destroyed by disease or slaughtered for human use in civilized countries
be collected into large deposits, as obscure causes have gathered
together those of extinct animals, they would soon form aggregations
which might almost be called mountains. There were in the United States,
in 1860, as we shall see hereafter, nearly one hundred and two millions
of horses, black cattle, sheep, and swine. There are great numbers of
all the same animals in the British American Provinces, and in Mexico,
and there are large herds of wild horses on the plains, and of tamed
among the independent Indian tribes of North America. It would perhaps
not be extravagant to suppose that all those cattle may amount to two
thirds as many as those of the United States, and thus we have in North
America a total of 170,000,000 domestic quadrupeds belonging to species
introduced by European colonization, besides dogs, cats, and other
four-footed household pets and pests, also of foreign origin.
If we allow half a solid foot to the skeleton and other slowly
destructible parts of each animal, the remains of these herds would form
a cubical mass measuring not much short of four hundred and fifty feet
to the side, or a pyramid equal in dimensions to that of Cheops, and as
the average life of these animals does not exceed six or seven years,
the accumulations of their bones, horns, hoofs, and other durable
remains would amount to at least fifteen times as great a volume in a
single century. It is true that the actual mass of solid matter, left by
the decay of dead domestic quadrupeds and permanently added to the crust
of the earth, is not so great as this calculation makes it. The greatest
proportion of the soft parts of domestic animals, and even of the bones,
is soon decomposed, through direct consumption by man and other
carnivora, industrial use, and employment as manure, and enters into new
combinations in which its animal origin is scarcely traceable; there is,
nevertheless, a large annual residuum, which, like decayed vegetable
matter, becomes a part of the superficial mould; and in any event, brute
life immensely changes the form and character of the superficial strata,
if it does not sensibly augment the quantity of the matter composing
them.
The remains of man, too, add to the earthy coating that covers the face
of the globe. The human bodies deposited in the catacombs during the
long, long ages of Egyptian history, would perhaps build as large a pile
as one generation of the quadrupeds of the United States. In the
barbarous days of old Moslem warfare, the conquerors erected large
pyramids of human skulls. The soil of cemeteries in the great cities of
Europe has sometimes been raised several feet by the deposit of the dead
during a few generations. In the East, Turks and Christians alike bury
bodies but a couple of feet beneath the surface. The grave is respected
as long as the tombstone remains, but the sepultures of the ignoble
poor, and of those whose monuments time or accident has removed, are
opened again and again to receive fresh occupants. Hence the ground in
Oriental cemeteries is pervaded with relics of humanity, if not wholly
composed of them; and an examination of the soil of the lower part of
the _Petit Champ des Morts_ at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the
observer that it consists almost exclusively of the comminuted bones of
his fellow man.
[60] It is asserted that the bones of mammoths and mastodons, in many
instances, appear to have been grazed or cut by flint arrow-heads or
other stone weapons. These accounts have often been discredited, because
it has been assumed that the extinction of these animals was more
ancient than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it highly
probable, if not certain, that this conclusion has been too hastily
adopted. Lyell observes: "These stories * * must in future be more
carefully inquired into, for we can scarcely doubt that the mastodon in
North America lived down to a period when the mammoth coexisted with man
in Europe."--_Antiquity of Man_, p. 354.
On page 143 of the volume just quoted, the same very distinguished
writer remarks that man "no doubt played his part in hastening the era
of the extinction" of the large pachyderms and beasts of prey; but, as
contemporaneous species of other animals, which man cannot be supposed,
to have extirpated, have also become extinct, he argues that the
disappearance of the quadrupeds in question cannot be ascribed to human
action alone.
On this point it may be observed that, as we cannot know what precise
physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct
organism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified
by the action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of
such organisms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no just
idea.
[61] Evelyn thought the depasturing of grass by cattle serviceable to
its growth. "The biting of cattle," he remarks, "gives a gentle
loosening to the roots of the herbage, and makes it to grow fine and
sweet, and their very breath and treading as well as soil, and the
comfort of their warm bodies, is wholesome and marvellously
cherishing."--_Terra, or Philosophical Discourse of Earth_, p. 36.
In a note upon this passage, Hunter observes: "Nice farmers consider the
lying of a beast upon the ground, for one night only, as a sufficient
tilth for the year. The breath of graminivorous quadrupeds does
certainly enrich the roots of grass; a circumstance worthy of the
attention of the philosophical farmer."--_Terra_, same page.
The "philosophical farmer" of the present day will not adopt these
opinions without some qualification.
[62] The rat and the mouse, though not voluntarily transported, are
passengers by every ship that sails from Europe to a foreign port, and
several species of these quadrupeds have, consequently, much extended
their range and increased their numbers in modern times. From a story of
Heliogabalus related by Lampridius, _Hist. Aug. Scriptores_, ed.
Casaubon, 1690, p. 110, it would seem that mice at least were not very
common in ancient Rome. Among the capricious freaks of that emperor, it
is said that he undertook to investigate the statistics of the arachnoid
population of the capital, and that 10,000 pounds of spiders (or
spiders' webs--for aranea is equivocal) were readily collected; but when
he got up a mouse show, he thought ten thousand mice a very fair number.
I believe as many might almost be found in a single palace in modern
Rome. Rats are not less numerous in all great cities, and in Paris,
where their skins are used for gloves, and their flesh, it is whispered,
in some very complex and equivocal dishes, they are caught by legions. I
have read of a manufacturer who contracted to buy of the rat catchers,
at a high price, all the rat skins they could furnish before a certain
date, and failed, within a week, for want of capital, when the stock of
peltry had run up to 600,000.
[63] BIGELOW, _Les Etats Unis en_ 1863, pp. 379, 380. In the same
paragraph this volume states the number of animals slaughtered in the
United States by butchers, in 1859, at 212,871,653. This is an error of
the press. Number is confounded with value. A reference to the tables of
the census shows that the animals slaughtered that year were estimated
at 212,871,653 _dollars_; the number of head is not given. The wild
horses and horned cattle of the prairies and the horses of the Indians
are not included in the returns.
[64] Of this total number, 2,240,000, or nearly nine per cent., are
reported as working oxen. This would strike European, and especially
English agriculturists, as a large proportion; but it is explained by
the difference between a new country and an old, in the conditions which
determine the employment of animal labor. Oxen are very generally used
in the United States and Canada for hauling timber and firewood through
and from the forests; for ploughing in ground still full of rocks,
stumps, and roots; for breaking up the new soil of the prairies with its
strong matting of native grasses, and for the transportation of heavy
loads over the rough roads of the interior. In all these cases, the
frequent obstructions to the passage of the timber, the plough, and the
sled or cart, are a source of constant danger to the animals, the
vehicles, and the harness, and the slow and steady step of the ox is
attended with much less risk than the swift and sudden movements of the
impatient horse. It is surprising to see the sagacity with which the
dull and clumsy ox--hampered as he is by the rigid yoke, the most absurd
implement of draught ever contrived by man--picks his way, when once
trained to forest work, among rocks and roots, and even climbs over
fallen trees, not only moving safely, but drawing timber over ground
wholly impracticable for the light and agile horse.
Cows, so constantly employed for draught in Italy, are never yoked or
otherwise used for labor in America, except in the Slave States.
[65] "About five miles from camp we ascended to the top of a high hill,
and for a great distance ahead every square mile seemed to have a herd
of buffalo upon it. Their number was variously estimated by the members
of the party; by some as high as half a million. I do not think it any
exaggeration to set it down at 200,000."--STEVENS'S _Narrative and Final
Report. Reports of Explorations and Surveys for Railroad to Pacific_,
vol. xii, book i, 1860.
The next day, the party fell in with a "buffalo trail," where at least
100,000 were thought to have crossed a slough.
[66] The most zealous and successful New England hunter of whom I have
any personal knowledge, and who continued to indulge his favorite
passion much beyond the age which generally terminates exploits in
woodcraft, lamented on his deathbed that he had not lived long enough to
carry up the record of his slaughtered deer to the number of one
thousand, which he had fixed as the limit of his ambition. He was able
to handle the rifle, for sixty years, at a period when the game was
still nearly as abundant as ever, but had killed only nine hundred and
sixty of these quadrupeds, of all species. The exploits of this Nimrod
have been far exceeded by prairie hunters, but I doubt whether, in the
originally wooded territory of the Union, any single marksman has
brought down a larger number.
[67] _Erdkunde_, viii. _Asien, 1ste Abtheilung_, pp. 660, 758.
[68] See chapter iii, _post_; also HUMBOLDT, _Ansichten der Natur_, i,
p. 71. From the anatomical character of the bones of the urus, or
auerochs, found among the relics of the lacustrine population of ancient
Switzerland, and from other circumstances, it is inferred that this
animal had been domesticated by that people; and it is stated, I know
not upon what authority, in _Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia_, that it had
been tamed by the Veneti also. See LYELL, _Antiquity of Man_, pp. 24,
25, and the last-named work, p. 489. This is a fact of much interest,
because it is, I believe, the only known instance of the extinction of a
domestic quadruped, and the extreme improbability of such an event gives
some countenance to the theory of the identity of the domestic ox with,
and its descent from, the urus.
[69] In maintaining the recent existence of the lion in the countries
named in the text, naturalists have, perhaps, laid too much weight on
the frequent occurrence of representations of this animal in sculptures
apparently of a historical character. It will not do to argue, twenty
centuries hence, that the lion and the unicorn were common in Great
Britain in Queen Victoria's time, because they are often seen "fighting
for the crown" in the carvings and paintings of that period.
[70]
Dar nach sloger schiere, einen wisent bat elch.
Starcher bore biere. but einen grimmen schelch.
_XVI Auentiure._
The testimony of the _Nibelungen-Lied_ is not conclusive evidence that
these quadrupeds existed in Germany at the time of the composition of
that poem. It proves too much; for, a few lines above those just quoted,
Sigfrid is said to have killed a lion, an animal which the most
patriotic Teuton will hardly claim as a denizen of mediaeval Germany.
[71] The wild turkey takes readily to the water, and is able to cross
rivers of very considerable width by swimming. By way of giving me an
idea of the former abundance of this bird, an old and highly respectable
gentleman who was among the early white settlers of the West, told me
that he once counted, in walking down the northern bank of the Ohio
River, within a distance of four miles, eighty-four turkeys as they
landed singly, or at most in pairs, after swimming over from the
Kentucky side.
[72] The wood pigeon has been observed to increase in numbers in Europe
also, when pains have been taken to exterminate the hawk. The pigeons,
which migrated in flocks so numerous that they were whole days in
passing a given point, were no doubt injurious to the grain, but
probably less so than is generally supposed; for they did not confine
themselves exclusively to the harvests for their nourishment.
[73] Pigeons were shot near Albany, in New York, a few years ago, with
green rice in their crops, which it was thought must have been growing,
a very few hours before, at the distance of seven or eight hundred
miles.
[74] Professor Treadwell, of Massachusetts, found that a half-grown
American robin in confinement ate in one day sixty-eight earthworms,
weighing together nearly once and a half as much as the bird himself,
and another had previously starved upon a daily allowance of eight or
ten worms, or about twenty per cent. of his own weight. The largest of
these numbers appeared, so far as could be judged by watching parent
birds of the same species, as they brought food to their young, to be
much greater than that supplied to them when fed in the nest; for the
old birds did not return with worms or insects oftener than once in ten
minutes on an average. If we suppose the parents to hunt for food twelve
hours in a day, and a nest to contain four young, we should have
seventy-two worms, or eighteen each, as the daily supply of the brood.
It is probable enough that some of the food collected by the parents may
be more nutritious than the earthworms, and consequently that a smaller
quantity sufficed for the young in the nest than when reared under
artificial conditions.
The supply required by growing birds is not the measure of their wants
after they have arrived at maturity, and it is not by any means certain
that great muscular exertion always increases the demand for
nourishment, either in the lower animals or in man. The members of the
English Alpine Club are not distinguished for appetites which would make
them unwelcome guests to Swiss landlords, and I think every man who has
had the personal charge of field or railway hands, must have observed
that laborers who spare their strength the least are not the most
valiant trencher champions. During the period when imprisonment for debt
was permitted in New England, persons confined in country jails had no
specific allowance, and they were commonly fed without stint. I have
often inquired concerning their diet, and been assured by the jailers
that their prisoners, who were not provided with work or other means of
exercise, consumed a considerably larger supply of food than common
out-door laborers.
[75] I hope Michelet has good authority for this statement, but I am
unable to confirm it.
