I have more than once alluded to the collateral and unsought consequences of human action as being often more momentous than the direct and desired results. There are cases where such incidental, or, in popular speech, accidental, consequences, though of minor importance in themselves, serve to illustrate natural processes; others, where, by the magnitude and character of the material traces they leave behind them, they prove that man, in primary or in more advanced stages of social life, must have occupied particular districts for a longer period than has been supposed by popular chronology. "On the coast of Jutland," says Forchhammer, "wherever a bolt from a wreck or any other fragment of iron is deposited in the beach sand, the particles are cemented together, and form a very solid mass around the iron. A remarkable formation of this sort was observed a few years ago in constructing the sea wall of the harbor of Elsineur. This stratum, which seldom exceeded a foot in thickness, rested upon common beach sand, and was found at various depths, less near the shore, greater at some distance from it. It was composed of pebbles and sand, and contained a great quantity of pins, and some coins of the reign of Christian IV, between the beginning and the middle of the seventeenth century. Here and there, a coating of metallic copper had been deposited by galvanic action, and the presence of completely oxydized metallic iron was often detected. An investigation undertaken by Councillor Reinhard and myself, at the instance of the Society of Science, made it in the highest degree probable that this formation owed its origin to the street sweepings of the town, which had been thrown upon the beach, and carried off and distributed by the waves over the bottom of the harbor."[488] These and other familiar observations of the like sort show that a sandstone reef, of no inconsiderable magnitude, might originate from the stranding of a ship with a cargo of iron,[489] or from throwing the waste of an establishment for working metals into running water which might carry it to the sea.
Parthey records a singular instance of unforeseen mischief from an interference with the arrangements of nature. A landowner at Malta possessed a rocky plateau sloping gradually toward the sea, and terminating in a precipice forty or fifty feet high, through natural openings in which the sea water flowed into a large cave under the rock. The proprietor attempted to establish salt works on the surface, and cut shallow pools in the rock for the evaporation of the water. In order to fill the salt pans more readily, he sank a well down to the cave beneath, through which he drew up water by a windlass and buckets. The speculation proved a failure, because the water filtered through the porous bottom of the pans, leaving little salt behind. But this was a small evil, compared with other destructive consequences that followed. When the sea was driven into the cave by violent west or northwest winds, it shot a jet d'eau through the well to the height of sixty feet, the spray of which was scattered far and wide over the neighboring gardens and blasted the crops. The well was now closed with stones, but the next winter's storms hurled them out again, and spread the salt spray over the grounds in the vicinity as before. Repeated attempts were made to stop the orifice, but at the time of Parthey's visit the sea had thrice burst through, and it was feared that the evil was without remedy.[490]
I have mentioned the great extent of the heaps of oyster and other shells left by the American Indians on the Atlantic coast of the United States. Some of the Danish kitchen-middens, which closely resemble them, are a thousand feet long, from one hundred and fifty to two hundred wide, and from six to ten high. These piles have an importance as geological witnesses, independent of their bearing upon human history. Wherever the coast line appears, from other evidence, to have remained unchanged in outline and elevation since they were accumulated, they are found near the sea, and not more than about ten feet above its level. In some cases they are at a considerable distance from the beach, and in these instances, so far as yet examined, there are proofs that the coast has advanced in consequence of upheaval or of fluviatile or marine deposit. Where they are altogether wanting, the coast seems to have sunk or been washed away by the sea. The constancy of these observations justifies geologists in arguing, where other evidence is wanting, the advance of land or sea respectively, or the elevation or depression of the former, from the position or the absence of these heaps alone.
Every traveller in Italy is familiar with Monte Testaccio, the mountain of potsherds, at Rome; but this deposit, large as it is, shrinks into insignificance when compared with masses of similar origin in the neighborhood of older cities. The castaway pottery of ancient towns in Magna Græcia composes strata of such extent and thickness that they have been dignified with the appellation of the ceramic formation. The Nile, as it slowly changes its bed, exposes in its banks masses of the same material, so vast that the population of the world during the whole historical period would seem to have chosen this valley as a general deposit for its broken vessels.
