428 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 
which wash away the soil, is or was very marked in the South of France, in 
Dauphiné, Provence, and the French Alps. With the felling of trees and the 
pasturing of sheep on the upper edge of the forest—for sheep break the soil and 
expose the roots—the higher ground has been laid bare. Rainstorms have in 
consequence swept off the soil, and the floods have devastated the valleys. 
The mountain-sides have become deserts, and the valleys have been turned into 
swamps. ‘When they destroyed the forest,’ wrote the great French geographer, 
Reclus, about thirty years ago, ‘they also destroyed the very ground on which 
it stood’; and then he continues: ‘ The devastating action of the streams in the 
French Alps is a very curious phenomenon in the historical point of view, for it 
explains why so many of the districts of Syria, Greece, Asia Minor, Africa, and 
Spain have been forsaken by their inhabitants. The men have disappeared 
along with the trees; the axe of the woodman, no less than the sword of the 
conqueror, have put an end to, or transplanted, entire populations.’ In the 
latter part of the South African war Sir William Willcocks, skilled in irrigation 
in Egypt, and subsequently reclaiming Mesopotamia, was brought to South Africa 
to report upon the possibilities of irrigation there, and in his report dated Novem- 
ber 1901 he wrote as follows : ‘ Seeing in Basutoland the effect of about thirty 
years of cultivation and more or less intense habitation convinced me of the 
fact that another country with steep slopes and thin depth of soil, like Pales- 
tine, has been almost completely denuded by hundreds of years of cultivation 
and intense habits. The Palestine which Joshua conquered and which the 
children of Israel inhabited was in all probability covered over great part of 
its area by sufticient earth to provide food for a population a hundred times as 
dense as that which can be supported to-day.’ The Scotch geologist, Hugh 
Miller, again, attributed the formation of the Scotch mosses to the cutting down 
of timber by Roman soldiers. ‘What had been an overturned forest became 
in the course of years a deep morass.’ 
In past times there have been voices raised in favour of the forests, but they 
have been voices crying in the desert which man has made. Here is one. The 
old chronicler Holinshed, who lived in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, noted the 
amount of timber cut down for house building and in order to increase the area 
for pasturage. ‘Every small occasion in my time,’ he writes, ‘is enough to cut 
down a great wood’; and in another passage either he himself or one of his 
collaborators writes that he would wish to live to see four things reformed in 
England : ‘The want of discipline in the Church, the covetous dealing of most 
of our merchants in the preferment of commodities of other countries and 
hindrance of their own, the holding of fairs and markets upon the Sunday to 
be abolished and referred to the Wednesdays, and that every man in whatever 
part of the champaine soil enjoyeth forty acres of land and upwards after that 
rate, either by free deed, copyhoid or fee farm, might plant one acre of wood or 
sow the same with oke mast, hazell, beach, and sufficient provision be made that 
it be cherished and kept.’ 
Mr. Marsh seems to have thought that the Old World, and especially the 
countries which formed the old Roman Empire, had been ruined almost past 
redemption; and for the beneficent action of man on Nature he looked across the 
seas. ‘Australia and New Zealand,’ he writes, ‘are perhaps the countries from 
which we have a right to expect the fullest elucidation of these difficult and 
disputable problems. Here exist greater facilities and stronger motives for the 
careful study of the topics in question than have ever been found combined in 
any other theatre of European colonisation.’ 
His book was first written half a century ago. He was a pessimist evidently, 
and pessimists exaggerate even more than optimists, for there is nothing more 
exhilarating and consoling to ourselves than to predict the worst possible con- 
sequences from our neighbours’ folly. Further, though it may be true that man 
became more destructive as he became more civilised, it is also true that the 
destruction has been wrought directly rather by the unscientific than by the 
scientific man. If we have not grown less destructive since, at any rate we have 
shown signs of penitence, and science has come to our aid in the work of 
reparation. Governments and associations have turned their attention to protect- 
ing woodland and reafforesting tracts which have been laid bare. The Touring 
Club of France, for instance, I am told, have taken up the question of the damage 
done by destruction of trees by men and sheep in Haute Savoie, and they assist 
