Man and Nature Part 31

This pa.s.sage is also of interest as showing that soaking in salt water, as a mode of seasoning, was practised in Harrison's time.

But the importation of wainscot, or boards for ceiling, panelling, and otherwise finishing rooms, which was generally of oak, commenced three centuries before the time of Harrison. On page 204 of the _Liber Albus_--a book which could have been far more valuable if the editor had given us the texts, with his learned notes, instead of a translation--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 countries, a duty of one halfpenny is imposed on every hundred of boards called "weynscotte," and of one penny on every hundred of boards called "Rygholt." The editor explains "Rygholt" as "wood of Riga." This was doubtless pine or fir. The year in which these provisions were made does not appear, but they belong to the reign of Henry III.

[211] In a letter addressed to the Minister of Public Works, after the terrible inundations of 1857, the Emperor thus happily expressed himself: "Before we seek the remedy for an evil, 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 our fields produce but few rivulets, but those which fall on our roofs and are collected in the gutters, form small streams at once. Now, the roofs are mountains--the gutters are valleys."

"To continue the comparison," observes D'Hericourt, "roofs are smooth and impermeable, and the rain water pours rapidly off from their surfaces; but this rapidity of flow would be greatly diminished if the roofs were carpeted with mosses and gra.s.ses; more still, if they were covered with dry leaves, little shrubs, strewn branches, and other impediments--in short, if they were wooded."--_Annales Forestieres, Dec._, 1857, p. 311.

[212] "The roots of vegetables," says D'Hericourt, "perform the office of a perpendicular drainage a.n.a.logous to that which has been practised with success in 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 filters down along the stakes, and, in certain cases, as favorable results are obtained by this method as by horizontal drains."--_Annales Forestieres_, 1857, p. 312.

[213] The productiveness of Egypt has been attributed too exclusively to the fertilizing effects of the slime deposited by the inundations of the Nile; for in that climate a liberal supply of water would produce good crops on almost any ordinary sand, while, without water, the richest soil would yield nothing. The sediment deposited annually is but a very small fraction of an inch in thickness. It is alleged that in quant.i.ty 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 uniformly rich in all climates; those brought down by rivers, carried out into salt water, and then returned again by the tide, seem to be more permanently fertile than any others. The polders of the Netherland coast are of this character, and the meadows in Lincolnshire, which have been covered with slime by _warping_, as it is called, or admitting water over them at high tide, are remarkably productive. See _Appendix_, No. 28.

[214] "The laws against clearing have never been able to prevent these operations when the proprietor found his advantage in them, and the long series of royal ordinances and decrees of parliaments, proclaimed from the days of Charlemagne to our own, with a view of securing forest property, have served only to show the impotence of legislative notion on this subject."--CLAVe, _etudes sur l'economie Forestiere_, p. 32.

"A proprietor can always contrive to clear his woods, whatever may be done to prevent him; it is a mere question of time, and a few imprudent cuttings, a few abuses of the right of pasturage, suffice to destroy a forest in spite of all regulations to the contrary."--DUNOYER, _De la Liberte du Travail_, ii, p. 452, as quoted by Clave, p. 353.

Both authors agree that the preservation of the forests in France is practicable only by their transfer to the state, which alone can protect them and secure their proper treatment. It is much to be feared that even this measure would be inadequate 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 live-oak woods of Florida, which were intended to be preserved for the use of the navy, and it more than once paid contractors a high price for timber stolen from its own forests. The authorities of the individual States might be more efficient.

[215] See the lively account of the sale of a communal wood in BERLEPSCH, _Die Alpen, Holzschlager und Flosser_.

[216] Streffleur (_Ueber die Natur und die Wirkungen der Wildbache_, p.

3) maintains that all the observations and speculations of French authors on the nature of torrents had been antic.i.p.ated by Austrian writers. In proof of this a.s.sertion 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 Wa.s.serbauwerke_, Konigsberg, 1826, none of which works are known to me. It is evident, however, that the conclusions of Surell and other French writers whom I cite, are original results of personal investigation, and not borrowed opinions.

