[441] "In the Middle Ages," says Willibald Alexis, as quoted by Müller, Das Buch der Pflanzenwelt i, p. 16, "the Nehrung was extending itself further, and the narrow opening near Lochstadt had filled itself up with sand. A great pine forest bound with its roots the dune sand and the heath uninterruptedly from Danzig to Pillau. King Frederick William I was once in want of money. A certain Herr von Korff promised to procure it for him, without loan or taxes, if he could be allowed to remove something quite useless. He thinned out the forests of Prussia, which then, indeed, possessed little pecuniary value; but he felled the entire woods of the Frische Nehrung, so far as they lay within the Prussian territory. The financial operation was a success. The king had money, but in the elementary operation which resulted from it, the state received irreparable injury. The sea winds rush over the bared hills; the Frische Haff is half-choked with sand; the channel between Elbing, the sea, and Königsberg is endangered, and the fisheries in the Haff injured. The operation of Herr von Korff brought the king 200,000 thalers. The state would now willingly expend millions to restore the forests again."
[442] Staring, Voormaals en Thans, p. 231. Had the dunes of the Netherlandish and French coasts, at the period of the Roman invasion, resembled the moving sand hills of the present day, it is inconceivable that they could have escaped the notice of so acute a physical geographer as Strabo; and the absolute silence of Cæsar, Ptolemy, and the encyclopædic Pliny, respecting them, would be not less inexplicable.
The Old Northern language, the ancient tongue of Denmark, though rich in terms descriptive of natural scenery, had no name for dune, nor do I think the sand hills of the coast are anywhere noticed in Icelandic literature. The modern Icelanders, in treating of the dunes of Jutland, call them klettr, hill, cliff, and the Danish klit is from that source. The word Düne is also of recent introduction into German. Had the dunes been distinguished from other hillocks, in ancient times, by so remarkable a feature as the propensity to drift, they would certainly have acquired a specific name in both Old Northern and German. So long as they were wooded knolls, they needed no peculiar name; when they became formidable, from the destruction of the woods which confined them, they acquired a designation.
[443] The sands of Cape Cod were partially, if not completely, covered with vegetation by nature. Dr. Dwight, describing the dunes as they were in 1800, says: "Some of them are covered with beach grass; some fringed with whortleberry bushes; and some tufted with a small and singular growth of oaks. * * * The parts of this barrier, which are covered with whortleberry bushes and with oaks, have been either not at all, or very little blown. The oaks, particularly, appear to be the continuation of the forests originally formed on this spot. * * * They wore all the marks of extreme age; were, in some instances, already decayed, and in others decaying; were hoary with moss, and were deformed by branches, broken and wasted, not by violence, but by time."—Travels, iii, p. 91.
[444] Bergsöe (Reventlovs Virksomhed, ii, 3) states that the dunes on the west coast of Jutland were stationary before the destruction of the forests to the east of them. The felling of the tall trees removed the resistance to the lower currents of the westerly winds, and the sands have since buried a great extent of fertile soil. See also same work, ii, p. 124.
[445] "We must, therefore, not be surprised to see the people here deal as gingerly with their dunes, as if treading among eggs. He who is lucky enough to own a molehill of dune pets it affectionately, and spends his substance in cherishing and fattening it. That fair, fertile, rich province, the peninsula of Eiderstädt in the south of Friesland, has, on the point toward the sea, only a tiny row of dunes, some six miles long or so; but the people talk of their fringe of sand hills as if it were a border set with pearls. They look upon it as their best defence against Neptune. They have connected it with their system of dikes, and for years have kept sentries posted to protect it against wanton injury."—J. G. Kohl, Die Inseln u. Marschen Schleswig-Holsteins, ii, p. 115.
[446] Sand banks sometimes connect themselves with the coast at both ends, and thus cut off a portion of the sea. In this case, as well as when salt water is enclosed by sea dikes, the water thus separated from the ocean gradually becomes fresh, or at least brackish. The Haffs, or large expanses of fresh water in Eastern Prussia—which are divided from the Baltic by narrow sand banks called Nehrungen, or, at sheltered points of the coast, by fluviatile deposits called Werders—all have one or more open passages, through which the water of the rivers that supply them at last finds its way to the sea.
[447] Andresen, Om Klitformationen, pp. 68-72.
[448] Id., pp. 231, 232. Andresen's work, though printed in 1861, was finished in 1859. Lyell (Antiquity of Man, 1863, p. 14) says: "Even in the course of the present century, the salt waters have made one eruption into the Baltic by the Liimfjord, although they have been now again excluded."
[449] Forchhammer, Geognostische Studien am Meeres-Ufer. Leonhard und Bronn, Jahrbuch, 1841, pp. 11, 13.
[450] Andresen, Om Klitformationen, pp. 68, 72.
[451] Voormaals en Thans, pp. 126, 170.
[452] See a very interesting article entitled "Le Littoral de la France," by Élisée Reclus, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, for December, 1862, pp. 901, 936.
[454] The movement of the dunes has been hardly less destructive on the north side of the Gironde. Sea the valuable article of Élisée Reclus already referred to, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, for December, 1862, entitled "Le Littoral de la France."
[455] Laval, Mémoire sur les Dunes du Golfe de Gascogne, Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1847, p. 223. The author adds, as a curious and unexplained fact, that some of these pools, though evidently not original formations but mere accumulations of water dammed up by the dunes, have, along their western shore, near the base of the sand hills, a depth of more than one hundred and thirty feet, and hence their bottoms are not less than eighty feet below the level of the lowest tides. Their western banks descend steeply, conforming nearly to the slope of the dunes, while on the northeast and south the inclination of their beds is very gradual. The greatest depth of these pools corresponds to that of the sea ten miles from the shore. Is it possible that the weight of the sands has pressed together the soil on which they rest, and thus occasioned a subsidence of the surface extending beyond their base? See Appendix, No. 61.
