Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action

by George P. Marsh

THE WATERS.

LAND ARTIFICIALLY WON FROM THE WATERS: a, EXCLUSION OF THE SEA BY DIKING; b, DRAINING OF LAKES AND MARSHES; c, GEOGRAPHICAL INFLUENCE OF SUCH OPERATIONS—LOWERING OF LAKES—MOUNTAIN LAKES—CLIMATIC EFFECTS OF DRAINING LAKES AND MARSHES—GEOGRAPHICAL AND CLIMATIC EFFECTS OF AQUEDUCTS, RESERVOIRS, AND CANALS—SURFACE AND UNDERDRAINING, AND THEIR CLIMATIC AND GEOGRAPHICAL EFFECTS—IRRIGATION AND ITS CLIMATIC AND GEOGRAPHICAL EFFECTS.

INUNDATIONS AND TORRENTS: a, RIVER EMBANKMENTS; b, FLOODS OF THE ARDÈCHE; c, CRUSHING FORCE OF TORRENTS; d, INUNDATIONS OF 1856 IN FRANCE; e, REMEDIES AGAINST INUNDATIONS—CONSEQUENCES IF THE NILE HAD BEEN CONFINED BY LATERAL DIKES.

IMPROVEMENTS IN THE VAL DI CHIANA—IMPROVEMENTS IN THE TUSCAN MAREMME—OBSTRUCTION OF RIVER MOUTHS—SUBTERRANEAN WATERS—ARTESIAN WELLS—ARTIFICIAL SPRINGS—ECONOMIZING PRECIPITATION.

Land artificially won from the Waters.

Man, as we have seen, has done much to revolutionize the solid surface of the globe, and to change the distribution and proportions, if not the essential character, of the organisms which inhabit the land and even the waters. Besides the influence thus exerted upon the life which peoples the sea, his action upon the land has involved a certain amount of indirect encroachment upon the territorial jurisdiction of the ocean. So far as he has increased the erosion of running waters by the destruction of the forest, he has promoted the deposit of solid matter in the sea, thus reducing its depth, advancing the coast line, and diminishing the area covered by the waters. He has gone beyond this, and invaded the realm of the ocean by constructing within its borders wharves, piers, lighthouses, breakwaters, fortresses, and other facilities for his commercial and military operations; and in some countries he has permanently rescued from tidal overflow, and even from the very bed of the deep, tracts of ground extensive enough to constitute valuable additions to his agricultural domain. The quantity of soil gained from the sea by these different modes of acquisition is, indeed, too inconsiderable to form an appreciable element in the comparison of the general proportion between the two great forms of terrestrial surface, land and water; but the results of such operations, considered in their physical and their moral bearings, are sufficiently important to entitle them to special notice in every comprehensive view of the relations between man and nature.

There are cases, as on the western shores of the Baltic, where, in consequence of the secular elevation of the coast, the sea appears to be retiring; others, where, from the slow sinking of the land, it seems to be advancing. These movements depend upon geological causes wholly out of our reach, and man can neither advance nor retard them. There are also cases where similar apparent effects are produced by local oceanic currents, by river deposit or erosion, by tidal action, or by the influence of the wind upon the waves and the sands of the sea beach. A regular current may drift suspended earth and seaweed along a coast until they are caught by an eddy and finally deposited out of the reach of further disturbance, or it may scoop out the bed of the sea and undermine promontories and headlands; a powerful river, as the wind changes the direction of its flow at its outlet, may wash away shores and sandbanks at one point to deposit their material at another; the tide or waves, stirred to unusual depths by the wind, may gradually wear down the line of coast, or they may form shoals and coast dunes by depositing the sand they have rolled up from the bottom of the ocean. These latter modes of action are slow in producing effects sufficiently important to be noticed in general geography, or even to be visible in the representations of coast line laid down in ordinary maps; but they nevertheless form conspicuous features in local topography, and they are attended with consequences of great moment to the material and the moral interests of men.

The forces which produce these results are all in a considerable degree subject to control, or rather to direction and resistance, by human power, and it is in guiding and combating them that man has achieved some of his most remarkable and honorable conquests over nature. The triumphs in question, or what we generally call harbor and coast improvements, whether we estimate their value by the money and labor expended upon them, or by their bearing upon the interests of commerce and the arts of civilization, must take a very high rank among the great works of man, and they are fast assuming a magnitude greatly exceeding their former relative importance. The extension of commerce and of the military marine, and especially the introduction of vessels of increased burden and deeper draught of water, have imposed upon engineers tasks of a character which a century ago would have been pronounced, and, in fact, would have been impracticable; but necessity has stimulated an ingenuity which has contrived means of executing them, and which gives promise of yet greater performance in time to come.

Men have ceased to admire the power which heaped up the great pyramid to gratify the pride of a despot with a giant sepulchre; for many great harbors, many important lines of internal communication, in the civilized world, now exhibit works which surpass the vastest remains of ancient architectural art in mass and weight of matter, demand the exercise of far greater constructive skill, and involve a much heavier pecuniary expenditure than would now be required for the building of the tomb of Cheops. It is computed that the great pyramid, the solid contents of which when complete were about 3,000,000 cubic yards, could be erected for a million of pounds sterling. The breakwater at Cherbourg, founded in rough water sixty feet, deep, at an average distance of more than two miles from the shore, contains double the mass of the pyramid, and many a comparatively unimportant railroad has been constructed at twice the cost which would now build that stupendous monument. Indeed, although man, detached from the solid earth, is almost powerless to struggle against the sea, he is fast becoming invincible by it so long as his foot is planted on the shore, or even on the bottom of the rolling ocean; and though on some battle fields between the waters and the land, he is obliged slowly to yield his ground, yet he retreats still facing the foe, and will finally be able to say to the sea: "Thus far shalt thou come and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed!"

The description of works of harbor and coast improvement which have only an economical value, not a true geographical importance, does not come within the plan of the present volume, and in treating this branch of my subject, I shall confine myself to such as are designed either to gain new soil by excluding the waters from grounds which they had permanently or occasionally covered, or to resist new encroachments of the sea upon the land.

a. Exclusion of the Sea by Diking.

The draining of the Lincolnshire fens in England, which converted about 400,000 acres of marsh, pool, and tide-washed flat into plough land and pasturage, is a work, or rather series of works, of great magnitude, and it possesses much economical, and, indeed, no trifling geographical importance. Its plans and methods were, at least in part, borrowed from the example of like improvements in Holland, and it is, in difficulty and extent, inferior to works executed for the same purpose on the opposite coast of the North Sea, by Dutch, Frisic, and Low German engineers. The space I can devote to such operations will be better employed in describing the latter, and I content myself with the simple statement I have already made of the quantity of worthless and even pestilential land which has been rendered both productive and salubrious in Lincolnshire, by diking out the sea, and the rivers which traverse the fens of that country.

The almost continued prevalence of west winds upon both coasts of the German Ocean occasions a constant set of the currents of that sea to the east, and both for this reason and on account of the greater violence of storms from the former quarter, the English shores are much less exposed to invasion by the waves than those of the Netherlands and the provinces contiguous to them on the north. The old Netherlandish chronicles are filled with the most startling accounts of the damage done by the irruptions of the ocean, from west winds or extraordinarily high tides, at times long before any considerable extent of seacoast was diked. Several hundreds of these terrible inundations are recorded, and in very many of them the loss of human lives is estimated as high as one hundred thousand. It is impossible to doubt that there must be enormous exaggeration in these numbers; for, with all the reckless hardihood shown by men in braving the dangers and privations attached by nature to their birthplace, it is inconceivable that so dense a population as such wholesale destruction of life supposes could find the means of subsistence, or content itself to dwell, on a territory liable, a dozen times in a century, to such fearful devastation. There can be no doubt, however, that the low continental shores of the German Ocean very frequently suffered immense injury from inundation by the sea, and it is natural, therefore, that the various arts of resistance to the encroachments of the ocean, and, finally, of aggressive warfare upon its domain, and of permanent conquest of its territory, should have been earlier studied and carried to higher perfection in the latter countries, than in England, which had much less to lose or to gain by the incursions or the retreat of the waters.

Indeed, although the confinement of swelling rivers by artificial embankments is of great antiquity, I do not know that the defence or acquisition of land from the sea by diking was ever practised on a large scale until systematically undertaken by the Netherlanders, a few centuries after the commencement of the Christian era. The silence of the Roman historians affords a strong presumption that this art was unknown to the inhabitants of the Netherlands at the time of the Roman invasion, and the elder Pliny's description of the mode of life along the coast which has now been long diked in, applies precisely to the habits of the people who live on the low islands and mainland flats lying outside of the chain of dikes, and wholly unprotected by embankments of any sort.

It has been conjectured, and not without probability, that the causeways built by the Romans across the marshes of the Low Countries, in their campaigns against the Germanic tribes, gave the natives the first hint of the utility which might be derived from similar constructions applied to a different purpose.[306] If this is so, it is one of the most interesting among the many instances in which the arts and enginery of war have been so modified as to be eminently promotive of the blessings of peace, thereby in some measure compensating the wrongs and sufferings they have inflicted on humanity.[307] The Lowlanders are believed to have secured some coast and bay islands by ring dikes, and to have embanked some fresh water channels, as early as the eighth or ninth century; but it does not appear that sea dikes, important enough to be noticed in historical records, were constructed on the mainland before the thirteenth century. The practice of draining inland accumulation of water, whether fresh or salt, for the purpose of bringing under cultivation the ground they cover, is of later origin, and is said not to have been adopted until after the middle of the fifteenth century.[308]

The total amount of surface gained to the agriculture of the Netherlands by diking out the sea and by draining shallow bays and lakes, is estimated by Staring at three hundred and fifty-five thousand bunder or hectares, equal to eight hundred and seventy-seven thousand two hundred and forty acres, which is one tenth of the area of the kingdom.[309] In very many instances, the dikes have been partially, in some particularly exposed localities totally destroyed by the violence of the sea, and the drained lands again flooded. In some cases, the soil thus painfully won from the ocean has been entirely lost; in others it has been recovered by repairing or rebuilding the dikes and pumping out the water. Besides this, the weight of the dikes gradually sinks them into the soft soil beneath, and this loss of elevation must be compensated by raising the surface, while the increased burden thus added tends to sink them still lower. "Tetens declares," says Kohl, "that in some places the dikes have gradually sunk to the depth of sixty or even a hundred feet."[310] For these reasons, the processes of dike building have been almost everywhere again and again repeated, and thus the total expenditure of money and of labor upon the works in question is much greater than would appear from an estimate of the actual cost of diking-in a given extent of coast land and draining a given area of water surface.[311]

On the other hand, by erosion of the coast line, the drifting of sand dunes into the interior, and the drowning of fens and morasses by incursions of the sea—all caused, or at least greatly aggravated, by human improvidence—the Netherlands have lost a far larger area of land since the commencement of the Christian era than they have gained by diking and draining. Staring despairs of the possibility of calculating the loss from the first-mentioned two causes of destruction, but he estimates that not less than six hundred and forty thousand bunder, or one million five hundred and eighty-one thousand acres, of fen and marsh have been washed away, or rather deprived of their vegetable surface and covered by water, and thirty-seven thousand bunder, or ninety-one thousand four hundred acres of recovered land, have been lost by the destruction of the dikes which protected them.[312] The average value of land gained from the sea is estimated at about nineteen pounds sterling, or ninety dollars, per acre; while the lost fen and morass was not worth more than one twenty-fifth part of the same price. The ground buried by the drifting of the dunes appears to have been almost entirely of this latter character, and, upon the whole, there is no doubt that the soil added by human industry to the territory of the Netherlands, within the historical period, greatly exceeds in pecuniary value that which has fallen a prey to the waves during the same era.

Upon most low and shelving coasts, like those of the Netherlands, the maritime currents are constantly changing, in consequence of the variability of the winds, and the shifting of the sandbanks, which the currents themselves now form and now displace. While, therefore, at one point the sea is advancing landward, and requiring great effort to prevent the undermining and washing away of the dikes, it is shoaling at another by its own deposits, and exposing, at low water, a gradually widening belt of sands and ooze. The coast lands selected for diking-in are always at points where the sea is depositing productive soil. The Eider, the Elbe, the Weser, the Ems, the Rhine, the Maas, and the Schelde bring down large quantities of fine earth. The prevalence of west winds prevents the waters from carrying this material far out from the coast, and it is at last deposited northward or southward from the mouth of the rivers which contribute it, according to the varying drift of the currents.

The process of natural deposit which prepares the coast for diking-in is thus described by Staring: "All sea-deposited soil is composed of the same constituents. First comes a stratum of sand, with marine shells, or the shells of mollusks living in brackish water. If there be tides, and, of course, flowing and ebbing currents, mud is let fall upon the sand only after the latter has been raised above low-water mark; for then only, at the change from flood to ebb, is the water still enough to form a deposit of so light a material. Where mud is found at greater depths, as, for example, in a large proportion of the Ij, it is a proof that at this point there was never any considerable tidal flow or other current. * * * The powerful tidal currents, flowing and ebbing twice a day, drift sand with them. They scoop out the bottom at one point, raise it at another, and the sandbanks in the current are continually shifting. As soon as a bank raises itself above low-water mark, flags and reeds establish themselves upon it. The mechanical resistance of these plants checks the retreat of the high water and favors the deposit of the earth suspended in it, and the formation of land goes on with surprising rapidity. When it has risen to high-water level, it is soon covered with grasses, and becomes what is called schor in Zeeland, kwelder in Friesland. Such grounds are the foundation or starting point of the process of diking. When they are once elevated to the flood-tide level, no more mud is deposited upon them except by extraordinary high tides. Their further rise is, accordingly, very slow, and it is seldom advantageous to delay longer the operation of diking."[313]

The formation of new banks by the sea is constantly going on at points favorable for the deposit of sand and earth, and hence opportunity is continually afforded for enclosure of new land outside of that already diked in, the coast is fast advancing seaward, and every new embankment increases the security of former enclosures. The province of Zeeland consists of islands washed by the sea on their western coasts, and separated by the many channels through which the Schelde and some other rivers find their way to the ocean. In the twelfth century these islands were much smaller and more numerous than at present. They have been gradually enlarged, and, in several instances, at last connected by the extension of their system of dikes. Walcheren is formed of ten islets united into one about the end of the fourteenth century. At the middle of the fifteenth century, Goeree and Overflakkee consisted of separate islands, containing altogether about ten thousand acres; by means of above sixty successive advances of the dikes, they have been brought to compose a single island, whose area is not less than sixty thousand acres.[314]

In the Netherlands—which the first Napoleon characterized as a deposit of the Rhine, and as, therefore, by natural law, rightfully the property of him who controlled the sources of that great river—and on the adjacent Frisic, Low German and Danish shores and islands, sea and river dikes have been constructed on a grander and more imposing scale than in any other country. The whole economy of the art has been there most thoroughly studied, and the literature of the subject is very extensive. For my present aim, which is concerned with results rather than with processes, it is not worth while to refer to professional treatises, and I shall content myself with presenting such information as can be gathered from works of a more popular character.[315]

The superior strata of the lowlands upon and near the coast are, as we have seen, principally composed of soil brought down by the great rivers I have mentioned, and either directly deposited by them upon the sands of the bottom, or carried out to sea by their currents, and then, after a shorter or longer exposure to the chemical and mechanical action of salt water and marine currents, restored again to the land by tidal overflow and subsidence from the waters in which it was suspended. At a very remote period, the coast flats were, at many points, raised so high by successive alluvious or tidal deposits as to be above ordinary high water level, but they were still liable to occasional inundation from river floods, and from the sea water also, when heavy or long-continued west winds drove it landward. The extraordinary fertility of this soil and its security as a retreat from hostile violence attracted to it a considerable population, while its want of protection against inundation exposed it to the devastations of which the chroniclers of the Middle Ages have left such highly colored pictures. The first permanent dwellings on the coast flats were erected upon artificial mounds, and many similar precarious habitations still exist on the unwalled islands and shores beyond the chain of dikes. River embankments, which, as is familiarly known, have from the earliest antiquity been employed in many countries where sea dikes are unknown, were probably the first works of this character constructed in the Low Countries, and when two neighboring streams of fresh water had been embanked, the next step in the process would naturally be to connect the river walls together by a transverse dike or raised causeway, which would serve to secure the intermediate ground both against the backwater of river floods and against overflow by the sea. The oldest true sea dikes described in historical records, however, are those enclosing islands in the estuaries of the great rivers, and it is not impossible that the double character they possess as a security against maritime floods and as a military rampart, led to their adoption upon those islands before similar constructions had been attempted upon the mainland.