[217] Whether Palissy was acquainted with this ancient practice, or whether it was one of those original suggestions of which his works are so full, I know not; but in his treatise, _Des Eaux et Fontaines_, he thus recommends it, by way of reply to the objections of "Theorique,"

who had expressed the fear 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 by great storms, when thou shalt have made ready thy parterre to receive the water, thou must lay great stones athwart the deep channels which lead to thy parterre. And so the force of the rushing currents shall be deadened, and thy water shall flow peacefully into his cisterns."--_[OE]uvres Completes_, p. 173.

[218] Ladoucette says the peasant of Devoluy "often goes a distance of five hours over rocks and precipices for a single [man's] load of wood;"

and he remarks on another page, that "the justice of peace of that canton had, in the course of forty-three years, but once heard the voice of the nightingale."--_Histoire, etc., des Hautes Alpes_, pp. 220, 434.

[219] The valley of Embrun, now almost completely devastated, was once remarkable for its fertility. In 1806, Hericart de Thury said of it: "In this magnificent valley nature had been prodigal of her gifts. Its inhabitants have blindly revelled in her favors, and fallen asleep in the midst of her profusion."--BECQUEREL, _Des Climats, etc._, p. 314.

[220] In the days of the Roman empire the Durance was a navigable river, with a commerce so important that the boatmen upon it formed a distinct corporation.--LADOUCETTE, _Histoire, etc., des Hautes Alpes_, p. 354.

Even as early as 1789, the Durance was computed to have already covered with gravel and pebbles not less than 130,000 acres, "which, but for its inundations, would have been the finest land in the province."--ARTHUR YOUNG, _Travels in France_, vol. i, ch. i.

[221] Between 1851 and 1856 the population of Languedoc and Provence had increased by 101,000 souls. The augmentation, however, was wholly in the provinces of the plains, where all the princ.i.p.al cities are found. In these provinces the increase was 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, of cultivated soil. In 1852, it had but 74,000 hectares. In other words, in ten years 25,000 hectares, or 61,000 acres, had been washed away or rendered worthless for cultivation, by torrents and the abuses of pasturage.--CLAVe, _etudes_, pp. 66, 67.

[222] The Skalara-Tobel, for instance, near Coire. See the description in BERLEPSCH, _Die Alpen_, pp. 169 _et seqq_, or in Stephen's English translation.

The recent change in the character of the Mella--a river anciently so remarkable for the gentleness of its current that it was specially noticed by Catullus as flowing _molli flumine_--deserves more than a pa.s.sing remark. This river rises in the mountain chain east of Lake Iseo, and traversing the district of Brescia, empties into the Oglio after a course of about seventy miles. The iron works in the upper valley of the Mella had long created a considerable demand for wood, but their operations were not so extensive as to occasion any very sudden or general destruction of the forests, and the only evil experienced from the clearings was the gradual diminution of the volume of the river.

Within the last twenty years, the superior quality of the arms manufactured at Brescia 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 inundated much ground never before overflowed, but destroyed a great number of bridges, dams, factories, and other valuable structures, and, what was a far more serious evil, swept off from the rocks an incredible extent of soil, and converted one of the most beautiful valleys of the Italian Alps into a ravine almost as bare and as barren as the savagest gorge of Southern France. The pecuniary damage was estimated at many millions of francs, and the violence of the catastrophe was deemed so extraordinary, even in a country subject to similar visitations, that the sympathy excited for the sufferers produced, in five months, voluntary contributions for their relief to the amount of nearly $200,000--_Delle Inondazioni del Mella, etc., nella notte del 14 al 15 Agosto_, 1850.

The author of this remarkable pamphlet has chosen as a motto a pa.s.sage from the Vulgate translation of Job, which is interesting as showing accurate observation of the action of the torrent: "Mons cadens definit, et saxum transfertur de loco suo; lapides excavant aquae et alluvione paullatim terra consumitur."--_Job_ xiv, 18, 19.

The English version is much less striking, and gives a different sense.

[223] Streffleur quotes from Duile the following observations: "The channel of the Tyrolese brooks is often raised much above the valleys through which they flow. The bed of the Fersina is elevated high above the city of Trient, which lies near it. The Villerbach flows 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 of Schlanders, Kortsch, and Laas, are lower than the surface of the Gadribach. The Saldurbach at Schluderns menaces the far lower village with destruction, and the chief town, Schwaz, is in similar danger from the Lahnbach."--STREFFLEUR, _Ueber die Wildbache, etc._, p. 7.

