THE TUSCAN MAREMMA. 531 
or Maremme—for the plural form is most generally used— 
lies upon and near the western coast of Tuscany, and comprises 
about 1,900 square miles English, of which 500 square miles, 
or 820,000 acres, are plain and marsh including 45,500 acres 
of water surface, and about 290,000 acres are forest. One of 
the mountain peaks, that of Mount Amiata, rises to the height 
of 6,280 feet. The mountains of the Maremma are healthy, 
the lower hills much less so, as the malaria is felt at some points 
at the height of 1,000 feet, and the plains, with the exception 
of a few localities favorably situated on the seacoast, are in a 
high degree pestilential. The fixed population is about 80,000, 
of whom one-sixth live on the plains in the winter and about 
one-tenth in the summer. Nine or ten thousand laborers come 
down from the mountains of the Maremma and the neighbor- 
ing provinces into the plain, during the latter season, to culti- 
vate and gather the crops. 
Out of this small number of inhabitants and strangers, 35,- 
619 were ill enough to require medical treatment between the 
Ist of June, 1840, and the 1st of June, 1841, and more than 
one-half the cases were of intermittent, malignant, gastric, 
or catarrhal fever. Very few agricultural laborers escaped 
fever, though the disease did not always manifest itself until 
they had returned to the mountains. In the province of Gros- 
seto, which embraces nearly the whole of the Maremma, the 
annual mortality was 3.92 per cent., the average duration of life 
but 23.18 years, and 75 per cent. of the deaths were among 
persons engaged in agriculture. 
The filling up.of the low grounds and the partial separation 
of the waters of the sea and the land, which had been in pro- 
gress since the year 1827, now began to show very decided 
effects upon the sanitary condition of the population. In the 
year ending June Ist, 1842, the number of the sick was re- 
duced by more than 2,000, and the cases of fever by more than 
4,000. The next year the cases of fever fell to 10,500, and in 
that ending June Ist, 1844, to 9,200. The political events of 
1848, and the preceding and following years, occasioned the 