At some points of the coast, various contrivances, such as piers, piles, and, in fact, obstructions of all sorts to the ebb of the current, are employed to facilitate the deposit of slime, before a regular enclosure is commenced. Usually, however, the first step is to build low and cheap embankments, extending from an older dike, or from high ground, around the parcel of flat intended to be secured. These are called summer dikes (sommer-deich, pl. sommer-deiche, German; zomerkaai, zomerkade, pl. zomerkaaie, zomerkaden, Dutch). They are erected when a sufficient extent of ground to repay the cost has been elevated enough to be covered with coarse vegetation fit for pasturage. They serve both to secure the ground from overflow by the ordinary flood tides of mild weather, and to retain the slime deposited by very high water, which would otherwise be partly carried off by the retreating ebb. The elevation of the soil goes on slowly after this; but when it has at last been sufficiently enriched, and raised high enough to justify the necessary outlay, permanent dikes are constructed by which the water is excluded at all seasons. These embankments are constructed of sand from the coast dunes or from sandbanks, and of earth from the mainland or from flats outside the dikes, bound and strengthened by fascines, and provided with sluices, which are generally founded on piles and of very expensive construction, for drainage at low water. The outward slope of the sea dikes is gentle, experience having shown that this form is least exposed to injury both from the waves and from floating ice, and the most modern dikes are even more moderate in the inclination of the seaward scarp than the older ones.[316] The crown of the dike, however, for the last three or four feet of its height, is much steeper, being intended rather as a protection against the spray than against the waves, and the inner slope is always comparatively abrupt.

The height and thickness of dikes varies according to the elevation of the ground they enclose, the rise of the tides, the direction of the prevailing winds, and other special causes of exposure, but it may be said that they are, in general, raised from fifteen to twenty feet above ordinary high-water mark. The water slopes of river dikes are protected by plantations of willows or strong semi-aquatic shrubs or grasses, but as these will not grow upon banks exposed to salt water, sea dikes must be faced with stone, fascines, or some other revêtement.[317] Upon the coast of Schleswig and Holstein, where the people have less capital at their command, they defend their embankments against ice and the waves by a coating of twisted straw or reeds, which must be renewed as often as once, sometimes twice a year. The inhabitants of these coasts call the chain of dikes "the golden border," a name it well deserves, whether we suppose it to refer to its enormous cost, or, as is more probable, to its immense value as a protection to their fields and their firesides.

When outlying flats are enclosed by building new embankments, the old interior dikes are suffered to remain, both as an additional security against the waves, and because the removal of them would be expensive. They serve, also, as roads or causeways, a purpose for which the embankments nearest the sea are seldom employed, because the whole structure might be endangered from the breaking of the turf by wheels and the hoofs of horses. Where successive rows of dikes have been thus constructed, it is observed that the ground defended by the more ancient embankments is lower than that embraced within the newer enclosures, and this depression of level has been ascribed to a general subsidence of the coast from geological causes; but the better opinion seems to be that it is, in most cases, due merely to the consolidation and settling of the earth from being more effectually dried, from the weight of the dikes, from the tread of men and cattle, and from the movement of the heavy wagons which carry off the crops.[318] Notwithstanding this slow sinking, most of the land enclosed by dikes is still above low-water mark, and can, therefore, be wholly or partially freed from rain water, and from that received by infiltration from higher ground, by sluices opened at the ebb of the tide. For this purpose, the land is carefully ditched, and advantage is taken of every favorable occasion for discharging the water through the sluices. But the ground cannot be effectually drained by this means, unless it is elevated four or five feet, at least, above the level of the ebb tide, because the ditches would not otherwise have a sufficient descent to carry the water off in the short interval between ebb and flow, and because the moisture of the saturated subsoil is always rising by capillary attraction. Whenever, therefore, the soil has sunk below the level I have mentioned, and in cases where its surface has never been raised above it, pumps, worked by wind or some other mechanical power, must be very frequently employed to keep the land dry enough for pasturage and cultivation.[319]

b. Draining of Lakes and Marshes.

The substitution of steam engines for the feeble and uncertain action of windmills, in driving pumps, has much facilitated the removal of water from the polders and the draining of lakes, marshes, and shallow bays, and thus given such an impulse to these enterprises, that not less than one hundred and ten thousand acres were reclaimed from the waters, and added to the agricultural domain of the Netherlands, between 1815 and 1858. The most important of these undertakings was the draining of the Lake of Haarlem, and for this purpose some of the most powerful hydraulic engines ever constructed were designed and executed.[320] The origin of this lake is unknown. It is supposed by some geographers to be a part of an ancient bed of the Rhine, the channel of which, as there is good reason to believe, has undergone great changes since the Roman invasion of the Netherlands; by others it is thought to have once formed an inland marine channel, separated from the sea by a chain of low islands, which the sand washed up by the tides has since connected with the mainland and converted into a continuous line of coast. The best authorities, however, find geological evidence that the surface occupied by the lake was originally a marshy tract containing within its limits little solid ground, but many ponds and inlets, and much floating as well as fixed fen.

In consequence of the cutting of turf for fuel, and the destruction of the few trees and shrubs which held the loose soil together with their roots, the ponds are supposed to have gradually extended themselves, until the action of the wind upon their enlarged surface gave their waves sufficient force to overcome the resistance of the feeble barriers which separated them, and to unite them all into a single lake. Popular tradition, it is true, ascribes the formation of the Lake of Haarlem to a single irruption of the sea, at a remote period, and connects it with one or another of the destructive inundations of which the Netherland chronicles describe so many; but on a map of the year 1531, a chain of four smaller waters occupies nearly the ground afterward covered by the Lake of Haarlem, and they have more probably been united by gradual encroachments resulting from the improvident practices above referred to, though no doubt the consummation may have been hastened by floods, and by the neglect to maintain dikes, or the intentional destruction of them, in the long wars of the sixteenth century.

The Lake of Haarlem was a body of water not far from fifteen miles in length, by seven in greatest width, lying between the cities of Amsterdam and Leyden, running parallel with the coast of Holland at the distance of about five miles from the sea, and covering an area of about 45,000 acres. By means of the Ij, it communicated with the Zuiderzee, the Mediterranean of the Netherlands, and its surface was little above the mean elevation of that of the sea. Whenever, therefore, the waters of the Zuiderzee were acted upon by strong northwest winds, those of the Lake of Haarlem were raised proportionally and driven southward, while winds from the south tended to create a flow in the opposite direction. The shores of the lake were everywhere low, and though in the course of the eighty years between 1767 and 1848 more than £350,000 or $1,700,000 had been expended in checking its encroachments, it often burst its barriers, and produced destructive inundations. On the 29th of November, 1836, a south wind brought its waters to the very gates of Amsterdam, and on the 26th of December of the same year, in a northwest gale, they overflowed twenty thousand acres of land at the southern extremity of the lake, and flooded a part of the city of Leyden. The depth of water did not, in general, exceed fourteen feet, but the bottom was a semi-fluid ooze or slime, which partook of the agitation of the waves, and added considerably to their mechanical force. Serious fears were entertained that the lake would form a junction with the inland waters of the Legmeer and Mijdrecht, swallow up a vast extent of valuable soil, and finally endanger the security of a large proportion of the land which the industry of Holland had gained in the course of centuries from the ocean.

For this reason, and for the sake of the large addition the bottom of the lake would make to the cultivable soil of the state, it was resolved to drain it, and the preliminary steps for that purpose were commenced in the year 1840. The first operation was to surround the entire lake with a ring canal and dike, in order to cut off the communication with the Ij, and to exclude the water of the streams and morasses which discharged themselves into it from the land side. The dike was composed of different materials, according to the means of supply at different points, such as sand from the coast dunes, earth and turf excavated from the line of the ring canal, and floating turf,[321] fascines being everywhere used to bind and compact the mass together. This operation was completed in 1848, and three steam pumps were then employed for five years in discharging the water. The whole enterprise was conducted at the expense of the state, and in 1853 the recovered lands were offered for sale for its benefit. Up to 1858, forty-two thousand acres had been sold at not far from sixteen pounds sterling or seventy-seven dollars an acre, amounting altogether to £661,000 sterling or $3,200,000. The unsold lands were valued at more than £6,000 or nearly $30,000, and as the total cost was £764,500 or about $3,700,000, the direct loss to the state, exclusive of interest on the capital expended, may be stated at £100,000 or something less than $500,000.

In a country like the United States, of almost boundless extent of sparsely inhabited territory, such an expenditure for such an object would be poor economy. But Holland has a narrow domain, great pecuniary resources, an excessively crowded population, and a consequent need of enlarged room and opportunity for the exercise of industry. Under such circumstances, and especially with an exposure to dangers so formidable, there is no question of the wisdom of the measure. It has already provided homes and occupation for more than five thousand citizens, and furnished a profitable investment for a capital of not less than £400,000 sterling or $2,000,000, which has been expended in improvements over and above the purchase money of the soil; and the greater part of this sum, as well as of the cost of drainage, has been paid as a compensation for labor. The excess of governmental expenditure over the receipts, if employed in constructing ships of war or fortifications, would have added little to the military strength of the kingdom; but the increase of territory, the multiplication of homes and firesides which the people have an interest in defending, and the augmentation of agricultural resources, constitute a stronger bulwark against foreign invasion than a ship of the line or a fortress armed with a hundred cannon.

The bearing of the works I have noticed, and of others similar in character, upon the social and moral, as well as the purely economical interests of the people of the Netherlands, has induced me to describe them more in detail than the general purpose of this volume may be thought to justify; but if we consider them simply from a geographical point of view, we shall find that they are possessed of no small importance as modifications of the natural condition of terrestrial surface. There is good reason to believe that before the establishment of a partially civilized race upon the territory now occupied by Dutch, Frisic, and Low German communities, the grounds not exposed to inundation were overgrown with dense woods, that the lowlands between these forests and the sea coasts were marshes, covered and partially solidified by a thick matting of peat plants and shrubs interspersed with trees, and that even the sand dunes of the shore were protected by a vegetable growth which, in a great measure, prevented the drifting and translocation of them.

The present causes of river and coast erosion existed, indeed, at the period in question; but some of them must have acted with less intensity, there were strong natural safeguards against the influence of marine and fresh-water currents, and the conflicting tendencies had arrived at a condition of approximate equilibrium, which permitted but slow and gradual changes in the face of nature. The destruction of the forests around the sources and along the valleys of the rivers by man gave them a more torrential character. The felling of the trees, and the extirpation of the shrubbery upon the fens by domestic cattle, deprived the surface of cohesion and consistence, and the cutting of peat for fuel opened cavities in it, which, filling at once with water, rapidly extended themselves by abrasion of their borders, and finally enlarged to pools, lakes, and gulfs, like the Lake of Haarlem and the northern part of the Zuiderzee. The cutting of the wood and the depasturing of the grasses upon the sand dunes converted them from solid bulwarks against the ocean to loose accumulations of dust, which every sea breeze drove farther landward, burying, perhaps, fertile soil and choking up watercourses on one side, and exposing the coast to erosion by the sea upon the other.

c. Geographical Influence of such Operations.

The changes which human action has produced within twenty centuries in the Netherlands and the neighboring provinces, are certainly of no small geographical importance, considered simply as a direct question of loss and gain of territory. They have also undoubtedly been attended with some climatic consequences, they have exercised a great influence on the spontaneous animal and vegetable life of this region, and they cannot have failed to produce effects upon tidal and other oceanic currents, the range of which may be very extensive. The force of the tidal wave, the height to which it rises, the direction of its currents, and, in fact, all the phenomena which characterize it, as well as all the effects it produces, depend as much upon the configuration of the coast it washes, and the depth of water, and form of bottom near the shore, as upon the attraction which occasions it. Every one of the terrestrial conditions which affect the character of tidal and other marine currents has been very sensibly modified by the operations I have described, and on this coast, at least, man has acted almost as powerfully on the physical geography of the sea as on that of the land.

Lowering of Lakes.

The hydraulic works of the Netherlands and of the neighboring states are of such magnitude, that they quite throw into the shade all other known artificial arrangements for defending the land against the encroachments of the rivers and the sea, and for reclaiming to the domain of agriculture and civilization soil long covered by the waters. But although the recovery and protection of lands flooded by the sea seems to be an art wholly of Netherlandish origin, we have abundant evidence, that in ancient as well as in comparatively modern times, great enterprises more or less analogous in character have been successfully undertaken, both in inland Europe and in the less familiar countries of the East.