[224] The snow drifts into the ravines and acc.u.mulates to incredible depths, and the water resulting from its dissolution and from the deluging rains which fall in spring, and sometimes in the summer, being confined by rocky 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 Doveria, along which the Simplon road pa.s.ses, was filled with solid snowdrifts to the depth of a hundred feet above the carriage road, and the sledge track by which pa.s.sengers and the mails were carried ran at that height.

Other things being equal, the transporting power of the water is greatest where its flow is most rapid. This is usually in the direction of the axis of the ravine. As the current pours out of the gorge and escapes from the lateral confinement of its walls, it spreads and divides itself into numerous smaller streams, which shoot out 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 and weight of the matter transported. Every flood both increases the height of this central point and extends the entire circ.u.mference of the deposit. The stream retaining most nearly the original direction moves with the greatest momentum, and consequently transports the solid matter with which it is charged to the greatest distance.

The untravelled reader will comprehend this the better when he is informed that the southern slope of the Alps generally rises suddenly out of the plain, with no intervening hill to break the abruptness of the transition, except those consisting of comparatively 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. This arrangement of surfaces naturally facilitates the formation of vast deposits at their points of emergence, and the centre of the acc.u.mulation in the case of very small torrents is not unfrequently a hundred feet high, and sometimes very much more.

Torrents and the rivers that receive them transport mountain debris to almost incredible distances. Lorentz, in an official report on this subject, as quoted by Marschand from the Memoirs 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 ravages to the vicinity of the mountains, but extend them into the fertile fields of Provence and other departments, to the distance of forty or fifty leagues."--_Entwaldung der Gebirge_, p. 17.

[225] The precipitous walls of the Val de Lys, and more especially of the Val Doveria, though here and there shattered, show in many places a smoothness of face over a large vertical plane, at the height of hundreds of feet above the bottom 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 suffer lateral displacement occasionally, where there is room for the shifting of the channel; but if any elevation or depression takes place in them, it is too slow to be perceptible except in case of some merely temporary obstruction.

[226] Lombardini found, twenty years ago, that the mineral matter brought down to the Po by its tributaries was, in general, comminuted to about the same degree of fineness as the sands of its bed at their points of discharge. In the case of the Trebbia, which rises high in the Apennines and empties into the Po at Piacenza, it was otherwise, that river rolling pebbles and coa.r.s.e gravel into the channel of the princ.i.p.al 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 removed most of the disintegrated and loose rock in their upper basins. The valley of the Trebbia had been recently cleared, and all the forces which tend to the degradation and transportation of rock were in full activity.--_Notice sur les Rivieres de la Lombardie, Annales des Ponts et Chaussees_, 1847, 1er semestre, p. 131.

Since the date of Lombardini's observations, many Alpine valleys have been stripped of their woods. It would be interesting to know whether any sensible change has been produced in the character or quant.i.ty of the matter transported by them to the Po.

[227] In proportion as the dikes are improved, and breaches and the escape of the water through them are less frequent, the height of the annual inundations is increased. 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 which they were built; but they have recently been obliged to construct ring dikes for their protection.--BAUMGARTEN, after LOMBARDINI, in the paper last quoted, pp. 141, 147.

[228] Three centuries ago, when the declivities of the mountains still retained a much larger proportion of their woods, the moderate annual floods of the Po were occasioned by the melting of the snows, and, as appears by a pa.s.sage of Ta.s.so quoted by Castellani (_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 almost uniformly in the autumn or late summer. Castellani, on the page just quoted, says that even so late as about 1780, the Po required a heavy rain of a week to overflow its banks, but that forty years later, it was sometimes raised to full flood in a single day.

[229] This change of coast line cannot be ascribed to upheaval, for a comparison of the level of old buildings--as, for instance, the church of San Vitale and the tomb of Theodoric at Ravenna--with that of the sea, tends to prove a depression rather than an elevation of their foundations.