[76] Apropos of the sparrow--a single pair of which, according to
Michelet, p. 315, carries to the nest four thousand and three hundred
caterpillars or coleoptera in a week--I take from the _Record_, an
English religious newspaper, of December 15, 1862, the following article
communicated to a country paper by a person who signs himself "A real
friend to the farmer:"
"_Crawley Sparrow Club._--The annual dinner took place at the George Inn
on Wednesday last. The first prize was awarded to Mr. I. Redford, Worth,
having destroyed within the last year 1,467. Mr. Heayman took the second
with 1,448 destroyed. Mr. Stone, third, with 982 affixed. Total
destroyed, 11,944. Old birds, 8,663; young ditto, 722; eggs, 2,556."
This trio of valiant fowlers, and their less fortunate--or rather less
unfortunate, but not therefore less guilty--associates, have rescued by
their prowess, it may be, a score of pecks of grain from being devoured
by the voracious sparrow, but every one of the twelve thousand hatched
and unhatched birds, thus sacrificed to puerile vanity and ignorant
prejudice, would have saved his bushel of wheat by preying upon insects
that destroy the grain. Mr. Redford, Mr. Heayman, and Mr. Stone ought to
contribute the value of the bread they have wasted to the fund for the
benefit of the Lancashire weavers; and it is to be hoped that the next
Byron will satirize the sparrowcide as severely as the first did the
prince of anglers, Walton, in the well known lines:
"The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it."
[77] SALVAGNOLI, _Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane_, p. 143. The country
about Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen or twenty feet high,
which are a standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the
fowlers who watch from them the flocks of small birds and drive them
down in to the nets by throwing stones over them. See _Appendix_, No.
14.
Tschudi has collected in his little work, _Ueber die
Landwirthschaftliche Bedeutung der Voegel_, many interesting facts
respecting the utility of birds, and the wanton destruction of them in
Italy and elsewhere. Not only the owl, but many other birds more
familiarly known as predacious in their habits, are useful by destroying
great numbers of mice and moles. The importance of this last service
becomes strikingly apparent when it is known that the burrows of the
mole are among the most frequent causes of rupture in the dikes of the
Po, and, consequently, of inundations which lay many square miles under
water.--_Annales des Ponts et Chaussees_, 1847, 1re semestre, p. 150.
See also VOGT, _Nuetzliche u. schaedliche Thiere_.
[78] Wild birds are very tenacious in their habits. The extension of
particular branches of agriculture introduces new birds; but unless in
the case of such changes in physical conditions, particular species seem
indissolubly attached to particular localities. The migrating tribes
follow almost undeviatingly the same precise line of flight in their
annual journeys, and establish themselves in the same breeding places
from year to year. The stork is a strong-winged bird and roves far for
food, but very rarely establishes new colonies. He is common in Holland,
but unknown in England. Not above five or six pairs of storks commonly
breed in the suburbs of Constantinople along the European shore of the
narrow Bosphorus, while--much to the satisfaction of the Moslems, who
are justly proud of the marked partiality of so orthodox a bird--dozens
of chimneys of the true believers on the Asiatic side are crowned with
his nests. See _App._ No. 15.
[79] It is not the unfledged and the nursing bird alone that are exposed
to destruction by severe weather. Whole flocks of adult and
strong-winged tribes are killed by hail. Severe winters are usually
followed by a sensible diminution in the numbers of the non-migrating
birds, and a cold storm in summer often proves fatal to the more
delicate species. On the 10th of June, 184-, five or six inches of snow
fell in Northern Vermont. The next morning I found a humming bird killed
by the cold, and hanging by its claws just below a loose clapboard on
the wall of a small wooden building where it had sought shelter.
[80] LYELL, _Antiquity of Man_, p. 409, observes: "Of birds it is
estimated that the number of those which die every year equals the
aggregate number by which the species to which they respectively belong
is, on the average, permanently represented."
A remarkable instance of the influence of new circumstances upon birds
was observed upon the establishment of a lighthouse on Cape Cod some
years since. The morning after the lamps were lighted for the first
time, more than a hundred dead birds of several different species,
chiefly water fowl, were found at the foot of the tower. They had been
killed in the course of the night by flying against the thick glass or
grating of the lantern. See _Appendix_, No. 16.
Migrating birds, whether for greater security from eagles, hawks, and
other enemies, or for some unknown reason, perform a great part of their
annual journeys by night; and it is observed in the Alps that they
follow the high roads in their passage across the mountains. This is
partly because the food in search of which they must sometimes descend
is principally found near the roads. It is, however, not altogether for
the sake of consorting with man, or of profiting by his labors, that
their line of flight conforms to the paths he has traced, but rather
because the great roads are carried through the natural depressions in
the chain, and hence the birds can cross the summit by these routes
without rising to a height where at the seasons of migration the cold
would be excessive.
The instinct which guides migratory birds in their course is not in all
cases infallible, and it seems to be confounded by changes in the
condition of the surface. I am familiar with a village in New England,
at the junction of two valleys, each drained by a mill stream, where the
flocks of wild geese which formerly passed, every spring and autumn,
were very frequently lost, as it was popularly phrased, and I have often
heard their screams in the night as they flew wildly about in perplexity
as to the proper course. Perhaps the village lights embarrassed them, or
perhaps the constant changes in the face of the country, from the
clearings then going on, introduced into the landscape features not
according with the ideal map handed down in the anserine family, and
thus deranged its traditional geography.
[81] The cappercailzie, or tjaeder, as he is called in Sweden, is a bird
of singular habits, and seems to want some of the protective instincts
which secure most other wild birds from destruction. The younger
Laestadius frequently notices the tjaeder, in his very remarkable account
of the Swedish Laplanders--a work wholly unsurpassed as a genial picture
of semi-barbarian life, and not inferior in minuteness of detail to
Schlatter's description of the manners of the Nogai Tartars, or even to
Lane's admirable and exhaustive work on the Modern Egyptians. The
tjaeder, though not a bird of passage, is migratory, or rather wandering
in domicile, and appears to undertake very purposeless and absurd
journeys. "When he flits," says Laestadius, "he follows a straight
course, and sometimes pursues it quite out of the country. It is said
that, in foggy weather, he sometimes flies out to sea, and, when tired,
falls into the water and is drowned. It is accordingly observed that,
when he flies westwardly, toward the mountains, he soon comes back
again; but when he takes an eastwardly course, he returns no more, and
for a long time is very scarce in Lapland. From this it would seem that
he turns back from the bald mountains, when he discovers that he has
strayed from his proper home, the wood; but when he finds himself over
the Baltic, where he cannot alight to rest and collect himself, he flies
on until he is exhausted and falls into the sea."--PETRUS LAESTADIUS,
_Journal af foersta aret, etc._, p. 325.
[82] _Die Herzogthuemer Schleswig und Holstein_, i, p. 203.
[83] Gulls hover about ships in port, and often far out at sea,
diligently watching for the waste of the caboose. "While the four great
fleets, English, French, Turkish, and Egyptian, were lying in the
Bosphorus, in the summer and autumn of 1853, a young lady of my family
called my attention to the fact that the gulls were far more numerous
about the ships of one of the fleets than about the others. This was
verified by repeated observation, and the difference was owing no doubt
to the greater abundance of the refuse from the cookrooms of the naval
squadron most frequented by the birds. Persons acquainted with the
economy of the navies of the states in question, will be able to
conjecture which fleet was most favored with these delicate attentions.
[84] Birds do not often voluntarily take passage on board ships bound
for foreign countries, but I can testify to one such case. A stork,
which had nested near one of the palaces on the Bosphorus, had, by some
accident, injured a wing, and was unable to join his follows when they
commenced their winter migration to the banks of the Nile. Before he was
able to fly again, he was caught, and the flag of the nation to which
the palace belonged was tied to his leg, so that he was easily
identified at a considerable distance. As his wing grow stronger, he
made several unsatisfactory experiments at flight, and at last, by a
vigorous effort, succeeded in reaching a passing ship bound southward,
and perched himself on a topsail yard. I happened to witness this
movement, and observed him quietly maintaining his position as long as I
could discern him with a spyglass. I suppose he finished the voyage, for
he certainly did not return to the palace.
[85] The enthusiasm of naturalists is not always proportioned to the
magnitude or importance of the organisms they concern themselves with.
It is not recorded that Adams, who found the colossal antediluvian
pachyderm in a thick-ribbed mountain of Siberian ice, ran wild over his
_trouvaille_; but Schmidl, in describing the natural history of the
caves of the Karst, speaks of an eminent entomologist as "_der
glueckliche Entdecker_," the _happy_ discoverer of a new coleopteron, in
one of those dim caverns. How various are the sources of happiness!
Think of a learned German professor, the bare enumeration of whose
Rath-ships and scientific Mitglied-ships fills a page, made famous in
the annals of science, immortal, happy, by the discovery of a beetle!
Had that imperial _ennuye_, who offered a premium for the invention of a
new pleasure, but read Schmidl's _Hoehlen des Karstes_, what splendid
rewards would he not have heaped upon Kirby and Spence!
[86] I believe there is no foundation for the supposition that
earthworms attack the tuber of the potato. Some of them, especially one
or two species employed by anglers as bait, if natives of the woods, are
at least rare in shaded grounds, but multiply very rapidly after the
soil is brought under cultivation. Forty or fifty years ago they were so
scarce in the newer parts of New England, that the rustic fishermen of
every village kept secret the few places where they were to be found in
their neighborhood, as a professional mystery, but at present one can
hardly turn over a shovelful of rich moist soil anywhere, without
unearthing several of them. A very intelligent lady, born in the woods
of Northern New England, told me that, in her childhood, these worms
were almost unknown in that region, though anxiously sought for by the
anglers, but that they increased as the country was cleared, and at last
became so numerous in some places, that the water of springs, and even
of shallow wells, which had formerly been excellent, was rendered
undrinkable by the quantity of dead worms that fell into them. The
increase of the robin and other small birds which follow the settler
when he has prepared a suitable home for them, at last checked the
excessive multiplication of the worms, and abated the nuisance.
[87] I have already remarked that the remains of extant animals are
rarely, if ever, gathered in sufficient quantities to possess any
geographical importance by their mere mass; but the decayed exuviae of
even the smaller and humbler forms of life are sometimes abundant enough
to exercise a perceptible influence on soil and atmosphere. "The plain
of Cumana," says Humboldt, "presents a remarkable phenomenon, after
heavy rains. The moistened earth, when heated by the rays of the sun,
diffuses the musky odor common in the torrid zone to animals of very
different classes, to the jaguar, the small species of tiger cat, the
cabiai, the gallinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper, and the
rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations, the vehicles of this aroma, appear
to be disengaged in proportion as the soil, which contains the remains
of an innumerable multitude of reptiles, worms, and insects, begins to
be impregnated with water. Wherever we stir the earth, we are struck
with the mass of organic substances which in turn are developed and
become transformed or decomposed. Nature in these climes seems more
active, more prolific, and so to speak, more prodigal of life."
[88] It is remarkable that Palissy, to whose great merits as an acute
observer I am happy to have frequent occasion to bear testimony, had
noticed that vegetation was necessary to maintain the purity of water in
artificial reservoirs, though he mistook the rationale of its influence,
which he ascribed to the elemental "salt" supposed by him to play an
important part in all the operations of nature. In his treatise upon
Waters and Fountains, p. 174, of the reprint of 1844, he says: "And in
special, thou shalt note one point, the which is understood of few: that
is to say, that the leaves of the trees which fall upon the parterre,
and the herbs growing beneath, and singularly the fruits, if any there
be upon the trees, being decayed, the waters of the parterre shall draw
unto them the salt of the said fruits, leaves, and herbs, the which
shall greatly better the water of thy fountains, and hinder the
putrefaction thereof."
[89] Between the years 1851 and 1853, both inclusive, the United States
exported 2,665,857 pounds of beeswax, besides a considerable quantity
employed in the manufacture of candles for exportation. This is an
average of more than 330,000 pounds per year. The census of 1850 gave
the total production of wax and honey for that year at 14,853,128
pounds. In 1860, it amounted to 26,370,813 pounds, the increase being
partly due to the introduction of improved races of bees from Italy and
Switzerland.--BIGELOW, _Les Etats Unis en 1863_, p. 376.
[90] A few years ago, a laborer, employed at a North American port in
discharging a cargo of hides from the opposite extremity of the
continent, was fatally poisoned by the bite or the sting of an unknown
insect, which ran out from a hide he was handling.
[91] In many insects, some of the stages of life regularly continue for
several years, and they may, under peculiar circumstances, be almost
indefinitely prolonged. Dr. Dwight mentions the following remarkable
case of this sort, which may be new to many readers: "While I was here
[at Williamstown, Mass.], Dr. Fitch showed me an insect, about an inch
in length, of a brown color tinged with orange, with two antennae, not
unlike a rosebug. This insect came out of a tea table, made of the
boards of an apple tree." Dr. Dwight examined the table, and found the
"cavity whence the insect had emerged into the light," to be "about two
inches in length, nearly horizontal, and inclining upward very little,
except at the mouth. Between the hole, and the outside of the leaf of
the table, there were forty grains of the wood." It was supposed that
the sawyer and the cabinet maker must have removed at least thirteen
grains more, and the table had been in the possession of its proprietor
for twenty years.
