FORESTS OF ITALY. Ste 
observed, and it is generally true that the present condition of 
the forest in Italy is much less due to the want of wise legisla- 
tion for its protection than to the laxity of the Governments in 
enforcing their laws. 
It is very common in Italy to ascribe to the French occupa- 
tion under the first Empire all the improvements and all the 
abuses of recent times, according to the political sympathies of 
the individual; and the French are often said to have prostra- 
ted every forest which has disappeared within this century. 
But, however this may be, no energetic system of repression 
or restoration was adopted by any of the Italian States after the 
downfall of the Empire, and the taxes on forest property in 
some of them were so burdensome that rural municipalities 
sometimes proposed to cede their common woods to the Goy- 
ernment, without any other compensation than the remission of 
the taxes imposed on forest-lands.* Under such circumstances, 
woodlands would soon become disafforested, and where facili- 
ties of transportation and a good demand for timber have in- 
creased the inducements to fell it, as upon the borders of the 
Mediterranean, the destruction of the forest and all the evils 
which attend it have gone on at a seriously alarming rate. 
Gallenga gives a striking account of the wanton destruction 
of the forests in Northern Italy within his personal recollection,+ 
and there are few Italians past middle life whose own memory 
will not supply similar reminiscences. The clearing of the 
mountain valleys of the provinces of Bergamo and of Brescia is 
recent, and Lombardini informs us the felling of the woods in 
the Valtelline commenced little more than forty years ago. 
Although no country has produced more able writers on the 
* See the Politeenico for the month of May, 1862, p. 234. 
+ ‘‘ Far away in the darkest recesses of the mountains a kind of universal 
conspiracy seems to have been got up among these Alpine people,—a destruc- 
tive mania to hew and sweep down everything that stands on roots.” — Country 
Life in Piedmont, p. 134. 
** There are huge pyramids of mountains now bare and bleak from base to 
summit, which men still living and still young remember seeing richly man- 
tled with ali oo primeval forests.”—Jdid., p. 135. 
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