Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/78

68 The State of New York, in particular, is discussing the question of making a great forest reservation in the Adirondacks, in order to avert floods, droughts, and other calamities which there is reason to fear may follow the alleged rapid destruction of the forests of that region.

In the course of this discussion many allusions have been made to the ravages of floods in the south of France, and to the success of efforts to tame those torrents, by reforesting the basins which they drained. A short account of those torrents and their origin, the ruin wrought by them, and the victory which forest science has gained over them, may interest the readers of "The Popular Science Monthly."

Professor Guyot, whose recent death is such a great loss to science, taught that variety of coast-outline, of elevation, of climate, and natural products, is necessary for the richest development of the individual and of society; and that in no part of the world were so many of these favoring conditions originally brought together as in the regions bordering the Mediterranean.

The Roman Empire, which, at the time when it was most widely extended, consisted almost entirely of the countries lying around or near this sea, had the best situation of any of the great empires that have arisen. The grouping and arrangement of the land and water masses; the diversity of elevation and of coast-outline; the rich and varied scenery; the wide range of animal, vegetable, and mineral products; the great number of populous, wealthy, and nobly built cities, with the marvelous Roman roads binding them together, and the majestic Roman law co-ordinating their civic life—all cooperated to make this region the garden of the world. The fact that the most favored part of the earth's surface should have been so nearly ruined, as it has been, by selfish and short-sighted treatment of the forest, its most precious possession, ought to have been a lesson to all future settlers of new territory. That it has not been heeded by the settlers of North America, the increasing frequency and severity of floods and droughts and the swift and menacing approach of timber-famine plainly prove.

The streams which flow through the valleys that wind back from the sea into the heart of the mountains and hills bordering the Mediterranean would, in their normal condition, be limpid and perennial. But, owing to this short-sighted cutting of timber from steep hillsides, and to the equally short-sighted over-pasturing of the cleared spaces afterward with sheep and goats, most of these streams were, in the upper part of their courses, changed into torrents, whose beds in dry weather are cheerless expanses of sand and gravel.

During heavy rain, or when snow is rapidly melted upon the mountains (and this is especially apt to occur when a warm wind, called the Fœhn, coming probably from Sahara, and saturating itself with