[456] Andresen, Om Klitformationem, pp. 56, 79, 82.
[457] Staring, De Bodem van Nederland, i, pp. 329-331. Id., Voormaals en Thans, p. 163. Andresen, Om Klitformationen, pp. 280, 295.
The creation of new dunes, by the processes mentioned in the text, seems to be much older in Europe than the adoption of measures for securing them by planting. Dr. Dwight mentions a case in Massachusetts, where a beach was restored, and new dunes formed, by planting beach grass. "Within the memory of my informant, the sea broke over the beach which connects Truro with Province Town, and swept the body of it away for some distance. The beach grass was immediately planted on the spot; in consequence of which the beach was again raised to a sufficient height, and in various places into hills."—Dwight's Travels, iii, p. 93.
[458] Staring, i, pp. 310, 332.
[459] There is some confusion in the popular use of these names, and in the scientific designations of sand plants, and they are possibly applied to different plants in different places. Some writers style the gourbet Calamagrostis arenaria, and distinguish it from the Danish Klittetag or Hjelme.
[460] Bread, not indeed very palatable, has been made of the seeds of the arundo, but the quantity which can be gathered is not sufficient to form an important economical resource.——Andresen, Om Klitformationen, p. 160.
[461] Bergsöe, Reventlovs Virksomhed, ii, p. 4.
[462] Measures were taken for the protection of the dunes of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, during the colonial period, though I believe they are now substantially abandoned. A hundred years ago, before the valley of the Mississippi, or even the rich plains of Central and Western New York, were opened to the white settler, the value of land was relatively much greater in New England than it is at present, and consequently some rural improvements were then worth making, which would not now yield sufficient returns to tempt the investment of capital. The money and the time required to subdue and render productive twenty acres of sea sand on Cape Cod, would buy a "section" and rear a family in Illinois. The son of the Pilgrims, therefore, abandons the sand hills, and seeks a better fortune on the fertile prairies of the West.
Dr. Dwight, who visited Cape Cod in the year 1800, after describing the "beach grass, a vegetable bearing a general resemblance to sedge, but of a light bluish-green, and of a coarse appearance," which "flourishes with a strong and rapid vegetation on the sands," observes that he received "from a Mr. Collins, formerly of Truro, the following information:" "When he lived at Truro, the inhabitants were, under the authority of law, regularly warned in the month of April, yearly, to plant beach grass, as, in other towns of New England, they are warned to repair highways. It was required by the laws of the State, and under the proper penalties for disobedience; being as regular a public tax as any other. The people, therefore, generally attended and performed the labor. The grass was dug in bunches, as it naturally grows; and each bunch divided into a number of smaller ones. These were set out in the sand at distances of three feet. After one row was set, others were placed behind it in such a manner as to shut up the interstices; or, as a carpenter would say, so as to break the joints. * * * When it is once set, it grows and spreads with rapidity. * * * The seeds are so heavy that they bend down the heads of the grass; and when ripe, drop directly down by its side, where they immediately vegetate. Thus in a short time the ground is covered.
"Where this covering is found, none of the sand is blown. On the contrary, it is accumulated and raised continually as snow gathers and rises among bushes, or branches of trees cut and spread upon the earth. Nor does the grass merely defend the surface on which it is planted; but rises, as that rises by new accumulations; and always overtops the sand, however high that may be raised by the wind."—Dwight's Travels in New England and New York, ii, p. 92, 93.
This information was received in 1800, and it relates to a former state of things, probably more than twenty years previous, and earlier than 1779, when the Government of Denmark first seriously attempted the conquest of the dunes.
The depasturing of the beach grass—a plant allied in habits, if not in botanical character, to the arundo—has been attended with very injurious effects in Massachusetts. Dr. Dwight, after referring to the laws for its propagation, already cited, says: "The benefit of this useful plant, and of these prudent regulations, is, however, in some measure lost. There are in Province Town, as I was informed, one hundred and forty cows. These animals, being stinted in their means of subsistence, are permitted to wander, at times, in search of food. In every such case, they make depredations on the beach grass, and prevent its seeds from being formed. In this manner the plant is ultimately destroyed."—Travels, iii, p. 94.
On page 101 of the same volume, the author mentions an instance of great injury from this cause. "Here, about one thousand acres were entirely blown away to the depth, in many places, of ten feet. * * * Not a green thing was visible except the whortleberries, which tufted a few lonely hillocks rising to the height of the original surface and prevented by this defence from being blown away also. These, although they varied the prospect, added to the gloom by their strongly picturesque appearance, by marking exactly the original level of the plain, and by showing us in this manner the immensity of the mass which had been thus carried away by the wind. The beach grass had been planted here, and the ground had been formerly enclosed; but the gates had been left open, and the cattle had destroyed this invaluable plant."
[463] Andresen, Om Klitformationen, pp. 237, 240.
[464] "These plantations, perseveringly continued from the time of Brémontier now cover more than 40,000 hectares, and compose forests which are not only the salvation of the department, but constitute its wealth."—Clavé, Études Forestières, p. 254.
Other authors have stated the plantations of the French dunes to be much more extensive.
[465] Kruse, Dünenbau, pp. 34, 38, 40.
[466] These processes are substantially similar to those employed in the pineries of the Carolinas, but they are better systematized and more economically conducted in France. In the latter country, all the products of the pine, even to the cones, find a remunerating market, while, in America, the price of resin is so low, that in the fierce steamboat races on the great rivers, large quantities of it are thrown into the furnaces to increase the intensity of the fires. In a carefully prepared article on the Southern pineries published in an American magazine—I think Harper's—a few years ago, it was stated that the resin from the turpentine distilleries was sometimes allowed to run to waste; and the writer, in one instance, observed a mass, thus rejected as rubbish, which was estimated to amount to two thousand barrels. See Appendix, No. 62.
[467] Andresen, Om Klitformationen, pp. 78, 262, 275.
