Gascogne, Annales des Ponts et Chau

u auf den Ostsee-Küsten West

van Nederland, 1856, vol. i

maals en Thans, 1

andling og Bestyrelse, 1861, 1 vol. 8vo, x, 392 pp

sand plains by planting, Pannewitz, Anleitung zum Anbau der Sandfl?chen, 1832. I am not acquainted with either of the latter two works but I have consulted with advantage, on this subject, Delamarre, Historique de la Cr

s, one seldom needs to dig more than a foot to find the sand moist, and in the depressions, fre

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. b

points on their surface. They are sunk to the depth of three or four mètres only, and the

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 is thought to be by so

pressions between the sand hills of the

e 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 Brittan

lmost wholly of garnet. For a very full examination of the mechanical and chemical

m van Nederla

d Marschen der Herzogthümer Sch

and, i, p. 317. See also, Bergs?e,

ace 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 landward and fill

d the particles which compose them may in time become more disintegr

eiving new accessions from the Sahara. They are constantly advancing out into the

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 s

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 mètres to two and a half in depth, dug in a sand which pressure, and probably the presence of certain salts, have cemented so as to form true sandst

n cemented together by the infiltration of Nile water, would probably s

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 dete

Mexican Boundary Commission, 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 hi

el Emory says that on an "examination of the sand with a microscope of suffici

of the dune sand, consisting of quartz, chalcedony, carnelian, agate, rose quartz, and probably chrysolite, were

observer, it is said that an examination of dune sands brought from the Llano

e same localities as those examined by Mr. Blake, and the differen

a high point in the dunes, as a characteristic feature of the sand hills of the Algerian desert. This s

Peru, New York,

ection of the wind, the sand is deposited with a windward angle of from 6° to 12°, and the bank presents a concave face to the wind, while, behind the obstruction, the outline is convex;" and he lays it down as a general rule, that a slope, from which sand is blown, is left with a concavity of about one inch of depth to four feet of distance; a slope, upon which sand is dropped by the wind, is convex. I

of the Netherlands and the Danish coast; for while all observers agree in assigning to the seaward and landward faces of those latter, respectively, angles of from 5° to 12°, and 30° with the hor

ght, 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 i

ussées, 1847, 2me sémestre, p. 231. The same opinion had been expressed

orff 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 pecuniary 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 success. The king had money, but in the elementary oper

embled the moving sand hills of the present day, it is inconceivable that they could have escaped the notice of so acute a physical geogr

es of Jutland, call them klettr, hill, cliff, and the Danish klit is from that source. The word Düne is also of recent introduction into German. Had the dunes been distinguished from other hillocks, in ancient times, by so remarkable a feature as the propensity to dr

ith 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 origina

e destruction of the forests to the east of them. The felling of the tall trees removed the resistance to the lower curre

That fair, fertile, rich province, the peninsula of Eiderst?dt in the south of Friesland, has, on the point toward the sea, 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

ated 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

Om Klitformati

tiquity of Man, 1863, p. 14) says: "Even in the course of the present century, the salt waters ha

tudien am Meeres-Ufer. Leonhard un

Om Klitformati

ls en Thans,

ittoral de la France," by élisée Reclus, in the Rev

ederland, i, p. 425.

of the Gironde. Sea the valuable article of élisée Reclus already referred to, in

near the base of the sand hills, a depth of more than one hundred 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, conforming nearly to the slope of the dunes, while on the northeast and south the inclination of t

m Klitformationem

p. 329-331. Id., Voormaals en Thans, p. 163

re 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 f

ing, i, pp

of sand plants, and they are possibly applied to different plants in different places. Some writer

arundo, but the quantity which can be gathered is not sufficient to form

Reventlovs Virk

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. Th

the month of April, yearly, to plant beach grass, as, in other towns of New England, they are warned to repair highways. It was required by the laws of the State, and under the proper penalties for disobedience; being as regular a public tax as any other. The people, therefore, generally attended and performed the labor. The grass was dug in bunches, as it naturally grows; and each bunch divided into a number of smaller ones. These were set out in

s, or branches of trees cut and spread upon the earth. Nor does the grass merely defend the surface on which it is planted; but rises, as that rises by n

ings, probably more than twenty years previous, and earlier than 1779, when t

ited, says: "The benefit of this useful plant, and of these prudent regulations, is, however, in some measure lost. There are in Province Town, as I was informed, one hundred and forty cows. These animals, being stinted in their means of su