One of the best known of these is the tunnel which serves to discharge the surplus waters of the Lake of Albano, about fourteen miles from Rome. This lake, about six miles in circuit, occupies one of the craters of an extinct volcanic range, and the surface of its waters is about nine hundred feet above the sea. It is fed by rivulets and subterranean springs originating in the Alban Mount, or Monte Cavo, the most elevated peak of the volcanic group just mentioned, which rises to the height of about three thousand feet. At present the lake has no discoverable natural outlet, but it is not known that the water ever stood at such a height as to flow regularly over the lip of the crater. It seems that at the earliest period of which we have any authentic memorials, its level was usually kept by evaporation, or by discharge through subterranean channels, considerably below the rim of the basin which encompassed it, but in the year 397 B. C., the water, either from the obstruction of such channels, or in consequence of increased supplies from unknown sources, rose to such a height as to flow over the edge of the crater, and threaten inundation to the country below by bursting through its walls. To obviate this danger, a tunnel for carrying off the water was pierced at a level much below the height to which it had risen. This gallery, cut entirely with the chisel through the rock for a distance of six thousand feet, or nearly a mile and one seventh, is still in so good condition as to serve its original purpose. The fact that this work was contemporaneous with the siege of Veii, has given to ancient annalists occasion to connect the two events, but modern critics are inclined to reject Livy's account of the matter, as one of the many improbable fables which disfigure the pages of that historian. It is, however, repeated by Cicero and by Dionysins of Halicarnassus, and it is by no means impossible that, in an age when priests and soothsayers monopolized both the arts of natural magic and the little which yet existed of physical science, the Government of Rome, by their aid, availed itself at once of the superstition and of the military ardor of its citizens to obtain their sanction to an enterprise which sounder arguments might not have induced them to approve.

Still more remarkable is the tunnel cut by the Emperor Claudius to drain the Lake Fucinus, now Lago di Celano, in the Neapolitan territory, about fifty miles eastward of Rome. This lake, as far as its history is known, has varied very considerably in its dimensions at different periods, according to the character of the seasons. It has no visible outlet, but was originally either drained by natural subterranean conduits, or kept within certain extreme limits by evaporation. In years of uncommon moisture, it spread over the adjacent soil and destroyed the crops; in dry seasons, it retreated, and produced epidemic disease by poisonous exhalations from the decay of vegetable and animal matter upon its exposed bed. Julius Cæsar had proposed the construction of a tunnel to drain the lake, but the enterprise was not actually undertaken until the reign of Claudius, when—after a temporary failure, from errors in levelling by the engineers, as was pretended at the time, or, as now appears certain, in consequence of frauds by the contractors in the execution of the work—it was at least partially completed. From this imperfect construction, it soon got out of repair, but was restored by Hadrian, and seems to have answered its design for some centuries. In the barbarism which followed the downfall of the empire, it again fell into decay, and though numerous attempts were made to repair it during the Middle Ages, no tolerable success seems to have attended any of these efforts, until the present generation.

Works have now been some years in progress for restoring, or rather enlarging and rebuilding this ancient tunnel, upon a scale of grandeur which does infinite honor to the liberality and public spirit of the projectors, and with an ingenuity of design and a constructive skill which reflect the highest credit upon the professional ability of the engineers who have planned the works and directed their execution. The length of this tunnel is 18,634 feet, or rather more than three miles and a half. Of course, it is one of the longest subterranean galleries yet executed in Europe, and it offers many curious particulars in its original design which cannot here be described. The difference between the highest and the lowest known levels of the surface of the lake amounts to at least forty feet, and the difference of area covered at these respective stages is not much less than eight thousand acres. The tunnel will reduce the water to a much lower point, and it is computed that, including the lands occasionally overflowed, not less than forty thousand acres of as fertile soil as any in Italy will be recovered from the lake and permanently secured from inundation by its waters.

Many similar enterprises have been conceived and executed in modern times, both for the purpose of reclaiming land covered by water and for sanitary reasons.[322] They are sometimes attended with wholly unexpected evils, as, for example, in the case of Barton Pond, in Vermont, and in that of the Lake Storsjö, in Sweden, already mentioned on a former page. Another still less obvious consequence of the withdrawal of the waters has occasionally been observed in these operations. The hydrostatic force with which the water, in virtue of its specific gravity, presses against the banks that confine it, has a tendency to sustain them whenever their composition and texture are not such as to expose them to softening and dissolution by the infiltration of the water. If then, the slope of the banks is considerable, or if the earth of which they are composed rests on a smooth and slippery stratum inclining toward the bed of the lake, they are liable to fall or slide forward when the mechanical support of the water is removed, and this sometimes happens on a considerable scale. A few years ago, the surface of the Lake of Lungern, in the Canton of Unterwalden, in Switzerland, was lowered by driving a tunnel about a quarter of a mile long through the narrow ridge, called the Kaiserstuhl, which forms a barrier at the north end of the basin. When the water was drawn off, the banks, which are steep, cracked and burst, several acres of ground slid down as low as the water receded, and even the whole village of Lungern was thought to be in no small danger.

Other inconveniences of a very serious character have often resulted from the natural wearing down, or, much more frequently, the imprudent destruction, of the barriers which confine mountain lakes. In their natural condition, such basins serve both to receive and retain the rocks and other detritus brought down by the torrents which empty into them, and to check the impetus of the rushing waters by bringing them to a temporary pause; but if the outlets are lowered so as to drain the reservoirs, the torrents continue their rapid flow through the ancient bed of the basins, and carry down with them the sand and gravel with which they are charged, instead of depositing their burden as before in the still waters of the lakes.

Mountain Lakes.

It is a common opinion in America that the river meadows, bottoms, or intervales, as they are popularly called, are generally the beds of ancient lakes which have burst their barriers and left running currents in their place. It was shown by Dr. Dwight, many years ago, that this is very far from being universally true; but there is no doubt that mountain lakes were of much more frequent occurrence in primitive than in modern geography, and there are many chains of such still existing in regions where man has yet little disturbed the original features of the earth. In the long valleys of the Adirondack range in Northern New York, and in the mountainous parts of Maine, eight, ten, and even more lakes and lakelets are sometimes found in succession, each emptying into the next lower pool, and so all at last into some considerable river. When the mountain slopes which supply these basins shall be stripped of their woods, the augmented swelling of the lakes will break down their barriers, their waters will run off, and the valleys will present successions of flats with rivers running through them, instead of chains of lakes connected by natural canals.

A similar state of things seems to have existed in the ancient geography of France. "Nature," says Lavergne, "has not excavated on the flanks of our Alps reservoirs as magnificent as those of Lombardy; she had, however, constructed smaller, but more numerous lakes, which the negligence of man has permitted to disappear. Auguste de Gasparin, brother of the illustrious agriculturist, demonstrated more than thirty years ago, in an original paper, that many natural dikes formerly existed in the mountain valleys, which have been swept away by the waters. He proposed to rebuild and to multiply them. This interesting suggestion has reappeared several times since, but has met with strong opposition from skilful engineers. It would, nevertheless, be well to try the experiment of creating artificial lakes which should fill themselves with the water of melting snows and deluging rains, to be drawn out in times of drought. If this plan has able opposers, it has also warm advocates. Experience alone can decide the question."[323]

Climatic Effects of Draining Lakes and Marshes.

The draining of lakes, marshes, and other superficial accumulations of moisture, reduces the water surface of a country, and, of course, the evaporation from it. Lakes, too, in elevated positions, lose a part of their water by infiltration, and thereby supply other lakes, springs, and rivulets at lower levels. Hence, it is evident that the draining of such waters, if carried on upon a large scale, must affect both the humidity and the temperature of the atmosphere, and the permanent supply of water for extensive districts.[324]

Geographical and Climatic Effects of Aqueducts, Reservoirs, and Canals.

Many processes of internal improvement, such as aqueducts for the supply of great cities, railroad cuts and embankments, and the like, divert water from its natural channels, and affect its distribution and ultimate discharge. The collecting of the waters of a considerable district into reservoirs, to be thence carried off by means of aqueducts, as, for example, in the forest of Belgrade, near Constantinople, deprives the grounds originally watered by the springs and rivulets of the necessary moisture, and reduces them to barrenness. Similar effects must have followed from the construction of the numerous aqueducts which supplied ancient Rome with such a profuse abundance of water. On the other hand, the filtration of water through the banks or walls of an aqueduct carried upon a high level across low ground, often injures the adjacent soil, and is prejudicial to the health of the neighboring population; and it has been observed in Switzerland, that fevers have been produced by the stagnation of the water in excavations from which earth had been taken to form embankments for railways.

If we consider only the influence of physical improvements on civilized life, we shall perhaps ascribe to navigable canals a higher importance, or at least a more diversified influence, than to any other works of man designed to control the waters of the earth, and to affect their distribution, They bind distant regions together by social ties, through the agency of the commerce they promote; they facilitate the transportation of military stores and engines, and of other heavy material connected with the discharge of the functions of government; they encourage industry by giving marketable value to raw material and to objects of artificial elaboration which would otherwise be worthless on account of the cost of conveyance; they supply from their surplus waters means of irrigation and of mechanical power; and, in many other ways, they contribute much to advance the prosperity and civilization of nations. Nor are they wholly without geographical importance. They sometimes drain lands by conveying off water which would otherwise stagnate on the surface, and, on the other hand, like aqueducts, they render the neighboring soil cold and moist by the percolation of water through their embankments;[325] they dam up, check, and divert the course of natural currents, and deliver them at points opposite to, or distant from, their original outlets; they often require extensive reservoirs to feed them, thus retaining through the year accumulations of water—which would otherwise run off, or evaporate in the dry season—and thereby enlarging the evaporable surface of the country; and we have already seen that they interchange the flora and the fauna of provinces widely separated by nature. All these modes of action certainly influence climate and the character of terrestrial surface, though our means of observation are not yet perfected enough to enable us to appreciate and measure their effects.

Climatic and Geographical Effects of Surface and Underground Draining.

I have commenced this chapter with a description of the dikes and other hydraulic works of the Netherland engineers, because the geographical results of such operations are more obvious and more easily measured, though certainly not more important, than those of the older and more widely diffused modes of resisting or directing the flow of waters, which have been practised from remote antiquity in the interior of all civilized countries. Draining and irrigation are habitually regarded as purely agricultural processes, having little or no relation to technical geography; but we shall find that they exert a powerful influence on soil, climate, and animal and vegetable life, and may, therefore, justly claim to be regarded as geographical elements.

Surface and Under-draining and their Effects.

Superficial draining is a necessity in all lands newly reclaimed from the forest. The face of the ground in the woods is never so regularly inclined as to permit water to flow freely over it. There are, even on the hillsides, many small ridges and depressions, partly belonging to the original distribution of the soil, and partly occasioned by irregularities in the growth and deposit of vegetable matter. These, in the husbandry of nature, serve as dams and reservoirs to collect a larger supply of moisture than the spongy earth can at once imbibe. Besides this, the vegetable mould is, even under the most favorable circumstances, slow in parting with the humidity it has accumulated under the protection of the woods, and the infiltration from neighboring forests contributes to keep the soil of small clearings too wet for the advantageous cultivation of artificial crops. For these reasons, surface draining must have commenced with agriculture itself, and there is probably no cultivated district, one may almost say no single field, which is not provided with artificial arrangements for facilitating the escape of superficial water, and thus carrying off moisture which, in the natural condition of the earth, would have been imbibed by the soil.

The beneficial effects of surface drainage, the necessity of extending the fields as population increased, and the inconveniences resulting from the presence of marshes in otherwise improved regions, must have suggested at a very early period of human industry the expediency of converting bogs and swamps into dry land by drawing off their waters; and it would not be long after the introduction of this practice before further acquisition of agricultural territory would be made by lowering the outlet of small ponds and lakes, and adding the ground they covered to the domain of the husbandman.

All these processes belong to the incipient civilization of the ante-historical periods, but the construction of subterranean channels for the removal of infiltrated water marks ages and countries distinguished by a great advance in agricultural theory and practice, a great accumulation of pecuniary capital, and a density of population which creates a ready demand and a high price for all products of rural industry. Under-draining, too, would be most advantageous in damp and cool climates, where evaporation is slow, and upon soils where the natural inclination of surface does not promote a very rapid flow of the surface waters. All the conditions required to make this mode of rural improvement, if not absolutely necessary, at least apparently profitable, exist in Great Britain, and it is, therefore, very natural that the wealthy and intelligent farmers of England should have carried this practice farther, and reaped a more abundant pecuniary return from it, than those of any other country.

Besides superficial and subsoil drains, there is another method of disposing of superfluous surface water, which, however, can rarely be practised, because the necessary conditions for its employment are not of frequent occurrence. Whenever a tenacious water-holding stratum rests on a loose, gravelly bed, so situated as to admit of a free discharge of water from or through it by means of the outcropping of the bed at a lower level, or of deep-lying conduits leading to distant points of discharge, superficial waters may be carried off by opening a passage for them through the impervious into the permeable stratum. Thus, according to Bischof, as early as the time of King Réné, in the first half of the fifteenth century, the plain of Paluns, near Marseilles, was laid dry by boring, and Wittwer informs us that drainage is effected at Munich by conducting the superfluous water into large excavations, from which it filters through into a lower stratum of pebble and gravel lying a little above the level of the river Isar.[326] So at Washington, in the western part of the city, which lies high above the rivers Potomac and Rock Creek, many houses are provided with dry wells for draining their cellars and foundations. These extend through hard tenacious earth to the depth of thirty or forty feet, when they strike a stratum of gravel, through which the water readily passes off.

This practice has been extensively employed at Paris, not merely for carrying off ordinary surface water, but for the discharge of offensive and deleterious fluids from chemical and manufacturing establishments. A well of this sort received, in the winter of 1832-'33, twenty thousand gallons per day of the foul water from a starch factory, and the same process was largely used in other factories. The apprehension of injury to common and artesian wells and springs led to an investigation on this subject, in behalf of the municipal authorities, by Girard and Parent Duchatelet, in the latter year. The report of these gentlemen, published in the Annales des Ponts et Chaussées for 1833, second half year, is full of curious and instructive facts respecting the position and distribution of the subterranean waters under and near Paris; but it must suffice to say that the report came to the conclusion that, in consequence of the absolute immobility of these waters, and the relatively small quantity of noxious fluid to be conveyed to them, there was no danger of the diffusion of this latter, if discharged into them. This result will not surprise those who know that, in another work, Duchatelet maintains analogous opinions as to the effect of the discharge of the city sewers into the Seine upon the waters of that river. The quantity of matter delivered by them he holds to be so nearly infinitesimal, as compared with the volume of water of the Seine, that it cannot possibly affect it to a sensible degree. I would, however, advise determined water drinkers living at Paris to adopt his conclusions, without studying his facts and his arguments; for it is quite possible that he may convert his readers to a faith opposite to his own, and that they will finally agree with the poet who held water an "ignoble beverage."

Climatic and Geographical Effects of Surface Draining.