[468] Laval, Mémoire sur les Dunes du Golfe de Gascogne, Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1847, 2me sémestre, p. 261. See Appendix, No. 63.
[469] There are extensive ranges of dunes on various parts of the coasts of the British Islands, but I find no estimate of their area. Pannewitz (Anleitung zam Anbau der Sandflächen), as cited by Andresen (Om Klitformationen, p. 45), states that the drifting sands of Europe, including, of course, sand plains as well as dunes, cover an extent of 21,000 square miles. This is, perhaps, an exaggeration, though there is, undoubtedly, much more desert land of this description on the European continent than has been generally supposed. There is no question that most of this waste is capable of reclamation by simple planting, and no mode of physical improvement is better worth the attention of civilized Governments than this.
There are often serious objections to extensive forest planting on soils capable of being otherwise made productive, but they do not apply to sand wastes, which, until covered by woods, are not only a useless incumbrance, but a source of serious danger to all human improvements in the neighborhood of them.
[470] Boitel, Mise en valeur des Terres pauvres par le Pin maritime, pp. 212, 218.
[471] See Appendix, No. .
[472] For details, consult Andresen, Om Klitformationen, pp. 223, 236.
[473] When the deposit is not very deep, and the adjacent land lying to the leeward of the prevailing winds is covered with water, or otherwise worthless, the surface is sometimes freed from the drifts by repeated harrowings, which loosen the sand, so that the wind takes it up and transports it to grounds where accumulations of it are less injurious.
[474] Travels and Researches in Chaldæa, chap. ix.
[475] Études Forestières, p. 253.
[476] Lavergne, Économie Rurale de la France, p. 300, estimates the area of the Landes of Gascony at 700,000 hectares, or about 1,700,000 acres. The same author states (p. 304), that when the Moors were driven from Spain by the blind cupidity and brutal intolerance of the age, they demanded permission to establish themselves in this desert; but political and religious prejudices prevented the granting of this liberty. At this period the Moors were a far more cultivated people than their Christian persecutors, and they had carried many arts, that of agriculture especially, to a higher pitch than any other European nation. But France was not wise enough to accept what Spain had cast out, and the Landes remained a waste for three centuries longer. See Appendix, No. 64.
The forest of Fontainebleau, which contains above 40,000 acres, is not a plain, but its soil is composed almost wholly of sand, interspersed with ledges of rock. The sand forms not less than ninety-eight per cent. of the earth, and, as it is almost without water, it would be a drifting desert but for the artificial propagation of forest trees upon it.
[477] Économie Rurale de la Belgique, par Emile de Laveleye, Revue des Deux Mondes, Juin, 1861, pp. 617-644.
[478] Geognosie, ii, p. 1173.
[479] According to Hohenstein, Der Wald, pp. 228, 229, an extensive plantation of pines—a tree new to Southern Russia—was commenced in 1842, on the barren and sandy banks of the Ingula, near Elisabethgrod, and has met with very flattering success. Other experiments in sylviculture at different points on the steppes promise valuable results.
[480] "Sixteen years ago," says an Odessa landholder, "I attempted to fix the sand of the steppes, which covers the rocky ground to the depth of a foot, and forms moving hillocks with every change of wind. I tried acacias and pines in vain; nothing would grow in such a soil. At length I planted the varnish tree, or ailanthus, which succeeded completely in binding the sand." This result encouraged the proprietor to extend his plantations over both dunes and sand steppes, and in the course of sixteen years this rapidly growing tree had formed real forests. Other landowners have imitated his example with great advantage.—Rentsch, Der Wald, p. 44, 45.
[481] Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste, i, pp. 204 et seqq.
[482] "If we suppose the narrow isthmus of Central America to be sunk in the ocean, the warm equatorial current would no longer follow its circuitous route around the Gulf of Mexico, but pour itself through the new opening directly into the Pacific. We should then lose the warmth of the Gulf Stream, and cold polar currents flowing farther southward would take its place and be driven upon our coasts by the western winds. The North Sea would resemble Hudson's Bay, and its harbors be free from ice at best only in summer. The power and prosperity of its coasts would shrivel under the breath of winter, as a medusa thrown on shore shrinks to an insignificant film under the influence of the destructive atmosphere. Commerce, industry, fertility of soil, population, would disappear, and the vast waste—a new Labrador—would become a worthless appendage of some clime more favored by nature."—Hartwig, Das Leben des Meeres, p. 70.
[483] I know nothing of Captain Allen's work but its title and its subject. Very probably he may have anticipated many of the following speculations, and thrown light on points upon which I am ignorant.
[484] "Some haue writtē, that by certain kings inhabiting aboue, the Nilus should there be stopped; & at a time prefixt, let loose vpon a certaine tribute payd them by the Aegyptians. The error springing perhaps frō a truth (as all wandring reports for the most part doe) in that the Sultan doth pay a certaine annuall summe to the Abissin Emperour for not diuerting the course of the Riuer, which (they say) he may, or impouerish it at the least."—George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey, etc., p. 98.
[485] The Recca, a river with a considerable current, has been satisfactorily identified with a stream flowing through the cave of Trebich, and with the Timavo—the Timavus of Virgil and the ancient geographers—which empties through several mouths into the Adriatic between Trieste and Aquileia. The distance from Trieste to a suitable point in the grotto of Trebich is thought to be less than three miles, and the difficulties in the way of constructing a tunnel do not seem formidable. The works of Schmidl, Die Höhlen des Karstes, and Der unterirdische Lauf der Recca, are not common out of Germany, but the reader will find many interesting facts derived from them in two articles entitled Der unterirdische Lauf der Recca, in Aus der Natur, xx, pp. 250-254, 263-266.