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 original level of the plai

Om Klitformation

over more than 40,000 hectares, and compose forests which are not only the salvatio

plantations of the French du

Dünenbau, p

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. In a carefully prepared article on the Southern pineries published in an American magazine-I

m Klitformationen

Gascogne, Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 184

hat 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, undoubtedly, much more desert land of this description on the Eu

de productive, but they do not apply to sand wastes, which, until covered by woods, are not only a use

r des Terres pauvres par le

e Append

ult Andresen, Om Klitfo

d with water, or otherwise worthless, the surface is sometimes freed from the drifts by repeated harrowings, which lo

d Researches in

s Forestièr

lerance 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, a

y of sand, interspersed with ledges of rock. The sand forms not less than ninety-eight per cent. of the earth, and, a

, par Emile de Laveleye, Revue des D

gnosie, i

sia-was commenced in 1842, on the barren and sandy banks of the Ingula, near Elisabethgrod, and has met with very

ias 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 plantat

'un Naturaliste,

polar currents flowing farther southward would take its place and be driven upon our coasts by the western winds. The North Sea would resemble Hudson's Bay, and its harbors be free from ice at best only in summer. The power and prosperity of its coasts would shrivel under the breath of winter, as a medusa thr

subject. Very probably he may have anticipated many of the followin

the Aegyptians. The error springing perhaps frō a truth (as all wandring reports for the most part doe) in that the Sultan doth pay a certaine annuall summe to the Ab

Adriatic between Trieste and Aquileia. The distance from Trieste to a suitable point in the grotto of Trebich is thought to be less than three miles, and the difficulties in the way of constructing a tunnel do not seem formidable. The works of Schmidl, Die

ites Strabo as asserting that a similar practice prevailed in Iapygia; but it may be questioned whether the epithet τραχε

gen durch Sicilien und

Meeres Ufer, Leonhard und Bro

hleswig-Holste

rch Sicilien und die

urgeschichte der Vul

, formed by the cooling of the exposed surface, which bury and conceal the fluid mass. The stream rolls on under the coating,

on the east side of Vesuvius, I went quite up to one of the outlets. The lava shot out of the orifice upward with great velocity, like the water from a spring, in a stream eight or ten feet in diameter, throwing up occasionally volcanic bombs, but it immediately spread out on the declivity down which it flowed, to the width of several yards. It continued red hot in broad daylight, and without a particle of scori? on its surface, for a course of at lea

s 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

Descrizione del

turgeschichte der

set on fire, sometimes continue to burn for months. I take the foll

y was at length overcome, but all along the side of the sinkage the earth was thrown up, broken into yawning chasms, and the surface was thus elevated above its old watery level. Since that time this ground, thus slightly elevated, has been cultivated, and has yielded enormously of whatever the owner seemed disposed to plant upon it. Some three months ago, by some means unknown to us, the underlying peat took fire, and for weeks, as we had occasion to pass it, we notic

rn science, was made by Babbage in the ninth chapter of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. I have not the volume at hand, but

t 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 intellectual 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 exis

END

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 t

between N.E. and S.E.; S.E. and S.W.; S.W. and N.W. or N.W. and N.E. If the employment of these words were understood to be limited to thus expressing a direction near

, or Leather Pass, observed that "a great portion of the country to the east of the mountains" had been "completely changed in character by the agency of the beaver, which formerly existed here in enormous numbers. The shallow valleys were formerly traversed by rivers and chains of lakes which, dammed up along their course at numerous poin

rshes, the water now diffused through them will be collected in the lower or more yielding portions, cu