The fertility imparted to the banks of the Nile by the water and the slime of the inundations, is such that manures are little employed. Hence much domestic waste, which would elsewhere be employed to enrich the soil, is thrown out into vacant places near the town. Hills of rubbish are thus piled up which astonish the traveller almost as much as the solid pyramids themselves. The heaps of ashes and other household refuse collected on the borders and within the limits of Cairo were so large, that the removal of them by Ibrahim Pacha has been looked upon as one of the great works of the age.
The soil near cities, the street sweepings of which are spread upon the ground as manure, is perceptibly raised by them and by other effects of human industry, and in spite of all efforts to remove the waste, the level of the ground on which large towns stand is constantly elevated. The present streets of Rome are twenty feet above those of the ancient city. The Appian way between Rome and Albano, when cleared out a few years ago, was found buried four or five feet deep, and the fields along the road were elevated nearly or quite as much. The floors of many churches in Italy, not more than six or seven centuries old, are now three or four feet below the adjacent streets, though it is proved by excavations that they were built as many feet above them.
Resistance to Great Natural Forces.
I have often spoken of the greater and more subtile natural forces, and especially of geological agencies, as powers beyond human guidance or resistance. This is no doubt at present true in the main, but man has shown that he is not altogether impotent to struggle with even these mighty servants of nature, and his unconscious as well as his deliberate action may in some cases have increased or diminished the intensity of their energies. It is a very ancient belief that earthquakes are more destructive in districts where the crust of the earth is solid and homogeneous, than where it is of a looser and more interrupted structure. Aristotle, Pliny the elder, and Seneca believed that not only natural ravines and caves, but quarries, wells, and other human excavations, which break the continuity of the terrestrial strata and facilitate the escape of elastic vapors, have a sensible influence in diminishing the violence and preventing the propagation of the earth waves. In all countries subject to earthquakes this opinion is still maintained, and it is asserted that, both in ancient and in modern times, buildings protected by deep wells under or near them have suffered less from earthquakes than those the architects of which have neglected this precaution.[491]
If the commonly received theory of the cause of earthquakes is true—that, namely, which ascribes them to the elastic force of gases accumulated or generated in subterranean reservoirs—it is evident that open channels of communication between such reservoirs and the atmosphere might serve as a harmless discharge of gases that would otherwise acquire destructive energy. The doubt is whether artificial excavations can be carried deep enough to reach the laboratory where the elastic fluids are distilled. There are, in many places, small natural crevices through which such fluids escape, and the source of them sometimes lies at so moderate a depth that they pervade the superficial soil and, as it were, transpire from it, over a considerable area. When the borer of an ordinary artesian well strikes into a cavity in the earth, imprisoned air often rushes out with great violence, and this has been still more frequently observed in sinking mineral-oil wells. In this latter case, the discharge of a vehement current of inflammable fluid sometimes continues for hours and even longer periods. These facts seem to render it not wholly improbable that the popular belief of the efficacy of deep wells in mitigating the violence of earthquakes is well founded.
In general, light, wooden buildings are less injured by earthquakes than more solid structures of stone or brick, and it is commonly supposed that the power put forth by the earth wave is too great to be resisted by any amount of weight or solidity of mass that man can pile up upon the surface. But the fact that in countries subject to earthquakes many very large and strongly constructed palaces, temples, and other monuments have stood for centuries, comparatively uninjured, suggests a doubt whether this opinion is sound. The earthquake of the first of November, 1755, which was felt over a twelfth part of the earth's surface, was probably the most violent of which we have any clear and distinct account, and it seems to have exerted its most destructive force at Lisbon. It has often been noticed as a remarkable fact, that the mint, a building of great solidity, was almost wholly unaffected by the shock which shattered every house and church in the city, and its escape from the common ruin can hardly be accounted for except upon the supposition that its weight, compactness, and strength of material enabled it to resist an agitation of the earth which overthrew all weaker structures. On the other hand, a stone pier in the harbor of Lisbon, on which thousands of people had taken refuge, sank with its foundations to a great depth during the same earthquake; and it is plain that where subterranean cavities exist, at moderate depths, the erection of heavy masses upon them would tend to promote the breaking down of the strata which roof them over.