[486] Barth, Wanderungen durch die Küsten des Mittelmeeres, i, p. 353. In a note on page 380, of the same volume, Barth cites Strabo as asserting that a similar practice prevailed in Iapygia; but it may be questioned whether the epithet τραχεῖα, applied by Strabo to the original surface, necessarily implies that it was covered with a continuous stratum of rock.
[487] Parthey, Wanderungen durch Sicilien und die Levante, i, p. 404.
[488] Geognostische Studien am Meeres Ufer, Leonhard und Bronn, Jahrbuch, 1841, pp. 25, 26.
[489] Kohl, Schleswig-Holstein, ii, p. 45.
[490] Wanderungen durch Sicilien und die Levante, i, p. 406.
[491] Landgrebe, Naturgeschichte der Vulkane, ii, pp. 19, 20.
[492] Soon after the current issues from the volcano, it is covered above and at its sides, and finally in front, with scoriæ, formed by the cooling of the exposed surface, which bury and conceal the fluid mass. The stream rolls on under the coating, and between the walls of scoriæ, and it was the lateral crust which was broken through by the workmen mentioned in the text.
The distance to which lava flows, before its surface begins to solidify, depends on its volume, its composition, its temperature and that of the air, the force with which it is ejected, and the inclination of the declivity over which it runs. In most cases it is difficult to approach the current at points where it is still entirely fluid, and hence opportunities of observing it in that condition are not very frequent. In the eruption of February, 1850, on the east side of Vesuvius, I went quite up to one of the outlets. The lava shot out of the orifice upward with great velocity, like the water from a spring, in a stream eight or ten feet in diameter, throwing up occasionally volcanic bombs, but it immediately spread out on the declivity down which it flowed, to the width of several yards. It continued red hot in broad daylight, and without a particle of scoriæ on its surface, for a course of at least one hundred yards. At this distance, the suffocating, sulphurous vapors became so dense that I could follow the current no farther. The undulations of the surface were like those of a brook swollen by rain. I estimated the height of the waves at five or six inches by a breadth of eighteen or twenty. To the eye, the fluidity of the lava seemed as perfect as that of water, but masses of cold lava weighing ten or fifteen pounds floated upon it like cork.
The heat emitted by lava currents seems extremely small when we consider the temperature required to fuse such materials and the great length of time they take in cooling. I saw at Nicolosi ancient oil jars, holding a hundred gallons or more, which had been dug out from under a stream of old lava above that town. They had been very slightly covered with volcanic ashes before the lava flowed over them, but the lead with which holes in them had been plugged was not melted. The current that buried Mompiliere in 1669 was thirty-five feet thick, but marble statues, in a church over which the lava formed an arch, were found uncalcined and uninjured in 1704. See Scrope, Volcanoes, chap. VI. § 6.
[493] Ferrara, Descrizione dell' Etna, p. 108.
[494] Langrebe, Naturgeschichte der Vulkane, ii, p. 82.
[495] Physikalische Geographie, p. 168. Beds of peat, accidentally set on fire, sometimes continue to burn for months. I take the following account of a case of this sort from a recent American journal:
"A Curious Phenomenon.—When the track of the railroad between Brunswick and Bath was being graded, in crossing a meadow near the populous portion of the latter city, the 'dump' suddenly took on a sinking symptom, and down went the twenty feet fill of gravel, clay, and broken rocks, out of sight, and it was a long, long time before dirt trains could fill the capacious stomach that seemed ready to receive all the solid material that could be turned into it. The difficulty was at length overcome, but all along the side of the sinkage the earth was thrown up, broken into yawning chasms, and the surface was thus elevated above its old watery level. Since that time this ground, thus slightly elevated, has been cultivated, and has yielded enormously of whatever the owner seemed disposed to plant upon it. Some three months ago, by some means unknown to us, the underlying peat took fire, and for weeks, as we had occasion to pass it, we noticed the smoke arising from the smouldering combustion beneath the surface. Rains fell, but the fire burned, and the smoke continued to arise. Monday we had occasion to pass the spot, and though nearly a week's rain had been drenching the ground, and though the surface was whitened with snow, and though pools of water were standing upon the surface in the immediate neighborhood, still the everlasting subterranean fire was burning, and the smoke arising through the snow."
[496] One of the sublimest, and at the same time most fearful suggestions that have been prompted by the researches of modern science, was made by Babbage in the ninth chapter of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. I have not the volume at hand, but the following explanation will recall to the reader, if it does not otherwise make intelligible, the suggestion I refer to.
No atom can be disturbed in place, or undergo any change of temperature, of electrical state, or other material condition, without affecting, by attraction or repulsion or other communication, the surrounding atoms. These, again, by the same law, transmit the influence to other atoms, and the impulse thus given extends through the whole material universe. Every human movement, every organic act, every volition, passion, or emotion, every intellectual process, is accompanied with atomic disturbance, and hence every such movement, every such act or process affects all the atoms of universal matter. Though action and reaction are equal, yet reaction does not restore disturbed atoms to their former place and condition, and consequently the effects of the least material change are never cancelled, but in some way perpetuated, so that no action can take place in physical, moral, or intellectual nature, without leaving all matter in a different state from what it would have been if such action had not occurred. Hence, to use language which I have employed on another occasion: there exists, not alone in the human conscience or in the omniscience of the Creator, but in external material nature, an ineffaceable, imperishable record, possibly legible even to created intelligence, of every act done, every word uttered, nay, of every wish and purpose and thought conceived by mortal man, from the birth of our first parent to the final extinction of our race; so that the physical traces of our most secret sins shall last until time shall be merged in that eternity of which not science, but religion alone, assumes to take cognizance.
APPENDIX.
No. 1 (page 19, note). It may be said that the cases referred to in the note on p. 19—and indeed all cases of a supposed acclimation consisting in physiological changes—are instances of the origination of new varieties by natural selection, the hardier maize, tomato, and other vegetables of the North, being the progeny of seeds of individuals endowed, exceptionally, with greater power of resisting cold than belongs in general to the species which produced them. But, so far as the evidence of change of climate, from a difference in vegetable growth, is concerned, it is immaterial whether we adopt this view or maintain the older and more familiar doctrine of a local modification of character in the plants in question.