This subject has been discussed by Perris in the Annales de la Société Entomologique de la France, for 1851 (?), 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 b

ité de la Culture du Pin Mari

other small animals in planting and in destroying nuts and other seeds of trees, may b

s of a family of flying squirrels in a hollow tree. The kernels were

any 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 c

tness of the period during which he has been partially tamed. The domestic swine bred in the woods of Hungary and the buffaloes of Southern Italy are so wild an

en 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 c

mference. The door of the chapter-hall in the cloister of the church of San Giovanni, at Saluzzo, is of vine wood, and the boards of which the panels wer

rds [courges], pease, beans of various colors, but not like ours," as common among the Indians of t

d 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 scientific travell

rated vineyards lose their peculiar qualities by 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 stoneles

eir owners. They transport seeds in their coats in both directions, and hence Alpine plants often shoot up at the foot of the mountains, the grasses of the plain on the borders of the glaciers; but in both cases, the

snip, and differenced only by conditions of growth, a richer soil depriving it, it is said, of its noxious properties. Many wild medicinal plants, such as p

eau's Excursions, an interesting descripti

r that a very few ibexes of a larger variety than those of

ing large arbors. These serve to collect birds, which are entrapped in nets in great numbers. These plantations are called ragnaje, and the reader wi

s. 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 abovementioned, when many flocks of twenty or thirty, and even a hundred individuals, were seen in Bohemia, Germany, Holland, Denmark, E

ondes for Sept. 1, 1864, entitled, La vie Anglaise, p. 119, it appears that suc

t learn that caprification is now practised

reat multiplication of vipers in some parts

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

e less timid than those of Europe. On one occasion, when I was encamped during a sand storm of some violence in Arabia Petr?a, a wild pigeon took refuge in one of our tents whic

rease of our fresh water fish cannot be ascribed 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 al

interesting way in his posthumous work, The Danish Woods-thinks, nevertheless, that at the season when the mast is falling swine are rather useful than other

oachments on the Gulf of Mexico not more than 4,400 years ago, before which period they suppose the Mississippi to have been "a comparatively clear stream," conveying very little sediment to

of one or more great lakes in its upper valley, whose bottoms are occupied by the present prairie region, has been suggested. The shores of these supposed lakes have not, I believe, bee

es Deux Mondes for Sept. 15, 1864; and, on the effects of human industry on the

r than the deciduous trees of the same climates. Is not this because the vital processes of trees of persistent foliage are les

high peaks solely to the condensation 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

h border the dunes of Gascony to the absorption of their water by the trees whi

ruction of the houses occupied by the eighty families which inhabit the village of Faucigny, in Savoy, in 1834, the forest inspector found that fifty thousand trees had been employed in building them. The

ed Avant-projet pour la création d'un sol fertile à la surface des Landes de Gascogne, Duponchel argues with much force, th

y contain, to such an extent that agates and other forms of silex may be artificially stained through their su

rred at an earlier period than the origin of the forest vegetation which, in later ages, covered the flanks

on them are usually of different species from those observed upon soil displaced at remote periods. This difference is so mark

sed and rendered innocent by the process described in the note. It is merely extracted by the acidulated or saline wate

t less than two millions of large trees have been felled. These ties have been, upon the average, at least once renewed, and

furniture, tools, and even house building-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 an average of two hundred and thirty cubic feet, or less than two cords, a year per household. The average consumption of wood in New England for domestic fu

anslation published at Berlin, in 1864, under the title, Das Auf?sten der Waldb?ume. The principal feature of De Courval's very successful system of sylviculture, is a mode of trimming which compels the tree to develop the stem by reducing the lateral ramification. Beginning with young trees, the buds are rubbed off from the stems, and superfluous lateral shoots are pruned down

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,

tural forces, but, in the old religious sense, an observer of organic nature, living, more than almost any other descriptive writer, among

