FORESTS OF ITALY. 319 
geously be doubled. Taking Italy as a whole, we may say that 
she is eminently fitted by climate, soil, and superficial forma- 
tion, to the growth of a varied and luxuriant arboreal vegeta- 
tion, and that in the interests of self-protection, the promotion of 
forestal industry is among the first duties of her people. There 
are in Western Piedmont valleys where the felling of the woods 
has produced consequences geographically and economically as 
disastrous as in South-eastern France, and there are many other 
districts in the Alps and the Apennines where human improvi- 
dence has been almost equally destructive. Some of these regions 
must be abandoned to absolute desolation, and for others the 
opportunity of physical restoration is rapidly passing away. 
But there are still millions of square miles which might profit- 
ably be planted with forest-trees, and thousands of acres of 
parched and barren hillside, within sight of almost every Italian 
provincial capital, which might easily and shortly be reclothed 
with verdant woods.* 
The denudation of the Central and Southern Apennines and 
of the Italian declivity of the Western Alps began at a period 
of unknown antiquity, but it does not seem to have been car- 
ried to a very dangerous length until the foreign conquests and 
extended commerce of Rome created a greatly increased de- 
* To one accustomed to the slow vegetation of less favored climes, the ra- 
pidity of growth in young plantations in Italy seems almost magical. The trees 
planted along the new drives and avenues in Florence have attained in three 
or four years a development which would require at least ten in our Northern 
States, This, itis true, is a special case, for the trees have been planted and 
tended with a skill and care which cannot be bestowed upon a forest ; but the 
growth of trees little cared for is still very rapid in Italy. According to Tos- 
canelli, Heonomia rurale nella Provincia di Pisa, p. 8, note—one of the most 
complete, curious, and instructive pictures of rural life which exists in any 
literature—the white poplar, Populus alba, attains in the valley of the Serchioa 
great height, with a mean diameter of two feet, in twenty years. Selmi states 
in his Miasma Palustre, p. 115, that the linden reaches a diameter of sixteen 
inches in the same period. The growthof foreign treesis sometimes extremely 
luxuriant in Italy. Two Atlas cedars, at the well-known villa of Careggi, near 
Florence, grown from seed sown in 1850, measure twenty inches in diameter, 
above the swell of the roots, with an estimated height of sixty feet. 