No. 2 (page 24, note). The adjectives of direction in -erly are not unfrequently used to indicate, in a loose way, the course of winds blowing from unspecified points between N.E. and S.E.; S.E. and S.W.; S.W. and N.W. or N.W. and N.E. If the employment of these words were understood to be limited to thus expressing a direction nearer to the cardinal point from whose name the adjective is taken than to any other cardinal point, they would be valuable elements of English meteorological nomenclature.
No. 3 (page 31). I find a confirmation of my observations on the habits of the beaver as a geographical agency, in a report of the proceedings of the British Association, in the London Athenæum of October 8, 1864, p. 469. It is there stated that Viscount Milton and Dr. Cheadle, in an expedition across the Rocky Mountains by the Yellow Head, or Leather Pass, observed that "a great portion of the country to the east of the mountains" had been "completely changed in character by the agency of the beaver, which formerly existed here in enormous numbers. The shallow valleys were formerly traversed by rivers and chains of lakes which, dammed up along their course at numerous points, by the work of those animals, have become a series of marshes in various stages of consolidation. So complete has this change been, that hardly a stream is found for a distance of two hundred miles, with the exception of the large rivers. The animals have thus destroyed, by their own labors, the waters necessary to their own existence."
When the process of "consolidation" shall have been completed, and the forest reëstablished upon the marshes, the water now diffused through them will be collected in the lower or more yielding portions, cut new channels for their flow, become running brooks, and thus restore the ancient aspect of the surface.
No. 4 (page 33, note). The lignivorous insects that attack living trees almost uniformly confine their ravages to trees already unsound or diseased in growth from the depredations of leaf-eaters, such as caterpillars and the like, or from other causes. The decay of the tree, therefore, is the cause not the consequence of the invasions of the borer. This subject has been discussed by Perris in the Annales de la Société Entomologique de la France, for 1851 (?), and his conclusions are confirmed by the observations of Samanos, who quotes, at some length, the views of Perris. "Having, for fifteen years," says the latter author, "incessantly studied the habits of lignivorous insects in one of the best wooded regions of France, I have observed facts enough to feel myself warranted in expressing my conclusions, which are: that insects in general—I am not speaking of those which confine their voracity to the leaf—do not attack trees in sound health, and they assail those only whose normal conditions and functions have been by some cause impaired."
See, more fully, Samanos, Traité de la Culture du Pin Maritime, Paris, 1864, pp. 140-145.
No. 5 (page 34, note). Very interesting observations, on the agency of the squirrel and other small animals in planting and in destroying nuts and other seeds of trees, may be found in a paper on the Succession of Forests in Thoreau's Excursions, pp. 135 et seqq.
I once saw several quarts of beech-nuts taken from the winter quarters of a family of flying squirrels in a hollow tree. The kernels were neatly stripped of their shells and carefully stored in a dry cavity.
No. 6 (page 40, note). Schroeder van der Kolk, in Het Verschil tusschen den Psychischen Aanleg van het Dier en van den Mensch, cites from Burdach and other authorities many interesting facts respecting instincts lost, or newly developed and become hereditary, in the lower animals, and he quotes Aristotle and Pliny as evidence that the common quadrupeds and fowls of our fields and our poultry yards were much less perfectly domesticated in their times than long, long ages of servitude have now made them.
Perhaps the half-wild character ascribed by P. Læstadius and other Swedish writers to the reindeer of Lapland, may be in some degree due to the comparative shortness of the period during which he has been partially tamed. The domestic swine bred in the woods of Hungary and the buffaloes of Southern Italy are so wild and savage as to be very dangerous to all but their keepers. The former have relapsed into their original condition, the latter have not yet been reclaimed from it.
Among other instances of obliterated instincts, Schroeder van der Kolk states that in Holland, where, for centuries, the young of the cow has been usually taken from the dam at birth and fed by hand, calves, even if left with the mother, make no attempt to suck; while in England, where calves are not weaned until several weeks old, they resort to the udder as naturally as the young of wild quadrupeds.—Ziel en Ligchaam, p. 128, n.
No. 7 (page 60, first note). At Piè di Mulera, at the outlet of the Val Anzasca, near the principal hotel, is a vine measuring thirty-one inches in circumference. The door of the chapter-hall in the cloister of the church of San Giovanni, at Saluzzo, is of vine wood, and the boards of which the panels were made could not have been less than ten inches wide. Statues and other objects of considerable dimensions, of vine wood, are mentioned by ancient writers.
No. 8 (page 63, second note). Cartier, A. D. 1535-'6, mentions "vines, great melons, cucumbers, gourds [courges], pease, beans of various colors, but not like ours," as common among the Indians of the banks of the St. Lawrence.—Bref Recit, etc., reprint. Paris, 1863, pp. 13, a; 14, b; 20, b; 31, a.
No. 8 (page 65, second paragraph). It may be considered very highly probable, if not certain, that the undiscriminating herbalists of the sixteenth century must have overlooked many plants native to this island. An English botanist, in an hour's visit to Aden, discovered several species of plants on rocks always reported, even by scientific travellers, as absolutely barren. But after all, it appears to be well established that the original flora of St. Helena was extremely limited, though now counting hundreds of species.
No. 9 (page 66, first note). Although the vine genus is very catholic and cosmopolite in its habits, yet particular varieties are extremely fastidious and exclusive in their requirements as to soil and climate. The stocks of many celebrated vineyards lose their peculiar qualities by transplantation, and the most famous wines are capable of production only in certain well-defined, and for the most part narrow districts. The Ionian vine which bears the little stoneless grape known in commerce as the Zante currant, has resisted almost all efforts to naturalize it elsewhere, and is scarcely grown except in two or three of the Ionian islands and in a narrow territory on the northern shores of the Morea.