[92] It does not appear to be quite settled whether the termites of
France are indigenous or imported. See QUATREFAGES, _Souvenirs d'un
Naturaliste_, ii, pp. 400, 542, 543.
[93] I have seen the larva of the dragon fly in an aquarium, bite off
the head of a young fish as long as itself.
[94] Insects and fish--which prey upon and feed each other--are the only
forms of animal life that are numerous in the native woods, and their
range is, of course, limited by the extent of the waters. The great
abundance of the trout, and of other more or less allied genera in the
lakes of Lapland, seems to be due to the supply of food provided for
them by the swarms of insects which in the larva state inhabit the
waters, or, in other stages of their life, are accidentally swept into
them. All travellers in the north of Europe speak of the gnat and the
mosquito as very serious drawbacks upon the enjoyments of the summer
tourist, who visits the head of the Gulf of Bothnia to see the midnight
sun, and the brothers Laestadius regard them as one of the great plagues
of sub-Arctic life. "The persecutions of these insects," says Lars Levi
Laestadius [_Culex pipiens_, _Culex reptans_, and _Culex pulicaris_],
"leave not a moment's peace, by day or night, to any living creature.
Not only man, but cattle, and even birds and wild beasts, suffer
intolerably from their bite." He adds in a note, "I will not affirm that
they have ever devoured a living man, but many young cattle, such as
lambs and calves, have been worried out of their lives by them. All the
people of Lapland declare that young birds are killed by them, and this
is not improbable, for birds are scarce after seasons when the midge,
the gnat, and the mosquito are numerous."--_Om Uppodlingar i
Lappmarken_, p. 50.
Petrus Laestadius makes similar statements in his _Journal foer foersta
aret_, p. 285.
[95] It is very questionable whether there is any foundation for the
popular belief in the hostility of swine and of deer to the rattlesnake,
and careful experiments as to the former quadruped seem to show that the
supposed enmity is wholly imaginary. Observing that the starlings,
_stornelli_, which bred in an old tower in Piedmont, carried something
from their nests and dropped it upon the ground, about as often as they
brought food to their young, I watched their proceedings, and found
every day lying near the tower numbers of dead or dying slowworms, and,
in a few cases, small lizards, which had, in every instance, lost about
two inches of the tail. This part I believe the starlings gave to their
nestlings, and threw away the remainder.
[96] Russell denies the existence of poisonous snakes in Northern Syria,
and states that the last instance of death known to have occurred from
the bite of a serpent near Aleppo took place a hundred years before his
time. In Palestine, the climate, the thinness of population, the
multitude of insects and of lizards, all circumstances, in fact, seem
very favorable to the multiplication of serpents, but the venomous
species, at least, are extremely rare, if at all known, in that country.
I have, however, been assured by persons very familiar with Mount
Lebanon, that cases of poisoning from the bite of snakes had occurred
within a few years, near Hasbeiyeh, and at other places on the southern
declivities of Lebanon and Hermon. In Egypt, on the other hand, the
cobra, the asp, and the cerastes are as numerous as ever, and are much
dreaded by all the natives, except the professional snake charmers. See
_Appendix_, No. 18.
[97] I use _whale_ not in a technical sense, but as a generic term for
all the large inhabitants of the sea popularly grouped under that name.
[98] From the narrative of Ohther, introduced by King Alfred into his
translation of Orosius, it is clear that the Northmen pursued the whale
fishery in the ninth century, and it appears, both from the poem called
The Whale, in the Codex Exoniensis, and from the dialogue with the
fisherman in the Colloquies of Aelfric, that the Anglo-Saxons followed
this dangerous chase at a period not much later. I am not aware of any
evidence to show that any of the Latin nations engaged in this fishery
until a century or two afterward, though it may not be easy to disprove
their earlier participation in it. In mediaeval literature, Latin and
Romance, very frequent mention is made of a species of vessel called in
Latin, _baleneria_, _balenerium_, _balenerius_, _balaneria_, etc.; in
Catalan, _balener_; in French, _balenier_; all of which words occur in
many other forms. The most obvious etymology of these words would
suggest the meaning, _whaler_, _baleinier_; but some have supposed that
the name was descriptive of the great size of the ships, and others have
referred it to a different root. From the fourteenth century, the word
occurs oftener, perhaps, in old Catalan, than in any other language; but
Capmany does not notice the whale fishery as one of the maritime
pursuits of the very enterprising Catalan people, nor do I find any of
the products of the whale mentioned in the old Catalan tariffs. The
_whalebone_ of the mediaeval writers, which is described as very white,
is doubtless the ivory of the walrus or of the narwhale.
[99] In consequence of the great scarcity of the whale, the use of coal
gas for illumination, the substitution of other fatty and oleaginous
substances, such as lard, palm oil, and petroleum, for right-whale oil
and spermaceti, the whale fishery has rapidly fallen off within a few
years. The great supply of petroleum, which is much used for lubricating
machinery as well as for numerous other purposes, has produced a more
perceptible effect on the whale fishery than any other single
circumstance. According to Bigelow, _Les Etats Unis en 1863_, p. 346,
the American whaling fleet was diminished by 29 in 1858, 57 in 1860, 94
in 1861, and 65 in 1862. The present number of American ships employed
in that fishery is 353.
[100] The Origin and History of the English Language, &c., pp. 423, 424.
[101] Among the unexpected results of human action, the destruction or
multiplication of fish, as well as of other animals, is a not unfrequent
occurrence. I shall have occasion to mention on a following page the
extermination of the fish in a Swedish river by a flood occasioned by
the sudden discharge of the waters of a pond. Williams, in his _History
of Vermont_, i, p. 149, quoted in Thompson's _Natural History of
Vermont_, p. 142, records a case of the increase of trout from an
opposite cause. In a pond formed by damming a small stream to obtain
water power for a sawmill, and covering one thousand acres of primitive
forest, the increased supply of food brought within reach of the fish
multiplied them to that degree, that, at the head of the pond, where, in
the spring, they crowded together in the brook which supplied it, they
were taken by the hands at pleasure, and swine caught them without
difficulty. A single sweep of a small scoopnet would bring up half a
bushel, carts were filled with them as fast as if picked up on dry land,
and in the fishing season they were commonly sold at a shilling
(eightpence halfpenny, or about seventeen cents) a bushel. The increase
in the size of the trout was as remarkable as the multiplication of
their numbers.
[102] BABINET, _Etudes et Lectures_, ii, pp. 108, 110.
[103] THOMPSON, _Natural History of Vermont_, p. 38, and Appendix,
p. 13. There is no reason to believe that the seal breeds in Lake
Champlain, but the individual last taken there must have been some
weeks, at least, in its waters. It was killed on the ice in the widest
part of the lake, on the 23d of February, thirteen days after the
surface was entirely frozen, except the usual small cracks, and a month
or two after the ice closed at all points north of the place where the
seal was found.
[104] See page 89, note, _ante_.
[105] According to Hartwig, the United Provinces of Holland had, in
1618, three thousand herring busses and nine thousand vessels engaged in
the transport of these fish to market. The whole number of persons
employed in the Dutch herring fishery was computed at 200,000.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this fishery was most
successfully prosecuted by the Swedes, and in 1781, the town of
Gottenburg alone exported 136,649 barrels, each containing 1,200
herrings, making a total of about 164,000,000; but so rapid was the
exhaustion of the fish, from this keen pursuit, that in 1799 it was
found necessary to prohibit the exportation of them altogether.--_Das
Leben des Meeres_, p. 182.
In 1855, the British fisheries produced 900,000 barrels, or enough to
supply a fish to every human inhabitant of the globe.
On the shores of Long Island Sound, the white fish, a species of herring
too bony to be easily eaten, is used as manure in very great quantities.
Ten thousand are employed as a dressing for an acre, and a single net
has sometimes taken 200,000 in a day.--DWIGHT's _Travels_, ii, pp. 512,
515.
[106] The indiscriminate hostility of man to inferior forms of animated
life is little creditable to modern civilization, and it is painful to
reflect that it becomes keener and more unsparing in proportion to the
refinement of the race. The savage slays no animal, not even the
rattlesnake, wantonly; and the Turk, whom we call a barbarian, treats
the dumb beast as gently as a child. One cannot live many weeks in
Turkey without witnessing touching instances of the kindness of the
people to the lower animals, and I have found it very difficult to
induce even the boys to catch lizards and other reptiles for
preservation as specimens. See _Appendix_, No. 19.
The fearless confidence in man, so generally manifested by wild animals
in newly discovered islands, ought to have inspired a gentler treatment
of them; but a very few years of the relentless pursuit, to which they
are immediately subjected, suffice to make them as timid as the wildest
inhabitants of the European forest. This timidity, however, may easily
be overcome. The squirrels introduced by Mayor Smith into the public
parks of Boston are so tame as to feed from the hands of passengers, and
they not unfrequently enter the neighboring houses.
[107] A fact mentioned by Schubert--and which in its causes and many of
its results corresponds almost precisely with those connected with the
escape of Barton Pond in Vermont, so well known to geological
students--is important, as showing that the diminution of the fish in
rivers exposed to inundations is chiefly to be ascribed to the
mechanical action of the current, and not mainly, as some have supposed,
to changes of temperature occasioned by clearing. Our author states
that, in 1796, a terrible inundation was produced in the Indalself,
which rises in the Storsjoe in Jemtland, by drawing off into it the
waters of another lake near Ragunda. The flood destroyed houses and
fields; much earth was swept into the channel, and the water made turbid
and muddy; the salmon and the smaller fish forsook the river altogether,
and never returned. The banks of the river have never regained their
former solidity, and portions of their soil are still continually
falling into the water.--_Resa genom Sverge_, ii, p. 51.
[108] WITTWER, _Physikalische Geographie_, p. 142.
[109] To vary the phrase, I make occasional use of _animalcule_, which,
as a popular designation, embraces all microscopic organisms. The name
is founded on the now exploded supposition that all of them are
animated, which was the general belief of naturalists when attention was
first drawn to them. It was soon discovered that many of them were
unquestionably vegetable, and there are numerous genera the true
classification of which is matter of dispute among the ablest observers.
There are cases in which objects formerly taken for living animalcules
turn out to be products of the decomposition of matter once animated,
and it is admitted that neither spontaneous motion nor even apparent
irritability are sure signs of animal life.
[110] See an interesting report on the coral fishery, by Sant' Agabio,
Italian Consul-General at Algiers, in the _Bollettino Consolare_,
published by the Department of Foreign Affairs, 1862, pp. 139, 151, and
in the _Annali di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio_, No. ii, pp. 360,
373.
[111] The fermentation of liquids, and in many cases the decomposition
of semi-solids, formerly supposed to be owing purely to chemical action,
are now ascertained to be due to vital processes of living minute
organisms both vegetable and animal, and consequently to physiological,
as well as to chemical forces. Even alcohol is stated to be an animal
product. See an interesting article by Auguste Laugel on the recent
researches of Pasteur, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, for September
15th, 1863.
[112] The recorded evidence in support of the proposition in the text
has been collected by L. F. Alfred Maury, in his _Histoire des grandes
Forets de la Gaule et de l'ancienne France_, and by Becquerel, in his
important work, _Des climats et de l'Influence qu'exercent les Sols
boises et non boises_, livre ii, chap. i to iv.
We may rank among historical evidences on this point, if not technically
among historical records, old geographical names and terminations
etymologically indicating forest or grove, which are so common in many
parts of the Eastern Continent now entirely stripped of woods--such as,
in Southern Europe, Breuil, Broglio, Brolio, Brolo; in Northern, Bruehl,
-wald, -wold, -wood, -shaw, -skeg, and -skov.
[113] The island of Madeira, whose noble forests were devastated by fire
not long after its colonization by European settlers, derives its name
from the Portuguese word for wood.
[114] Browsing animals, and most of all the goat, are considered by
foresters as more injurious to the growth of young trees, and,
therefore, to the reproduction of the forest, than almost any other
destructive cause. "According to Beatson's _Saint Helena_, introductory
chapter, and Darwin's _Journal of Researches in Geology and Natural
History_, pp. 582, 583," says Emsmann, in the notes to his translation
of Foissac, p. 654, "it was the goats which destroyed the beautiful
forests that, three hundred and fifty years ago, covered a continuous
surface of not less than two thousand acres in the interior of the
island [of St. Helena], not to mention scattered groups of trees. Darwin
observes: 'During our stay at Valparaiso, I was most positively assured
that sandal wood formerly grew in abundance on the island of Juan
Fernandez, but that this tree had now become entirely extinct there,
having been extirpated by the goats which early navigators had
introduced. The neighboring islands, to which goats have not been
carried, still abound in sandal wood.'"
