329 FORESTS OF ITALY. 
value of the forest and the general consequences of its destrue- 
tion than Italy, yet the specific geographical importance of the 
woods, except as a protection against inundations, has not 
been so clearly recognized in that country as in the States bor- 
dering it on the north and west. It is true that the face 
of nature has been as completely revolutionized by man, and 
that the action of torrents has created almost as wide and as 
hopeless devastation in Italy as in France; but in the French 
Umpire the recent desolation produced by clearing the forests 
is more extensive, has been more suddenly effected, has occurred 
in less remote and obscure localities, and, therefore, exvites a 
livelier and more general interest than in Italy, where public 
opinion does not so readily connect the effect with its true cause. 
Italy, too, from ancient habit, employs little wood in architec- 
tural construction; for generations she has maintained no 
military or commercial marine large enough to require ex- 
haustive quantities of timber,* and the mildness of her climate 
makes small demands on the woods for fuel. Besides these 
circumstances, it must be remembered that the sciences of obser- 
vation did not become knowledges of practical application till 
after the mischief was already mainly done and even forgotten 
in Alpine Italy, while its evils were just beginning to be sensibly 
felt in France when the claims of natural philosophy as a liberal 
study were first acknowledged in modern Europe. The former 
political condition of the Italian Peninsula would have effectu- 
ally prevented the adoption of a general system of forest econo- 
* The great naval and commercial marines of Venice and of Genoa must 
have occasioned an immense consumption of lumber in the Middle Ages, and 
the centuries immediately succeeding those commonly embraced in that desig- 
nation. The marine construction of that period employed larger timbers than 
the modern naval] architecture of most commercial countries, but apparently 
without a proportional increase of strength. The old modes of ship-building 
have been, to a considerable extent, handed down to very recent times in the 
Mediterranean, and though better models and modes of construction are now 
employed in Italian shipyards, an American or an Englishman looks with aston- 
ishment at the huge beams and thick planks so often employed in the con- 
struction of very small vessels navigating that sea, and not yet old enough to 
be broken up as unseaworthy. 