No physicist, I believe, has supposed that man can avert the eruption of a volcano or diminish the quantity of melted rock which it pours out of the bowels of the earth; but it is not always impossible to divert the course of even a large current of lava. "The smaller streams of lava near Catania," says Ferrara, in describing the great eruption of 1669, "were turned from their course by building dry walls of stone as a barrier against them. * * * It was proposed to divert the main current from Catania, and fifty men, protected by hides, were sent with hooks and iron bars to break the flank of the stream near Belpasso.[492] When the opening was made, fluid lava poured forth and flowed rapidly toward Paterno; but the inhabitants of that place, not caring to sacrifice their own town to save Catania, rushed out in arms and put a stop to the operation."[493] In the eruption of Vesuvius in 1794, the viceroy saved from impending destruction the town of Portici, and the valuable collection of antiquities then deposited there but since removed to Naples, by employing several thousand men to dig a ditch above the town, by which the lava current was carried off in another direction.[494]
Effects of Mining.
The excavations made by man, for mining and other purposes, may sometimes occasion disturbance of the surface by the subsidence of the strata above them, as in the case of the mine of Fahlun, but such accidents must always be too inconsiderable in extent to deserve notice in a geographical point of view. Such excavations, however, may interfere materially with the course of subterranean waters, and it has even been conjectured that the removal of large bodies of metallic ore from their original deposits might, at least locally, affect the magnetic and electrical condition of the earth's crust to a sensible degree.
Accidental fires in mines of coal or lignite sometimes lead to consequences not only destructive to large quantities of valuable material, but may, directly or indirectly, produce results important in geography. The coal occasionally takes fire from the miners' lights or other fires used by them, and, if long exposed to air in deserted galleries, may be spontaneously kindled. Under favorable circumstances, a stratum of coal will burn till it is exhausted, and a cavity may be burnt out in a few months which human labor could not excavate in many years. Wittwer informs us that a coal mine at St. Etienne in Dauphiny has been burning ever since the fourteenth century, and that a mine near Duttweiler, another near Epterode, and a third at Zwickau, have been on fire for two hundred years. Such conflagrations not only produce cavities in the earth, but communicate a perceptible degree of heat to the surface, and the author just quoted cites cases where this heat has been advantageously employed in forcing vegetation.[495]
Espy's Theories.
Espy's well known suggestion of the possibility of causing rain artificially, by kindling great fires, is not likely to be turned to practical account, but the speculations of this able meteorologist are not, for that reason, to be rejected as worthless. His labors exhibit great industry in the collection of facts, much ingenuity in dealing with them, remarkable insight into the laws of nature, and a ready perception of analogies and relations not obvious to minds less philosophically constituted. They have unquestionably contributed very essentially to the advancement of meteorological science. The possibility that the distribution and action of electricity may be considerably modified by long lines of iron railways and telegraph wires, is a kindred thought, and in fact rests much on the same foundation as the belief in the utility of lightning rods, but such influence is too obscure and too small to have been yet detected.
River Sediment.
The manifestation of the internal heat of the earth at any given point is conditioned by the thickness of the crust at such point. The deposits of rivers tend to augment that thickness at their estuaries. The sediment of slowly flowing rivers emptying into shallow seas is spread over so great a surface that we can hardly imagine the foot or two of slime they let fall over a wide area in a century to form an element among even the infinitesimal quantities which compose the terms of the equations of nature. But some swift rivers, rolling mountains of fine earth, discharge themselves into deeply scooped gulfs or bays, and in such cases the deposit amounts, in the course of a few years, to a mass the transfer of which from the surface of a large basin, and its accumulation at a single point, may be supposed to produce other effects than those measurable by the sounding line. Now, almost all the operations of rural life, as I have abundantly shown, increase the liability of the soil to erosion by water. Hence, the clearing of the valley of the Ganges by man must have much augmented the quantity of earth transported by that river to the sea, and of course have strengthened the effects, whatever they may be, of thickening the crust of the earth in the Bay of Bengal. In such cases, then, human action must rank among geological influences.
Nothing Small in Nature.
