386 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and reaches the meridian of Eiiiope near the centre of the Mediter- 

 ranean." The nations that " celebrated life as a festival " have lived 

 along this line, and we may doubt if in the most favored regions of 

 the New World human industi'v, with all the aids of modern science, 

 Avill ever reunite the opportunities of happiness which Nature once 

 lavished on lands that now entail only misery on their cultivators. 

 All over Spain and Portugal, Southern Italy, Greece, Turkey, Asia 

 Minor, Persia, and Western Afghanistan, and throughout Northern 

 Africa, from Morocco to the valley of the Nile, the aridity of the soil 

 makes the struggle for existence so hard that to the vast majority of 

 the inhabitants life from a blessing has been converted into a curse. 



Southern Spain, from Gibraltar to the head-waters of the Tagus, 

 maintains now only about one-tenth of its former population, Greece 

 about one-twentieth. As late as a. d. 670, a good while after the rise 

 of the Mohammedan power, the country now known as Tripoli, and 

 distinct from the Sahara only through the elevation of its mountains, 

 was the seat of eighty-five Christian bishops, and had a population of 

 6,000,000, of which number three-quarters of one per cent, are now left ! 

 The climate which, according to authentic description, must once 

 have resembled that of our Soutliern Alleghanies, is now so nearly in- 

 tolerable that even the inhumanity of an African despot forbears to 

 exact open-air labor from 9 a. m. to 5 p. m. Steamboats that pass near 

 the Tripolitan coast in summer, on their way from Genoa to Cairo, 

 have to keep up a continual shower of artificial rain to save their 

 deck-hands from being overcome by the furnace-air that breathes from 

 the ban-en hills of the opposite coast. The rivers of some of these 

 countries have shrunk to the size of their former tributaries, and from 

 Gibraltar to Samarcand the annual rainfall has decreased till failure 

 of crops has become a chronic complaint. 



And all this change is due to the insane destruction of forests. 

 The great Caucasian sylvania that once adorned the birth-land of the 

 white race from the Western Pyrenees to the foot-hills of the Hima- 

 layas has disappeared ; of the forest-area of Italy and Spain, in the 

 days of the elder Pliny, about two acres in a hundred are left ; in 

 Greece, hardly one. But even the nakedness of the most sterile tracts 

 of Southern Europe is exceeded by the utter desolation of the Otto- 

 man provinces. If there was not evidence that a gi-eat part of the 

 ruin had been accomplished before the fall of the Byzantine Empire, 

 the Turks would really seem to have been " tree-destroyers on princi- 

 ple." In the recesses of the Taurus range and the inaccessible heights 



of those 



" . . . . mountains that distill 

 Indus and Oxiis from their icy caves " 



a few remnants of wood have survived the general devastation, but 

 throughout the lowlands, from Bokhara to the Golden Horn, not a 

 stick or bush can grow up before the wood-famine of the wretched 



