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Transactions. 73 
equalised the flow of rivers and lesser streams. The destruction 
of forests in hot countries turned fertile lands into deserts ; in 
more temperate regions was the occasion of desolating floods. It 
had been declared by a recent writer that indiscriminate forest 
clearing was the sin that had cost the human race its earthly 
paradise, and that war, pestilence, storms, fanaticism, and intem- 
perance, together with all other mistakes and misfortunes, had 
not caused half as much permanent damage as this fatal crime 
against mother earth. The evil was of long standing, and its 
consequences might be traced throughout all history. Never- 
theless it was still proceeding, and, until recently, without check. 
The North American Continent, on its first discovery almost one 
continuous woodland from sea to sea, had been nearly, and often 
wantonly, denuded of trees, so that timber was becoming alarm- 
ingly scarce in the United States. The Central Asian table-land, 
that officina gentiwm, the original home of our Aryan race, was 
now almost a desert, mainly from this cause. As a proof of this, 
the state of the Khanate of Bokhara was adduced, a region 
which, by the foolish destruction of its woods, had been in quite 
recent times shorn of fertility. It had been well wooded and 
watered, and was regarded by the Central Asiatics as a sort of 
terrestrial paradise. But the mania of forest clearing and the fury 
of civil war had wasted the country of its woods, and now immense 
tracts, once well-peopled and cultivated, were disappearing under 
the stealthy and unceasing advance of the sands of the surround- 
ing deserts. The Russian possessions in the Caucasus were 
menaced by a similar fate from the same cause. Our recent 
acquisition, Cyprus, was once fertile to a proverb, but the waste- 
ful cutting down of its forests had been followed by drought and 
sterility. Ifthe higher lands of that island were, however, re- 
clothed with timber, there was no doubt that its plains would 
again become well-watered and fertile. It was thus that Egypt 
was losing its proverbial character of a rainless country. 
Even’ single trees induced precipitation. The inhabitants of 
one of the most arid of the Canaries were at one time supplied 
with water by a solitary tree, growing at the head of a deep 
valley, which daily strained a large quantity of water from the 
humid mist conveyed inland by the sea breeze. But this tree of 
life was now gone, and the mists, though they still remained, 
passed away without yielding their accustomed supply. This 
phenomenon might sometimes be observed in our own country on 
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