When we remove water from the surface, we diminish the evaporation from it, and, of course, the refrigeration which accompanies all evaporation is diminished in proportion. Hence superficial draining ought to be attended with an elevation of atmospheric temperature, and, in cold countries, it might be expected to lessen the frequency of frosts. Accordingly, it is a fact of experience that, other things being equal, dry soils, and the air in contact with them, are perceptibly warmer during the season of vegetation, when evaporation is most rapid, than moist lands and the atmospheric stratum resting upon them. Instrumental observation on this special point has not yet been undertaken on a very large scale, but still we have thermometric data sufficient to warrant the general conclusion, and the influence of drainage in diminishing the frequency of frost appears to be even better established than a direct increase of atmospheric temperature. The steep and dry uplands of the Green Mountain range in New England often escape frosts when the Indian corn harvest on moister grounds, five hundred or even a thousand feet lower, is destroyed or greatly injured by them. The neighborhood of a marsh is sure to be exposed to late spring and early autumnal frosts, but they cease to be feared after it is drained, and this is particularly observable in very cold climates, as, for example, in Lapland.[327]

In England, under-drains are not generally laid below the reach of daily variations of temperature, or below a point from which moisture might be brought to the surface by capillary attraction and evaporated by the heat of the sun. They, therefore, like surface drains, withdraw from local solar action much moisture which would otherwise be vaporized by it, and, at the same time, by drying the soil above them, they increase its effective hygroscopicity, and it consequently absorbs from the atmosphere a greater quantity of water than it did when, for want of under-drainage, the subsoil was always humid, if not saturated. Under-drains, then, contribute to the dryness as well as to the warmth of the atmosphere, and, as dry ground is more readily heated by the rays of the sun than wet, they tend also to raise the mean, and especially the summer temperature of the soil.

So far as respects the immediate improvement of soil and climate, and the increased abundance of the harvests, the English system of surface and subsoil drainage has fully justified the eulogiums of its advocates; but its extensive adoption appears to have been attended with some altogether unforeseen and undesirable consequences, very analogous to those which I have described as resulting from the clearing of the forests. The under-drains carry off very rapidly the water imbibed by the soil from precipitation, and through infiltration from neighboring springs or other sources of supply. Consequently, in wet seasons, or after heavy rains, a river bordered by artificially drained lands receives in a few hours, from superficial and from subterranean conduits, an accession of water which, in the natural state of the earth, would have reached it only by small instalments after percolating through hidden paths for weeks or even months, and would have furnished perennial and comparatively regular contributions, instead of swelling deluges, to its channel. Thus, when human impatience rashly substitutes swiftly acting artificial contrivances for the slow methods by which nature drains the surface and superficial strata of a river basin, the original equilibrium is disturbed, the waters of the heavens are no longer stored up in the earth to be gradually given out again, but are hurried out of man's domain with wasteful haste; and while the inundations of the river are sudden and disastrous, its current, when the drains have run dry, is reduced to a rivulet, it ceases to supply the power to drive the machinery for which it was once amply sufficient, and scarcely even waters the herds that pasture upon its margin.[328]

Irrigation and its Climatic and Geographical Effects.

We know little of the history of the extinct civilizations which preceded the culture of the classic ages, and no nation has, in modern times, spontaneously emerged from barbarism, and created for itself the arts of social life.[329] The improvements of the savage races whose history we can distinctly trace are borrowed and imitative, and our theories as to the origin and natural development of industrial art are conjectural. Of course, the relative antiquity of particular branches of human industry depends much upon the natural character of soil, climate, and spontaneous vegetable and animal life in different countries; and while the geographical influence of man would, under given circumstances, be exerted in one direction, it would, under different conditions, act in an opposite or a diverging line. I have given some reasons for thinking that in the climates to which our attention has been chiefly directed, man's first interference with the natural arrangement and disposal of the waters was in the way of drainage of surface. But if we are to judge from existing remains alone, we should probably conclude that irrigation is older than drainage; for, in the regions regarded by general tradition as the cradle of the human race, we find traces of canals evidently constructed for the former purpose at a period long preceding the ages of which we have any written memorials. There are, in ancient Armenia, extensive districts which were already abandoned to desolation at the earliest historical epoch, but which, in a yet remoter antiquity, had been irrigated by a complicated and highly artificial system of canals, the lines of which can still be followed; and there are, in all the highlands where the sources of the Euphrates rise, in Persia, in Egypt, in India, and in China, works of this sort which must have been in existence before man had begun to record his own annals.

In warm countries, such as most of those just mentioned, the effects I have described as usually resulting from the clearing of the forests would very soon follow. In such climates, the rains are inclined to be periodical; they are also violent, and for these reasons the soil would be parched in summer and liable to wash in winter. In these countries, therefore, the necessity for irrigation must soon have been felt, and its introduction into mountainous regions like Armenia must have been immediately followed by a system of terracing, or at least scarping the hillsides. Pasture and meadow, indeed, may be irrigated even when the surface is both steep and irregular, as may be observed abundantly on the Swiss as well as on the Piedmontese slope of the Alps; but in dry climates, plough land and gardens on hilly grounds require terracing, both for supporting the soil and for administering water by irrigation, and it should be remembered that terracing, of itself, even without special arrangements for controlling the distribution of water, prevents or at least checks the flow of rain water, and gives it time to sink into the ground instead of running off over the surface.

There are few things in Continental husbandry which surprise English or American observers so much as the extent to which irrigation is employed in agriculture, and that, too, on soils, and with a temperature, where their own experience would have led them to suppose it would be injurious to vegetation rather than beneficial to it. The summers in Northern Italy, though longer, are very often not warmer than in New England; and in ordinary years, the summer rains are as frequent and as abundant in the former country as in the latter. Yet in Piedmont and Lombardy, irrigation is bestowed upon almost every crop, while in New England it is never employed at all in farming husbandry, or indeed for any purpose except in kitchen gardens, and possibly, in rare cases, in some other small branch of agricultural industry.[330]

The summers in Egypt, in Syria, and in Asia Minor and even Rumelia, are almost rainless. In such climates, the necessity of irrigation is obvious, and the loss of the ancient means of furnishing it readily explains the diminished fertility of most of the countries in question.[331] The surface of Palestine, for example, is composed, in a great measure, of rounded limestone hills, once, no doubt, covered with forests. These were partially removed before the Jewish conquest.[332] When the soil began to suffer from drought, reservoirs to retain the waters of winter were hewn in the rock near the tops of the hills, and the declivities were terraced. So long as the cisterns were in good order, and the terraces kept up, the fertility of Palestine was unsurpassed, but when misgovernment and foreign and intestine war occasioned the neglect or destruction of these works—traces of which still meet the traveller's eye at every step,—when the reservoirs were broken and the terrace walls had fallen down, there was no longer water for irrigation in summer, the rains of winter soon washed away most of the thin layer of earth upon the rocks, and Palestine was reduced almost to the condition of a desert.

The course of events has been the same in Idumæa. The observing traveller discovers everywhere about Petra, particularly if he enters the city by the route of Wadi Ksheibeh, very extensive traces of ancient cultivation, and upon the neighboring ridges are the ruins of numerous cisterns evidently constructed to furnish a supply of water for irrigation.[333] In primitive ages, the precipitation of winter in these hilly countries was, in great part, retained for a time in the superficial soil, first by the vegetable mould of the forests, and then by the artificial arrangements I have described. The water imbibed by the earth was partly taken up by direct evaporation, partly absorbed by vegetation, and partly carried down by infiltration to subjacent strata which gave it out in springs at lower levels, and thus a fertility of soil and a condition of the atmosphere were maintained sufficient to admit of the dense population that once inhabited those now arid wastes. At present, the rain water runs immediately off from the surface and is carried down to the sea, or is drunk up by the sands of the wadis, and the hillsides which once teemed with plenty are bare of vegetation, and seared by the scorching winds of the desert.

In Southern Europe, in the Turkish Empire, and in many other countries, a very large proportion of the surface is, if not absolutely flooded, at least thoroughly moistened by irrigation, a great number of times in the course of every season, and this, especially, at periods when it would otherwise be quite dry, and when, too, the power of the sun and the capacity of the air for absorbing moisture are greatest. Hence it is obvious that the amount of evaporation from the earth in these countries, and, of course, the humidity and the temperature of both the soil and the atmosphere in contact with it, must be much affected by the practice of irrigation. The cultivable area of Egypt, or the space accessible to cultivation, between desert and desert, is more than seven thousand square statute miles. Much of the surface, though not out of the reach of irrigation, lies too high to be economically watered, and irrigation and cultivation are therefore confined to an area of five or six thousand square miles, nearly the whole of which is regularly and constantly watered when not covered by the inundation, except in the short interval between the harvest and the rise of the waters. For nearly half of the year, then, irrigation adds five or six thousand square miles, or more than a square equatorial degree, to the evaporable surface of the Nile valley, or, in other words, more than decuples the area from which an appreciable quantity of moisture would otherwise be evaporated; for after the Nile has retired within its banks, its waters by no means cover one tenth of the space just mentioned.[334] The fresh-water canals now constructing, in connection with the works for the Suez canal, will not only restore the long abandoned fields east of the Nile, but add to the arable soil of Egypt hundreds of square miles of newly reclaimed desert, and thus still further increase the climatic effects of irrigation.[335]

The Nile receives not a single tributary in its course through Egypt; there is not so much as one living spring in the whole land,[336] and, with the exception of a narrow strip of coast, where the annual precipitation is said to amount to six inches, the fall of rain in the territory of the Pharaohs is not two inches in the year. The subsoil of the whole valley is pervaded with moisture by infiltration from the Nile, and water can everywhere be found at the depth of a few feet. Were irrigation suspended, and Egypt abandoned, as in that case it must be, to the operations of nature, there is no doubt that trees, the roots of which penetrate deeply, would in time establish themselves on the deserted soil, fill the valley with verdure, and perhaps at last temper the climate, and even call down abundant rain from the heavens.[337] But the immediate effect of discontinuing irrigation would be, first, an immense reduction of the evaporation from the valley in the dry season, and then a greatly augmented dryness and heat of the atmosphere. Even the almost constant north wind—the strength of which would be increased in consequence of these changes—would little reduce the temperature of the narrow cleft between the burning mountains which hem in the channel of the Nile, so that a single year would transform the most fertile of soils to the most barren of deserts, and render uninhabitable a territory that irrigation makes capable of sustaining as dense a population as has ever existed in any part of the world.[338] Whether man found the valley of the Nile a forest, or such a waste as I have just described, we do not historically know. In either case, he has not simply converted a wilderness into a garden, but has unquestionably produced extensive climatic change.[339]

The fields of Egypt are more regularly watered than those of any other country bordering on the Mediterranean, except the rice grounds in Italy, and perhaps the marcite or winter meadows of Lombardy; but irrigation is more or less employed throughout almost the entire basin of that sea, and is everywhere attended with effects which, if less in degree, are analogous in character to those resulting from it in Egypt. In general, it may be said that the soil is nowhere artificially watered except when it is so dry that little moisture would be evaporated from it, and, consequently, every acre of irrigated ground is so much added to the evaporable surface of the country. When the supply of water is unlimited, it is allowed, after serving its purpose on one field, to run into drains, canals, or rivers. But in most regions where irrigation is regularly employed, it is necessary to economize the water; after passing over or through one parcel of ground, it is conducted to another; no more is withdrawn from the canals at any one point than is absorbed by the soil it irrigates, or evaporated from it, and, consequently, it is not restored to liquid circulation, except by infiltration or precipitation. We are safe, then, in saying that the humidity evaporated from any artificially watered soil is increased by a quantity bearing a large proportion to the whole amount distributed over it; for most even of that which is absorbed by the earth is immediately given out again either by vegetables or by evaporation.

It is not easy to ascertain precisely either the extent of surface thus watered, or the amount of water supplied, in any given country, because these quantities vary with the character of the season; but there are not many districts in Southern Europe where the management of the arrangements for irrigation is not one of the most important branches of agricultural labor. The eminent engineer Lombardini describes the system of irrigation in Lombardy as, "every day in summer, diffusing over 550,000 hectares of land 45,000,000 cubic mètres of water, which is equal to the entire volume of the Seine, at an ordinary flood, or a rise of three mètres above the hydrometer at the bridge of La Tournelle at Paris."[340] Niel states the quantity of land irrigated in the former kingdom of Sardinia, including Savoy, in 1856, at 240,000 hectares, or not much less than 600,000 acres. This is about four thirteenths of the cultivable soil of the kingdom. According to the same author, the irrigated lands in France did not exceed 100,000 hectares, or 247,000 acres, while those in Lombardy amounted to 450,000 hectares, more than 1,100,000 acres.[341] In these three states alone, then, there were more than three thousand square miles of artificially watered land, and if we add the irrigated soils of the rest of Italy, of the Mediterranean islands, of the Spanish peninsula, of Turkey in Europe and in Asia Minor, of Syria, of Egypt and the remainder of Northern Africa, we shall see that irrigation increases the evaporable surface of the Mediterranean basin by a quantity bearing no inconsiderable proportion to the area naturally covered by water within it. As near as can be ascertained, the amount of water applied to irrigated lands is scarcely anywhere less than the total precipitation during the season of vegetable growth, and in general it much exceeds that quantity. In grass grounds and in field culture it ranges from 27 or 28 to 60 inches, while in smaller crops, tilled by hand labor, it is sometimes carried as high as 300 inches.[342] The rice grounds and the marcite of Lombardy are not included in these estimates of the amount of water applied. Arrangements are concluded, and new plans proposed, for an immense increase of the lands fertilized by irrigation in France and Italy, and there is every reason to believe that the artificially watered soil of the latter country will be doubled, that of France quadrupled, before the end of this century. There can be no doubt that by these operations man is exercising a powerful influence on soil, on vegetable and animal life, and on climate, and hence that in this, as in many other fields of industry, he is truly a geographical agency.[343] The quantity of water artificially withdrawn from running streams for the purpose of irrigation is such as very sensibly to affect their volume, and it is, therefore, an important element in the geography of rivers. Brooks of no trifling current are often wholly diverted from their natural channels to supply the canals, and their entire mass of water completely absorbed, so that it does not reach the river which it naturally feeds, except in such proportion as it is conveyed to it by infiltration. Irrigation, therefore, diminishes great rivers in warm countries by cutting off their sources of supply as well as by direct abstraction of water from their channels. We have just seen that the system of irrigation in Lombardy deprives the Po of a quantity of water equal to the total delivery of the Seine at ordinary flood, or, in other words, of the equivalent of a tributary navigable for hundreds of miles by vessels of considerable burden. The new canals commenced and projected will greatly increase the loss. The water required for irrigation in Egypt is less than would be supposed from the exceeding rapidity of evaporation in that arid climate; for the soil is thoroughly saturated during the inundation, and infiltration from the Nile continues to supply a considerable amount of humidity in the dryest season. Linant Bey computed that twenty-nine cubic mètres per day sufficed to irrigate a hectare in the Delta.[344] This is equivalent to a fall of rain of two millimètres and nine tenths per day, or, if we suppose water to be applied for one hundred and fifty days during the dry season, to a total precipitation of 435 millimètres, about seventeen inches and one third. Taking the area of actually cultivated soil in Egypt at the low estimate of 3,600,000 acres, and the average amount of water daily applied in both Upper and Lower Egypt at twelve hundredths of an inch in depth, we have an abstraction of 61,000,000 cubic yards, which—the mean daily delivery of the Nile being in round numbers 320,000,000 cubic yards—is nearly one fifth of the average quantity of water contributed to the Mediterranean by that river.

