218 
THE FOREST IN ITALY. 
and that art has been most philosophically discussed, and most 
sldlfully and successfully practised, in Germany. 
The eminence of Italian theoretical liydrographers and the 
great ability of Italian hydraulic engineers are well known, 
but the specific geographical importance of the woods has not 
been so clearly recognized in Italy as in the states bordering 
it on the north and west. It is true that the face of nature has 
been as completely revolutionized by man, and that the action 
of torrents has created as wide and as hopeless devastation in 
that country as in France; but in the French Empire the deso¬ 
lation produced by clearing the forests is more recent,* has 
been more suddenly effected, and, therefore, excites a livelier 
and more general interest than in Italy, where public opinion 
does not so readily connect the effect with its true cause. 
Italy, too, from ancient habit, employs little wood in architec¬ 
tural construction ; for generations she has maintained no mil¬ 
itary or commercial marine large enough to require exhaustive 
quantities of timber,f and the mildness of her climate makes 
* There seems to have been a tendency to excessive clearing in Cen¬ 
tral and Western, earlier than in Southeastern France. Wise and good 
Bernard Palissy—one of those persecuted Protestants of the sixteenth 
century, whose heroism, virtue, refinement, and taste shine out in such 
splendid contrast to the brutality, corruption, grossness, and barbarism of 
their oppressors—in the Recepte Veritable , first printed in 1563, thus com¬ 
plains : “ When I consider the value of the least clump of trees, or even of 
thorns, I much marvel at the great ignorance of men, who, as it seemeth, 
do nowadays study only to break down, fell, and waste the fair forests 
which their forefathers did guard so choicely. I would think no evil of 
them for cutting down the woods, did they but replant again some part of 
them ; but they care nought for the time to come, neither reck they of the 
great damage they do to their children which shall come after them.”— 
CEuvres Completes de Bernard Palissy , 1844, p. 88. 
t The great naval and commercial marines of Venice and of Genoa must 
have occasioned an immense consumption of lumber in the Middle Ages, 
and the centuries immediately succeeding those commonly embraced in 
that designation. The marine construction of that period employed larger 
timbers than the modern naval architecture of most commercial coun¬ 
tries, but apparently without a proportional increase of strength. The old 
modes of ship building have been, to a considerable extent, handed down 