It is a legal maxim that "the law concerneth not itself with trifles," de minimus non curat lex; but in the vocabulary of nature, little and great are terms of comparison only; she knows no trifles, and her laws are as inflexible in dealing with an atom as with a continent or a planet.[496] The human operations mentioned in the last few paragraphs, therefore, do act in the ways ascribed to them, though our limited faculties are at present, perhaps forever, incapable of weighing their immediate, still more their ultimate consequences. But our inability to assign definite values to these causes of the disturbance of natural arrangements is not a reason for ignoring the existence of such causes in any general view of the relations between man and nature, and we are never justified in assuming a force to be insignificant because its measure is unknown, or even because no physical effect can now be traced to it as its origin. The collection of phenomena must precede the analysis of them, and every new fact, illustrative of the action and reaction between humanity and the material world around it, is another step toward the determination of the great question, whether man is of nature or above her.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In the Middle Ages, feudalism, and a nominal Christianity whose corruptions had converted the most beneficent of religions into the most baneful of superstitions, perpetuated every abuse of Roman tyranny, and added new oppressions and new methods of extortion to those invented by older despotisms. The burdens in question fell most heavily on the provinces that had been longest colonized by the Latin race, and these are the portions of Europe which have suffered the greatest physical degradation. "Feudalism," says Blanqui, "was a concentration of scourges. The peasant, stripped of the inheritance of his fathers, became the property of inflexible, ignorant, indolent masters; he was obliged to travel fifty leagues with their carts whenever they required it; he labored for them three days in the week, and surrendered to them half the product of his earnings during the other three; without their consent he could not change his residence, or marry. And why, indeed, should he wish to marry, when he could scarcely save enough to maintain himself? The Abbot Alcuin had twenty thousand slaves, called serfs, who were forever attached to the soil. This is the great cause of the rapid depopulation observed in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of monasteries which sprang up on every side. It was doubtless a relief to such miserable men to find in the cloisters a retreat from oppression; but the human race never suffered a more cruel outrage, industry never received a wound better calculated to plunge the world again into the darkness of the rudest antiquity. It suffices to say that the prediction of the approaching end of the world, industriously spread by the rapacious monks at this time, was received without terror."—Résumé de l'Histoire du Commerce, p. 156.
The abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which, in the time of Charlemagne, had possessed a million of acres, was, down to the Revolution, still so wealthy, that the personal income of the abbot was 300,000 livres. The abbey of Saint-Denis was nearly as rich as that of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.—Lavergne, Économie Rurale de la France, p. 104.
Paul Louis Courier quotes from La Bruyère the following striking picture of the condition of the French peasantry in his time: "One sees certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scattered over the country and attached to the soil, which they root and turn over with indomitable perseverance. They have, as it were, an articulate voice, and when they rise to their feet, they show a human face. They are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the labor of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting, and therefore deserve some small share of the bread they have grown." "These are his own words," adds Courier; "he is speaking of the fortunate peasants, of those who had work and bread, and they were then the few."—Pétition à la Chambre des Députís pour les Villageois que l'on empêche de danser.
Arthur Young, who travelled in France from 1787 to 1789, gives, in the twenty-first chapter of his Travels, a frightful account of the burdens of the rural population even at that late period. Besides the regular governmental taxes, and a multitude of heavy fines imposed for trifling offences, he enumerates about thirty seignorial rights, the very origin and nature of some of which are now unknown, while those of some others, claimed and enforced by ecclesiastical as well as by temporal lords, are as repulsive to humanity and morality, as the worst abuses ever practised by heathen despotism. Most of these, indeed, had been commuted for money payments, and were levied on the peasantry as pecuniary imposts for the benefit of prelates and lay lords, who, by virtue of their nobility, were exempt from taxation. Who can wonder at the hostility of the French plebeian classes toward the aristocracy in the days of the Revolution?
[2] The temporary depopulation of an exhausted soil may be, in some cases, a physical, though, like fallows in agriculture, a dear-bought advantage. Under favorable circumstances, the withdrawal of man and his flocks allows the earth to clothe itself again with forests, and in a few generations to recover its ancient productiveness. In the Middle Ages, worn-out fields were depopulated, in many parts of the Continent, by civil and ecclesiastical tyrannies, which insisted on the surrender of the half of a loaf already too small to sustain its producer. Thus abandoned, these lands often relapsed into the forest state, and, some centuries later, were again brought under cultivation with renovated fertility.