Irrigation, as employed for certain special purposes in Europe and America, is productive of very prejudicial climatic effects. I refer particularly to the cultivation of rice in the Slave States of the American Union and in Italy. The climate of the Southern States is not necessarily unhealthy for the white man, but he can scarcely sleep a single night in the vicinity of the rice grounds without being attacked by a dangerous fever.[345] The neighborhood of the rice fields is less pestilential in Lombardy and Piedmont than in South Carolina and Georgia, but still very insalubrious to both man and beast. "Not only does the population decrease where rice is grown," says Escourrou Milliago, "but even the flocks are attacked by typhus. In the rice grounds, the soil is divided into compartments rising in gradual succession to the level of the irrigating canal, in order that the water, after having flowed one field, may be drawn off to another, and thus a single current serve for several compartments, the lowest field, of course, still being higher than the ditch which at last drains both it and the adjacent soil. This arrangement gives a certain force of hydrostatic pressure to the water with which the rice is irrigated, and the infiltration from these fields is said to extend through neighboring grounds, sometimes to the distance of not less than a myriamètre, or six English miles, and to be destructive to crops and even trees reached by it. Land thus affected can no longer be employed for any purpose but growing rice, and when prepared for that crop, it propagates still further the evils under which it had itself suffered, and, of course, the mischief is a growing one."[346]

The attentive traveller in Egypt and Nubia cannot fail to notice many localities, generally of small extent, where the soil is rendered infertile by an excess of saline matter in its composition. In many cases, perhaps in all, these barren spots lie rather above the level usually flooded by the inundations of the Nile, and yet they exhibit traces of former cultivation. Recent observations in India, a notice of which I find in an account of a meeting of the Asiatic Society in the Athenæum of December 20, 1862, No. 1834, suggest a possible explanation of this fact. At this meeting, Professor Medlicott read an essay on "the saline efflorescence called 'Reh' and 'Kuller,'" which is gradually invading many of the most fertile districts of Northern and Western India, and changing them into sterile deserts. It consists principally of sulphate of soda (Glauber's salts), with varying proportions of common salt. Mr. Medlicott pronounces "these salts (which, in small quantities are favorable to fertility of soil) to be the gradual result of concentration by evaporation of river and canal waters, which contain them in very minute quantities, and with which the lands are either irrigated or occasionally overflowed." The river inundations in hot countries usually take place but once in a year, and, though the banks remain submerged for days or even weeks, the water at that period, being derived principally from rains and snows, must be less highly charged with mineral matter than at lower stages, and besides, it is always in motion. The water of irrigation, on the other hand, is applied for many months in succession, it is drawn from rivers at the seasons when their proportion of salts is greatest, and it either sinks into the superficial soil, carrying with it the saline substances it holds in solution, or is evaporated from the surface, leaving them upon it. Hence irrigation must impart to the soil more salts than natural inundation. The sterilized grounds in Egypt and Nubia lying above the reach of the floods, as I have said, we may suppose them to have been first cultivated in that remote antiquity when the Nile valley received its earliest inhabitants. They must have been artificially irrigated from the beginning; they may have been under cultivation many centuries before the soil at a lower level was invaded by man, and hence it is natural that they should be more strongly impregnated with saline matter than fields which are exposed every year, for some weeks, to the action of running water so nearly pure that it would be more likely to dissolve salts than to deposit them.

INUNDATIONS AND TORRENTS.

In pointing out in a former chapter the evils which have resulted from the too extensive destruction of the forests, I dwelt at some length on the increased violence of river inundations, and especially on the devastations of torrents, in countries improvidently deprived of their woods, and I spoke of the replanting of the forests as the only effectual method of preventing the frequent recurrence of disastrous floods. There are many regions where, from the loss of the superficial soil, from financial considerations, and from other causes, the restoration of the woods is not, under present circumstances, to be hoped for. Even where that measure is feasible and in actual process of execution, a great number of years must elapse before the action of the destructive causes in question can be arrested or perhaps even sensibly mitigated by it. Besides this, leaving out of view the objections urged by Belgrand and his followers to the generally received opinions concerning the beneficial influence of the forest as respects river inundations—for no one disputes its importance in preventing the formation and limiting the ravages of mountain torrents—floods will always occur in years of excessive precipitation, whether the surface of the soil be generally cleared or generally wooded.

Physical improvement in this respect, then, cannot he confined to preventive measures, but, in countries subject to damage by inundation, means must he contrived to obviate dangers and diminish injuries to which human life and all the works of human industry will occasionally be exposed, in spite of every effort to lessen the frequency of their recurrence by acting directly on the causes that produce them. As every civilized country is, in some degree, subject to inundation by the overflow of rivers, the evil is a familiar one, and needs no general description. In discussing this branch of the subject, therefore, I may confine myself chiefly to the means that have been or may be employed to resist the force and limit the ravages of floods, which, left wholly unrestrained, would not only inflict immense injury upon the material interests of man, but produce geographical revolutions of no little magnitude.

a. River Embankments.

The most obvious and doubtless earliest method of preventing the escape of river waters from their natural channels, and the overflow of fields and towns by their spread, is that of raised embankments along their course. The necessity of such embankments usually arises from the gradual elevation of the bed of running streams in consequence of the deposit of the earth and gravel they are charged with in high water; and, as we have seen, this elevation is rapidly accelerated when the highlands around the headwaters of rivers are cleared of their forests. When a river is embanked at a given point, and, consequently, the water of its floods, which would otherwise spread over a wide surface, is confined within narrow limits, the velocity of the current and its transporting power are augmented, and its burden of sand and gravel is deposited at some lower point, where the rapidity of its flow is checked by a diminution in the inclination of the bed, by a wider channel, or finally by a lacustrine or marine basin which receives its waters. Wherever it lets fall solid material, its channel is raised in consequence, and the declivity of the whole bed between the head of the embankment and the slack of the stream is reduced. Hence the current, at first accelerated by confinement, is afterward checked by the mechanical resistance of the matter deposited, and by the diminished inclination of its channel, and then begins again to let fall the earth it holds in suspension, and to raise its bed at the point where its overflow had been before prevented by embankment. The bank must now be raised in proportion, and these processes would be repeated and repeated indefinitely, had not nature provided a remedy in floods, which sweep out recent deposits, burst the bonds of the river and overwhelm the adjacent country with final desolation, or divert the current into a new channel, destined to become, in its turn, the scene of a similar struggle between man and the waters.

Few rivers, like the Nile, more than compensate by the fertilizing properties of their water and their slime for the damage they may do in inundations, and, consequently, there are few whose floods are not an object of dread, few whose encroachments upon their banks are not a source of constant anxiety and expense to the proprietors of the lands through which they flow. River dikes, for confining the spread of currents at high water, are of great antiquity in the East, and those of the Po and its tributaries were begun before we have any trustworthy physical or political annals of the provinces upon their borders. From the earliest ages, the Italian hydraulic engineers have stood in the front rank of their profession, and the Italian literature of this branch of material improvement is exceedingly voluminous. But the countries for which I write have no rivers like the Po, no plains like those of Lombardy, and the dangers to which the inhabitants of English and American river banks are exposed are more nearly analogous to those that threaten the soil and population in the valleys and plains of France, than to the perils and losses of the Lombard. The writings of the Italian hydrographers, too, though rich in professional instruction, are less accessible to foreigners and less adapted to popular use than those of French engineers.[347] For these reasons I shall take my citations principally from French authorities, though I shall occasionally allude to Italian writers on the floods of the Tiber, of the Arno, and some other Italian streams which much resemble those of the rivers of England and the United States.

b. Floods of the Ardèche.

The floods of mountain streams are attended with greater immediate danger to life and property than those of rivers of less rapid flow, because their currents are more impetuous, and they rise more suddenly and with less previous warning. At the same time, their ravages are confined within narrower limits, the waters retire sooner to their accustomed channel, and the danger is more quickly over, than in the case of inundations of larger rivers. The Ardèche, which has given its name to a department in France, drains a basin of 600,238 acres, or a little less than nine hundred and thirty-eight square miles. Its remotest source is about seventy-five miles, in a straight line, from its junction with the Rhone, and springs at an elevation of four thousand feet above that point. At the lowest stage of the river, the bed of the Chassezac, its largest and longest tributary, is in many places completely dry on the surface—the water being sufficient only to supply the subterranean channels of infiltration—and the Ardèche itself is almost everywhere fordable, even below the mouth of the Chassezac. But in floods, the river has sometimes risen more than sixty feet at the Pont d'Arc, a natural arch of two hundred feet chord, which spans the stream below its junction with all its important affluents. At the height of the inundation of 1827, the quantity of water passing this point—after deducting thirty per cent. for material transported with the current and for irregularity of flow—was estimated at 8,845 cubic yards to the second, and between twelve at noon on the 10th of September of that year and ten o'clock the next morning, the water discharged through the passage in question amounted to more than 450,000,000 cubic yards. This quantity, distributed equally through the basin of the river, would cover its entire area to a depth of more than five inches.

The Ardèche rises so suddenly that, in the inundation of 1846, the women who were washing in the bed of the river had not time to save their linen, and barely escaped with their lives, though they instantly fled upon hearing the roar of the approaching flood. Its waters and those of its affluents fall almost as rapidly, for in less than twenty-four hours after the rain has ceased in the Cévennes, where it rises, the Ardèche returns within its ordinary channel, even at its junction with the Rhone. In the flood of 1772, the water at La Beaume de Ruoms, on the Beaume, a tributary of the Ardèche, rose thirty-five feet above low water, but the stream was again fordable on the evening of the same day. The inundation of 1827 was, in this respect, exceptional, for it continued three days, during which period the Ardèche poured into the Rhone 1,305,000,000 cubic yards of water.

The Nile delivers into the sea 101,000 cubic feet or 3,741 cubic yards per second, on an average of the whole year.[348] This is equal to 323,222,400 cubic yards per day. In a single day of flood, then, the Ardèche, a river too insignificant to be known except in the local topography of France, contributed to the Rhone once and a half, and for three consecutive days once and one third, as much as the average delivery of the Nile during the same periods, though the basin of the latter river contains 500,000 square miles of surface, or more than five hundred times as much as that of the former.

The average annual precipitation in the basin of the Ardèche is not greater than in many other parts of Europe, but excessive quantities of rain frequently fall in that valley in the autumn. On the 9th of October, 1827, there fell at Joyeuse, on the Beaume, no less than thirty-one inches between three o'clock in the morning and midnight. Such facts as this explain the extraordinary suddenness and violence of the floods of the Ardèche, and the basins of many other tributaries of the Rhone exhibit meteorological phenomena not less remarkable.[349] The inundation of the 10th September, 1857, was accompanied with a terrific hurricane, which passed along the eastern slope of the high grounds where the Ardèche and several other western affluents of the Rhone take their rise. The wind tore up all the trees in its path, and the rushing torrents bore their trunks down to the larger streams, which again transported them to the Rhone in such rafts that one might almost have crossed that river by stepping from trunk to trunk.[350] The Rhone, therefore, is naturally subject to great and sudden inundations, and the same remark may be applied to most of the principal rivers of France, because the geographical character of all of them is approximately the same.

The height and violence of the inundations of most great rivers are determined by the degree in which the floods of the different tributaries are coincident in time. Were all the affluents of the Rhone to pour their highest annual floods into its channel at once, were a dozen Niles to empty themselves into its bed at the same moment, its water would rise to a height and rush with an impetus that would sweep into the Mediterranean the entire population of its banks, and all the works that man has erected upon the plains which border it. But such a coincidence can never happen. The tributaries of this river run in very different directions, and some of them are swollen principally by the melting of the snows about their sources, others almost exclusively by heavy rains. When a damp southeast wind blows up the valley of the Ardèche, its moisture is condensed, and precipitated in a deluge upon the mountains which embosom the headwaters of that stream, thus producing a flood, while a neighboring basin, the axis of which lies transversely or obliquely to that of the Ardèche, is not at all affected.[351]

It is easy to see that the damage occasioned by such floods as I have described must be almost incalculable, and it is by no means confined to the effects produced by overflow and the mechanical force of the superficial currents. In treating of the devastations of torrents in a former chapter, I confined myself principally to the erosion of surface and the transportation of mineral matter to lower grounds by them. The general action of torrents, as there shown, tends to the ultimate elevation of their beds by the deposit of the earth, gravel, and stone conveyed by them; but until they have thus raised their outlets so as sensibly to diminish the inclination of their channels—and sometimes when extraordinary floods give the torrents momentum enough to sweep away the accumulations which they have themselves heaped up—the swift flow of their currents, aided by the abrasion of the rolling rocks and gravel, scoops their beds constantly deeper, and they consequently not only undermine their banks, but frequently sap the most solid foundations which the art of man can build for the support of bridges and hydraulic structures.[352]

In the inundation of 1857, the Ardèche destroyed a stone bridge near La Beaume, which had been built about eighty years before. The resistance of the piers, which were erected on piles, the channel at that point being of gravel, produced an eddying current that washed away the bed of the river above them, and the foundation, thus deprived of lateral support, yielded to the weight of the bridge, and the piles and piers fell up stream.

By a curious law of compensation, the stream which, at flood, scoops out cavities in its bed, often fills them up again as soon as the diminished velocity of the current allows it to let fall the sand and gravel with which it is charged, so that when the waters return to their usual channel, the bottom shows no sign of having been disturbed. In a flood of the Escontay, a tributary of the Rhone, in 1846, piles driven sixteen feet into its gravelly bed for the foundation of a pier were torn up and carried off, and yet, when the river had fallen to low-water mark, the bottom at that point appeared to have been raised higher than it was before the flood, by new deposits of sand and gravel, while the cut stones of the half-built pier were found buried to a great depth, in the excavation which the water had first washed out. The gravel with which rivers thus restore the level of their beds is principally derived from the crushing of the rocks brought down by the mountain torrents, and the destructive effects of inundations are immensely diminished by this reduction of large stones to minute fragments. If the blocks hurled down from the cliffs were transported unbroken to the channels of large rivers, the mechanical force of their movement would be irresistible. They would overthrow the strongest barriers, spread themselves over a surface as wide as the flow of the waters, and convert the most smiling valleys into scenes of the wildest desolation.

c. Crushing Force of Torrents.

