THE TUSCAN MAREMMA, 529 
which is a recent deposit of the waters, is little elevated above 
the sea, and admits into its lagoons and the mouths of its 
rivers floods of salt-water with every western wind, every ris- 
ing tide.* 
The western coast of Tuscany is not supposed to have been 
an unhealthy region before the conquest of Etruria by the 
Romans, but it certainly became so within a few centuries 
after that event. This was a natural consequence of the neg- 
lect or wanton destruction of the public improvements, and 
especially the hydraulic works in which the Etruscans were so 
skilful, and of the felling of the upland forests, to satisfy the 
demand for wood at Rome for domestic, industrial, and muiti- 
tary purposes. After the downfall of the Roman empire, the 
incursions of the barbarians, and then feudalism, foreign dom- 
ination, intestine wars, and temporal and spiritual tyrannies, 
ageravated still more cruelly the moral and physical evils 
which Tuscany and the other Italian States were doomed to 
suffer, and from which they have enjoyed but brief respites 
during the whole period of modern history. The Maremma 
was already proverbially unhealthy in the time of Dante, who 
refers to the fact in several familiar passages, and the petty 
tyrants upon its borders often sent criminals to places of con- 
finement in its territory, as a slow but certain mode of execu- 
tion. Ignorance of the causes of the insalubrity, and often the 
interference of private rights, + prevented the adoption of meas- 
* The tide rises ten inches on the coast of Tuscany. See Memoir by FAn- 
TONI, in the appendix to SALVAGNOLI, Rapporto, p. 189. 
On the tides of the Mediterranean, see BOTTGER, Das Mittelmeer, p. 190. 
+ In Catholic countries, the discipline of the church requires a meagre diet 
at certain seasons, and as fish is not flesh, there is a great demand for that 
article of food at those periods. For the convenience of monasteries and their: 
patrons, and as a source of pecuniary emolument to ecclesiastical establish- 
ments and sometimes to lay proprietors, great numbers of artificial fish-ponds 
were created during the Middle Ages. They were generally shallow pools 
formed by damming up the outlet of marshes, and they were among the most 
fruitful sources of endemic disease, and of the peculiar malignity of the epi- 
demics which so often ravaged Europe in those centuries. These ponds, in 
religious hands, were too sacred to be infringed upon for sanitary purposes, 
