416 
PHYSICAL RESTORATION IN TUSCANY. 
It is, in general, true, tliat the intervention of man has 
hitherto seemed to insure the final exhaustion, ruin, and deso¬ 
lation of every province of nature which he has reduced to his 
dominion. Attila was only giving an energetic and pictu¬ 
resque expression to the tendencies of human action, as per¬ 
sonified in himself, when he said that u no grass grew where 
his horse’s hoofs had trod.” The instances are few, where a 
second civilization has flourished upon the ruins ot an ancient 
culture, and lands once rendered uninhabitable by human acts 
or neglect have generally been forever abandoned as hope¬ 
lessly irreclaimable. It is, as I have before remarked, a ques¬ 
tion of vast importance, how far it is practicable to restore the 
garden we have wasted, and it is a problem on which expe¬ 
rience throws little light, because few deliberate attempts have 
yet been made at the work of physical regeneration, on a scale 
large enough to warrant general conclusions in any one class 
of cases. 
The valleys and shores of Tuscany form, however, a striking 
exception to this remark. The success w T ith which human 
guidance has made the operations of nature herself available 
for the restoration of her disturbed harmonies, in the Yal di 
Chiana and the Tuscan Maremma, is among the noblest, if not 
the most brilliant achievements of modern engineering, and, 
regarded in all its bearings on the great question of which I 
have just spoken, it is, as an example, of more importance to 
the general interests of humanity than the proudest work of 
internal improvement that mechanical means have yet con¬ 
structed. The operations in the Yal di Chiana have consisted 
chiefly in so regulating the flow of the surface waters into and 
through it, as to compel them to deposit their sedimentary 
matter at the will of the engineers, and thereby to raise 
grounds rendered insalubrious and unfit for agricultural use 
by stagnating water; the improvements in the Maremma have 
embraced both this method of elevating the level of the soil, 
words, reduced tlie length of the channel more than three miles ; and in 
1807 and 1810 the two salti of Mezzanone effected a reduction of distance 
to the amount of between seven and eight miles.— Baumgarten, 1. c. p. 188. 