There are few operations of nature where the effect seems more disproportioned to the cause than in the comminution of rock in the channel of swift waters. Igneous rocks are generally so hard as to be wrought with great difficulty, and they bear the weight of enormous superstructures without yielding to the pressure; but to the torrent they are as wheat to the millstone. The streams which pour down the southern scarp of the Mediterranean Alps along the Riviera di Ponente, near Genoa, have short courses, and a brisk walk of a couple of hours or even less takes you from the sea beach to the headspring of many of them. In their heaviest floods, they bring rounded masses of serpentine quite down to the sea, but at ordinary high water their lower course is charged only with finely divided particles of that rock. Hence, while, near their sources, their channels are filled with pebbles and angular fragments, intermixed with a little gravel, the proportions are reversed near their mouths, and, just above the points where their outlets are partially choked by the rolling shingle of the beach, their beds are composed of sand and gravel to the almost total exclusion of pebbles. The greatest depth of the basin of the Ardèche is seventy-five miles, but most of its tributaries have a much shorter course. "These affluents," says Mardigny, "hurl into the bed of the Ardèche enormous blocks of rock, which this river, in its turn, bears onward, and grinds down, at high water, so that its current rolls only gravel at its confluence with the Rhone."[353]

Guglielmini argued that the gravel and sand of the beds of running streams were derived from the trituration of rocks by the action of the currents, and inferred that this action was generally sufficient to reduce hard rock to sand in its passage from the source to the outlet of rivers. Frisi controverted this opinion, and maintained that river sand was of more ancient origin, and he inferred from experiments in artificially grinding stones that the concussion, friction, and attrition of rock in the channel of running waters were inadequate to its comminution, though he admitted that these same causes might reduce silicious sand to a fine powder capable of transportation to the sea by the currents.[354] Frisi's experiments were tried upon rounded and polished river pebbles, and prove nothing with regard to the action of torrents upon the irregular, more or less weathered, and often cracked and shattered rocks which lie loose in the ground at the head of mountain valleys. The fury of the waters and of the wind which accompanies them in the floods of the French Alpine torrents is such, that large blocks of stone are hurled out of the bed of the stream to the height of twelve or thirteen feet. The impulse of masses driven with such force overthrows the most solid masonry, and their concussion cannot fail to be attended with the crushing of the rocks themselves.[355]

d. Inundations of 1856 in France.

The month of May, 1856, was remarkable for violent and almost uninterrupted rains, and most of the river basins of France were inundated to an extraordinary height. In the valleys of the Loire and its affluents, about a million of acres, including many towns and villages, were laid under water, and the amount of pecuniary damage was almost incalculable.[356] The flood was not less destructive in the valley of the Rhone, and in fact an invasion by a hostile army could hardly have been more disastrous to the inhabitants of the plains than was this terrible deluge. There had been a flood of this latter river in the year 1840, which, for height and quantity of water, was almost as remarkable as that of 1856, but it took place in the month of November, when the crops had all been harvested, and the injury inflicted by it upon agriculturists was, therefore, of a character to be less severely and less immediately felt than the consequences of the inundation of 1856.[357]

In the fifteen years between these two great floods, the population and the rural improvements of the river valleys had much increased, common roads, bridges, and railways had been multiplied and extended, telegraph lines had been constructed, all of which shared in the general ruin, and hence greater and more diversified interests were affected by the catastrophe of 1856 than by any former like calamity. The great flood of 1840 had excited the attention and roused the sympathies of the French people, and the subject was invested with new interest by the still more formidable character of the inundations of 1856. It was felt that these scourges had ceased to be a matter of merely local concern, for, although they bore most heavily on those whose homes and fields were situated within the immediate reach of the swelling waters, yet they frequently destroyed harvests valuable enough to be a matter of national interest, endangered the personal security of the population of important political centres, interrupted communication for days and even weeks together on great lines of traffic and travel—thus severing as it were all Southwestern France from the rest of the empire—and finally threatened to produce great and permanent geographical changes. The well-being of the whole commonwealth was seen to be involved in preventing the recurrence, and in limiting the range of such devastations. The Government encouraged scientific investigation of the phenomena and their laws. Their causes, their history, their immediate and remote consequences, and the possible safeguards to be employed against them, have been carefully studied by the most eminent physicists, as well as by the ablest theoretical and practical engineers of France. Many hitherto unobserved facts have been collected, many new hypotheses suggested, and many plans, more or less original in character, have been devised for combating the evil; but thus far, the most competent judges are not well agreed as to the mode, or even the possibility, of applying a remedy.

e. Remedies against Inundations.

Perhaps no one point has been more prominent in the discussions than the influence of the forest in equalizing and regulating the flow of the water of precipitation. As we have already seen, opinion is still somewhat divided on this subject, but the conservative action of the woods in this respect has been generally recognized by the public of France, and the Government of the empire has made this principle the basis of important legislation for the protection of existing forests, and for the formation of new. The clearing of woodland, and the organization and functions of a police for its protection, are regulated by a law bearing date June 18th, 1859, and provision was made for promoting the restoration of private woods by a statute adopted on the 28th of July, 1860. The former of these laws passed the legislative body by a vote of 246 against 4, the latter with but a single negative voice. The influence of the government, in a country where the throne is so potent as in France, would account for a large majority, but when it is considered that both laws, the former especially, interfere very materially with the rights of private domain, the almost entire unanimity with which they were adopted is proof of a very general popular conviction, that the protection and extension of the forests is a measure more likely than any other to check the violence, if not to prevent the recurrence, of destructive inundations. The law of July 28th, 1860, appropriated 10,000,000 francs, to be expended, at the rate of 1,000,000 francs per year, in executing or aiding the replanting of woods. It is computed that this appropriation will secure the creation of new forest to the extent of about 250,000 acres, or one eleventh part of the soil where the restoration of the forest is thought feasible and, at the same time, specially important as a security against the evils ascribed in a great measure to its destruction.

The provisions of the laws in question are preventive rather than remedial; but some immediate effect may be expected to result from them, particularly if they are accompanied with certain other measures, the suggestion of which has been favorably received. The strong repugnance of the mountaineers to the application of a system which deprives them of a part of their pasturage—for the absolute exclusion of domestic animals is indispensable to the maintenance of an existing forest and to the formation of a new—is the most formidable obstacle to the execution of the laws of 1859-'60. It is proposed to compensate this loss by a cheap system of irrigation of lower pasture grounds, consisting in little more than in running horizontal furrows along the hillsides, thus converting the scarp of the hills into a succession of small terraces which, when once turfed over, are very permanent. Experience is said to have demonstrated that this simple process suffices to retain the water of rains, of snows, and of small springs and rivulets, long enough for the irrigation of the soil, thus increasing its product of herbage in a fivefold proportion, and that it partially checks the too rapid flow of surface water into the valleys, and, consequently, in some measure obviates one of the most prominent causes of inundations.[358] It is evident that, if such results are produced by this method, its introduction upon an extensive scale must also have the same climatic effects as other systems of irrigation.

Whatever may be the ultimate advantages of reclothing a large extent of the territory of France with wood, or of so shaping its surface as to prevent the too rapid flow of water over it, the results to be obtained by such processes can be realized in an adequate measure only after a long succession of years. Other steps must be taken, both for the immediate security of the lives and property of the present generation, and for the prevention of yet greater and remoter evils which are inevitable unless means to obviate them are found before it is forever too late. The frequent recurrence of inundations like those of 1856, for a single score of years, in the basins of the Rhone and the Loire, with only the present securities against them, would almost depopulate the valleys of those rivers, and produce physical revolutions in them, which, like revolutions in the political world, could never be made to "go backward."

Destructive inundations are seldom, if ever, produced by precipitation within the limits of the principal valley, but almost uniformly by sudden thaws or excessive rains on the mountain ranges where the tributaries take their rise. It is therefore plain that any measures which shall check the flow of surface waters into the channels of the affluents, or which shall retard the delivery of such waters into the principal stream by its tributaries, will diminish in the same proportion the dangers and the evils of inundation by great rivers. The retention of the surface waters upon or in the soil can hardly be accomplished except by the methods already mentioned, replanting of forests, and furrowing or terracing. The current of mountain streams can be checked by various methods, among which the most familiar and obvious is the erection of barriers or dams across their channels, at points convenient for forming reservoirs large enough to retain the superfluous waters of great rains and thaws. Besides the utility of such basins in preventing floods, the construction of them is recommended by very strong considerations, such as the meteorological effects of increased evaporable surface, the furnishing of a constant supply of water for agricultural and mechanical purposes, and, finally, their value as ponds for breeding and rearing fish, and, perhaps, for cultivating aquatic vegetables.

The objections to the general adoption of the system of reservoirs are these: the expense of their construction and maintenance; the reduction of cultivable area by the amount of surface they must cover; the interruption they would occasion to free communication; the probability that they would soon be filled up with sediment, and the obvious fact that when full of earth or even water, they would no longer serve their principal purpose; the great danger to which they would expose the country below them in case of the bursting of their barriers;[359] the evil consequences they would occasion by prolonging the flow of inundations in proportion as they diminished their height; the injurious effects it is supposed they would produce upon the salubrity of the neighboring districts; and, lastly, the alleged impossibility of constructing artificial basins sufficient in capacity to prevent, or in any considerable measure to mitigate, the evils they are intended to guard against.

The last argument is more easily reduced to a numerical question than the others. The mean and extreme annual precipitation of all the basins where the construction of such works would be seriously proposed is already approximately known by meteorological tables, and the quantity of water, delivered by the greatest floods which have occurred within the memory of man, may be roughly estimated from their visible traces. From these elements, or from recorded observations, the capacity of the necessary reservoirs can be calculated. Let us take the case of the Ardèche. In the inundation of 1857, that river poured into the Rhone 1,305,000,000 cubic yards of water in three days. If we suppose that half this quantity might have been suffered to flow down its channel without inconvenience, we shall have about 650,000,000 cubic yards to provide for by reservoirs. The Ardèche and its principal affluent, the Chassezac, have, together, about twelve considerable tributaries rising near the crest of the mountains which bound the basin. If reservoirs of equal capacity were constructed upon all of them, each reservoir must be able to contain 54,000,000 cubic yards, or, in other words, must be equal to a lake 3,000 yards long, 1,000 yards wide, and 18 yards deep, and besides, in order to render any effectual service, the reservoirs must all have been empty at the commencement of the rains which produced the inundation.

Thus far, I have supposed the swelling of the waters to be uniform throughout the whole basin; but such was by no means the fact in the inundation of 1857, for the rise of the Chassezac, which is as large as the Ardèche proper, did not exceed the limits of ordinary floods, and the dangerous excess came solely from the headwaters of the latter stream. Hence reservoirs of double the capacity I have supposed would have been necessary upon the tributaries of that river, to prevent the injurious effects of the inundation. It is evident that the construction of reservoirs of such magnitude for such a purpose is financially, if not physically, impracticable, and when we take into account a point I have just suggested, namely, that the reservoirs must be empty at all times of apprehended flood, and, of course, their utility limited almost solely to the single object of preventing inundations, the total inapplicability of such a measure in this particular case becomes still more glaringly manifest.

Another not less conclusive fact is that the valleys of all the upland tributaries of the Ardèche descend so rapidly, and have so little lateral expansion, as to render the construction of capacious reservoirs in them quite impracticable. Indeed, engineers have found but two points in the whole basin suitable for that purpose, and the reservoirs admissible at these would have only a joint capacity of about 70,000,000 cubic yards, or less than one ninth part of what I suppose to be required. The case of the Ardèche is no doubt an extreme one, both in the topographical character of its basin and in its exposure to excessive rains; but all destructive inundations are, in a certain sense, extreme cases also, and this of the Ardèche serves to show that the construction of reservoirs is not by any means to be regarded as a universal panacea against floods.

Nor, on the other hand, is this measure to be summarily rejected. Nature has adopted it on a great scale, on both flanks of the Alps, and on a smaller, on those of the Adirondacks and lower chains, and in this as in many other instances, her processes may often be imitated with advantage. The validity of the remaining objections to the system under discussion depends on the topography, geology, and special climate of the regions where it is proposed to establish such reservoirs. Many upland streams present numerous points where none of these objections, except those of expense and of danger from the breaking of dams, could have any application. Reservoirs may be so constructed as to retain the entire precipitation of the heaviest thaws and rains, leaving only the ordinary quantity to flow along the channel; they may be raised to such a height as only partially to obstruct the surface drainage; or they may be provided with sluices by means of which their whole contents can be discharged in the dry season and a summer crop be grown upon the ground they cover at high water. The expediency of employing them and the mode of construction depend on local conditions, and no rules of universal applicability can be laid down on the subject.

It is remarkable that nations which we, in the false pride of our modern civilization, so generally regard as little less than barbarian, should have long preceded Christian Europe in the systematic employment of great artificial basins for the various purposes they are calculated to subserve. The ancient Peruvians built strong walls, of excellent workmanship, across the channels of the mountain sources of important streams, and the Arabs executed immense works of similar description, both in the great Arabian peninsula and in all the provinces of Spain which had the good fortune to fall under their sway. The Spaniards of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who, in many points of true civilization and culture, were far inferior to the races they subdued, wantonly destroyed these noble monuments of social and political wisdom, or suffered them to perish, because they were too ignorant to appreciate their value, or too unskilful as practical engineers to be able to maintain them, and some of their most important territories were soon reduced to sterility and poverty in consequence.

Another method of preventing or diminishing the evils of inundation by torrents and mountain rivers, analogous to that employed for the drainage of lakes, consists in the permanent or occasional diversion of their surplus waters, or of their entire currents, from their natural courses, by tunnels or open channels cut through their banks. Nature, in many cases, resorts to a similar process. Most great rivers divide themselves into several arms in their lower course, and enter the sea by different mouths. There are also cases where rivers send off lateral branches to convey a part of their waters into the channel of other streams.[360] The most remarkable of these is the junction between the Amazon and the Orinoco by the natural canal of the Cassiquiare and the Rio Negro. In India, the Cambodja and the Menam are connected by the Anam; the Saluen and the Irawaddi by the Panlaun. There are similar examples, though on a much smaller scale, in Europe. The Torneå and the Calix rivers in Lapland communicate by the Tarando, and in Westphalia, the Else, an arm of the Haase, falls into the Weser.

The change of bed in rivers by gradual erosion of their banks is familiar to all, but instances of the sudden abandonment of a primitive channel are by no means wanting. At a period of unknown antiquity, the Ardèche pierced a tunnel 200 feet wide and 100 high, through a rock, and sent its whole current through it, deserting its former bed, which gradually filled up, though its course remained traceable. In the great inundation of 1827, the tunnel proved insufficient for the discharge of the water, and the river burst through the obstructions which had now choked up its ancient channel, and resumed its original course.[361]

It was probably such facts as these that suggested to ancient engineers the possibility of like artificial operations, and there are numerous instances of the execution of works for this purpose in very remote ages. The Bahr Jusef, the great stream which supplies the Fayoum with water from the Nile, has been supposed, by some writers, to be a natural channel; but both it and the Bahr el Wady are almost certainly artificial canals constructed to water that basin, to regulate the level of Lake Moeris, and possibly, also, to diminish the dangers resulting from excessive inundations of the Nile, by serving as waste-weirs to discharge a part of its surplus waters. Several of the seven ancient mouths of the Nile are believed to be artificial channels, and Herodotus even asserts that King Menes diverted the entire course of that river from the Libyan to the Arabian side of the valley. There are traces of an ancient river bed along the western mountains, which give some countenance to this statement. But it is much more probable that the works of Menes were designed rather to prevent a natural, than to produce an artificial, change in the channel of the river.