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 phenom

Necker's Letter to Sir David Brewster, is, as Tyndall observes, "hardly ever seen by either guides or travellers, though it would

perfection as would be expected; for I have frequently sought it in vain at the foot of the Alps, under conditions app

re the form of a beautiful girl to the stem of the palm, they do not represent it as rigidly straight, but on the contrary as made up of graceful curves, which seem less like permanent outlines than like flowing motion. In a palm grove, the tru

n by shoots from the stump to the cedar of Mount Atlas, which appears to be ide

Manchester railway, 480,000 cubic yards of stone were removed; that the earth excavated and removed in the construction of English railways up to that date, amounted to a hundred and fifty million cubic

s it to a depth of not more than two feet. At a flood depth of one foot, the Salicornia dies and is succeeded by various sand plants. These are followed by Poa distans and Poa maritima as the ground is raised by further deposits, and these plants finally by common grasses. The Salicornia is preceded by conferv

ut in sections fifty feet long by six or seven wide, and these were navigated like rafts to the spot w

of the improvements in question on tidal and other mar

s 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 possible that the territory of those

t 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. Kl?den states the qua

the drawing off of the waters of the Lake of Haarlem was completed, and the preceding summer had dried the grounds laid bare so as greatly to reduce the evaporable surface, a change took place in the relative temperature of the two stations. Taking the mean of every successive period of five days from 1845 to 1852, the temperature at Zwanenburg was thirty-three hundredths o

bsorbed more solar heat at the same period, while in the winter it has radiated more warmth then when it was covered with water. Doubtless the quantity of humidity contain

he margin of the water suffered a considerable displacement. If the lake should be lowered to any considerable extent, in pursuance of the plan mentioned in the note on page 358, there is groun

oak, the pine, "beams," and "timber," are very frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, not one of the

nversion of pools and marshes into dry land, by a system of transverse dikes, which compelled the flood water to deposit its sedime

ch was a consequence of man's improvidence, had reduced the temperature one degree F. below the natural standard. The artificially irrigated lands of France, Piedmont, and Lombardy, taken together, are fifty times as extensive as the Lake of Haarlem, and they are situated in climates where evaporation is vastly more rapid than in the Netherlands. They must therefore, no doubt, affect the local climate to a far greater extent than has

l probability, nineteen centuries ago. The bed of the river Gardon, a rather swift stream, which flo

sses of pebbles belonging to the hardest rocks of the Jurassian period. These debris, 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 kilometres down the stream, bu

e 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 first to excavate, then to r

on as, by overflowing their banks, they escape from the swift current of the channel, and consequently the immediate banks of such rivers become higher than the grounds lying farther from the stream. In the "intervals," or "bottoms," of the great North American rivers, the alluvial banks are elevated and dry, the flats more remot

s of this river, it is observed that, at a certain distance from the channel, the bottoms, though lower than the banks, are flooded to a less depth. See cross sections in Plate IV. of Humphreys and Abbot's Report. This apparently anomalous fact is due, I suppose, to the greater swiftness of the current of the overflowing water in the

ater as the Po, and more than sis and a half times as much as the Nile. The discharge of the Mississippi is estimated at one-fourth of the precipitation in its basin, certain

large quantities of earth, and there is no doubt that this agency might be profitably employed to a far greater extent than has yet been attempted. Some of the

the Ionian Islands, who is familiar with this phenomenon, that the sea flo

freer from water in artificially well-drained, than in undrained agricul

the throwing up of living fish by them, an article entitled, Le Sahara, etc., b

te, it appears that the wells discovered by Ayme were truly artesian. They were bored in rock, and provided

rticles resulting from the disintegration of the latter, may be carried by rain in the case of dunes, or by the ordinary action of sea water in that of subaqueous sandbanks, d

ecies, are found in the sands of the Sahara, far from the sea, and even at c

important link in the chain of evidence which tends to prove that

y the water which pervades them. This stone, which is formed, so to speak, under our eye, has been found solid enough t

by the man?uvering of a corps of cavalry let loose a sand-drift which did ser

ts, from equally slight causes.-See Thoreau, A Wee

ittoral de la France, in the Revue des Deux Mondes for Sept. 1, 1864, pp. 193, 194. This able writer believes such pools to be the remains of ancien

e inland distilleries; it is ordinarily, therefore, conducted off to a little distance, in a wooden trough, and allowed to flow from it to waste upon the ground. At the first distillery I v

in Northwest 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

lliant account of the improvement of the Lan

be mixed with the calcareous slime and distributed over the Landes by watercourses constructed for the purpose. By this means, he supposes that a highly fertile soil could be formed on the surface, which would also be so raised by the process as to admit of free

