ATMOSPHERIC LEGISLATION. 
23 
the Athenian population. It often occurs to me to provoke the 
hilarity of civilizees, by setting forth the opinion that man, in his 
quality of sovereign of the globe, must some day be invested with 
the power of regulating the seasons, of moderating or stimulating, 
at his will, the heat of the Sun, so as, in short, to make rain or 
fine weather at pleasure on his earth. 
Those brave obscurants of the fashionable world do not under- 
stand how the privileges of their species can rise so high. Vainly 
you may object to them that the sky of Egypt has been, at least, 
6000 years without raining, and that this phenomenon of celestial 
irrigation, yet unknown in these localities at the time of the French 
expedition, now produces itself forty days in the year, by will of 
the present viceroy, Mohammed Ali. They do not listen to you, 
and shrug their shoulders in token of contempt and incredulity. 
They were more polite and more learned than that at Athens, 
twenty centuries ago. At this time every one took account per- 
fectly of the influence of forests, and of their destruction, on the 
climate of countries. Theophrastus mentions a clearing in the 
environs of Philippi, in Macedon, which occasioned a complete 
revolution in the temperature of the environing districts. Now it 
seems to me that a forest clearing is a work of the hands of man. 
Most of the towns of antiquity, Greek or Roman, had their sacred 
wood, to whose protection a local legend attributed the safety of 
the city. The Greeks respected the forests, and never allowed 
them to be stupidly cut down as we do, in order to gain a few 
votes for a ministerial candidate.. They understood all the impor- 
tance of the part which great forest masses play in the adminis- 
tration of the waters of heaven ; and this judicious respect for the 
forests reacted very happily on the multiplication of the large spe- 
cies of game. Thus the bear and the wolf have been perpetuated 
until our day in the north of Greece, and it is not the fault of the 
inhabitants of this country if the family of curly-haired lions, to 
which the famous lion of Nemea belonged, is no longer found 
there. Pausanias relates that this species, so much to be regret- 
ted, long chose its dwellings among the groves of Tempo and 
Olympus. 
The same Athenian people, in its love for natural objects, eagerly 