No. 10 (page 68, first note). In most of the countries of Southern Europe, sheep and beeves are wintered upon the plains, but driven in the summer to mountain pastures at many days' distance from the homesteads of their owners. They transport seeds in their coats in both directions, and hence Alpine plants often shoot up at the foot of the mountains, the grasses of the plain on the borders of the glaciers; but in both cases, they usually fail to propagate themselves by ripening their seed. This explains the scattered tufts of common clover, with pale and flaccid blossoms, which are sometimes seen at heights exceeding 7,000 feet above the sea.
No. 11 (page 73, last paragraph). The poisonous wild parsnip, which is very common in New England, is popularly believed to be identical with the garden parsnip, and differenced only by conditions of growth, a richer soil depriving it, it is said, of its noxious properties. Many wild medicinal plants, such as pennyroyal for example, are so much less aromatic and powerful, when cultivated in gardens, than when self-sown on meagre soils, as to be hardly fit for use.
No. 12 (page 74, second note). See in Thoreau's Excursions, an interesting description of the wild apple-trees of Massachusetts.
No. 13 (page 86, first paragraph). It is said at Courmayeur that a very few ibexes of a larger variety than those of the Cogne mountains, still linger about the Grande Jorasse.
No. 14 (page 92, first note). In Northern and Central Italy, one often sees hillocks crowned with grove-like plantations of small trees, much resembling large arbors. These serve to collect birds, which are entrapped in nets in great numbers. These plantations are called ragnaje, and the reader will find, in Bindi's edition of Davanzati, a very pleasant description of a ragnaja, though its authorship is not now ascribed to that eminent writer.
No. 15 (page 93, second note). The appearance of the dove-like grouse, Tetrao paradoxus, or Syrrhaptes Pallasii, in various parts of Europe, in 1859 and the following years, is a noticeable exception to the law of regularity which seems to govern the movements and determine the habitat of birds. The proper home of this bird is the steppes of Tartary, and it is not recorded to have been observed in Europe, or at least west of Russia, until the year abovementioned, when many flocks of twenty or thirty, and even a hundred individuals, were seen in Bohemia, Germany, Holland, Denmark, England, Ireland, and France. A considerable flock frequented the Frisian island of Borkum for more than five months. It was hoped they would breed and remain permanently in the island, but this expectation has been disappointed, and the steppe-grouse seems to have disappeared again altogether.
No. 16 (page 94, note). From an article by A. Esquiros, in the Revue des Deux Mondes for Sept. 1, 1864, entitled, La vie Anglaise, p. 119, it appears that such occurrences as that stated in the note are not unfrequent on the British coast.
No. 17 (page 100, first paragraph). I cannot learn that caprification is now practised in Italy, but it is still in use in Greece.
No. 18 (page 112, first note). The recent great multiplication of vipers in some parts of France, is a singular and startling fact.
Toussenel, quoting from official documents, states, that upon the offer of a reward of fifty centimes, or ten cents, a head, twelve thousand vipers were brought to the prefect of a single department, and that in 1859 fifteen hundred snakes and twenty quarts of snakes' eggs were found under a farm-house hearthstone. The granary, the stables, the roof, the very beds swarmed with serpents, and the family were obliged to abandon its habitation. Dr. Viaugrandmarais, of Nantes, reported to the prefect of his department more than two hundred recent cases of viper bites, twenty-four of which proved fatal.—Tristia, p. 176 et seqq.
No. 19 (page 121, first note). The Beduins are little given to the chase, and seldom make war on the game birds and quadrupeds of the desert. Hence the wild animals of Arabia are less timid than those of Europe. On one occasion, when I was encamped during a sand storm of some violence in Arabia Petræa, a wild pigeon took refuge in one of our tents which had not been blown down, and remained quietly perched on a boy in the midst of four or five persons, until the storm was over, and then took his departure, insalutato hospite.
No. 20 (page 122). It is possible that time may modify the habits of the fresh water fish of the North American States, and accommodate them to the now physical conditions of their native waters. Hence it may be hoped that nature, even unaided by art, will do something toward restoring the ancient plenty of our lakes and rivers. The decrease of our fresh water fish cannot be ascribed alone to exhaustion by fishing, for in the waters of the valleys and flanks of the Alps, which have been inhabited and fished ten times as long by a denser population, fish are still very abundant, and they thrive and multiply under circumstances where no American species could live at all. On the southern slope of those mountains, trout are caught in great numbers, in the swift streams which rush from the glaciers, and where the water is of icy coldness, and so turbid with particles of fine-ground rock, that you cannot see an inch below the surface. The glacier streams of Switzerland, however, are less abundant in fish.
No. 21 (page 131, note). Vaupell, though agreeing with other writers as to the injury done to the forest by most domestic animals—which he illustrates in an interesting way in his posthumous work, The Danish Woods—thinks, nevertheless, that at the season when the mast is falling swine are rather useful than otherwise to forests of beech and oak, by treading into the ground and thus sowing beechnuts and acorns, and by destroying moles and mice.—De Danske Skore, p. 12.
No. 22 (page 135, note). The able authors of Humphreys and Abbot's most valuable Report on the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi, conclude that the delta of that river began its encroachments on the Gulf of Mexico not more than 4,400 years ago, before which period they suppose the Mississippi to have been "a comparatively clear stream," conveying very little sediment to the sea. The present rate of advance of the delta is 262 feet a year, and there are reasons for thinking that the amount of deposit has long been approximately constant.—Report, pp. 435, 436.
The change in the character of the river must, if this opinion is well founded, be due to some geological revolution, or at least convulsion, and the hypothesis of the former existence of one or more great lakes in its upper valley, whose bottoms are occupied by the present prairie region, has been suggested. The shores of these supposed lakes have not, I believe, been traced, or even detected, and we cannot admit the truth of this hypothesis without supposing changes much more extensive than the mere bursting of the barrier which confined the waters.
