PHYSICAL DECAY OF ROMAN EMPIRE. 3 
Physical Decay of the Territory of the Roman Empire. 
If we compare the present physical condition of the coun- 
tries of which I am speaking, with the descriptions that ancient 
historians and geographers have given of their fertility and 
general capability of ministering to human uses, we shall find 
that more than one-half their whole extent—not excluding the 
provinces most celebrated for the profusion and variety of 
their spontaneous and their cultivated products, and for the 
wealth and social advancement of their inhabitants—is either 
deserted by civilized man and surrendered to hopeless desola- 
lation, or at least greatly reduced in both productiveness and 
population. Vast forests have disappeared from mountain 
spurs and ridges; the vegetable earth accumulated beneath 
the trees by the decay of leaves and fallen trunks, the soil of 
the alpine pastures which skirted and indented the woods, and 
the mould of the upland fields, are washed away ; meadows, 
once fertilized by irrigation, are waste and wnproductive be- 
cause the cisterns and reservoirs that supplied the ancient 
canals are broken, or the springs that fed them dried up; rivers 
famous in history and song have shrunk to humble brooklets ; 
the willows that ornamented and protected the banks of the 
lesser watercourses are gone, and the rivulets have ceased to 
exist as perennial currents, because the little water that finds 
its way into their old channels is evaporated by the droughts of 
summer, or absorbed by the parched earth before it reaches 
the lowlands; the beds of the brooks have widened into broad 
expanses of pebbles and gravel, over which, though in the hot 
season passed dryshod, in winter sealike torrents thunder ; 
the entrances of navigable streams are obstructed by sandbars ; 
and harbors, once marts of an extensive commerce, are shoaled 
by the deposits of the rivers at whose mouths they lie; the 
elevation of the beds of estuaries, and the consequently dimin- 
ished velocity and increased lateral spread of the streams which 
flow into them, have converted thousands of leagues of shallow 