[3] The subject of climatic change, with and without reference to human action as a cause, has been much discussed by Moreau de Jonnes, Dureau, de la Malle, Arago, Humboldt, Fuster, Gasparin, Becquerel, and many other writers in Europe, and by Noah Webster, Forry, Drake, and others in America. Fraas has endeavored to show, by the history of vegetation in Greece, not merely that clearing and cultivation have affected climate, but that change of climate has essentially modified the character of vegetable life. See his Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit.
Gods Almagt wenkte van den troon,
En schiep elk volk een land ter woon:
Hier vestte Zij een grondgebied,
Dat Zij ons zelven scheppen liet.
[5] The udometric measurements of Belgrand, reported in the Annales Forestières for 1854, and discussed by Vallès in chap. vi of his Études sur les Inondations, constitute the earliest, and, in some respects, the most remarkable series known to me, of persevering and systematic observations bearing directly and exclusively upon the influence of human action on climate, or, to speak more accurately, on precipitation and natural drainage. The conclusions of Belgrand, however, and of Vallès, who adopts them, have not been generally accepted by the scientific world, and they seem to have been, in part at least, refuted by the arguments of Héricourt and the observations of Cantegril, Jeandel, and Belland. See chapter iii: The Woods.
[6] Verses addressed by G. C. to Sir Walter Raleigh.—Hakluyt, i, p. 668.
——I troer, at Synets Sands er lagt i Öiet,
Mens dette kun er Redskab. Synet strömmer
Fra Sjælens Dyb, og Öiets fine Nerver
Gaae ud fra Hjernens hemmelige Værksted.
Henrik Hertz, Kong René's Datter, sc. ii.
In the material eye, you think, sight lodgeth!
The eye is but an organ. Seeing streameth
From the soul's inmost depths. The fine perceptive
Nerve springeth from the brain's mysterious workshop.
[8] Skill in marksmanship, whether with firearms or with other projectile weapons, depends more upon the training of the eye than is generally supposed, and I have often found particularly good shots to possess an almost telescopic vision. In the ordinary use of the rifle, the barrel serves as a guide to the eye, but there are sportsmen who fire with the but of the gun at the hip. In this case, as in the use of the sling, the lasso, and the bolas, in hurling the knife (see Babinet, Lectures, vii, p. 84), in throwing the boomerang, the javelin, or a stone, and in the employment of the blow pipe and the bow, the movements of the hand and arm are guided by that mysterious sympathy which exists between the eye and the unseeing organs of the body.
In shooting the tortoises of the Amazon and its tributaries, the Indians use an arrow with a long twine and a float attached to it. Avé-Lallemant (Die Benutzung der Palmen am Amazonenstrom, p. 32) thus describes their mode of aiming: "As the arrow, if aimed directly at the floating tortoise, would strike it at a small angle, and glance from its flat and wet shell, the archers have a peculiar method of shooting. They are able to calculate exactly their own muscular effort, the velocity of the stream, the distance and size of the tortoise, and they shoot the arrow directly up into the air, so that it falls almost vertically upon the shell of the tortoise, and sticks in it." Analogous calculations—if such physico-mental operations can properly be so called—are made in the use of other missiles; for no projectile flies in a right line to its mark. But the exact training of the eye lies at the bottom of all of them, and marksmanship depends almost wholly upon the power of that organ, whose directions the blind muscles implicitly follow. It is perhaps not out of place to observe here that our English word aim comes from the Latin æstimo, I calculate or estimate. See Wedgwood's Dictionary of English Etymology, and the note to the American edition, under Aim.
Another proof of the control of the limbs by the eye has been observed in deaf-and-dumb schools, and others where pupils are first taught to write on large slates or blackboards. The writing is in large characters, the small letters being an inch or more high. They are formed with chalk or a slate pencil firmly grasped in the fingers, and by appropriate motions of the wrist, elbow, and shoulder, not of the finger joints. Nevertheless, when a pen is put into the hand of a pupil thus taught, his handwriting, though produced by a totally different set of muscles and muscular movements, is identical in character with that which he has practised on the blackboard.