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 s

lth, 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 onl

an open canal across the Cape might not make every species that inhabits the waters on one side common to th

geological movement or movements upheaved to different levels the bottoms of waters thus separated by a narrow isthmus, and dislocated the connection between those b

n 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 con

N

main and St. Deni

ack for

s of

s glandu

nfiltration of fr

, artificial lo

ts of, artesia

unes o

ated dun

outh Amer

Indian

island

imitive physical c

ts of

noting its phys

fic observ

trees o

unes o

ges in hydrog

mpathy of ruder

fallibil

lized man to infe

action of on

he Europ

s of felling the

way, th

phical and climat

, surface dra

one of

etrified wo

s of,

ley of, Ven

enomenon of veg

', departm

n of fores

basin, flo

er to the Rho

f inundati

done

n river

its afflu

halonia, mills

ient irrigat

iver, depos

in the Val di

lls, their

object

al effec

the Algerian

nch Govern

probable res

the ancie

h of

arenari

n, islan

gless, extir

ld of physical

pine, various

ing tre

f, proposed

or artificial s

e, the fis

, sand dun

alley of, forme

egradatio

arcity of f

thical chara

agency in for

s increased

ney, produc

n in United

ct of plantat

ne of

ict of, rock fo

of climate in th

al list of au

ck and yellow),

of, in Unite

y, dove,

d consumers

yers of i

extirpat

estructi

ess o

of migr

on of sp

al value

ion of sp

he Ameri

migrations

icated

the proscri

n and nomencla

Engla

ries of

tem of dune pla

or to his

dune vineya

us' lett

ansfer and mig

to veget

of Belgi

histle,

ic and climatic

ffects of T

ed, Sue

of Dar

Dead Se

, in Gre

os,

Cod

nd the Vo

and the Ge

and the Miss

sand dun

e protecti

tion o

canal th

he, extinction o

, caves

posed changes in

ava stream

ra of Gr

ects of clear

, dates of its

breakwater

scription and char

its restor

ainage of, at

lly execu

val, their ch

ange, discu

ested

New England, Africa,

n, difficult t

oratio

, combusti

rly use of, f

use of, in

ge of, from natu

human gui

ct transferred

Aqueduct, B

alley of, dev

ern, on what

, proposed lo

e, lake

tree, yie

ial and political

influen

ly cultivat

ed by white

Sparrow

sea, stren

Bosphor

ga riv

ee, its be

of, proposed c

al effect

rojected ca

results

of, in Unite

rious to t

peat moss

s of

d movemen

protection o

ichness of loc

e in,

ines ri

ause of physi

f land by, in the

nd immense ex

by the Span

uction and effect on th

gypt

cent extirpation of,

extirpati

s, action of, o

d transfe

the forest

roposed dive

eographical

necessity in fo

temperat

groun

se of, in E

he atmosp

uilibrium of ri

ring,

nce, &

is,

rland, glacier

ater, relative

in the United State

le, below th

o cover rocky

es, effec

ssible preven

sbon,

lity of, in ag

n of, in New

catacom

or water

s snakes

crease of r

iveness

tent of irrigati

d soil of

tion o

er used for i

deposit

river cours

ed area

s of

lence and e

e of,

elta and cultiv

diversion of t

aps near

preserved in

hington, Cam

cial formation i

orest econ

f ornamental p

described by

prise in sylv

unes o

e Coucy, cru

nce on the fauna and fl

h and leve

canal f

es of artific

nic lava an

plains in the

ivation o

f the lim

study of physic

ernicious in

he, its pro

t forests of the U

n of, by man, 11

ity o

nd breeding of

ization

the artificiall

ive remains of, in

an orig

f Catholic c

au, forest

ing i

novati

of,

arts of preser

ence of, on the hu

earth

ganic

flicting influ

on tempera

itation,

h Ameri

lands and Asi

