PHYSICAL RESTORATION IN TUSCANY. 527 
resque expression to the tendencies of human action, as per- 
sonified in himself, when he said that “no grass grew where 
his horse’s hoofs had trod.” The instances are few, where a 
second civilization has flourished upon the ruins of an ancient 
culture, and lands once rendered uninhabitable by human acts 
or neglect have generally been forever abandoned as hopelessly 
irreclaimable. It is,as I have before remarked, a question 
of vast importance, how far it is practicable to restore the 
garden we have wasted, and it is a problem on which expe- 
rience throws little light, because few deliberate attempts have 
yet been made at the work of physical regeneration, on a scale 
large enough to warrant general conclusions in any one class of 
cases. 
The valleys and shores of Tuscany form, however, a striking 
exception to this remark. The success with which human 
guidance has made the operations of nature herself available 
for the restoration of her disturbed harmonies, in the Val di 
Chiana and the Tuscan Maremma, is among the noblest, if not 
the most brilliant achievements of modern engineering, and, 
regarded in all its bearings on the great question of which I 
have just spoken, it is, as an example, of more importance to 
the general interests of humanity than the proudest work of 
internal improvement that mechanical means have yet con- 
structed. The operations in the Val di Chiana have consisted 
chiefly in so regulating the flow of the surface-waters into and 
through it, as to compel them to deposit their sedimentary 
matter at the will of the engineers, and thereby to raise 
grounds rendered insalubrious and unfit for agricultural use by 
stagnating water; the improvements in the Maremma have em- 
braced both this method of elevating the level of the soil, and 
the prevention of the mixture of salt-water with fresh in the 
coast marshes and shallow bays, which is regarded as a very 
active cause of the development of malarious influences.* 
* The fact that the mixing of salt and fresh water in coast marshes and 
lagoons is deleterious to the sanitary condition of the vicinity, has been gen- 
erally admitted, though the precise reason why a mixture of both should be 