In the winter, the deer tribe, especially the great American moose deer,
subsists much on the buds and young sprouts of trees; yet--though from
the destruction of the wolves or from some not easily explained cause,
these latter animals have recently multiplied so rapidly in some parts
of North America, that, not long since, four hundred of them are said to
have been killed, in one season, on a territory in Maine not comprising
more than one hundred and fifty square miles--the wild browsing
quadrupeds are rarely, if ever, numerous enough in regions uninhabited
by man to produce any sensible effect on the condition of the forest. A
reason why they are less injurious than the goat to young trees may be
that they resort to this nutriment only in the winter, when the grasses
and shrubs are leafless or covered with snow, whereas the goat feeds
upon buds and young shoots principally in the season of growth. However
this may be, the natural law of consumption and supply keeps the forest
growth, and the wild animals which live on its products, in such a state
of equilibrium as to insure the indefinite continuance of both, and the
perpetuity of neither is endangered until man, who is above natural law,
interferes and destroys the balance.
When, however, deer are bred and protected in parks, they multiply like
domestic cattle, and become equally injurious to trees. "A few years
ago," says Clave, "there were not less than two thousand deer of
different ages in the forest of Fontainebleau. For want of grass, they
are driven to the trees, and they do not spare them. * * It is
calculated that the browsing of these animals, and the consequent
retardation of the growth of the wood, diminishes the annual product
of the forest to the amount of two hundred thousand cubic feet per
year, * * and besides this, the trees thus mutilated are soon exhausted
and die. The deer attack the pines, too, tearing off the bark in long
strips, or rubbing their heads against them when shedding their horns;
and sometimes, in groves of more than a hundred hectares, not one pine
is found uninjured by them."--_Revue des Deux Mondes_, Mai, 1863, p.
157. See also _Appendix_, No. 21.
Beckstein computes that a park of 2,500 acres, containing 250 acres of
marsh, 250 of fields and meadows, and the remaining 2,000 of wood, may
keep 364 deer of different species, 47 wild boars, 200 hares, 100
rabbits, and an indefinite number of pheasants. These animals would
require, in winter, 123,000 pounds of hay, and 22,000 pounds of
potatoes, besides what they would pick up themselves. The natural forest
most thickly peopled with wild animals would not, in temperate climates,
contain, upon the average, one tenth of these numbers to the same extent
of surface.
[115] Even the volcanic dust of Etna remains very long unproductive.
Near Nicolosi is a great extent of coarse black sand, thrown out in
1669, which, for almost two centuries, lay entirely bare, and can be
made to grow plants only by artificial mixtures and much labor.
The increase in the price of wines, in consequence of the diminution of
the product from the grape disease, however, has brought even these
ashes under cultivation. "I found," says Waltershausen, referring to the
years 1861-'62, "plains of volcanic sand and half-subdued lava streams,
which twenty years ago lay utterly waste, now covered with fine
vineyards. The ashfield of ten square miles above Nicolosi, created by
the eruption of 1669, which was entirely barren in 1835, is now planted
with vines almost to the summits of Monte Rosso, at a height of three
thousand feet."--_Ueber den Sicilianischen Ackerbau_, p. 19.
[116] _A Relation of a Journey Begun An. Dom._ 1610, lib. 4, p. 260,
edition of 1627. The testimony of Sandys on this point is confirmed by
that of Pighio, Braccini, Magliocco, Salimbeni, and Nicola di Rubeo, all
cited by Roth, _Der Vesuv._, p. 9. There is some uncertainty about the
date of the last eruption previous to the great one of 1631. Ashes,
though not lava, appear to have been thrown out about the year 1500, and
some chroniclers have recorded an eruption in the year 1306; but this
seems to be an error for 1036, when a great quantity of lava was
ejected. In 1139, ashes were thrown out for many days. I take those
dates from the work of Roth just cited.
[117] Except upon the banks of rivers or of lakes, the woods of the
interior of North America, far from the habitations of man, are almost
destitute of animal life. Dr. Newberry, describing the vast forests of
the yellow pine of the West, _Pinus ponderosa_, remarks: "In the arid
and desert regions of the interior basin, we made whole days' marches in
forests of yellow pine, of which neither the monotony was broken by
other forms of vegetation, nor its stillness by the flutter of a bird or
the hum of an insect."--_Pacific Railroad Report_, vol. vi, 1857. Dr.
NEWBERRY's _Report on Botany_, p. 37.
The wild fruit and nut trees, the Canada plum, the cherries, the many
species of walnut, the butternut, the hazel, yield very little,
frequently nothing, so long as they grow in the woods; and it is only
when the trees around them are cut down, or when they grow in pastures,
that they become productive. The berries, too--the strawberry, the
blackberry, the raspberry, the whortleberry, scarcely bear fruit at all
except in cleared ground.
The North American Indians did not inhabit the interior of the forests.
Their settlements were upon the shores of rivers and lakes, and their
weapons and other relics are found only in the narrow open grounds which
they had burned over and cultivated, or in the margin of the woods
around their villages.
The rank forests of the tropics are as unproductive of human aliment as
the less luxuriant woods of the temperate zone. In Strain's unfortunate
expedition across the great American isthmus, where the journey lay
principally through thick woods, several of the party died of
starvation, and for many days the survivors were forced to subsist on
the scantiest supplies of unnutritious vegetables perhaps never before
employed for food by man. See the interesting account of that expedition
in _Harper's Magazine_ for March, April, and May, 1855.
Clave, as well as many earlier writers, supposes that primitive man
derived his nutriment from the spontaneous productions of the wood. "It
is to the forests," says he, "that man was first indebted for the means
of subsistence. Exposed alone, without defence, to the rigor of the
seasons, as well as to the attacks of animals stronger and swifter than
himself, he found in them his first shelter, drew from them his first
weapons. In the first period of humanity, they provided for all his
wants: they furnished him wood for warmth, fruits for food, garments to
cover his nakedness, arms for his defence."--_Etudes sur l'Economie
Forestiere_, p. 13.
But the history of savage life, as far as it is known to us, presents
man in that condition as inhabiting only the borders of the forest and
the open grounds that skirt the waters and the woods, and as finding
only there the aliments which make up his daily bread.
[118] The origin of the great natural meadows, or prairies as they are
called, of the valley of the Mississippi, is obscure. There is, of
course, no historical evidence on the subject, and I believe that
remains of forest vegetation are seldom or never found beneath the
surface, even in the _sloughs_, where the perpetual moisture would
preserve such remains indefinitely. The want of trees upon them has been
ascribed to the occasional long-continued droughts of summer, and the
excessive humidity of the soil in winter; but it is, in very many
instances, certain that, by whatever means the growth of forests upon
them was first prevented or destroyed, the trees have been since kept
out of them only by the annual burning of the grass, by grazing animals,
or by cultivation. The groves and belts of trees which are found upon
the prairies, though their seedlings are occasionally killed by drought,
or by excess of moisture, extend themselves rapidly over them when the
seeds and shoots are protected against fire, cattle, and the plough. The
prairies, though of vast extent, must be considered as a local, and, so
far as our present knowledge extends, abnormal exception to the law
which clothes all suitable surfaces with forest; for there are many
parts of the United States--Ohio, for example--where the physical
conditions appear to be nearly identical with those of the States lying
farther west, but where there were comparatively few natural meadows.
The prairies were the proper feeding grounds of the bison, and the vast
number of those animals is connected, as cause or consequence, with the
existence of those vast pastures. The bison, indeed, could not convert
the forest into a pasture, but he would do much to prevent the pasture
from becoming a forest.
There is positive evidence that some of the American tribes possessed
large herds of domesticated bisons. See HUMBOLDT, _Ansichten der Natur_,
i, pp. 71-73. What authorizes us to affirm that this was simply the wild
bison reclaimed, and why may we not, with equal probability, believe
that the migratory prairie buffalo is the progeny of the domestic animal
run wild?
There are, both on the prairies, as in Wisconsin, and in deep forests,
as in Ohio, extensive remains of a primitive people, who must have been
more numerous and more advanced in art than the present Indian tribes.
There can be no doubt that the woods where such earthworks are found in
Ohio were cleared by them, and that the vicinity of these fortresses or
temples was inhabited by a large population. Nothing forbids the
supposition that the prairies were cleared by the same or a similar
people, and that the growth of trees upon them has been prevented by
fires and grazing, while the restoration of the woods in Ohio may be due
to the abandonment of that region by its original inhabitants. The
climatic conditions unfavorable to the spontaneous growth of trees on
the prairies may be an effect of too extensive clearings, rather than a
cause of the want of woods. See _Appendix_, No. 22.
[119] In many parts of the North American States, the first white
settlers found extensive tracts of thin woods, of a very park-like
character, called "oak openings," from the predominance of different
species of that tree upon them. These were the semi-artificial pasture
grounds of the Indians, brought into that state, and so kept, by partial
clearing, and by the annual burning of the grass. The object of this
operation was to attract the deer to the fresh herbage which sprang up
after the fire. The oaks bore the annual scorching, at least for a
certain time; but if it had been indefinitely continued, they would very
probably have been destroyed at last. The soil would have then been much
in the prairie condition, and would have needed nothing but grazing for
a long succession of years to make the resemblance perfect. That the
annual fires alone occasioned the peculiar character of the oak
openings, is proved by the fact, that as soon as the Indians had left
the country, young trees of many species sprang up and grew luxuriantly
upon them. See a very interesting account of the oak openings in
DWIGHT's _Travels_, iv, pp. 58-63.
[120] The practice of burning over woodland, at once to clear and manure
the ground, is called in Swedish _svedjande_, a participial noun from
the verb _att svedja_, to burn over. Though used in Sweden as a
preparation for crops of rye or other grain, it is employed in Lapland
more frequently to secure an abundant growth of pasturage, which follows
in two or three years after the fire; and it is sometimes resorted to as
a mode of driving the Laplanders and their reindeer from the vicinity of
the Swedish backwoodsman's grass grounds and haystacks, to which they
are dangerous neighbors. The forest, indeed, rapidly recovers itself,
but it is a generation or more before the reindeer moss grows again.
When the forest consists of pine, _tall_, the ground, instead of being
rendered fertile by this process, becomes hopelessly barren, and for a
long time afterward produces nothing but weeds and briers.--LAESTADIUS,
_Om Uppodlingar i Lappmarken_, p. 15. See also SCHUBERT, _Resa i
Sverge_, ii, p. 375.
In some parts of France this practice is so general that Clave says: "In
the department of Ardennes it (_le sartage_) is the basis of
agriculture. The northern part of the department, comprising the
arrondissements of Rocroi and Mezieres, is covered by steep wooded
mountains with an argillaceous, compact, moist and cold soil; it is
furrowed by three valleys, or rather three deep ravines, at the bottom
of which roll the waters of the Meuse, the Semoy, and the Sormonne, and
villages show themselves wherever the walls of the valleys retreat
sufficiently from the rivers to give room to establish them. Deprived of
arable soil, since the nature of the ground permits neither regular
clearing nor cultivation, the peasant of the Ardennes, by means of
burning, obtains from the forest a subsistence which, without this
resource, would fail him. After the removal of the disposable wood, he
spreads over the soil the branches, twigs, briars, and heath, sets fire
to them in the dry weather of July and August, and sows in September a
crop of rye, which he covers by a light ploughing. Thus prepared, the
ground yields from seventeen to twenty bushels an acre, besides a ton
and a half or two tons of straw of the best quality for the manufacture
of straw hats."--CLAVE, _Etudes sur l'Economie Forestiere_, p. 21.
Clave does not expressly condemn the _sartage_, which indeed seems the
only practicable method of obtaining crops from the soil he describes,
but, as we shall see hereafter, it is regarded by most writers as a
highly pernicious practice.
[121] The remarkable mounds and other earthworks constructed in the
valley of the Ohio and elsewhere in the territory of the United States,
by a people apparently more advanced in culture than the modern Indian,
were overgrown with a dense clothing of forest when first discovered by
the whites. But though the ground where they were erected must have been
occupied by a large population for a considerable length of time, and
therefore entirely cleared, the trees which grew upon the ancient
fortresses and the adjacent lands were not distinguishable in species,
or even in dimensions and character of growth, from the neighboring
forests, where the soil seemed never to have been disturbed. This
apparent exception to the law of change of crop in natural forest growth
was ingeniously explained by General Harrison's suggestion, that the
lapse of time since the era of the mound builders was so great as to
have embraced several successive generations of trees, and occasioned,
by their rotation, a return to the original vegetation.