It has been much doubted whether the artists of the classic ages possessed a more perfect sight than those of modern times, or whether, in executing their minute mosaics and gem engravings, they used magnifiers. Glasses ground convex have been found at Pompeii, but they are too rudely fashioned and too imperfectly polished to have been of any practical use for optical purposes. But though the ancient artists may have had a microscopic vision, their astronomers cannot have had a telescopic power of sight; for they did not discover the satellites of Jupiter, which are often seen with the naked eye at Oormeeah, in Persia, and sometimes, as I can testify by personal observation, at Cairo.
For a very remarkable account of the restoration of vision impaired from age, by judicious training, see Lessons in Life, by Timothy Titcomb, lesson xi.
[9] Antiquity of Man, p. 377.
[10] "One of them [the Indians] seated himself near me, and made from a fragment of quartz, with a simple piece of round bone, one end of which was hemispherical, with a small crease in it (as if worn by a thread) the sixteenth of an inch deep, an arrow head which was very sharp and piercing, and such as they use on all their arrows. The skill and rapidity with which it was made, without a blow, but by simply breaking the sharp edges with the creased bone by the strength of his hands—for the crease merely served to prevent the instrument from slipping, affording no leverage—was remarkable."—Reports of Explorations and Surveys for Pacific Railroad, vol. ii, 1855, Lieut. Beckwith's Report, p. 43.
It has been said that stone weapons are not found in Sicily, except in certain caves half filled with the skeletons of extinct animals. If they have not been found in that island in more easily accessible localities, I suspect it is because eyes familiar with such objects have not sought for them. In January, 1854, I picked up an arrow head of quartz in a little ravine or furrow just washed out by a heavy rain, in a field near the Simeto. It is rudely fashioned, but its artificial character and its special purpose are quite unequivocal.
[11] Probably no cultivated vegetable affords so good an opportunity of studying the laws of acclimation of plants as maize or Indian corn. Maize is grown from the tropics to at least lat. 47° in Northeastern America, and farther north in Europe. Every two or three degrees of latitude brings you to a new variety, with new climatic adaptations, and the capacity of the plant to accommodate itself to new conditions of temperature and season seems almost unlimited. We may easily suppose a variety of this grain, which had become acclimated in still higher latitudes, to have been lost, and in such case the failure to raise a crop from seed brought from some distance to the south would not prove that the climate had become colder.
Many persons now living remember that, when the common tomato was first introduced into Northern New England, it often failed to ripen; but, in the course of a very few years, it completely adapted itself to the climate, and now not only matures both its fruit and its seeds with as much certainty as any cultivated vegetable, but regularly propagates itself by self-sown seed. Meteorological observations, however, do not show any amelioration of the summer climate in those States within that period. See Appendix, No. 1.
Maize and the tomato, if not new to human use, have not been long known to civilization, and were, very probably, reclaimed and domesticated at a much more recent period than the plants which form the great staples of agricultural husbandry in Europe and Asia. Is the great power of accomodation to climate possessed by them due to this circumstance? There is some reason to suppose that the character of maize has been sensibly changed by cultivation in South America; for, according to Pöppig, the ears of this grain found in old Peruvian tombs belong to varieties not now known in Peru.—Travels in Peru, chap. vii.
[12] The cultivation of madder is said to have been introduced into Europe by an Oriental in the year 1765, and it was first planted in the neighborhood of Avignon. Of course, it has been grown in that district for less than a century; but upon soils where it has been a frequent crop, it is already losing much of its coloring properties.—Lavergne, Économie Rurale de la France, pp. 259-291.
I believe there is no doubt that the cultivation of madder in the vicinity of Avignon is of recent introduction; but it appears from Fuller and other evidence, that this plant was grown in Europe before the middle of the seventeenth century. The madder brought to France from Persia may be of a different species, or, at least, variety. "Some two years since," says Fuller, "madder was sown by Sir Nicholas Crispe at Debtford, and I hope will have good success; first because it groweth in Zeland in the same (if not a more northern) latitude. Secondly, because wild madder grows here in abundance; and why may not tame madder if cicurated by art. Lastly, because as good as any grew some thirty years since at Barn-Elms, in Surrey, though it quit not cost through some error in the first planter thereof, which now we hope will be rectified."—Fuller, Worthies of England, ii, pp. 57, 58.
