OUR FORESTS 107 



this should occur, the greatest city in this .country would soon 

 lose its place and become of second-rate importance. 



The story of how this very thing happened to the old Greek 

 city of Poseidonia is graphically told in the following lines : — 



" It was such a strange, tremendous story, that of the Greek Poseidonia, 

 later the Roman Psestum. Long ago those adventuring mariners from 

 Greece had seized the fertile plain, which at that time was covered with 

 forests of great oak and watered by two clear and shining rivers. They 

 drove the Italian natives back into the distant hills, for the white man's 

 burden even then included the taking of all the desirable things that were 

 being wasted by incompetent natives, and they brought over colonists — 

 whom the philosophers and moralists at home maligned, no doubt, 

 in the same pleasant fashion of our own day. And the colonists cut 

 down the oaks, and plowed the land, and built cities, and made harbors, 

 and finally dusted their busy hands and busy souls of the grime of labor and 

 wrought splendid temples in honor of the benign gods who had given them 

 the possessions of the Italians and filled them with power and fatness. 



" Every once in so often the natives looked lustfully down from the hills 

 upon this fatness, made an armed snatch at it, were driven back with bloody 

 contumely, and the heaping of riches upon riches went on. And more and 

 more the oaks were cut down — mark that ! for the stories of nations 

 are so inextricably bound up with the stories of trees — until all the plain 

 was cleared and tilled ; and then the foothills were denuded, and the wave 

 of destruction crept up the mountain sides, and they, too, were left naked 

 to the sun and the rains. 



'' At first these rains, sweeping down torrentially, unhindered by the 

 lost forests, only enriched the plain with the long-hoarded sweetness of 

 the trees ; but by and by the living rivers grew heavy and thick, vomiting 

 mud into the ever shallowing harbors, and the land soured with the un- 

 drained stagnant water. Commerce turned more and more to deeper 

 ports, and mosquitoes began to breed in the brackish soil that was making 

 fast between the city and the sea. 



" Who of all those powerful landowners and rich merchants could ever 

 have dreamed that little buzzing insects could sting a great city to death ? 

 But they did. Fevers grew more and more prevalent. The malaria 

 haunted population went more and more languidly about their business. 

 The natives, hardy and vigorous in the hills, were but feebly repulsed. 

 Carthage demanded tribute, and Rome took it, and changed the city's 

 name from Poseidonia to Psestum. After Rome grew weak, Saracen 