u,

rn France, Scotla

on humidity

rings

ezuela

ranad

and France

State

nter,

ences of its de

h, springs,

of, in Fr

any,

ly,

and,

f, on inund

h Ameri

ects of, in

ses of its de

sh Ameri

rope,

forest

Revolution on,

preservation of smal

birds

and necessity for i

f, in Eu

different coun

d States and

my of

of, in Fr

, all of artific

ral, their respecti

eir peculiar cha

tion of cat

preservi

revenue

y laws in F

rees,

ca, balance of geograp

drupeds and i

o, by in

cal importa

medi?val, cha

ewish

in France and

ouis IX

eated by circu

literature and

on on for

former physica

conditio

of, and fore

of, i

lakes

ns of 185

inst inundat

s of West

ts of the s

y, described by

thur Y

ambor

sand dune

Celano), drainage of

rns,

on the numbers of

nd and I

of, in Fr

stop poa

alley of

coast san

s of

d advance

reclaimin

s of,

eclamat

al influ

s, new sch

ence of changes pr

dern, improve

n, sands of

tent of for

es in Switz

ashmere or

e migration f

erland, destr

onomic effect in Fran

rapid increase

er beetle

e canals in, through the

Atho

ean water

ea, habi

ream, t

used for industr

rigin and exten

or draini

employ

ul resul

roductions of

, springs

hery, produ

duction of in the

ld, New England,

, movemen

England, exp

he Alpi

fflorescence of

ection of ri

rious to vege

ty of

fertilization

exuvi? in Sout

f injurious sp

es of

of life

ous, useful

on of, by

, in Norther

n of, by b

adrupe

ptiles

iply in the

selves to de

fluence of the

erman Oc

r obviat

in Fra

s again

f the woodlands in Franc

sins of rec

ru and Sp

n for dimin

e date of in anci

ans and Per

ty in hot c

rope,

estine

um?a,

, 371

ater so appli

lands irri

ts of

r suppl

n healt

from, in India

on vegetabl

e soi

c evils

in Holland and Sout

ver, Holl

the denudation o

n adverse to their

ts winter s

irrigati

henomena of N

ites of, visibl

s of felling th

n of fores

ts of the s

tzerland, artific

bterranean wa

dinger in

extent

Herodotus of mod

e sand

re, commu

nt of the Swedis

f, by steam hydra

filling up by aquat

ancient and mo

taly

tzerla

t consequen

heir disapp

insensibility of t

s and the d

diversion of th

us, phenome

itted b

of animal and

irruption of t

egetation

l state

habitant of

arthquake

es not multiply

nd ins

istics of irri

France, clem

ment of, ravages o

ade of Qu

States, 18

ke of, lowe

gigantic b

-ai of

cultivation of

ed from its

vation of, law of

country

nsported s

orks a

ion of, on

iency of

al influen

olutions wro

results of cons

, in old geologic

ts of, on the ea

tivenes

and inorganic

tion compared with

the balance

xercised fo

limits

vegetable

ns of

y with the

exterminatio

uction of

of insect

of new forms

of fish by,

f aquatic ani

ol of minute o

hysical con

land and the

graphical ch

ffects of hi

nd ever endur

, ancient and medi

t of,

itant

ement

deposits o

muses, cutt

ficulti

done by na

in Popay

tic effects of

ture of fresh and

ration of their mutua

South America

an Sea, tid

unes o

organic

e river,

ertainty and lat

omenclatu

on and evap

ake, sand d

lly woo

ersion of it

ations, effe

isms, their

sion and produc

l of their agen

al inse

atomac

, great f

in Fra

, "cut offs" and

n in the val

d canal

es, their cau

ency in the

their liability to ph

taccio, R

erican, rapid mult

nous, how to ren

es, accumula

ance t

an's reac

ation

ty of,

disturbed har

small

s, enthusi

ancient inund

f land by

erived from th

d gained from

incursions

of lands g

cess of rec

the dike sys

eir construc

protect

uses o

e level of t

e of do

conditio

ral, and economic interes

unes o

