Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/402

386 and reaches the meridian of Europe near the centre of the Mediterranean." The nations that "celebrated life as a festival" have lived along this line, and we may doubt if in the most favored regions of the New World human industry, with all the aids of modern science, will ever reunite the opportunities of happiness which Nature once lavished on lands that now entail only misery on their cultivators. All over Spain and Portugal, Southern Italy, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, Persia, and Western Afghanistan, and throughout Northern Africa, from Morocco to the valley of the Nile, the aridity of the soil makes the struggle for existence so hard that to the vast majority of the inhabitants life from a blessing has been converted into a curse.

Southern Spain, from Gibraltar to the head-waters of the Tagus, maintains now only about one-tenth of its former population, Greece about one-twentieth. As late as 670, a good while after the rise of the Mohammedan power, the country now known as Tripoli, and distinct from the Sahara only through the elevation of its mountains, was the seat of eighty-five Christian bishops, and had a population of 6,000,000, of which number three-quarters of one per cent, are now left! The climate which, according to authentic description, must once have resembled that of our Southern Alleghanies, is now so nearly intolerable that even the inhumanity of an African despot forbears to exact open-air labor from 9 to 5  Steamboats that pass near the Tripolitan coast in summer, on their way from Genoa to Cairo, have to keep up a continual shower of artificial rain to save their deck-hands from being overcome by the furnace-air that breathes from the ban-en hills of the opposite coast. The rivers of some of these countries have shrunk to the size of their former tributaries, and from Gibraltar to Samarcand the annual rainfall has decreased till failure of crops has become a chronic complaint.

And all this change is due to the insane destruction of forests. The great Caucasian sylvania that once adorned the birth-land of the white race from the Western Pyrenees to the foot-hills of the Himalayas has disappeared; of the forest-area of Italy and Spain, in the days of the elder Pliny, about two acres in a hundred are left; in Greece, hardly one. But even the nakedness of the most sterile tracts of Southern Europe is exceeded by the utter desolation of the Ottoman provinces. If there was not evidence that a great part of the ruin had been accomplished before the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Turks would really seem to have been "tree-destroyers on principle." In the recesses of the Taurus range and the inaccessible heights of those

a few remnants of wood have survived the general devastation, but throughout the lowlands, from Bokhara to the Golden Horn, not a stick or bush can grow up before the wood-famine of the wretched