A computation by a different method makes the deposits at the mouth of the Po 2,123,000 metres less; but as both of them omit the gravel and silt rolled, if not floated, down at ordinary and low water, we are safe in a.s.suming the larger quant.i.ty.--_Article last quoted_, p. 174. (See note, p. 329)

[230] Mengotti estimated the ma.s.s of solid matter annually "united to the waters of the Po" at 822,000,000 cubic metres, or nearly twenty times as much as, according to Lombardini, 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 quant.i.ty of earth and gravel is washed down from the Alps and the Apennines than is carried to the sea.--CASTELLANI, _Dell' Immediata Influenza delle Selve sul corso delle Acque_, i, pp. 42, 43.

I have contented myself with a.s.suming less than one fifth of Mengotti's estimate.

[231] BAUMGARTEN, _An. des Ponts et Chaussees_, 1847, 1er semestre, p.

175.

[232] The total superficies of the basin of the Po, down to Ponte Lagoscuro [Ferrara]--a point where it has received all its affluents--is 6,938,200 hectares, that is, 4,105,600 in mountain lands, 2,832,600 in plain lands.--DUMONT, _Travaux Publics, etc._, p. 272.

These latter two quant.i.ties are equal respectively to 10,145,348, and 6,999,638 acres, or 15,852 and 10,937 square miles.

[233] I do not use the numbers I have borrowed or a.s.sumed as factors the value of which is precisely ascertained; nor, for the purposes of the present argument, is quant.i.tative exactness important. I employ numerical statements simply as a means of aiding the imagination to form a general and certainly not extravagant idea of the extent of geographical revolutions which man has done much to accelerate, if not, strictly speaking, to produce.

There is an old proverb, _Dolus latet in generalibus_, and Arthur Young is not the only public economist who has warned his readers against the deceitfulness of round numbers. I think, on the contrary, that vastly more error has been produced by the affectation of precision in cases where precision is 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 say _terrestrial_ nature, because in cosmical movements we have fewer elements to deal with, and may therefore arrive at much more rigorous accuracy in determination of time and place than we can in fixing and predicting the quant.i.ties and the epochs of variable natural phenomena on the earth's surface.

The value of a high standard of accuracy in scientific observation can hardly be overrated; but habits of rigorous exactness will never be formed by an investigator who allows 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 general, attained by taking the mean of a great number of observations at every station, and this final precision is but the mutual balance and compensation of numerous errors.

Travellers are often misled by local habits in the use of what may be called representative numbers, where a definite is put for an indefinite quant.i.ty. A Greek, who wished to express the notion of a great, but undetermined number, used "myriad, or ten thousand;" a Roman, "six hundred;" an Oriental, "forty," or, at present, very commonly, "fifteen thousand." Many a tourist has gravely repeated, as an ascertained fact, the vague statement of the Arabs and the monks of Mount Sinai, that the ascent from the convent of St. Catherine to the summit of Gebel Moosa counts "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 contains fifteen thousand rooms. Any one who has observed the vast dimensions of most of the apartments of that structure will admit that we make a very small allowance of s.p.a.ce when we a.s.sign a square rod, sixteen and a half feet square, to each room upon the average. On an acre, there might be one hundred and sixty such rooms, including part.i.tion walls; and, to contain fifteen thousand of them, a building must cover more than nine acres, and be ten stories high, or possess other equivalent dimensions, which, as every traveller knows, many times exceeds the truth.

That most entertaining writer, About, reduces the number of rooms in the Vatican, but he compensates this reduction by increased dimensions, for 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 "presbytere," as he irreverently calls it, twelve thousand large rooms [_salles_], thirty courts, and three hundred staircases.--_Rome Contemporaire_, p. 68.

The pretended exactness of statistical tables is generally little better than an imposture; and those founded not on direct estimation by competent observers, but on the report of persons who have no particular interest in knowing, but often have a motive for distorting, the truth--such as census returns--are commonly to be regarded as but vague guesses at the actual fact.

Fuller, who, for the combination of wit, wisdom, fancy, and personal goodness, stands first in English literature, thus remarks on the pretentious exactness of historical and statistical writers: "I approve the plain, country By-word, as containing much Innocent Simplicity therein,

_'Almost and very nigh Have saved many a Lie.'_