The successive changes in the spontaneous growth of the forest, as
proved by the character of the wood found in bogs, is not unfrequently
such as to suggest the theory of a considerable change of climate during
the human period. But the laws which govern the germination and growth
of forest trees must be further studied, and the primitive local
conditions of the sites where ancient woods lie buried must be better
ascertained, before this theory can be admitted upon the evidence in
question. In fact, the order of succession--for a rotation or
alternation is not yet proved--may move in opposite directions in
different countries with the same climate and at the same time. Thus in
Denmark and in Holland the spike-leaved firs have given place to the
broad-leaved beech, while in Northern Germany the process has been
reversed, and evergreens have supplanted the oaks and birches of
deciduous foliage. The principal determining cause seems to be the
influence of light upon the germination of the seeds and the growth of
the young tree. In a forest of firs, for instance, the distribution of
the light and shade, to the influence of which seeds and shoots are
exposed, is by no means the same as in a wood of beeches or of oaks, and
hence the growth of different species will be stimulated in the two
forests. See BERG, _Das Verdraengen der Laubwaelder im Noerdlichen
Deutschland_, 1844. HEYER, _Das Verhalten der Waldbaeume gegen Licht und
Schatten_, 1852. STARING, _De Bodem van Nederland_, 1856, i, pp.
120-200. VAUPELL, _Om Boegens Indvandring i de Danske Skove_, 1857.
KNORR, _Studien ueber die Buchen-Wirthschaft_, 1863.
[122] There are, in Northern Italy and in Switzerland, joint-stock
companies which insure against damage by hail, as well as by fire and
lightning. Between the years 1854 and 1861, a single one of these
companies, La Riunione Adriatica, paid, for damage by hail in Piedmont,
Venetian Lombardy, and the Duchy of Parma, above 6,500,000 francs, or
nearly $200,000 per year.
[123] The _paragrandine_, or, as it is called in French, the
_paragrele_, is a species of conductor by which it has been hoped to
protect the harvests in countries particularly exposed to damage by
hail. It was at first proposed to employ for this purpose poles
supporting sheaves of straw connected with the ground by the same
material; but the experiment was afterward tried in Lombardy on a large
scale, with more perfect electrical conductors, consisting of poles
secured to the top of tall trees and provided with a pointed wire
entering the ground and reaching above the top of the pole. It was at
first thought that this apparatus, erected at numerous points over an
extent of several miles, was of some service as a protection against
hail, but this opinion was soon disputed, and does not appear to be
supported by well-ascertained facts. The question of a repetition of the
experiment over a wide area has been again agitated within a very few
years in Lombardy; but the doubts expressed by very able physicists as
to its efficacy, and as to the point whether hail is an electrical
phenomenon, have discouraged its advocates from attempting it.
[124] _Cenni sulla Importanza e Coltura dei Boschi_, p. 6.
[125] _Memoria sui Boschi, etc._, p. 44.
[126] _Travels in Italy_, chap. iii.
[127] _Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia_, i, p. 377.
[128] "Long before the appearance of man, * * * they [the forests] had
robbed the atmosphere of the enormous quantity of carbonic acid it
contained, and thereby transformed it into respirable air. Trees heaped
upon trees had already filled up the ponds and marshes, and buried with
them in the bowels of the earth--to restore it to us after thousands of
ages in the form of bituminous coal and of anthracite--the carbon which
was destined to become, by this wonderful condensation, a precious store
of future wealth."--CLAVE, _Etudes sur l'Economie Forestiere_, p. 13.
This opinion of the modification of the atmosphere by vegetation is
contested.
[129] Schacht ascribes to the forest a specific, if not a measurable,
influence upon the constitution of the atmosphere. "Plants imbibe from
the air carbonic acid and other gaseous or volatile products exhaled by
animals or developed by the natural phenomena of decomposition. On the
other hand, the vegetable pours into the atmosphere oxygen, which is
taken up by animals and appropriated by them. The tree, by means of its
leaves and its young herbaceous twigs, presents a considerable surface
for absorption and evaporation; it abstracts the carbon of carbonic
acid, and solidifies it in wood, fecula, and a multitude of other
compounds. The result is that a forest withdraws from the air, by its
great absorbent surface, much more gas than meadows or cultivated
fields, and exhales proportionally a considerably greater quantity of
oxygen. The influence of the forests on the chemical composition of the
atmosphere is, in a word, of the highest importance."--_Les Arbres_, p.
111. See _Appendix_, No. 23.
[130] Composition, texture and color of soil are important elements to
be considered in estimating the effects of the removal of the forest
upon its thermoscopic action. "Experience has proved," says Becquerel,
"that when the soil is bared, it becomes more or less heated [by the
rays of the sun] according to the nature and the color of the particles
which compose it, and according to its humidity, and that, in the
refrigeration resulting from radiation, we must take into the account
the conducting power of those particles also. Other things being equal,
silicious and calcareous sands, compared in equal volumes with different
argillaceous earths, with calcareous powder or dust, with humus, with
arable and with garden earth, are the soils which least conduct heat. It
is for this reason that sandy ground, in summer, maintains a high
temperature even during the night. We may hence conclude that when a
sandy soil is stripped of wood, the local temperature will be raised.
After the sands follow successively argillaceous, arable, and garden
ground, then humus, which occupies the lowest rank. If we represent the
power of calcareous sand to retain heat by 100, we have, according to
Schubler,
For [silicious?] sand 95.6
" arable calcareous soil 74.8
" argillaceous earth 68.4
" garden earth 64.8
" humus 49.0
"The retentive power of humus, then, is but half as great as that of
calcareous sand. We will add that the power of retaining heat is
proportional to the density. It has also a relation to the magnitude of
the particles. It is for this reason that ground covered with silicious
pebbles cools more slowly than silicious sand, and that pebbly soils are
best suited to the cultivation of the vine, because they advance the
ripening of the grape more rapidly than chalky and clayey earths, which
cool quickly. Hence we see that in examining the calorific effects of
clearing forests, it is important to take into account the properties of
the soil laid bare."--BECQUEREL, _Des Climats et des Sols boises_, p.
137.
[131] "The Washington elm at Cambridge--a tree of no extraordinary
size--was some years ago estimated to produce a crop of seven millions
of leaves, exposing a surface of two hundred thousand square feet, or
about five acres of foliage."--GRAY, _First Lessons in Botany and
Vegetable Physiology_, as quoted by COULTAS, _What may be learned from a
Tree_, p. 34.
[132] See, on this particular point, and on the general influence of the
forest on temperature, HUMBOLDT, _Ansichten der Natur_, i, 158.
[133] The radiating and refrigerating power of objects by no means
depends on their form alone. Melloni cut sheets of metal into the shape
of leaves and grasses, and found that they produced little cooling
effect, and were not moistened under atmospheric conditions which
determined a plentiful deposit of dew on the leaves of vegetables.
[134] BECQUEREL, _Des Climats, etc., Discours Prelim._ vi.
[135] _Travels_, i, p. 61.
[136] _Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia_, pp. 370, 371.
[137] BERGSOeE, _Reventlovs Virksomhed_, ii, p. 125.
[138] BECQUEREL, _Des Climats, etc._, p. 179.
[139] Ibid., p. 116.
[140] The following well-attested instance of a local change of climate
is probably to be referred to the influence of the forest as a shelter
against cold winds. To supply the extraordinary demand for Italian iron
occasioned by the exclusion of English iron in the time of Napoleon I,
the furnaces of the valleys of Bergamo were stimulated to great
activity. "The ordinary production of charcoal not sufficing to feed the
furnaces and the forges, the woods were felled, the copses cut before
their time, and the whole economy of the forest was deranged. At
Piazzatorre there was such a devastation of the woods, and consequently
such an increased severity of climate, that maize no longer ripened.
An association, formed for the purpose, effected the restoration
of the forest, and maize flourishes again in the fields of
Piazzatorre."--Report by G. ROSA, in _Il Politecnico_, Dicembre, 1861,
p. 614.
Similar ameliorations have been produced by plantations in Belgium. In
an interesting series of articles by Baude, entitled "Les Cotes de la
Manche," in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, I find this statement: "A
spectator placed on the famous bell tower of the cathedral of Antwerp,
saw, not long since, on the opposite side of the Schelde only a vast
desert plain; now he sees a forest, the limits of which are confounded
with the horizon. Let him enter within its shade. The supposed forest is
but a system of regular rows of trees, the oldest of which is not forty
years of age. These plantations have ameliorated the climate which had
doomed to sterility the soil where they are planted. While the tempest
is violently agitating their tops, the air a little below is still, and
sands far more barren than the plateau of La Hague have been
transformed, under their protection, into fertile fields."--_Revue des
Deux Mondes_, January, 1859, p. 277.
[141] _Cenni sulla Importanza e Coltura dei Boschi_, p. 31.
[142] _La Provence au point de vue des Torrents et des Inondations_, p.
19.
[143] _Ueber die Entwaldung der Gebirge_, p. 28.
[144] BECQUEREL, _Des Climats, etc._, p. 9.
[145] SALVAGNOLI, _Rapporto sul Bonificamento delle Maremme Toscane_,
pp. xli, 124.
[146] _Il Politecnico, Milano, Aprile e Maggio_, 1863, p. 35.
[147] SALVAGNOLI, _Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane_, pp. 213, 214.
[148] Except in the seething marshes of the tropics, where vegetable
decay is extremely rapid, the uniformity of temperature and of
atmospheric humidity renders all forests eminently healthful. See
HOHENSTEIN's observations on this subject, _Der Wald_, p. 41.
There is no question that open squares and parks conduce to the
salubrity of cities, and many observers are of opinion that the trees
and other vegetables with which such grounds are planted contribute
essentially to their beneficial influence. See an article in _Aus der
Natur_, xxii, p. 813.
[149] _Memoria sui Boschi di Lombardia_, p. 45.
[150] _Economie Rurale_, i, p. 22.
[151] ROSSMAeSSLER, _Der Wald_, p. 158.
[152] Ibid., p. 160.
[153] The low temperature of air and soil at which, in the frigid zone,
as well as in warmer latitudes under special circumstances, the
processes of vegetation go on, seems to necessitate the supposition that
all the manifestations of vegetable life are attended with an evolution
of heat. In the United States, it is common to protect ice, in
icehouses, by a covering of straw, which naturally sometimes contains
kernels of grain. These often sprout, and even throw out roots and
leaves to a considerable length, in a temperature very little above the
freezing point. Three or four years since, I saw a lump of very clear
and apparently solid ice, about eight inches long by six thick, on which
a kernel of grain had sprouted in an icehouse, and sent half a dozen or
more very slender roots into the pores of the ice and through the whole
length of the lump. The young plant must have thrown out a considerable
quantity of heat; for though the ice was, as I have said, otherwise
solid, the pores through which the roots passed were enlarged to perhaps
double the diameter of the fibres, but still not so much as to prevent
the retention of water in them by capillary attraction. See _App._ 24.
[154] BECQUEREL, _Des Climats, etc._, pp. 139-141.
[155] Dr. Williams made some observations on this subject in 1789, and
in 1791, but they generally belonged to the warmer months, and I do not
know that any extensive series of comparisons between the temperature of
the ground in the woods and the fields has been attempted in America.
Dr. Williams's thermometer was sunk to the depth of ten inches, and gave
the following results:
+-------------+--------------+--------------+-------------+
| | Temperature | Temperature | |
| TIME. | of ground in | of ground in | Difference. |
| | pasture. | woods. | |
+-------------+--------------+--------------+-------------+
| May 23 | 52 | 46 | 6 |
| " 28 | 57 | 48 | 9 |
| June 15 | 64 | 51 | 13 |
| " 27 | 62 | 51 | 11 |
| July 16 | 62 | 51 | 11 |
| " 30 | 651/2 | 551/2 | 10 |
| Aug. 15 | 68 | 58 | 10 |
| " 31 | 591/2 | 55 | 41/2 |
| Sept. 15 | 591/2 | 55 | 41/2 |
| Oct. 1 | 591/2 | 55 | 41/2 |
| " 15 | 49 | 49 | 0 |
| Nov. 1 | 43 | 43 | 0 |
| " 16 | 431/2 | 431/2 | 0 |
+-------------+--------------+--------------+-------------+
On the 14th of January, 1791, in a winter remarkable for its extreme
severity, he found the ground, on a plain open field where the snow had
been blown away, frozen to the depth of three feet and five inches; in
the woods where the snow was three feet deep, and where the soil had
frozen to the depth of six inches before the snow fell, the thermometer,
at six inches below the surface of the ground, stood at 39 deg.. In
consequence of the covering of the snow, therefore, the previously
frozen ground had been thawed and raised to seven degrees above the
freezing point.--WILLIAMS'S _Vermont_, i, p. 74.
