INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON PRECIPITATION. 189 
mingo, and indeed, in almost the entire West Indian group. 
In Palestine and many other parts of Asia and 
Northern Africa, which in ancient times were the granaries 
of Europe, fertile and populous, similar consequences have 
been experienced. These lands are now deserts, and it is 
the destruction of the forests alone which has produced this 
desolation. * * * In Southern France, many districts have, 
from the same cause, become barren wastes of stone, and the 
cultivation of the vine and the olive has suffered severely since 
the baring of the neighboring mountains. Since the extensive 
clearings between the Spree and the Oder, the inhabitants 
complain that the clover crop is much less productive than 
before. On the other hand, examples of the beneficial influ¬ 
ence of planting and restoring the woods are not wanting. In 
Scotland, where many miles square have been planted with 
trees, this effect has been manifest, and similar observations 
have been made in several places in Southern France. In 
Lower Egypt, both at Cairo and near Alexandria, rain rarely 
fell in considerable quantity—for example, during the French 
occupation of Egypt, about 1798, it did not rain for sixteen 
months—but since Mehemet Aali and Ibrahim Pacha executed 
their vast plantations (the former alone having planted more 
than twenty millions of olive and fig trees, cottonwood, 
oranges, acacias, planes, &c.), there now falls a good deal of 
rain, especially along the coast, in the months of November, 
December, and January; and even at Cairo it rains both 
oftener and more abundantly,' so that real showers are no 
rarity.” * 
Babinet, in one of his lectures,f cites the supposed fact of 
the increase of rain in Egypt in consequence of the planting 
of trees, and thus remarks upon it: “ A few years ago it 
never rained in Lower Egypt. The constant north winds, 
which almost exclusively prevail there, passed without obstruc¬ 
tion over a surface bare of vegetation. Grain was kept on 
* Om Slovene og om et ordnet SJcovbrug i Norge ) p. 106. 
t Etudes et Lectures , iv. p. 114. 