ts of the s

al dunes

n of dune

l of d

river, val

ient st

tions

elivery

al mouth

s of diking

f its depo

of do

used by its

at its mo

for irrig

diversion

possib

ts of

banks

in New En

ile boats

error in too definit

d Italian u

h, early uses i

of North Am

mounds

rimitive peopl

trees

ormer populo

l decay

desolati

caus

climat

restorati

ee, the

ance o

known to the

wild

lization of, b

braced in moder

ogical a

al importa

cs of, human a

diminution of

Vermont, transpor

merican, vor

al uses of, in U

transplanta

terrace culture and

fects of its

nard, charac

tificial sp

ni of Lomb

e Abbé, on fo

ccidental bu

of Denm

the Maremma, it

progress in

receptio

a, ancient irri

the sea unknown t

y of the eart

caus

in new co

mations predi

phy, study of r

on of the

and possibi

bed harmo

Old Wor

, former ordinary

the accidents of

on dune sands

, hardiho

most elegant of

pidity of its

a of Switze

its valuable

ncertain identity of

and domestic

abit by dome

al influen

wn in United

grown in E

introdu

ntal d

ccommodati

ted by tr

life in wild

ation

c origi

for protection of

r, theory of sp

ient state of

chang

taries, and depos

nts of,

ent o

ences of its em

livery

i of

and plain

the Lomb

terize

tive count

njectural or

ysical struc

state

ction of torr

of,

sand dune

ing o

or reclaim

umber in Unit

ation

igh tides

trade o

cientific u

sorption and infil

its precip

cathedr

oods o

ess of, in org

he Nile to, it

er, th

aphic and climati

ation of dune econo

or to his

proposed div

ltivatio

nsporting p

rmont

origin

ir banks by l

their rise a

of rivers an

obstructio

ean cours

effect on the cu

of, its e

natural ch

l do. in

Switzerl

deposi

e Nil

Po,

can riv

mbankme

use,

antage

o., superior

ts of

s, obstruct

d bank

by man's inf

tidal move

merican, vor

y permeable b

ural advantages o

y intellige

l decay

desola

despotism and

r diminishing i

ontinuity of a

rce o

to organic

natur

nution of fo

on rivers an

of the ste

o reclaim

lifornia, effect of

mposition an

of rive

posits of,

ied to the Medi

pt, 45

f, by the

, from th

accumulat

s of dep

g of du

ks, aqua

ent o

elves with th

s, how fo

ation

South America

culiarit

r, and perman

ly wood

by ancient w

ment o

rces of su

formation,

editerra

Michig

ile mout

erica

ern Eur

ture o

t of,

ity o

pe Co

f their san

ion wit

structure

form o

importanc

n of sands

against th

ern Eur

t of,

scony

nmark

ussia

rmation of, i

tion o

etatio

dapted

al of

neyard of Ca

, mode of d

uent pa

of Eur

of Gasc

ium,

n Euro

of reclai

public ent

prings

irpated in Juan

jected can

their machinery more

e extirpat

n, encroachments

ation, practical

n of, by dikes, in

hments

st,

imfjor

g-Holste

and,

ce,

ler's, extirp

in Lake Cha

ity o

as preserved by th

, ancient l

nts of

he middle ages, Ve

ice ravin

ne weapons

mines

il crop

duction in Sout

rain torre

sand in peni

monaster

ructive to i

of spec

Palestine an

n of the wo

ments

thermoscopic acti

of shaking in the

t on, in Unite

conomic emplo

he, extirpa

ssion of, in s

cial, proposed

binet

t of forest c

estructiveness o

ston,

na, flor

n of its f

phenomena of ve

bits of, in P

geographical

te of

waters, their

of sup

and curre

of, in the

tance

Karst

eece,

, danger from s

iterranean and Re

e, cultur

tree, prod

kes of Ho

fect of planta

ular superstition

t lacustrine habita

d, sand du

ts of the s

est manuals of

how profi

ethod

is treatm

taie d

ffects of ir

n of ani

f leaves,

and trim

Lake, Ch

, cultivated i

e, general

general diff

hite ant, rav

ascade of,

superiority of

