DESTRUCTION OF HILL JUNGLE IN PIN'ANS. 
535 
other effect than to protect the clay soil of the mountains from the 
action of the sun’s rays, this alone ought to be sufficient to ensure 
their careful preservation. It is in this soil that the waters which 
supply all the streams of the island, and which percolate downward 
to the lower lands, are enclosed. These mountains are in fact great 
natural reservoirs, elevated in mid air and exposing the most ex¬ 
tended surfaces possible, which are covered to a small depth with a 
sponge of porous decomposed rock for the absorption and retention 
of water. In ordinary seasons, when there is a considerable fall of 
rain, the importance of preventing the contents of these reservoirs 
from being dissipated may not be so obvious. But it may now be 
considered as a well established fact that the eastern Archipelago is 
subject to periodical droughts, although the laws of their recurrence 
are not yet ascertained. That such droughts will again and again 
happen, and are in fact in the settled course of nature admits of no 
question.* 
Nature when left to herself provides a compensatory influence in 
the dense leafy forests, but if these are consigned to destruction, 
every successive drought w ill prove more baneful than the preceding. 
Unless government will reserve at least the steeper mountain tracts, 
which are not adapted for permanent culture, there is nothing visio¬ 
nary in the apprehension, for it has been realized in other localities, 
that in some prolonged drought, after the naked sides of the hills 
have been exposed for a few weeks to the direct heat of the sun, 
every stream hi the island will be dried up, and universal aridity en¬ 
sue. The great extent to which the plain of the mainland of Pinang 
has been shorn of its forests would of itself produce an urgent ne¬ 
cessity for a stop being at once put to a w'ar with nature, which 
must entail severe calamities on the future. In those mountains in 
Greece which have been deprived of their forests the springs have 
disappeared. In other parts of the globe the same consequence has 
followed. The sultry atmosphere and dreadful droughts of the Cape 
cle Verde Islands are owing to the destruction of the forests. In 
* See on this subject ante p. U0 “On the Physical Geography and 
Geology of the Malay Peninsula.” 