No. 23 (page 143, note). See on this subject a paper by J. Jamin, in the Revue des Deux Mondes for Sept. 15, 1864; and, on the effects of human industry on the atmosphere, an article in Aus der Natur, vol. 29, 1864, pp. 443, 449, 465 et seqq.
No. 24 (page 159, second paragraph). All evergreens, even the broad-leaved trees, resist frosts of extraordinary severity better than the deciduous trees of the same climates. Is not this because the vital processes of trees of persistent foliage are less interrupted during winter than those of trees which annually shed their leaves, and therefore more organic heat is developed?
No. 25 (page 191, first paragraph). In discussing the influence of mountains on precipitation, meteorologists have generally treated the popular belief, that mountains "attract" to them clouds floating within a certain distance from them, as an ignorant prejudice, and they ascribe the appearance of clouds about high peaks solely to the condensation of the humidity of the air carried by atmospheric currents up the slopes of the mountain to a colder temperature. But if mountains do not really draw clouds and invisible vapors to them, they are an exception to the universal law of attraction. The attraction of the small Mount Shehallien was found sufficient to deflect from the perpendicular, by a measurable quantity, a plummet weighing but a few ounces. Why, then, should not greater masses attract to them volumes of vapor weighing hundreds of tons, and floating freely in the atmosphere within moderate distances of the mountains?
No. 26 (page 198, note). Élisée Redus ascribes the diminution of the ponds which border the dunes of Gascony to the absorption of their water by the trees which have been planted upon the sands.—Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 Aug., 1863, p. 694.
No. 27 (page 219, note). The waste of wood in European carpentry was formerly enormous, the beams of houses being both larger and more numerous than permanence or stability required. In examining the construction of the houses occupied by the eighty families which inhabit the village of Faucigny, in Savoy, in 1834, the forest inspector found that fifty thousand trees had been employed in building them. The builders "seemed," says Hudry-Menos, "to have tried to solve the problem of piling upon the walls the largest quantity of timber possible without crushing them."—Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 June, 1864, p. 601.
No. 28 (page 231, note). In a remarkable pamphlet, to which I shall have occasion to refer more than once hereafter, entitled Avant-projet pour la création d'un sol fertile à la surface des Landes de Gascogne, Duponchel argues with much force, that the fertilizing properties of river-slime are generally due much more to its mineral than to its vegetable constituents.
No. 29 (page 265, note). Even the denser silicious stones are penetrable by fluids and the coloring matter they contain, to such an extent that agates and other forms of silex may be artificially stained through their substance. This art was known to and practised by the ancient lapidaries, and it has been revived in recent times.
No. 30 (page 268). There is good reason for thinking that many of the earth and rock slides in the Alps occurred at an earlier period than the origin of the forest vegetation which, in later ages, covered the flanks of those mountains. See Bericht über die Untersuchung der Schweizerischen Hochgebirgswaldungen. 1862. P. 61.
Where more recent slides have been again clothed with woods, the trees, shrubs, and smaller plants which spontaneously grow upon them are usually of different species from those observed upon soil displaced at remote periods. This difference is so marked that the site of a slide can often be recognized at a great distance by the general color of the foliage of its vegetation.
No. 31 (page 286, note). It should have been observed that the venomous principle of poisonous mushrooms is not decomposed and rendered innocent by the process described in the note. It is merely extracted by the acidulated or saline water employed for soaking the plants, and care should be taken that this water be thrown away out of the reach of mischief.
No. 32 (page 293, note). Gaudry estimates the ties employed in the railways of France at thirty millions, to supply which not less than two millions of large trees have been felled. These ties have been, upon the average, at least once renewed, and hence we must double the number of ties and of trees required to furnish them.—Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 July, 1863, p. 425.
No. 33 (page 294, second paragraph of note). After all, the present consumption of wood and timber for fuel and other domestic and rural purposes, in many parts of Europe, seems incredibly small to an American. In rural Switzerland, the whole supply of firewood, fuel for small smitheries, dairies, breweries, brick and lime kilns, distilleries, fences, furniture, tools, and even house building—exclusive of the small quantity derived from the trimmings of fruit trees, grape vines and hedges, and from decayed fences and buildings—does not exceed an average of two hundred and thirty cubic feet, or less than two cords, a year per household. The average consumption of wood in New England for domestic fuel alone, is from five to ten times as much as Swiss families require for all the uses above enumerated. But the existing habitations of Switzerland are sufficient for a population which increases but slowly, and in the peasants' houses but a single room is usually heated. See Bericht über die Untersuchung der Schweiz. Hochgebirgswaldungen, pp. 85-89.
No. 34 (page 304). Among more recent manuals may be mentioned: Les Études de Maitre Pierre. Paris, 1864. 12mo; Bazelaire, Traité de Reboisement. 2d edition, Paris, 1864; and, in Italian, Siemoni, Manuale teorico-pratico d'arte Forestale. Firenze, 1864. 8vo. A very important work has lately been published in France by Viscount de Courval, which is known to me only by a German translation published at Berlin, in 1864, under the title, Das Aufästen der Waldbäume. The principal feature of De Courval's very successful system of sylviculture, is a mode of trimming which compels the tree to develop the stem by reducing the lateral ramification. Beginning with young trees, the buds are rubbed off from the stems, and superfluous lateral shoots are pruned down to the trunk. When large trees are taken in hand, branches which can be spared, and whose removal is necessary to obtain a proper length of stem, are very smoothly cut off quite close to the trunk, and the exposed surface is immediately brushed over with mineral-coal tar. When thus treated, it is said that the healing of the wound is perfect, and without any decay of the tree.
