THYSICAL DECAY OF EOMAN EMPIRE. 3 



most celebrated for the profusion and variety of their spontane- 

 ous and their cultivated products, and for the wealth and social 

 advancement of their inhabitants — is either deserted by civilized 

 man and surrendered to hopeless desolation, or at least greatly re- 

 duced in both productiveness and population. Yast forests have 

 disappeared from mountain spurs and ridges ; the vegetable earth 

 accumulated beneath the trees by the decay of leaves and of fallen 

 trunks, the soil of the alpine pastures which skirted and indented 

 the woods, and the mould of the upland fields, are washed away ; 

 meadows, once fertilized by irrigation, are waste and unproduc- 

 tive, because the cisterns and reservoirs that supplied the ancient 

 canals are broken, or the springs that fed them dried up ; rivers 

 famous in history and song have shrunk to humble brooklets ; the 

 willows that ornamented and protected the banks of the lesser 

 watercourses are gone, and the rivulets have ceased to exist as 

 perennial currents, because the little water that finds its way into 

 their old channels is evaporated by the droughts of summer, or 

 absorbed by the parched earth before it reaches the lowlands ; the 

 beds of. the brooks have widened into broad expanses of pebbles 

 and gravel, over which, though in the hot season passed dryshod, 

 in winter sealike torrents thunder ; the entrances of navigable 

 streams are obstructed by sandbars ; and harbors, once marts of 

 an extensive commerce, are shoaled by the deposits of the rivers 

 at whose mouths they he ; the elevation of the beds of estuaries, 

 and the consequently diminished velocity and increased lateral 

 spread of the streams which flow into them, have converted thou- 

 sands of leagues of shallow sea and fertile lowland into unpro- 

 ductive and miasmatic morasses. 



Besides the direct testimony of history to the ancient fertility 

 of the now exhausted regions to which I refer — Northern Africa, 

 the greater Arabian peninsula, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia and 

 many other provinces of Asia Minor, Greece, Sicily, and parts of 

 even Italy and Spain — the nmltitude and extent of yet remaining 

 architectural ruins, and of decayed works of internal improve- 

 ment, show that at former epochs a dense population inhabited 

 those now lonely districts. Such a population could have been 

 sustained only by a productiveness of soil of which we at present 

 discover but slender traces ; and the abundance derived from that 

 fertiUty serves to explain how large armies, hke those of the an- 



