Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/810

788 Sometimes a twofold drainage of the upper, as well as the under aspect of the soil may be practiced—that is, draining the subsoil and increasing the evaporation of the surface water. The cutting down of forests in malarious countries has often proved an excellent means of amelioration; because, by removing every obstacle to the direct action of the sun's rays on the surface of the soil, its humidity during the warm season is sometimes entirely exhausted. In spite of universal experience of this fact, a school originating with the great Roman physician, Lancisi, has sustained the contrary, counseling the maintenance and even the extension of forests in malarious countries. Lancisi was completely possessed with the "palustral prejudice," and believed that the malaria generated in the Pomptine Marshes, and attacking such townships as Cisterna, was intercepted, if only partially, by the forests between, and he therefore opposed the cutting down of the trees and recommended increased planting. He did not know that the malaria was already in the soil and covered by the forest in question. Some thirty years ago the Caetani family, to whom Cisterna belongs, cut down the forest, and twenty years thereafter Dr. Tommasi Crudeli was able to show that the health of the neighborhood had greatly improved in consequence. A commission appointed by the Minister of Agriculture investigated the whole subject of the coexistence of woods with malaria, and in its report issued in 1884 completely disproved the theory of Lancisi and confirmed that of Dr. Tommasi Crudeli.

Absorbent plants have been suggested and used as a means of drawing humidity from the soil, not without success in certain countries really malarious. The prejudice that the malaria is due to the putrescent decompositions of the soil has, in Italy, led to the choice of the Eucalyptus globulus as the tree best adapted to combat the poison, the idea being that the eucalyptus, which grows very rapidly, dries the humid earth, and at the same time by the aroma of its leaves destroys the so-called miasmata. No genuine instance of the eucalyptus having succeeded in its allotted task is yet known to Dr. Tommasi Crudeli, though he does not say that its success is impossible. Had its Italian patrons studied its action in its native Australia, where it flourishes much better than in Italy, they would have known that there are eucalyptus forests in those latitudes where malaria is very prevalent, as has been shown by Professor Liversidge, of the University of Sydney. The cultivation of the tree at the Tre Fontane, near Rome, which it was thought would prove entirely successful in combating the local malaria, disappointed expectations, for in 1882 that hamlet was the scene of a severe outbreak of the fever, while the rest of the Campagna was unusually exempt from it. The eucalyptus, in fact, is a capricious tree in European soil; while in full leaf, during the winter, it is often killed by nocturnal frost, and even by the late frosts of spring, to say nothing of humid cold and other adverse influences not