No. 35 (page 313). The most gorgeous autumnal coloring I have observed in the vegetation of Europe, has been in the valleys of the Durance and its tributaries in Dauphiny. I must admit that neither in variety nor in purity and brilliancy of tint, does this coloring fall much, if at all, short of that of the New England woods. But there is this difference: in Dauphiny, it is only in small shrubs that this rich painting is seen, while in North America the foliage of large trees is dyed in full splendor. Hence the American woodland has fewer broken lights and more of what painters call breadth of coloring. Besides this, the arrangement of the leafage in large globular or conical masses, affords a wider scale of light and shade, thus aiding now the gradation, now the contrast of tints, and gives the American October landscape a softer and more harmonious tone than marks the humble shrubbery of the forest hill-sides of Dauphiny.
Thoreau—who was not, like some very celebrated landscape critics of the present day, an outside spectator of the action and products of natural forces, but, in the old religious sense, an observer of organic nature, living, more than almost any other descriptive writer, among and with her children—has a very eloquent paper on the "Autumnal Tints" of the New England landscape.—See his Excursions, pp. 215 et seqq.
Few men have personally noticed so many facts in natural history accessible to unscientific observation as Thoreau, and yet he had never seen that very common and striking spectacle, the phosphorescence of decaying wood, until, in the latter years of his life, it caught his attention in a bivouac in the forests of Maine. He seems to have been more excited by this phenomenon than by any other described in his works. It must be a capacious eye that takes in all the visible facts in the history of the most familiar natural object.—The Maine Woods, p. 184.
"The luminous appearance of bodies projected against the sky adjacent to the rising" or setting sun, so well described in Professor Necker's Letter to Sir David Brewster, is, as Tyndall observes, "hardly ever seen by either guides or travellers, though it would seem, prima facie, that it must be of frequent occurrence." See Tyndall, Glaciers of the Alps. Part I. Second ascent of Mont Blanc.
Judging from my own observation, however, I should much doubt whether this brilliant phenomenon can be so often seen in perfection as would be expected; for I have frequently sought it in vain at the foot of the Alps, under conditions apparently otherwise identical with those where, in the elevated Alpine valleys, it shows itself in the greatest splendor.
No. 36 (page 314). European poets, whose knowledge of the date palm is not founded on personal observation, often describe its trunk as not only slender, but particularly straight. Nothing can be farther from the truth. When the Orientals compare the form of a beautiful girl to the stem of the palm, they do not represent it as rigidly straight, but on the contrary as made up of graceful curves, which seem less like permanent outlines than like flowing motion. In a palm grove, the trunks, so far from standing planted upright like the candles of a chandelier, bend in a vast variety of curves, now leaning towards, now diverging from, now crossing, each other, and among a hundred you will hardly see two whose axes are parallel.
No. 37 (page 316, first note). Charles Martin ascribes the power of reproduction by shoots from the stump to the cedar of Mount Atlas, which appears to be identical with the cedar of Lebanon.—Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 July, 1864, p. 315.
No. 38 (page 332). In an interesting article on recent internal improvements in England, in the London Quarterly Review for January, 1858, it is related that in a single rock cutting on the Liverpool and Manchester railway, 480,000 cubic yards of stone were removed; that the earth excavated and removed in the construction of English railways up to that date, amounted to a hundred and fifty million cubic yards, and that at the Round Down Cliff, near Dover, a single blast of nineteen thousand pounds of powder blew down a thousand million tons of chalk, and covered fifteen acres of land with the fragments.
No. 39 (page 339). According to Reventlov, whose work is one of the best sources of information on the subject of diking-in tide-washed flats, Salicornia herbacea appears as soon as the flat is raised high enough to be dry for three hours at ordinary ebb tide, or, in other words, where the ordinary flood covers it to a depth of not more than two feet. At a flood depth of one foot, the Salicornia dies and is succeeded by various sand plants. These are followed by Poa distans and Poa maritima as the ground is raised by further deposits, and these plants finally by common grasses. The Salicornia is preceded by confervæ, growing in deeper water, which spread over the bottom, and when covered by a fresh deposit of slime reappear above it, and thus vegetable and alluvial strata alternate until the flat is raised sufficiently high for the growth of Salicornia.—Om Marskdannelsen paa Vestkysten af Hertugdömmet Slesvig, pp. 7, 8.
No. 40 (page 348, note). The drijftil employed for the ring dike of the Lake of Haarlem, was in part cut in sections fifty feet long by six or seven wide, and these were navigated like rafts to the spot where they were sunk to form the dike.—Emile de Laveleye, Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 Sept., 1863, p. 285.
No. 41 (page 352, last paragraph). See on the influence of the improvements in question on tidal and other marine currents, Staring, De Bodem van Nederland, I. p. 279.
Although the dikes of the Netherlands and the adjacent states have protected a considerable extent of coast from the encroachments of the sea, and have won a large tract of cultivable land from the dominion of the waters, it has been questioned whether a different method of accomplishing these objects might not have been adopted with advantage. It has been suggested that a system of inland dikes and canals, upon the principle of those which, as will be seen in a subsequent part of the chapter on the waters, have been so successfully employed in the Val di Chiana and in Egypt, might have elevated the low grounds above the ocean tides, by spreading over them the sediment brought down by the Rhine, the Maes, and the Scheld. If this process had been introduced in the Middle Ages and constantly pursued to our times, the superficial and coast geography, as well as the hydrography of the countries in question, would undoubtedly have presented an aspect very different from their present condition; and by combining the process with a system of maritime dikes, which would have been necessary, both to resist the advance of the sea and to retain the slime deposited by river overflows, it is possible that the territory of those states would have been as extensive as it now is, and, at the same time, more elevated by several feet. But it must be borne in mind that we do not know the proportions in which the marine deposits that form the polders have been derived from materials brought down by these rivers or from other more remote sources. Much of the river slime has no doubt been transported by marine currents quite beyond the reach of returning streams, and it is uncertain how far this loss has been balanced by earth washed by the sea from distant shores and let fall on the coasts of the Netherlands and other neighboring countries.