IN VARIOUS COUNTRIES. 149 



Woods covered the hills, trees were everywhere abundant, and the 

 rains profuse and frequent. A recent visitor who sought the Island, 

 with which he had been familiar in the time of its greatest beauty, 

 for the sake of botanical study, a year or two since, found a third 

 part of it reduced to a desert. The short copious showei's had 

 ceased, and the process of desiccation was gradually extending over 

 the island. An attempt to restore the former fertility, by means of 

 planting, was made too late. One planter had set a thousand trees, 

 but every one of them failed." 



" The island of Curacoa," again says he, " was, within the memory 

 Of living persons, a garden of fertility. But now whole plantations, 

 with their once beautiful villas and terraced gardens, are nothing but 

 an arid waste ; and yet, sixty miles away, along the Spani^ Main, 

 the rankest vegetation covers the hills, and the burdened clouds 

 shower down abundant blessings," 



A writer in the Edinburgh Review, whom I have already had 

 occasion to quote, citing as his authority, I presume, Dr Robert 

 Brown, says, " ' By the destruction in France of a great extent of 

 forest,' writes Dr Brown, ' in order to replace them by cultivated 

 fields, the temperature has become very irregular ; heavy rains, 

 storms, and dryness, have each done their work upon the soil, and 

 made crops every year more and more uncertain.' In the Vosges, 

 the destruction of forests has gone so far that agriculture has suflFered, 

 the soil has become arid, and inundations are frequent. In the 

 Department of the Gard, in 1837, no rain fell for nine months. 



" Nismes, named from the forests which once surrounded it, is now 

 amid an arid waste. At Beziers. the Agricultural Society reported in 

 1797 that the forest which once sheltered the place having been 

 destroyed, the loss of the olive crop was the consequence. The 

 authorities of the Izere reported, in 1793, that the destruction of the 

 foresCs had altered the temperature, augmented dryness, and seriously 

 .affei^ed the crops. From Provence, from the valley of the Moselle, 

 from that of the Haute Garonne, from the Herault, and from the 

 Eastern PyKenees, come complaints of the same nature. The regular 

 rain-fall has been diminished, the temperature has changed and 

 become fuficertain, asiid partial and irregular storms have proved 

 curses rather than blessings wherever the forests have been ruthlessly 

 swept away." 



These statements also are all of them in accordance with what 

 has been reported with greater detail in regard to St. Helena and 

 Ascension. 



