PHYSICAL RESTORATION. 
47 
Could tliis old world, which man has overthrown, be 
rebuilded, could human cunning rescue its wasted hillsides 
and its deserted plains from solitnde or mere nomade occupa¬ 
tion, from barrenness, from nakedness, and from insalubrity, 
and restore the ancient fertility and healthfulness of the 
Etruscan sea coast, the Campagna and the Pontine marshes, 
of Calabria, of Sicily, of the Peloponnesus and insular and 
continental Greece, of Asia Minor, of the slopes of Lebanon 
and Hermon, of Palestine, of the Syrian desert, of Mesopo¬ 
tamia and the delta of the Euphrates, of the Cyrenaica, of 
Africa proper, bfumidia, and Mauritania, the thronging mil¬ 
lions of Europe might still find room on the Eastern continent, 
and the main current of emigration be turned toward the 
rising instead of the setting sun. 
But changes like these must await great political and 
moral revolutions in the governments and peoples by whom 
those regions are now possessed, a command of pecuniary and 
of mechanical means not at present enjoyed by those nations, 
and a more advanced and generally diffused knowledge of the 
processes by which the amelioration of soil and climate is pos¬ 
sible, than now anywhere exists. Until such circumstances 
shall conspire to favor the work of geographical regeneration, 
the countries I have mentioned, with here and there a local 
exception, will continue to sink into yet deeper desolation, and 
ature which might be economically important even in the climate of Swit¬ 
zerland. Saussure, by receiving the sun’s rays in a nest of boxes black¬ 
ened within and covered wdth glass, raised a thermometer enclosed in the 
inner box to the boiling point; and under the more powerful sun of the 
cape of Good Hope, Sir John Herschel cooked the materials for a family 
dinner by a similar process, using, however, but a single box, surrounded 
with dry sand and covered with two glasses. Why should not so easy a 
method of economizing fuel be resorted to in Italy, and even in more 
northerly climates ? 
The unfortunate John Davidson records in his journal that he saved fuel 
in Morocco by exposing his teakettle to the sun on the roof of his house, 
where the water rose to the temperature of one hundred and forty degrees, 
and, of course, needed little fire to bring it to boil. But this was the 
direct and simple, not the accumulated heat of the sun. 