Bodies of fresh water, so large as not to be sensibly affected by local
influences of narrow reach or short duration, would afford climatic
indications well worthy of special observation. Lake Champlain, which
forms the boundary between the States of New York and Vermont, presents
very favorable conditions for this purpose. This lake, which drains a
basin of about 6,000 square miles, covers an area, excluding its
islands, of about 500 square miles. It extends from lat. 43 deg. 30' to 45 deg.
20', in very nearly a meridian line, has a mean width of four and a half
miles, with an extreme breadth, excluding bays almost land-locked, of
thirteen miles. Its mean depth is not well known. It is, however, 400
feet deep in some places, and from 100 to 200 in many, and has few
shoals or flats. The climate is of such severity that it rarely fails to
freeze completely over, and to be safely crossed upon the ice, with
heavy teams, for several weeks every winter. THOMPSON (_Vermont_, p. 14,
and Appendix, p. 9) gives the following table of the times of the
complete closing and opening of the ice, opposite Burlington, about the
centre of the lake, and where it is ten miles wide.
+------+-------------+------------+-------+
| Year.| Closing. | Opening. | Days |
| | | |closed.|
+------+-------------+------------+-------+
| 1816 | February 9 | | |
| 1817 | January 29 | April 16 | 78 |
| 1818 | February 2 | April 15 | 72 |
| 1819 | March 4 | April 17 | 44 |
| 1820 |{February 3 | February | } 4 |
| |{March 8 | March 12 | } |
| 1821 | January 15 | April 21 | 95 |
| 1822 | January 24 | March 30 | 75 |
| 1823 | February 7 | April 5 | 57 |
| 1824 | January 22 | February 11| 20 |
| 1825 | February 9 | | |
| 1826 | February 1 | March 24 | 51 |
| 1827 | January 21 | March 31 | 68 |
| 1828 | not closed | | |
| 1829 | January 31 | April | |
| 1832 | February 6 | April 17 | 70 |
| 1833 | February 2 | April 6 | 63 |
| 1834 | February 13 | February 20| 7 |
| 1835 |{January 10 | January 23 | 18 |
| |{February 7 | April 12 | 64 |
| 1836 | January 27 | April 21 | 85 |
| 1837 | January 15 | April 26 | 101 |
| 1838 | February 2 | April 13 | 70 |
| 1839 | January 25 | April 6 | 71 |
| 1840 | January 25 | February 20| 26 |
| 1841 | February 18 | April 19 | 61 |
| 1842 | not closed | | |
| 1843 | February 16 | April 22 | 65 |
| 1844 | January 25 | April 11 | 77 |
| 1845 | February 3 | March 26 | 51 |
| 1846 | February 10 | March 26 | 44 |
| 1847 | February 15 | April 23 | 68 |
| 1848 | February 13 | February 26| 13 |
| 1849 | February 7 | March 23 | 44 |
| 1850 | not closed | | |
| 1851 | February 1 | March 12 | 89 |
| 1852 | January 18 | April 10 | 92 |
+------+-------------+------------+-------+
In 1847, although, at the point indicated, the ice broke up on the 23d
of April, it remained frozen much later at the North, and steamers were
not able to traverse the whole length of the lake until May 6th.
[156] We are not, indeed, to suppose that condensation of vapor and
evaporation of water are going on in the same stratum of air at the same
time, or, in other words, that vapor is condensed into raindrops, and
raindrops evaporated, under the same conditions; but rain formed in one
stratum, may fall through another, where vapor would not be condensed.
Two saturated strata of different temperatures may be brought into
contact in the higher regions, and discharge large raindrops, which, if
not divided by some obstruction, will reach the ground, though passing
all the time through strata which would vaporize them if they were in a
state of more minute division.
[157] It is perhaps too much to say that the influence of trees upon the
wind is strictly limited to the mechanical resistance of their trunks,
branches, and foliage. So far as the forest, by dead or by living
action, raises or lowers the temperature of the air within it, so far it
creates upward or downward currents in the atmosphere above it, and,
consequently, a flow of air toward or from itself. These air streams
have a certain, though doubtless a very small influence on the force and
direction of greater atmospheric movements.
[158] As a familiar illustration of the influence of the forest in
checking the movement of winds, I may mention the well-known fact, that
the sensible cold is never extreme in thick woods, where the motion of
the air is little felt. The lumbermen in Canada and the Northern United
States labor in the woods, without inconvenience, when the mercury
stands many degrees below the zero of Fahrenheit, while in the open
grounds, with only a moderate breeze, the same temperature is almost
insupportable. The engineers and firemen of locomotives, employed on
railways running through forests of any considerable extent, observe
that, in very cold weather, it is much easier to keep up the steam while
the engine is passing through the woods than in the open ground. As soon
as the train emerges from the shelter of the trees the steam gauge
falls, and the stoker is obliged to throw in a liberal supply of fuel to
bring it up again.
Another less frequently noticed fact, due, no doubt, in a great measure
to the immobility of the air, is, that sounds are transmitted to
incredible distances in the unbroken forest. Many instances of this have
fallen under my own observation, and others, yet more striking, have
been related to me by credible and competent witnesses familiar with a
more primitive condition of the Anglo-American world. An acute observer
of natural phenomena, whose childhood and youth were spent in the
interior of one of the newer New England States, has often told me that
when he established his home in the forest, he always distinctly heard,
in still weather, the plash of horses' feet, when they forded a small
brook nearly seven-eighths of a mile from his house, though a portion of
the wood that intervened consisted of a ridge seventy or eighty feet
higher than either the house or the ford.
I have no doubt that, in such cases, the stillness of the air is the
most important element in the extraordinary transmissibility of sound;
but it must be admitted that the absence of the multiplied and confused
noises, which accompany human industry in countries thickly peopled by
man, contributes to the same result. We become, by habit, almost
insensible to the familiar and never-resting voices of civilization in
cities and towns; but the indistinguishable drone, which sometimes
escapes even the ear of him who listens for it, deadens and often quite
obstructs the transmission of sounds which would otherwise be clearly
audible. An observer, who wishes to appreciate that hum of civic life
which he cannot analyze, will find an excellent opportunity by placing
himself on the hill of Capo di Monte at Naples, in the line of
prolongation of the street called Spaccanapoli.
It is probably to the stillness of which I have spoken, that we are to
ascribe the transmission of sound to great distances at sea in calm
weather. In June, 1853, I and my family were passengers on board a ship
of war bound up the AEgean. On the evening of the 27th of that month, as
we were discussing, at the tea table, some observations of Humboldt on
this subject, the captain of the ship told us that he had once heard a
single gun at sea at the distance of ninety nautical miles. The nest
morning, though a light breeze had sprung up from the north, the sea was
of glassy smoothness when we went on deck. As we came up, an officer
told us that he had heard a gun at sunrise, and the conversation of the
previous evening suggested the inquiry whether it could have been fired
from the combined French and English fleet then lying at Beshika Bay.
Upon examination of our position we were found to have been, at sunrise,
ninety sea miles from that point. We continued beating up northward, and
between sunrise and twelve o'clock meridian of the 28th, we had made
twelve miles northing, reducing our distance from Beshika Bay to
seventy-eight sea miles. At noon we heard several guns so distinctly
that we were able to count the number. On the 29th we came up with the
fleet, and learned from an officer who came on board that a royal salute
had been fired at noon on the 28th, in honor of the day as the
anniversary of the Queen of England's coronation. The report at sunrise
was evidently the morning gun, those at noon the salute.
Such cases are rare, because the sea is seldom still, and the
[Greek: kymaton anerithmon gelasma] rarely silent, over so great a space
as ninety or even seventy-eight nautical miles. I apply the epithet
_silent_ to [Greek: gelasma] advisedly. I am convinced that AEschylus
meant the audible laugh of the waves, which is indeed of _countless_
multiplicity, not the visible smile of the sea, which, belonging to the
great expanse as one impersonation, is single, though, like the human
smile, made up of the play of many features.
[159] "The presence of watery vapor in the air is general. * * *
Vegetable surfaces are endowed with the power of absorbing gases,
vapors, and also, no doubt, the various soluble bodies which are
presented to them. The inhalation of humidity is carried on by the
leaves upon a large scale; the dew of a cold summer night revives the
groves and the meadows, and a single shower of rain suffices to refresh
the verdure of a forest which a long drought had parched."--SCHACHT,
_Les Arbres_, ix, p. 340.
The absorption of the vapor of water by leaves is disputed. "The
absorption of watery vapor by the leaves of plants is, according to
Unger's experiments, inadmissible."--WILHELM, _Der Boden und das
Wasser_, p. 19. If this latter view is correct, the apparently
refreshing effects of atmospheric humidity upon vegetation must be
ascribed to moisture absorbed by the ground from the air and supplied to
the roots. In some recent experiments by Dr. Sachs, a porous flower-pot,
with a plant growing in it, was left unwatered until the earth was dry,
and the plant began to languish. The pot was then placed in a glass case
containing air, which was kept always saturated with humidity, but no
water was supplied, and the leaves of the plant were exposed to the open
atmosphere. The soil in the flower pot absorbed from the air moisture
enough to revive the foliage, and keep it a long time green, but not
enough to promote development of new leaves.--Id., ibid., p. 18.
[160] The experiments of Hales and others, on the absorption and
exhalation of water by vegetables, are of the highest physiological
interest; but observations on sunflowers, cabbages, hops, and single
branches of isolated trees, growing in artificially prepared soils and
under artificial conditions, furnish no trustworthy data for computing
the quantity of water received and given off by the natural wood.
[161] In the primitive forest, except where the soil is too wet for the
dense growth of trees, the ground is generally too thickly covered with
leaves to allow much room for ground mosses. In the more open woods of
Europe, this form of vegetation is more frequent--as, indeed, are many
other small plants of a more inviting character--than in the native
American forest. See, on the cryptogams and wood plants, ROSSMAeSSLER,
_Der Wald_, pp. 33 _et seqq._
[162] Emerson (_Trees of Massachusetts_, p. 493) mentions a maple six
feet in diameter, as having yielded a barrel, or thirty-one and a half
gallons of sap in twenty-four hours, and another, the dimensions of
which are not stated, as having yielded one hundred and seventy-five
gallons in the course of the season. The _Cultivator_, an American
agricultural journal, for June, 1842, states that twenty gallons of sap
were drawn in eighteen hours from a single maple, two and a half feet in
diameter, in the town of Warner, New Hampshire, and the truth of this
account has been verified by personal inquiry made in my behalf. This
tree was of the original forest growth, and had been left standing when
the ground around it was cleared. It was tapped only every other year,
and then with six or eight incisions. Dr. Williams (_History of
Vermont_, i, p. 91) says: "A man much employed in making maple sugar,
found that, for twenty-one days together, a maple tree discharged seven
and a half gallons per day."
An intelligent correspondent, of much experience in the manufacture of
maple sugar, writes me that a second-growth maple, of about two feet in
diameter, standing in open ground, tapped with four incisions, has, for
several seasons, generally run eight gallons per day in fair weather. He
speaks of a very large tree, from which sixty gallons were drawn in the
course of a season, and of another, something more than three feet
through, which made forty-two pounds of wet sugar, and must have yielded
not less than one hundred and fifty gallons.
[163] "The buds of the maple," says the same correspondent, "do not
start till toward the close of the sugar season. As soon as they begin
to swell, the sap seems less sweet, and the sugar made from it is of a
darker color, and with less of the distinctive maple flavor."
[164] "In this region, maples are usually tapped with a three-quarter
inch bit, boring to the depth of one and a half or two inches. In the
smaller trees, one incision only is made, two in those of eighteen
inches in diameter, and four in trees of larger size. Two 3/4-inch holes
in a tree twenty-two inches in diameter = 1/46 of the circumference, and
1/169 of the area of section."
"Tapping does not check the growth, but does injure the quality of the
wood of maples. The wood of trees often tapped is lighter and less dense
than that of trees which have not been tapped, and gives less heat in
burning. No difference has been observed in the starting of the buds of
tapped and untapped trees."--_Same correspondent._
[165] Dr. Rush, in a letter to Jefferson, states the number of maples
fit for tapping on an acre at from thirty to fifty. "This," observes my
correspondent, "is correct with regard to the original growth, which is
always more or less intermixed with other trees; but in second growth,
composed of maples alone, the number greatly exceeds this. I have had
the maples on a quarter of an acre, which I thought about an average of
second-growth 'maple orchards,' counted. The number was found to be
fifty-two, of which thirty-two were ten inches or more in diameter, and,
of course, large enough to tap. This gives two hundred and eight trees
to the acre, one hundred and twenty-eight of which were of proper size
for tapping."