Perhaps the recent diseases of the olive, the vine, and the silkworm—the prevailing malady of which insect is supposed by some to be the effect of an incipient decay of the mulberry tree—may be, in part, due to changes produced in the character of the soil by exhaustion through long cultivation.
[13] In many parts of New England there are tracts, miles in extent, and presenting all varieties of surface and exposure, which were partially cleared sixty or seventy years ago, and where little or no change in the proportion of cultivated ground, pasturage, and woodland has taken place since. In some cases, these tracts compose basins apparently scarcely at all exposed to any local influence in the way of percolation or infiltration of water toward or from neighboring valleys. But in such situations, apart from accidental disturbances, the ground is growing drier and drier, from year to year, springs are still disappearing, and rivulets still diminishing in their summer supply of water. A probable explanation of this is to be found in the rapid drainage of the surface of cleared ground, which prevents the subterranean natural reservoirs, whether cavities or merely strata of bibulous earth, from filling up. How long this process is to last before an equilibrium is reached, none can say. It may be, for years; it may be, for centuries.
Livingstone states facts which favor the supposition that a secular desiccation is still going on in central Africa. When the regions where the earth is growing drier were cleared of wood, or, indeed, whether forests ever grew there, we are unable to say, but the change appears to have been long in progress. There is reason to suspect a similar revolution in Arabia Petræa. In many of the wadis, and particularly in the gorges between Wadi Feiran and Wadi Esh Sheikh, there are water-worn banks showing that, at no very remote period, the winter floods must have risen fifty feet in channels where the growth of acacias and tamarisks and the testimony of the Arabs concur to prove that they have not risen six feet within the memory or tradition of the present inhabitants. There is little probability that any considerable part of the Sinaitic peninsula has been wooded since its first occupation by man, and we must seek the cause of its increasing dryness elsewhere than in the removal of the forest.
[14] The soil of newly subdued countries is generally in a high degree favorable to the growth of the fruits of the garden and the orchard, but usually becomes much less so in a very few years. Plums, of many varieties, were formerly grown, in great perfection and abundance, in many parts of New England where at present they can scarcely be reared at all; and the peach, which, a generation or two ago, succeeded admirably in the southern portion of the same States, has almost ceased to be cultivated there. The disappearance of these fruits is partly due to the ravages of insects, which have in later years attacked them; but this is evidently by no means the sole, or even the principal cause of their decay. In these cases, it is not to the exhaustion of the particular acres on which the fruit trees have grown that we are to ascribe their degeneracy, but to a general change in the condition of the soil or the air; for it is equally impossible to rear them successfully on absolutely new land in the neighborhood of grounds where, not long since, they bore the finest fruit.
I remember being told, many years ago, by one of the earliest settlers of the State of Ohio, a very intelligent and observing person, that the apple trees raised there from seed sown soon after the land was cleared, bore fruit in less than half the time required to bring to bearing those reared from seed sown when the ground had been twenty years under cultivation.
In the peat mosses of Denmark, Scotch firs and other trees not now growing in the same localities, are found in abundance. Every generation of trees leaves the soil in a different state from that in which it found it; every tree that springs up in a group of trees of another species than its own, grows under different influences of light and shade and atmosphere from its predecessors. Hence the succession of crops, which occurs in all natural forests, seems to be due rather to changes of condition than of climate. See chapter iii, post.
[15] The nomenclature of meteorology is vague and sometimes equivocal. Not long since, it was suspected that the observers reporting to a scientific institution did not agree in their understanding of the mode of expressing the direction of the wind prescribed by their instructions. It was found, upon inquiry, that very many of them used the names of the compass-points to indicate the quarter from which the wind blew, while others employed them to signify the quarter toward which the atmospheric currents were moving. In some instances, the observers were no longer within the reach of inquiry, and of course their tables of the wind were of no value.
"Winds," says Mrs. Somerville, "are named from the points whence they blow, currents exactly the reverse. An easterly wind comes from the east; whereas an easterly current comes from the west, and flows toward the east."—Physical Geography, p. 229.