Two of the most celebrated cascades in Europe, those of the Teverone at Tivoli and of the Velino at Terni, owe, if not their existence, at least their position and character, to the diversion of their waters from their natural beds into new channels, in order to obviate the evils produced by their frequent floods. Remarkable works of the same sort have been executed in Switzerland, in very recent times. Until the year 1714, the Kander, which drains several large Alpine valleys, ran, for a considerable distance, parallel with the Lake of Thun, and a few miles below the city of that name emptied into the river Aar. It frequently flooded the flats along the lower part of its course, and it was determined to divert it into the Lake of Thun. For this purpose, two parallel tunnels were cut through the intervening rock, and the river turned into them. The violence of the current burst up the roof of the tunnels, and, in a very short time, wore the new channel down not less than one hundred feet, and even deepened the former bed at least fifty feet, for a distance of two or three miles above the tunnel. The lake was two hundred feet deep at the point where the river was conducted into it, but the gravel and sand carried down by the Kander has formed at its mouth a delta containing more than a hundred acres, which is still advancing at the rate of several yards a year. The Linth, which formerly sent its waters directly to the Lake of Zurich, and often produced very destructive inundations, was turned into the Wallensee about forty years ago, and in both these cases a great quantity of valuable land was rescued both from flood and from insalubrity.

In Switzerland, the most terrible inundations often result from the damming up of deep valleys by ice slips or by the gradual advance of glaciers, and the accumulation of great masses of water above the obstructions. The ice is finally dissolved by the heat of summer or the flow of warm waters, and when it bursts, the lake formed above is discharged almost in an instant, and all below is swept down to certain destruction. In 1595, about a hundred and fifty lives and a great amount of property were lost by the eruption of a lake formed by the descent of a glacier into the valley of the Drance, and a similar calamity laid waste a considerable extent of soil in the year 1818. On this latter occasion, the barrier of ice and snow was 3,000 feet long, 600 thick, and 400 high, and the lake which had formed above it contained not less than 800,000,000 cubic feet. A tunnel was driven through the ice, and about 300,000,000 cubic feet of water safely drawn off by it, but the thawing of the walls of the tunnel rapidly enlarged it, and before the lake was half drained, the barrier gave way and the remaining 500,000,000 cubic feet of water were discharged in half an hour. The recurrence of these floods has since been prevented by directing streams of water, warmed by the sun, upon the ice in the bed of the valley, and thus thawing it before it accumulates in sufficient mass to threaten serious danger.

In the cases of diversion of streams above mentioned, important geographical changes have been directly produced by those operations. By the rarer process of draining glacier lakes, natural eruptions of water, which would have occasioned not less important changes in the face of the earth, have been prevented by human agency.

The principal means hitherto relied upon for defence against river inundations has been the construction of dikes along the banks of the streams, parallel to the channel and generally separated from each other by a distance not much greater than the natural width of the bed.[362] If such walls are high enough to confine the water and strong enough to resist its pressure, they secure the lands behind them from all the evils of inundation except those resulting from infiltration; but such ramparts are enormously costly in original construction and maintenance, and, as we have already seen, the filling up of the bed of the river in its lower course, by sand and gravel, involves the necessity of occasionally incurring new expenditures in increasing the height of the banks.[363] They are attended, too, with some collateral disadvantages. They deprive the earth of the fertilizing deposits of the waters, which are powerful natural restoratives of soils exhausted by cultivation; they accelerate the rapidity and transporting power of the current at high water by confining it to a narrower channel, and it consequently conveys to the sea the earthy matter it holds in suspension, and chokes up harbors with a deposit which it would otherwise have spread over a wide surface; they interfere with roads and the convenience of river navigation, and no amount of cost or care can secure them from occasional rupture, in case of which the rush of the waters through the breach is more destructive than the natural flow of the highest inundation.[364]

For these reasons, many experienced engineers are of opinion that the system of longitudinal dikes ought to be abandoned, or, where that cannot be done without involving too great a sacrifice of existing constructions, their elevation should be much reduced, so as to present no obstruction to the lateral spread of extraordinary floods, and they should be provided with sluices to admit the water without violence whenever they are likely to be overflowed. Where dikes have not been erected, and where they have been reduced in height, it is proposed to construct, at convenient intervals, transverse embankments of moderate height running from the banks of the river across the plains to the hills which bound them. These measures, it is argued, will diminish the violence of inundations by permitting the waters to extend themselves over a greater surface and thus retarding the flow of the river currents, and will, at the same time, secure the deposit of fertilizing slime upon all the soil covered by the flood.

Rozet, an eminent French engineer, has proposed a method of diminishing the ravages of inundations, which aims to combine the advantages of all other systems, and at the same time to obviate the objections to which they are all more or less liable.[365] The plan of Rozet is recommended by its simplicity and cheapness as well as its facility and rapidity of execution, and is looked upon with favor by many persons very competent to judge in such matters. He proposes to commence with the amphitheatres in which mountain torrents so often rise, by covering their slopes and filling their beds with loose blocks of rock, and by constructing at their outlets, and at other narrow points in the channels of the torrents, permeable barriers of the same material promiscuously heaped up, much according to the method employed by the ancient Romans in their northern provinces for a similar purpose. By this means, he supposes, the rapidity of the current would be checked, and the quantity of transported pebbles and gravel much diminished.

When the stream has reached that part of its course where it is bordered by soil capable of cultivation, and worth the expense of protection, he proposes to place along one or both sides of the stream, according to circumstances, a line of cubical blocks of stone or pillars of masonry three or four feet high and wide, and at the distance of about eleven yards from each other. The space between the two lines, or between a line and the opposite high bank, would, of course, be determined by observation of the width of the swift-water current at high floods. As an auxiliary measure, small ditches and banks, or low walls of pebbles, should be constructed from the line of blocks across the grounds to be protected, nearly at right angles to the current, but slightly inclining downward, and at convenient distances from each other. Rozet thinks the proper interval would be 300 yards, and it is evident that, if he is right in his main principle, hedges, rows of trees, or even common fences, would in many cases answer as good a purpose as banks and trenches or low walls. The blocks or pillars of stone would, he contends, check the lateral currents so as to compel them to let fall all their pebbles and gravel in the main channel—where they would be rolled along until ground down to sand or silt—and the transverse obstructions would detain the water upon the soil long enough to secure the deposit of its fertilizing slime. Numerous facts are cited in support of the author's views, and I imagine there are few residents of rural districts whose own observation will not furnish testimony confirmatory of their soundness.[366]

The deposit of slime by rivers upon the flats along their banks not only contributes greatly to the fertility of the soil thus flowed, but it subserves a still more important purpose in the general economy of nature. All running streams begin with excavating channels for themselves, or deepening the natural depressions in which they flow;[367] but in proportion as their outlets are raised by the solid material transported by their currents, their velocity is diminished, they deposit gravel and sand at constantly higher and higher points, and so at last elevate, in the middle and lower part of their course, the beds they had previously scooped out.[368] The raising of the channels is compensated in part by the simultaneous elevation of their banks and the flats adjoining them, from the deposit of the finer particles of earth and vegetable mould brought down from the mountains, without which elevation the low grounds bordering all rivers would be, as in many cases they in fact are, mere morasses.

All arrangements which tend to obstruct this process of raising the flats adjacent to the channel, whether consisting in dikes which confine the waters, and, at the same time, augment the velocity of the current, or in other means of producing the last-mentioned effect, interfere with the restorative economy of nature, and at last occasion the formation of marshes where, if left to herself, she would have accumulated inexhaustible stores of the richest soil, and spread them out in plains above the reach of ordinary floods.[369]

Consequences if the Nile had been Diked.

If a system of continuous lateral dikes, like those of the Po, had been adopted in Egypt in the early dynasties, when the power and the will to undertake the most stupendous material enterprises were so eminently characteristic of the government of that country, and the waters of the annual inundation consequently prevented from flooding the land, it is conceivable that the productiveness of the small area of cultivable soil in the Nile valley might have been long kept up by artificial irrigation and the application of manures. But nature would have rebelled at last, and centuries before our time the mighty river would have burst the fetters by which impotent man had vainly striven to bind his swelling floods, the fertile fields of Egypt would have been converted into dank morasses, and then, perhaps, in some distant future, when the expulsion of man should have allowed the gradual restoration of the primitive equilibrium, would be again transformed into luxuriant garden and plough land. Fortunately, the "wisdom of Egypt" taught her children better things. They invited and welcomed, not repulsed, the slimy embraces of Nilus, and his favors have been, from the hoariest antiquity, the greatest material blessing ever bestowed upon a people.[370]

The valley of the Po has probably not been cultivated or inhabited so long as that of the Nile, but embankments have been employed on its lower course for at least two thousand years, and for many centuries they have been connected in a continuous chain. I have pointed out in a former chapter the effects produced on the geography of the Adriatic by the deposit of river sediment in the sea at the mouths of the Po, the Adige, and the Brenta. If these rivers had been left unconfined, like the Nile, and allowed to spread their muddy waters at will, according to the laws of nature, the slime they have carried to the coast would have been chiefly distributed over the plains of Lombardy. Their banks would have risen as fast as their beds, the coast line would not have been extended so far into the Adriatic, and, the current of the streams being consequently shorter, the inclination of their channel and the rapidity of their flow would not have been so greatly diminished. Had man spared a reasonable proportion of the forests of the Alps, and not attempted to control the natural drainage of the surface, the Po would resemble the Nile in all its essential characteristics, and, in spite of the difference of climate, perhaps be regarded as the friend and ally, not the enemy and the invader, of the population which dwells upon its banks.[371]

The Nile is larger than all the rivers of Lombardy together,[372] it drains a basin twenty times as extensive, its banks have been occupied by man probably twice as long. But its geographical character has not been much changed in the whole period of recorded history, and, though its outlets have somewhat fluctuated in number and position, its historically known encroachments upon the sea are trifling compared with those of the Po and the neighboring streams. The deposits of the Nile are naturally greater in Upper than in Lower Egypt. They are found to have raised the soil at Thebes about seven feet within the last seventeen hundred years, and in the Delta the rise has been certainly more than half as great.

We shall, therefore, not exceed the truth if we suppose the annually inundated surface of Egypt to have been elevated, upon an average, ten feet, within the last 5,000 years, or twice and a half the period during which the history of the Po is known to us.[373]

We may estimate the present actually cultivated area of Egypt at about 5,500 square statute miles. As I have computed in a note on page 372, that area is not more than half as extensive as under the dynasties of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies; for—though, in consequence of the elevation of the river bed, the inundations now have a wider natural spread—the industry of the ancient Egyptians conducted the Nile water over a great extent of soil it does not now reach. We may, then, adopt a mean between the two quantities, and we shall probably come near the truth if we assume the convenient number of 7,920 square statute miles as the average measure of the inundated land during the historical period. Taking the deposit on this surface at ten feet, the river sediment let fall on the soil of Egypt within the last fifty centuries would amount to fifteen cubic miles.

Had the Nile been banked in, like the Po, all this deposit, except that contained in the water diverted by canals or otherwise drawn from the river for irrigation and other purposes, would have been carried out to sea.[374] This would have been a considerable quantity; for the Nile holds earth in suspension even at low water, a much larger proportion during the flood, and irrigation must have been carried on during the whole year. The precise amount which would have been thus distributed over the soil is matter of conjecture, but three cubic miles is certainly a liberal estimate. This would leave twelve cubic miles as the quantity which embankments would have compelled the Nile to transport to the Mediterranean over and above what it has actually deposited in that sea. The Mediterranean is shoal for some miles out to sea along the whole coast of the Delta, and the large bays or lagoons within the coast line, which communicate both with the river and the sea, have little depth of water. These lagoons the river deposits would have filled up, and there would still have been surplus earth enough to extend the Delta far into the Mediterranean.[375]

Deposits of the Tuscan Rivers.

The Arno, and all the rivers rising on the western slopes and spurs of the Apennines, carry down immense quantities of mud to the Mediterranean. There can be no doubt that the volume of earth so transported is very much greater than it would have been had the soil about the headwaters of those rivers continued to be protected from wash by forests; and there is as little question that the quantity borne out to sea by the rivers of Western Italy is much increased by artificial embankments, because they are thereby prevented from spreading over the surface the sedimentary matter with which they are charged. The western coast of Tuscany has advanced some miles seaward within a very few centuries. The bed of the sea, for a long distance, has been raised, and of course the relative elevation of the land above it lessened; harbors have been filled up and destroyed; long lines of coast dunes have been formed, and the diminished inclination of the beds of the rivers near their outlets has caused their waters to overflow their banks and convert them into pestilential marshes. The territorial extent of Western Italy has thus been considerably increased, but the amount of soil habitable and cultivable by man has been, in a still higher proportion, diminished. The coast of ancient Etruria was filled with great commercial towns, and their rural environs were occupied by a large and prosperous population. But maritime Tuscany has long been one of the most unhealthy districts in Christendom; the famous mart of Populonia has not an inhabitant; the coast is almost absolutely depopulated, and the malarious fevers have extended their ravages far into the interior.

These results are certainly not to be ascribed wholly to human action. They are, in a large proportion, due to geological causes over which man has no control. The soil of much of Tuscany becomes pasty, almost fluid even, as soon as it is moistened, and when thoroughly saturated with water, it flows like a river. Such a soil as this would not be completely protected by woods, and, indeed, it would now be difficult to confine it long enough to allow it to cover itself with forest vegetation. Nevertheless, it certainly was once chiefly wooded, and the rivers which flow through it must then have been much less charged with earthy matter than at present, and they must have carried into the sea a smaller proportion of their sediment when they were free to deposit it on their banks than since they have been confined by dikes.[376]

It is, in general, true, that the intervention of man has hitherto seemed to insure the final exhaustion, ruin, and desolation of every province of nature which he has reduced to his dominion. Attila was only giving an energetic and picturesque expression to the tendencies of human action, as personified in himself, when he said that "no grass grew where his horse's hoofs had trod." The instances are few, where a second civilization has flourished upon the ruins of an ancient culture, and lands once rendered uninhabitable by human acts or neglect have generally been forever abandoned as hopelessly irreclaimable. It is, as I have before remarked, a question of vast importance, how far it is practicable to restore the garden we have wasted, and it is a problem on which experience 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 with which human guidance has made the operations of nature herself available for the restoration of her disturbed harmonies, in the Val 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 constructed. The operations in the Val 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, and the prevention of the mixture of salt water with fresh in the coast marshes and shallow bays, which is a very active cause of the development of malarious influences.[377]

Improvements in the Val di Chiana.