According to the census returns, the quantity of maple sugar made
in the United States in 1850 was 34,253,436 pounds; in 1860, it was
38,863,884 pounds, besides 1,944,594 gallons of molasses. The cane
sugar made in 1850 amounted to 237,133,000 pounds; in 1859, to
302,205,000.--_Preliminary Report on the Eighth Census_, p. 88.
According to Bigelow, _Les Etats Unis d'Amerique en 1863_, chap. iv, the
sugar product of Louisiana alone for 1862 is estimated at 528,321,500
pounds.
[166] The correspondent already referred to informs me that a black
birch, tapped about noon with two incisions, was found the next morning
to have yielded sixteen gallons. Dr. Williams (_History of Vermont_, i,
p. 91) says: "A large birch, tapped in the spring, ran at the rate of
five gallons an hour when first tapped. Eight or nine days after, it was
found to run at the rate of about two and a half gallons an hour, and at
the end of fifteen days the discharge continued in nearly the same
quantity. The sap continued to flow for four or five weeks, and it was
the opinion of the observers that it must have yielded as much as sixty
barrels [1,890 gallons]."
[167] "The best state of weather for a good run," says my correspondent,
"is clear days, thawing fast in the daytime and freezing well at night,
with a gentle west or northwest wind; though we sometimes have clear,
fine, thawing days followed by frosty nights, without a good run of sap,
I have thought it probable that the irregular flow of sap on different
days in the same season is connected with the variation in atmospheric
pressure; for the atmospheric conditions above mentioned as those most
favorable to a free flow of sap are also those in which the barometer
usually indicates pressure considerably above the mean. With a south or
southeast wind, and in lowering weather, which causes a fall in the
barometer, the flow generally ceases, though the sap sometimes runs till
after the beginning of the storm. With a _gentle_ wind, south of west,
maples sometimes run all night. When this occurs, it is oftenest shortly
before a storm. Last spring, the sap of a sugar orchard in a neighboring
town flowed the greater part of the time for two days and two nights
successively, and did not cease till after the commencement of a rain
storm."
The cessation of the flow of sap at night is perhaps in part to be
ascribed to the nocturnal frost, which checks the melting of the snow,
of course diminishing the supply of moisture in the ground, and
sometimes congeals the strata from which the rootlets suck in water.
From the facts already mentioned, however, and from other well-known
circumstances--such, for example, as the more liberal flow of sap from
incisions on the south side of the trunk--it is evident that the
withdrawal of the stimulating influences of the sun's light and heat is
the principal cause of the suspension of the circulation in the night.
[168] "The flow ceases altogether soon after the buds begin to
swell."--_Letter before quoted._
[169] We might obtain a contribution to an approximate estimate of the
quantity of moisture abstracted by forest vegetation from the earth and
the air, by ascertaining, as nearly as possible, the quantity of wood on
a given area, the proportion of assimilable matter contained in the
fluids of the tree at different seasons of the year, the ages of the
trees respectively, and the quantity of leaf and seed annually shed by
them. The results would, indeed, be very vague, but they might serve to
check or confirm estimates arrived at by other processes. The following
facts are items too loose perhaps to be employed as elements in such a
computation.
Dr. Williams, who wrote when the woods of Northern New England were
generally in their primitive condition, states the number of trees
growing on an acre at from one hundred and fifty to six hundred and
fifty, according to their size and the quality of the soil; the quantity
of wood, at from fifty to two hundred cords, or from 238 to 952 cubic
yards, but adds that on land covered with pines, the quantity of wood
would be much greater. Whether he means to give the entire solid
contents of the tree, or, as is usual in ordinary estimates in New
England, the marketable wood only, the trunks and larger branches, does
not appear. Next to the pine, the maple would probably yield a larger
amount to a given area than any of the other trees mentioned by Dr.
Williams, but mixed wood, in general, measures most. In a good deal of
observation on this subject, the largest quantity of marketable wood I
have ever known cut on an acre of virgin forest was one hundred and four
cords, or 493 cubic yards, and half that amount is considered a very
fair yield. The smaller trees, branches, and twigs would not increase
the quantity more than twenty-five per cent., and if we add as much more
for the roots, we should have a total of about 750 cubic yards. I think
Dr. Williams's estimate too large, though it would fall much below the
product of the great trees of the Mississippi Valley, of Oregon, and of
California. It should be observed that these measurements are those of
the wood as it lies when 'corded' or piled up for market, and exceed the
real solid contents by not less than fifteen per cent.
"In a soil of medium quality," says Clave, quoting the estimates of
Pfeil, for the climate of Prussia, "the volume of a hectare of pines
twenty years old, would exceed 80 cubic metres [421/2 cubic yards to
the acre]; it would amount to but 24 in a meagre soil. This tree attains
its maximum of mean growth at the age of seventy-five years. At that
age, in the sandy earth of Prussia, it produces annually about 5 cubic
metres, with a total volume of 311 cubic metres per hectare [166 cubic
yards per acre]. After this age the volume increases, but the mean rate
of growth diminishes. At eighty years, for instance, the volume is 335
cubic metres, the annual production 4 only. The beech reaches its
maximum of annual growth at one hundred and twenty years. It then has a
total volume of 633 cubic metres to the hectare [335 cubic yards to the
acre], and produces 5 cubic metres per year."--CLAVE, _Etudes_, p. 151.
These measures, I believe, include the entire ligneous product of the
tree, exclusive of the roots, and express the actual solid contents. The
specific gravity of maple wood is stated to be 75. Maple sap yields
sugar at the rate of about one pound _wet_ sugar to three gallons of
sap, and wet sugar is to dry sugar in about the proportion of nineteen
to sixteen. Besides the sugar, there is a small residuum of "sand,"
composed of phosphate of lime, with a little silex, and it is certain
that by the ordinary hasty process of manufacture, a good deal of sugar
is lost; for the drops, condensed from the vapor of the boilers on the
rafters of the rude sheds where the sap is boiled, have a decidedly
sweet taste.
[170] "The elaborated sap, passing out of the leaves, is received into
the inner bark, * * * and a part of what descends finds its way even to
the ends of the roots, and is all along diffused laterally into the
stem, where it meets and mingles with the ascending crude sap or raw
material. So there is no separate circulation of the two kinds of sap;
and no crude sap exists separately in any part of the plant. Even in the
root, where it enters, this mingles at once with some elaborated sap
already there."--GRAY, _How Plants Grow_, Sec. 273.
[171] Ward's tight glazed cases for raising, and especially for
transporting plants, go far to prove that water only circulates through
vegetables, and is again and again absorbed and transpired by organs
appropriated to these functions. Seeds, growing grasses, shrubs, or
trees planted in proper earth, moderately watered and covered with a
glass bell or close frame of glass, live for months and even years, with
only the original store of air and water. In one of Ward's early
experiments, a spire of grass and a fern, which sprang up in a corked
bottle containing a little moist earth introduced as a bed for a snail,
lived and flourished for eighteen years without a new supply of either
fluid. In these boxes the plants grow till the enclosed air is exhausted
of the gaseous constituents of vegetation, and till the water has
yielded up the assimilable matter it held in solution, and dissolved and
supplied to the roots the nutriment contained in the earth in which they
are planted. After this, they continue for a long time in a state of
vegetable sleep, but if fresh air and water be introduced into the
cases, or the plants be transplanted into open ground, they rouse
themselves to renewed life, and grow vigorously, without appearing to
have suffered from their long imprisonment. The water transpired by the
leaves is partly absorbed by the earth directly from the air, partly
condensed on the glass, along which it trickles down to the earth,
enters the roots again, and thus continually repeats the circuit. See
_Aus der Natur_, 21, B. S. 537.
[172] WILHELM, _Der Boden und das Wasser_, p. 18. It is not ascertained
in what proportions the dew is evaporated, and in what it is absorbed by
the earth, in actual nature, but there can be no doubt that the amount
of water taken up by the ground, both from vapor suspended in the air
and from dew, is large. The annual fall of dew in England is estimated
at five inches, but this quantity is much exceeded in many countries
with a clearer sky. "In many of our Algerian campaigns," says Babinet,
"when it was wished to punish the brigandage of the unsubdued tribes, it
was impossible to set their grain fields on fire until a late hour of
the day; for the plants were so wet with the night dew that it was
necessary to wait until the sun had dried them."--_Etudes et Lectures_,
ii, p. 212.
[173] "It has been concluded that the dry land occupies about 49,800,000
square statute miles. This does not include the recently discovered
tracts of land in the vicinity of the poles, and allowing for yet
undiscovered land (which, however, can only exist in small quantity), if
we assign 51,000,000 to the land, there will remain about 146,000,000 of
square miles for the extent of surface occupied by the ocean."--Sir J.
F. W. HERSCHEL, _Physical Geography_, 1861, p. 19.
It does not appear to which category Herschel assigns the inland seas
and the fresh-water lakes and rivers of the earth; and Mrs. Somerville,
who states that the "dry land occupies an area of 38,000,000 of square
miles," and that "the ocean covers nearly three fourths of the surface
of the globe," is equally silent on this point.--_Physical Geography_,
fifth edition, p. 30. On the following page, Mrs. Somerville, in a note,
cites Mr. Gardner as her authority, and says that, "according to his
computation, the extent of land is about 37,673,000 square British
miles, independently of Victoria Continent; and the sea occupies
110,849,000. Hence the land is to the sea as 1 to 4 nearly." Sir John F.
W. Herschel makes the area of dry land and ocean together 197,000,000
square miles; Mrs. Somerville, or rather Mr. Gardner, 148,522,000. I
suppose Sir John Herschel includes the islands in his aggregate of the
"dry land," and the inland waters under the general designation of the
"ocean," and that Mrs. Somerville excludes both.
[174] It has been observed in Sweden that the spring, in many districts
where the forests have been cleared off, now comes on a fortnight later
than in the last century.--ASBJOeRNSEN, _Om Skovene i Norge_, p. 101.
The conclusion arrived at by Noah Webster, in his very learned and able
paper on the supposed change in the temperature of winter, read before
the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1799, was as follows:
"From a careful comparison of these facts, it appears that the weather,
in modern winters, in the United States, is more inconstant than when
the earth was covered with woods, at the first settlement of Europeans
in the country; that the warm weather of autumn extends further into the
winter months, and the cold weather of winter and spring encroaches upon
the summer; that, the wind being more variable, snow is less permanent,
and perhaps the same remark may be applicable to the ice of the rivers.
These effects seem to result necessarily from the greater quantity of
heat accumulated in the earth in summer since the ground has been
cleared of wood and exposed to the rays of the sun, and to the greater
depth of frost in the earth in winter by the exposure of its uncovered
surface to the cold atmosphere."--_Collection of Papers by_ NOAH
WEBSTER, p. 162.
[175] I have seen, in Northern New England, the surface of the open
ground frozen to the depth of twenty-two inches, in the month of
November, when in the forest earth no frost was discoverable; and later
in the winter, I have known an exposed sand knoll to remain frozen six
feet deep, after the ground in the woods was completely thawed.
[176]
----Det golde Stroeg i Afrika,
Der Intet voxe kan, da ei det regner,
Og, omvendt, ingen Regn kan falde, da
Der Intet voxer.
PALUDAN-MUeLLER, _Adam Homo_, ii, 408.
[177]
Und Stuerme brausen um die Wette
Vom Meer aufs Land, vom Land aufs Meer.
GOETHE, _Faust, Song of the Archangels_.
[178] _Etudes sur l'Economie Forestiere_, pp. 45, 46.
[179] I am not aware of any evidence to show that Malta had any woods of
importance at any time since the cultivation of cotton was introduced
there; and if it is true, as has been often asserted, that its present
soil was imported from Sicily, it can certainly have possessed no
forests since a very remote period. In Sandys's time, 1611, there were
no woods in the island, and it produced little cotton. He describes it
as "a country altogether champion, being no other than a rocke couered
ouer with earth, but two feete deepe where the deepest; hauing but few
trees but such as beare fruite. * * * So that their wood they haue from
Sicilia." They have "an indifferent quantity of cotton wooll, but that
the best of all other."--SANDYS, _Travels_, p. 228.
[180] SCHACHT, _Les Arbres_, p. 412.
[181] _What may be learned from a Tree_, p. 117.
[182] _Der Wald_, p. 13.
[183] _Om Skovene og deres Forhold til National[oe]conomien_, pp.
131-133.
[184] _Om Skovene og om et ordnet Skovbrug i Norge_, p. 106.
[185] _Etudes et Lectures_, iv. p. 114.