There is no philological ground for this distinction, and it probably originated in a confusion of the terminations -wardly and -erly, both of which are modern. The root of the former ending implies the direction to or to-ward which motion is supposed. It corresponds to, and is probably allied with, the Latin versus. The termination -erly is a corruption or softening of -ernly, easterly for easternly, and many authors of the seventeenth century so write it. In Hakluyt (i, p. 2), easterly is applied to place, "easterly bounds," and means eastern. In a passage in Drayton, "easterly winds" must mean winds from the east; but the same author, in speaking of nations, uses northerly for northern. Hakewell says: "The sonne cannot goe more southernely from vs, nor come more northernely towards vs." Holland, in his translation of Pliny, referring to the moon has: "When shee is northerly," and "shee is gone southerly." Richardson, to whom I am indebted for the above citations, quotes a passage from Dampier where westerly is applied to the wind, but the context does not determine the direction. The only example of the termination in -wardly given by this lexicographer is from Donne, where it means toward the west.
Shakspeare, in Hamlet (v. ii), uses northerly wind for wind from the north. Milton does not employ either of these terminations, nor were they known to the Anglo-Saxons, who, however, had adjectives of direction in -an or -en, -ern and -weard, the last always meaning the point toward which motion is supposed, the others that from which it proceeds.
We use an east wind, an eastern wind, and an easterly wind, to signify the same thing. The two former expressions are old, and constant in meaning; the last is recent, superfluous, and equivocal. See Appendix, No. 2.
[16] I do not here speak of the vast prairie region of the Mississippi valley, which cannot properly be said ever to have been a field of British colonization; but of the original colonies, and their dependencies in the territory of the present United States, and in Canada. It is, however, equally true of the Western prairies as of the Eastern forest land, that they had arrived at a state of equilibrium, though under very different conditions.
[17] The great fire of Miramichi in 1825, probably the most extensive and terrific conflagration recorded in authentic history, spread its ravages over nearly six thousand square miles, chiefly of woodland, and was of such intensity that it seemed to consume the very soil itself. But so great are the recuperative powers of nature, that, in twenty-five years, the ground was thickly covered again with trees of fair dimensions, except where cultivation and pasturage kept down the forest growth.
[18] The English nomenclature of this geographical feature does not seem well settled. We have bog, swamp, marsh, morass, moor, fen, turf moss, peat moss, quagmire, all of which, though sometimes more or less accurately discriminated, are often used interchangeably, or are perhaps employed, each exclusively, in a particular district. In Sweden, where, especially in the Lappish provinces, this terr-aqueous formation is very extensive and important, the names of its different kinds are more specific in their application. The general designation of all soils permanently pervaded with water is Kärr. The elder Læstadius divides the Kärr into two genera: Myror (sing. myra), and Mossar (sing. mosse). "The former," he observes, "are grass-grown, and overflowed with water through almost the whole summer; the latter are covered with mosses and always moist, but very seldom overflowed." He enumerates the following species of Myra, the character of which will perhaps be sufficiently understood by the Latin terms into which he translates the vernacular names, for the benefit of strangers not altogether familiar with the language and the subject: 1. Hömyror, paludes graminosæ. 2. Dy, paludes profundæ. 3. Flarkmyror, or proper kärr, paludes limosæ. 4. Fjällmyror, paludes uliginosæ. 5. Tufmyror, paludes cæspitosæ. 6. Rismyror, paludes virgatæ. 7. Starrängar, prata irrigata, with their subdivisions, dry starrängar or risängar, wet starrängar and fräkengropar. 8. Pölar, laeunæ. 9. Gölar, fossæ inundatæ. The Mossar, paludes turfosæ, which are of great extent, have but two species: 1. Torfmossar, called also Mossmyror and Snottermyror, and, 2. Björnmossar.
The accumulations of stagnant or stagnating water originating in bogs are distinguished into Trāsk, stagna, and Tjernar or Tjärnar (sing. Tjern or Tjärn), stagnatiles. Trāsk are pools fed by bogs, or water emanating from them, and their bottoms are slimy; Tjernar are small Träsk situated within the limits of Mossar.—L. L. Læstadius, om Möjligheten af Uppodlingar i Lappmarken, pp. 23, 24.