Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/406

390 of this earth. "The ills that flesh here is heir to," he says, "are only three: wounds, the effects of poison, and decrepitude—the latter rarely makes its appearance before the completion of the ninetieth year." Since the Portuguese have felled their glorious forests for the sake of madeira (building-material), these islands have become hotbeds of disease.

The valley of the Guadalquivir, as late as a century before the discovery of America, supported a population of 7,000,000 of probably the healthiest and happiest men of Southern Europe. Since the live oak and chestnut groves of the surrounding heights have disappeared this population has shrunk to a million and a quarter of sickly wretches, who depend for their sustenance on the scant produce of sandy barrens that become sandier and drier from year to year.

It would be exaggeration to say that the barrenness of a treeless country is an evil without remedy. Nature is always ready to assist in any work of regeneration, and there is no desert so void and naked that it might not be reclaimed in the course of half a century. The Khédive of Egypt has wrested land from the sand-wastes as the Hollanders win it from the sea, and by a cheaper process than the building of extensive dikes. By planting date-palms and olive-trees, Egypt has added many hundred square miles to her arable surface, and, as Baker-Pasha assures us, her annual rainfall has almost doubled. Between Karnak and Soodan the rain-gauge shows now a yearly average of sixteen inches, where nine inches was the maximum before 1820. And not only the limits of these tree-plantations, but also the adjoining districts, have been benefited; on the table-land of Wady-Halfa the present temperature is not nearly as oppressive as it was within the memory of men now living, and currant-bushes and wild-mulberries have sprung up where they never grew before. In France, too, the Government has reclaimed the Landes, a sandy steppe on the southwestern coast, by planting willows and bay-trees; and even Algeria has been improved by the persistent tree-culture of the French colonists.

But how slow and laborious is this work of restoration, and how easily might we forestall its necessity if we would begin in time! A legislative act to protect the woods of all the upper ridges in hill countries, and of a certain percentage of acres, say fifteen in a hundred, in the plains, would be an effectual guarantee against evils which otherwise will assuredly overtake us, and speedier than Europe, on account of the compact shape of our continent, that deprives us of the advantages of a marine climate.

Let us remember that the aphorism of the greatest physician of modern times applies to other organisms as well as to the human body. "Timely prevention," said Dr. Radcliffe, "not only saves us from diseases, but from those greater evils—the remedies."