[186] The supposed increase in the frequency and quantity of rain in
Lower Egypt is by no means established. I have heard it disputed on the
spot by intelligent Franks, whose residence in that country began before
the plantations of Mehemet Aali and Ibrahim Pacha, and I have been
assured by them that meteorological observations, made at Alexandria
about the beginning of this century, show an annual fall of rain as
great as is usual at this day. The mere fact, that it did not rain
during the French occupation, is not conclusive. Having experienced a
gentle shower of nearly twenty-four hours' duration in Upper Egypt, I
inquired of the local governor in relation to the frequency of this
phenomenon, and was told by him that not a drop of rain had fallen at
that point for more than two years previous.
The belief in the increase of rain in Egypt rests almost entirely on the
observations of Marshal Marmont, and the evidence collected by him in
1836. His conclusions have been disputed, if not confuted, by Jomard and
others, and are probably erroneous. See, FOISSAC, _Meteorologie_, German
translation, pp. 634-639.
It certainly sometimes rains briskly at Cairo, but evaporation is
exceedingly rapid in Egypt--as any one, who ever saw a Fellah woman wash
a napkin in the Nile, and dry it by shaking it a few moments in the air,
can testify; and a heap of grain, wet a few inches below the surface,
would probably dry again without injury. At any rate, the Egyptian
Government often has vast quantities of wheat stored at Boulak, in
uncovered yards through the winter, though it must be admitted that the
slovenliness and want of foresight in Oriental life, public and private,
are such that we cannot infer the safety of any practice followed in the
East, merely from its long continuance.
Grain, however, may be long kept in the open air in climates much less
dry than that of Egypt, without injury, except to the superficial
layers; for moisture does not penetrate to a great depth in a heap of
grain once well dried, and kept well aired. When Louis IX was making his
preparations for his campaign in the East, he had large quantities of
wine and grain purchased in the Island of Cyprus, and stored up, for two
years, to await his arrival. "When we were come to Cyprus," says
Joinville, _Histoire de Saint Louis_, Sec.Sec. 72, 73, "we found there greate
foison of the Kynge's purveyance. * * The wheate and the barley they had
piled up in greate heapes in the feeldes, and to looke vpon, they were
like vnto mountaynes; for the raine, the whyche hadde beaten vpon the
wheate now a longe whyle, had made it to sproute on the toppe, so that
it seemed as greene grasse. And whanne they were mynded to carrie it to
Egypte, they brake that sod of greene herbe, and dyd finde under the
same the wheate and the barley, as freshe as yf menne hadde but nowe
thrashed it."
[187] _Etude sur les Eaux au point de vue des Inondations_, p. 91.
[188] _Economie Rurale_, ii, chap. xx, Sec. 4, pp. 756-759. See also p.
733.
[189] Jacini, speaking of the great Italian lakes, says: "A large
proportion of the water of the lakes, instead of discharging itself by
the Ticino, the Adda, the Oglio, the Mincio, filters through the
silicious strata which underlie the hills, and follows subterranean
channels to the plain, where it collects in the _fontanili_, and being
thence conducted into the canals of irrigation, becomes a source of
great fertility."--_La Proprieta Fondiaria, etc._, p. 144.
[190] _Meteorologie_, German translation by EMSMANN, p. 605.
[191] _Handbuch der Physischen Geographie_, p. 658.
[192] _Annales des Ponts et Chaussees_, 1854, 1st semestre, pp. 21 _et
seqq._ See the comments of VALLES on these observations, in his _Etudes
sur les Inondations_, pp. 441 _et seqq._
[193] The passage in Pliny is as follows: "Nascuntur fontes, decisis
plerumque silvis, quos arborum alimenta consumebant, sicut in Haemo,
obsidente Gallos Cassandro, quum valli gratia cecidissent. Plerumque
vero damnosi torrentes corrivantur, detracta collibus silva continere
nimbos ac digerere consueta."--_Nat. Hist._, xxxi, 30.
Seneca cites this case, and another similar one said to have been
observed at Magnesia, from a passage in Theophrastus, not to be found in
the extant works of that author; but he adds that the stories are
incredible, because shaded grounds abound most in water: fere
aquosissima sunt quaecumque umbrosissima.--_Quaest. Nat._, iii, 11. _See
Appendix_, No. 26.
[194] "Why go so far for the proof of a phenomenon that is repeated
every day under our own eyes, and of which every Parisian may convince
himself, without venturing beyond the Bois de Boulogne or the forest of
Meudon? Let him, after a few rainy days, pass along the Chevreuse road,
which is bordered on the right by the wood, on the left by cultivated
fields. The fall of water and the continuance of the rain have been the
same on both sides; but the ditch on the side of the forest will remain
filled with water proceeding from the infiltration through the wooded
soil, long after the other, contiguous to the open ground, has performed
its office of drainage and become dry. The ditch on the left will have
discharged in a few hours a quantity of water, which the ditch on the
right requires several days to receive and carry down to the
valley."--CLAVE, _Etudes, etc._, pp. 53, 54.
[195] VALLES, _Etudes sur les Inondations_, p. 472.
[196] _Economie Rurale_, p. 730.
[197] _Ueber die Entwaldung der Gebirge_, pp. 20 _et seqq._
[198] _Physische Geographie_, p. 32.
[199] _The Trees of America_, pp. 50, 51.
[200] THOMPSON's _Vermont_, appendix, p. 8.
[201] _Trees of America_, p. 48.
[202] Dumont, following Dansse, gives an interesting extract from the
Misopogon of the Emperor Julian, showing that, in the fourth century,
the Seine--the level of which now varies to the extent of thirty feet
between extreme high and extreme low water mark--was almost wholly
exempt from inundations, and flowed with a uniform current through the
whole year. "Ego olim eram in hibernis apud caram Lutetiam, [sic] enim
Galli Parisiorum oppidum appellant, quae insula est non magna, in fluvio
sita, qui eam omni ex parte eingit. Pontes sublicii utrinque ad eam
ferunt, raroque fluvius minuitur ae crescit; sed qualis aestate, talis
esse solet hyeme."--_Des Travaux Publics dans leur Rapports avec
l'Agriculture_, p. 361, note.
As Julian was six years in Gaul, and his principal residence was at
Paris, his testimony as to the habitual condition of the Seine, at a
period when the provinces where its sources originate were well wooded,
is very valuable.
[203] Almost every narrative of travel in those countries which were the
earliest seats of civilization, contains evidence of the truth of these
general statements, and this evidence is presented with more or less
detail in most of the special works on the forest which I have occasion
to cite. I may refer particularly to HOHENSTEIN, _Der Wald_, 1860, as
full of important facts on this subject. See also CAIMI, _Cenni sulla
Importanza dei Boschi_, for some statistics not readily found elsewhere,
on this and other topics connected with the forest.
[204] Stanley, citing SELDEN, _De Jure Naturali_, book vi, and
FABRICIUS, _Cod. Pseudap._ V. T., i, 874, mentions a remarkable Jewish
tradition of uncertain but unquestionably ancient date, which is among
the oldest evidences of public respect for the woods, and of enlightened
views of their importance and proper treatment:
"To Joshua a fixed Jewish tradition ascribed ten decrees, laying down
precise rules, which were instituted to protect the property of each
tribe and of each householder from lawless depredation. Cattle, of a
smaller kind, were to be allowed to graze in thick woods, not in thin
woods; in woods, no kind of cattle without the owner's consent. Sticks
and branches might be gathered by any Hebrew, but not cut. * * * Woods
might be pruned, provided they were not olives or fruit trees, and that
there was sufficient shade in the place."--_Lectures on the History of
the Jewish Church_, part i, p. 271.
[205] There seems to have been a tendency to excessive clearing in
Central and Western, earlier than in Southeastern France. Wise and good
Bernard Palissy--one of those persecuted Protestants of the sixteenth
century, whose heroism, virtue, refinement, and taste shine out in such
splendid contrast to the brutality, corruption, grossness, and barbarism
of their oppressors--in the _Recepte Veritable_, first printed in 1563,
thus complains: "When I consider the value of the least clump of trees,
or even of thorns, I much marvel at the great ignorance of men, who, as
it seemeth, do nowadays study only to break down, fell, and waste the
fair forests which their forefathers did guard so choicely. I would
think no evil of them for cutting down the woods, did they but replant
again some part of them; but they care nought for the time to come,
neither reck they of the great damage they do to their children which
shall come after them."--_[OE]uvres Completes de Bernard Palissy_, 1844,
p. 88.
[206] The great naval and commercial marines of Venice and of Genoa must
have occasioned an immense consumption of lumber in the Middle Ages, and
the centuries immediately succeeding those commonly embraced in that
designation. The marine construction of that period employed larger
timbers than the modern naval architecture of most commercial countries,
but apparently without a proportional increase of strength. The old
modes of ship building have been, to a considerable extent, handed down
to the present day in the Mediterranean, and an American or an
Englishman looks with astonishment at the huge beams and thick planks so
often employed in the construction of very small vessels navigating that
sea. According to Hummel, the desolation of the Karst, the high plateau
lying north of Trieste, now one of the most parched and barren districts
in Europe, is owing to the felling of its woods to build the navies of
Venice. "Where the miserable peasant of the Karst now sees nothing but
bare rock swept and scoured by the raging Bora, the fury of this wind
was once subdued by mighty firs, which Venice recklessly cut down to
build her fleets."--_Physische Geographie_, p. 32. See _Appendix_, No.
27.
[207] _Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia_, i, p. 367.
[208] See the periodical _Politecnico_, published at Milan, for the
month of May, 1862, p. 234.
[209] _Annali di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio_, vol. i, p. 77.
[210] HOLINSHED, reprint of 1807, i, pp. 357, 358. It is evident from
this passage, and from another on page 397 of the same volume, that,
though sea coal was largely exported to the Continent, it had not yet
come into general use in England. It is a question of much interest,
when coal was first employed in England for fuel. I can find no evidence
that it was used as a combustible until more than a century after the
Norman conquest. It has been said that it was known to the Anglo-Saxon
population, but I am acquainted with no passage in the literature of
that people which proves this. The dictionaries explain the Anglo-Saxon
word _graefa_ by sea coal. I have met with this word in no Anglo-Saxon
work, except in the _Chronicle_, A. D. 852, from a manuscript certainly
not older than the twelfth century, and in that passage it may as
probably mean peat as coal, and quite as probably something else as
either. Coal is not mentioned in King Alfred's Bede, in Glanville, or in
Robert of Gloucester, though all these writers speak of jet as found in
England, and are full in their enumeration of the mineral products of
the island.
England was anciently remarkable for its forests, but Caesar says it
wanted the _fagus_ and the _abies_. There can be no doubt that _fagus_
means the beech, which, as the remains in the Danish peat mosses show,
is a tree of late introduction into Denmark, where it succeeded the fir,
a tree not now native to that country. The succession of forest crops
seems to have been the same in England; for Harrison, p. 359, speaks of
the "great store of firre" found lying "at their whole lengths" in the
"fens and marises" of Lancashire and other counties, where not even
bushes grew in his time. We cannot be sure what species of evergreen
Caesar intended by _abies_. The popular designations of spike-leaved
trees are always more vague and uncertain in their application than
those of broad-leaved trees. _Pinus_, _pine_, has been very loosely
employed even in botanical nomenclature, and _Kiefer_, _Fichte_, and
_Tanne_ are often confounded in German.--ROSSMAeSSLER, _Der Wald_, pp.
256, 289, 324. If it were certain that the _abies_ of Caesar was the fir
formerly and still found in peat mosses, and that he was right in
denying the existence of the beech in England in his time, the
observation would be very important, because it would fix a date at
which the fir had become extinct, and the beech had not yet appeared in
the island.
The English oak, though strong and durable, was not considered generally
suitable for finer work in the sixteenth century. There were, however,
exceptions. "Of all in Essex," observes HARRISON, _Holinshed_, i, p.
357, "that growing in Bardfield parke is the finest for ioiners craft:
for oftentimes haue I seene of their workes made of that oke so fine and
faire, as most of the wainescot that is brought hither out of Danske;
for our wainescot is not made in England. Yet diuerse haue assaied to
deale without [with our] okes to that end, but not with so good successe
as they haue hoped, bicause the ab or iuice will not so soone be remoued
and cleane drawne out, which some attribute to want of time in the salt
water."
This passage 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 grasses; 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 analogous 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 quantity
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, Holzschlaeger und Floesser_.
[216] Streffleur (_Ueber die Natur und die Wirkungen der Wildbaeche_, p.
3) maintains that all the observations and speculations of French
authors on the nature of torrents had been anticipated by Austrian
writers. In proof of this assertion 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 Wasserbauwerke_,
Koenigsberg, 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 principal 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 Skalaera-Tobel, for instance, near Coire. See the description
in BERLEPSCH, _Die Alpen_, pp. 169 _et seqq_, or in Stephen's English
translation.