of, in fo

American

ion in Hu

Minor, oak w

troduction to N

l plan for draining t

structive ac

prevent

n Southeaster

ence

Alps

Alps

ting the beds of ma

ting ravi

ing power

extingui

g force

sms, specific te

given out

nce on tempe

n of wate

of sa

moisture by fo

ion of

refrigera

gneous produ

nst avalanches

ting the actio

forest tr

imensio

proportions of heig

e longevit

American co

numerous in

catalogu

uropean and Amer

ern Europe and t

r of success

rest,

sed supply of

American, 1

rs of, their

restorati

s in Val di

he Marem

, elevation of

s of, New G

on of wa

foreign plant

annual har

quadrupe

irds

ing woods on i

ts of

ty of lif

ment of, ravages o

chs, domestica

ation

dence of glacie

transfer by ma

scade of,

vegetati

f February

ion, resista

egetation

proposed dive

rmation of th

adt, lak

sumption of, for

elded

ses for p

cts, utiliz

to Old and

d in Chin

he, food

ction

te of its commenc

iddle ag

ican

asserted

ion to Am

als, numb

table and animal, te

ing, introductio

crease o

n forests of

ing, Sou

eased dema

ng, railroa

price o

iron in th

easing its du

d by rapid

s for wor

earth originall

f their prop

y of man and dome

ish food fo

emoval

ng of

n and Fr

n the so

n of, its

l influen

influence

on tempera

emitting sur

r and wi

oducts

helter

nce, 1

nglan

nd Jutl

ion against

e extremes of t

rest,

fungi, absorbent

e, destroyer o

artary ox

ographical r

vince, forma

a mari

roposed drai

geographical

E

H'S "C

ife of

FORSYTH,

s. crown octavo. Printed on tint

d a Friend. His letters are full of interesting details, which enable us to form a vivid idea of how the old Romans lived 2,000 years ago; and the Biography embraces not only a Hi

arefully gleaning from his extensive correspondence all those little traits of character and habit which marked his private and dom

to the present time as the differences of age and manners warrant. * * * These volumes we heartily recommend as both a useful and agreeable guide to the writings and character of one who was next

biographer to take when narrating the life, the personal life, of Cicero. Mr. Forsyth produces what we venture to say will become one of the classics of En

rds the truth; it lifts a corner of the veil which has hung over the scenes and actors of times so full of ferm

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RBY'S "

iad of

SH BLANK VERSE BY E

ifth Londo

tavo, on tinted paper

and Reviews from the E

ably nearer than Pope to the text of the original. * * * We think that Lord Derby's translation will not only be read, but read over and over again. * * * Lord Derby has given t

e find more spirit, more tact in avoiding either trivial or conceited phrases, and altogether a presence of merits, and an absence of defects which cont

his great rival. For the rest, if Pope is dethroned what remains? * * * It is the Iliad we would place in the hands of English readers as th

uous place. * * * Lord Derby's work is, on the whole, more remarkable for the constancy of its excellence and the high level whic

ed to, and thus become a permanent classic of the language, or whether it give place to the still more perfect production of some yet unknown poet-it must equally be co

CAN N

n critics unite in declaring, with The Times, "that it is by far the best representation of Homer's 'Iliad' in the English language." His purpose was to produce a translation, and not a paraphras

irst honest opportunity of doing so. The Earl's translation is devoid alike of pretension and of prettiness. It is animated in movement, simple and representative to phr

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