For twenty miles or more after the remotest headwaters of the Arno have united to form a considerable stream, this river flows southeastward to the vicinity of Arezzo. It here sweeps round to the northwest, and follows that course to near its junction with the Sieve, a few miles above Florence, from which point its general direction is westward to the sea. From the bend at Arezzo, a depression called the Val di Chiana runs southeastward until it strikes into the valley of the Paglia, a tributary of the Tiber, and thus connects the basin of the latter river with that of the Arno. In the Middle Ages, and down to the eighteenth century, the Val di Chiana was often overflowed and devastated by the torrents which poured down from the highlands, transporting great quantities of slime with their currents, stagnating upon its surface, and gradually converting it into a marshy and unhealthy district, which was at last very greatly reduced in population and productiveness. It had, in fact, become so desolate that even the swallow had deserted it.[378]

The bed of the Arno near Arezzo and that of the Paglia at the southern extremity of the Val di Chiana did not differ much in level. The general inclination of the valley was therefore small; it does not appear to have ever been divided into opposite slopes by a true watershed, and the position of the summit seems to have shifted according to the varying amount and place of deposit of the sediment brought down by the lateral streams which emptied into it. The length of its principal channel of drainage, and even the direction of its flow at any given point, were therefore fluctuating. Hence, much difference of opinion was entertained at different times with regard to the normal course of this stream, and, consequently, to the question whether it was to be regarded as properly an affluent of the Tiber or of the Arno.

The bed of the latter river at the bend has been eroded to the depth of thirty or forty feet, and that, apparently, at no very remote period. If it were elevated to what was evidently its original height, the current of the Arno would be so much above that of the Paglia as to allow of a regular flow from its channel to the latter stream, through the Val di Chiana, provided the bed of the valley had remained at the level which excavations prove it to have had a few centuries ago, before it was raised by the deposits I have mentioned. These facts, together with the testimony of ancient geographers which scarcely admits of any other explanation, are thought to prove that all the waters of the Upper Arno were originally discharged through the Val di Chiana into the Tiber, and that a part of them still continued to flow, at least occasionally, in that direction down to the days of the Roman empire, and perhaps for some time later. The depression of the bed of the Arno, and the raising of that of the valley by the deposits of the lateral torrents and of the Arno itself, finally cut off the branch of the river which had flowed to the Tiber, and all its waters were turned into its present channel, though the principal drainage of the Val di Chiana appears to have been in a southeastwardly direction until within a comparatively recent period.

In the sixteenth century, the elevation of the bed of the valley had become so considerable, that in 1551, at a point about ten miles south of the Arno, it was found to be not less than one hundred and thirty feet above that river; then followed a level of ten miles, and then a continuous descent to the Paglia. Along the level portion of the valley was a boatable channel, and lakes, sometimes a mile or even two miles in breadth, had formed at various points farther south. At this period, the drainage of the summit level might easily have been determined in either direction, and the opposite descents of the valley made to culminate at the north or at the south end of the level. In the former case, the watershed would have been ten miles south of the Arno; in the latter, twenty miles, and the division would have been not very unequal.

Various schemes were suggested at this time for drawing off the stagnant waters, as well as for the future regular drainage of the valley, and small operations for those purposes were undertaken with partial success; but it was feared that the discharge of the accumulated waters into the Tiber would produce a dangerous inundation, while the diversion of the drainage into the Arno would increase the violence of the floods to which that river was very subject, and no decisive steps were taken. In 1606, an engineer whose name has not been preserved proposed, as the only possible method of improvement, the piercing of a tunnel through the hills bounding the valley on the west to convey its waters to the Ombrone, but the expense and other objections prevented the adoption of this project.[379] The fears of the Roman Government for the security of the valley of the Tiber had induced it to construct barriers across that part of the channel which lay within its territory, and these obstructions, though not specifically intended for that purpose, naturally promoted the deposit of sediment and the elevation of the bed of the valley in their neighborhood. The effect of this measure and of the continued spontaneous action of the torrents was, that the northern slope, which in 1551 had commenced at the distance of ten miles from the Arno, was found in 1605 to begin, nearly thirty miles south of that river, and in 1645 it had been removed about six miles farther in the same direction.[380]

In the seventeenth century, the Tuscan and Papal Governments consulted Galileo, Torricelli, Castelli, Cassini, Viviani, and other distinguished philosophers and engineers, on the possibility of reclaiming the valley by a regular artificial drainage. Most of these eminent physicists were of opinion that the measure was impracticable, though not altogether for the same reasons; but they seem to have agreed in thinking that the opening of such channels, in either direction, as would give the current a flow sufficiently rapid to drain the lands properly, would dangerously augment the inundations of the river—whether the Tiber or the Arno—into which the waters should be turned. The general improvement of the valley was now for a long time abandoned, and the waters were allowed to spread and stagnate until carried off by partial drainage, infiltration, and evaporation. Torricelli had contended that the slope of a large part of the valley was too small to allow it to be drained by ordinary methods, and that no practicable depth and width of canal would suffice for that purpose. It could be laid dry, he thought, only by converting its surface into an inclined plane, and he suggested that this might be accomplished by controlling the flow of the numerous torrents which pour into it, so as to force them to deposit their sediment at the pleasure of the engineer, and, consequently, to elevate the level of the area over which it should be spread.[381] This plan did not meet with immediate general acceptance, but it was soon adopted for local purposes at some points in the southern part of the valley, and it gradually grew in public favor and was extended in application until its final triumph a hundred years later.

In spite of these encouraging successes, however, the fear of danger to the valley of the Arno and the Tiber, and the difficulty of an agreement between Tuscany and Rome—the boundary between which states crossed the Val di Chiana not far from the halfway point between the two rivers—and of reconciling other conflicting interests, prevented the resumption of the projects for the general drainage of the valley until after the middle of the eighteenth century. In the mean time the science of hydraulics had become better understood, and the establishment of the natural law according to which the velocity of a current of water, and of course the proportional quantity discharged by it in a given time, are increased by increasing its mass, had diminished if not dissipated the fear of exposing the banks of the Arno to greater danger from inundations by draining the Val di Chiana into it.

The suggestion of Torricelli was finally adopted as the basis of a comprehensive system of improvement, and it was decided to continue and extend the inversion of the original flow of the waters, and to turn them into the Arno from a point as far to the south as should be found practicable. The conduct of the works was committed to a succession of able engineers who, for a long series of years, were under the general direction of the celebrated philosopher and statesman Fossombroni, and the success has fully justified the expectations of the most sanguine advocates of the scheme. The plan of improvement embraced two branches: the one, the removal of certain obstructions in the bed of the Arno, and, consequently, the further depression of the channel of that river, in certain places, with the view of increasing the rapidity of its current; the other, the gradual filling up of the ponds and swamps, and raising of the lower grounds of the Val di Chiana, by directing to convenient points the flow of the streams which pour down into it, and there confining their waters by temporary dams until the sediment was deposited where it was needed. The economical result of these operations has been, that in 1835 an area of more than four hundred and fifty square miles of pond, marsh, and damp, sickly low grounds had been converted into fertile, healthy and well-drained soil, and, consequently, that so much territory has been added to the agricultural domain of Tuscany.

But in our present view of the subject, the geographical revolution which has been accomplished is still more interesting. The climatic influence of the elevation and draining of the soil must have been considerable, though I do not know that an increase or a diminution of the mean temperature or precipitation in the valley has been established by meteorological observation. There is, however, in the improvement of the sanitary condition of the Val di Chiana, which was formerly extremely unhealthy, satisfactory proof of a beneficial climatic change. The fevers, which not only decimated the population of the low grounds but infested the adjacent hills, have ceased their ravages, and are now not more frequent than in other parts of Tuscany. The strictly topographical effect of the operations in question, besides the conversion of marsh into dry surface, has been the inversion of the inclination of the valley for a distance of thirty-five miles, so that this great plain which, within a comparatively short period, sloped and drained its waters to the south, now inclines and sends its drainage to the north. The reversal of the currents of the valley has added to the Arno a new tributary equal to the largest of its former affluents, and a most important circumstance connected with this latter fact is, that the increase of the volume of its waters has accelerated their velocity in a still greater proportion, and, instead of augmenting the danger from its inundations, has almost wholly obviated that source of apprehension. Between the beginning of the fifteenth century and the year 1761, thirty-one destructive floods of the Arno are recorded; between 1761, when the principal streams of the Val di Chiana were diverted into that river, and 1835, not one.[382]

Improvements in the Tuscan Maremme.

In the improvements of the Tuscan Maremma, more formidable difficulties have been encountered. The territory to be reclaimed was more extensive; the salubrious places of retreat for laborers and inspectors were more remote; the courses of the rivers to be controlled were longer and their natural inclination less rapid; some of them, rising in wooded regions, transported comparatively little earthy matter,[383] and above all,

A like example is observed in the Anapus near Syracuse, which, below the junction of its two branches, is narrower, though swifter than either of them, and such cases are by no means unfrequent. The immediate effect of the confluence of two rivers upon the current below depends upon local circumstances, and especially upon the angle of incidence. If the two nearly coincide in direction, so as to include a small angle, the joint current will have a greater velocity than the slower confluent, perhaps even than either of them. If the two rivers run in transverse, still more if they flow in more or less opposite directions, the velocity of the principal branch will be retarded both above and below the junction, and at high water it may even set back the current of the affluent.

On the other hand, the diversion of a considerable branch from a river retards its velocity below the point of separation, and here a deposit of earth in its channel immediately begins, which has a tendency to turn the whole stream into the new bed. "Theory and the authority of all hydrographical writers combine to show that the channels of rivers undergo an elevation of bed below a canal of diversion."—Letter of Fossombroni, in Salvagnoli, Raccolta di Documenti, p. 32. See the early authorities and discussions on the principle stated in the text, in Frisi, Del modo di regolare i Fiumi e i Torrenti, libro iii, capit. i. the coast, which is a recent deposit of the waters, is little elevated above the sea, and admits into its lagoons and the mouths of its rivers floods of salt water with every western wind, every rising tide.[384]

The western coast of Tuscany is not supposed to have been an unhealthy region before the conquest of Etruria by the Romans, but it certainly became so within a few centuries after that event. This was a natural consequence of the neglect or wanton destruction of the public improvements, and especially the hydraulic works in which the Etruscans were so skilful, and of the felling of the upland forests, to satisfy the demand for wood at Rome for domestic, industrial, and military purposes. After the downfall of the Roman empire, the incursions of the barbarians, and then feudalism, foreign domination, intestine wars, and temporal and spiritual tyrannies, aggravated still more cruelly the moral and physical evils which Tuscany and the other Italian States were doomed to suffer, and from which they have enjoyed but brief respites during the whole period of modern history. The Maremma was already proverbially unhealthy in the time of Dante, who refers to the fact in several familiar passages, and the petty tyrants upon its borders often sent criminals to places of confinement in its territory, as a slow but certain mode of execution. Ignorance of the causes of the insalubrity, and often the interference of private rights,[385] prevented the adoption of measures to remove it, and the growing political and commercial importance of the large towns in more healthful localities absorbed the attention of Government, and deprived the Maremma of its just share in the systems of physical improvement which were successfully adopted in interior and Northern Italy.

Before any serious attempts were made to drain or fill up the marshes of the Maremme, various other sanitary experiments were tried. It was generally believed that the insalubrity of the province was the consequence, not the cause, of its depopulation, and that, if it were once densely inhabited, the ordinary operations of agriculture, and especially the maintenance of numerous domestic fires, would restore it to its ancient healthfulness.[386] In accordance with these views, settlers were invited from various parts of Italy, from Greece, and, after the accession of the Lorraine princes, from that country also, and colonized in the Maremme. To strangers coming from soils and skies so unlike those of the Tuscan marshes, the climate was more fatal than to the inhabitants of the neighboring districts, whose constitutions had become in some degree inured to the local influences, or who at least knew better how to guard against them. The consequence very naturally was that the experiment totally failed to produce the desired effects, and was attended with a great sacrifice of life and a heavy loss to the treasury of the state.

The territory known as the Tuscan Maremma, ora maritima, or Maremme—for the plural form is most generally used—lies upon and near the western coast of Tuscany, and comprises about 1,900 square miles English, of which 500 square miles, or 320,000 acres, are plain and marsh including 45,500 acres of water surface, and about 290,000 acres are forest. One of the mountain peaks, that of Mount Amiata, rises to the height of 6,280 feet. The mountains of the Maremma are healthy, the lower hills much less so, as the malaria is felt at some points at the height of 1,000 feet, and the plains, with the exception of a few localities favorably situated on the seacoast, are in a high degree pestilential. The fixed population is about 80,000, of whom one sixth live on the plains in the winter and about one tenth in the summer. Nine or ten thousand laborers come down from the mountains of the Maremma and the neighboring provinces into the plain, during the latter season, to cultivate and gather the crops.

Out of this small number of inhabitants and strangers, 35,619 were ill enough to require medical treatment between the 1st of June, 1840, and the 1st of June, 1841, and more than one half the cases were of intermittent, malignant, gastric, or catarrhal fever. Very few agricultural laborers escaped fever, though the disease did not always manifest itself until they had returned to the mountains. In the province of Grosseto, which embraces nearly the whole of the Maremma, the annual mortality was 3.92 per cent. the average duration of life but 23.18 years, and 75 per cent. of the deaths were among persons engaged in agriculture.

The filling up of the low grounds and the partial separation of the waters of the sea and the land, which had been in progress since the year 1827, now began to show very decided effects upon the sanitary condition of the population. In the year ending June 1st, 1842, the number of the sick was reduced by more than 2,000, and the cases of fever by more than 4,000. The next year, the cases of fever fell to 10,500, and in that ending June 1st, 1844, to 9,200. The political events of 1848 and the preceding and following years, occasioned the suspension of the works of improvement in the Maremma, but they were resumed after the revolution of 1859, and are now in successful progress.

I have spoken, with some detail, of the improvements in the Val di Chiana and the Tuscan Maremma, because of their great relative importance, and because their history is well known; but like operations have been executed in the territory of Pisa and upon the coast of the duchy of Lucca. In the latter case, they were confined principally to prevention of the intermixing of fresh water with that of the sea. In 1741, sluices or lock gates were constructed for this purpose, and the following year, the fevers, which had been destructive to the coast population for a long time previous, disappeared altogether. In 1768 and 1769, the works having fallen to decay, the fevers returned in a very malignant form, but the rebuilding of the gates again restored the healthfulness of the shore. Similar facts recurred in 1784 and 1785, and again from 1804 to 1821. This long and repeated experience has at last impressed upon the people the necessity of vigilant attention to the sluices, which are now kept in constant repair. The health of the coast is uninterrupted, and Viareggio, the capital town of the district, is now much frequented for its sea baths and its general salubrity, at a season when formerly it was justly shunned as the abode of disease and death.[387]

It is now a hundred years since the commencement of the improvements in the Val di Chiana, and those of the Maremma have been in more or less continued operation for above a generation. They have, as we have seen, produced important geographical changes in the surface of the earth and in the flow of considerable rivers, and their effects have been not less conspicuous in preventing other changes, of a deleterious character, which would infallibly have taken place if they had not been arrested by the improvements in question. It has been already stated that, in order to prevent the overflow of the valley of the Tiber by freely draining the Val di Chiana into it, the Papal authorities, long before the commencement of the Tuscan works, constructed strong barriers near the southern end of the valley, which detained the waters of the wet season until they could be gradually drawn off into the Paglia. They consequently deposited most of their sediment in the Val di Chiana and carried down comparatively little earth to the Tiber. The lateral streams contributing the largest quantities of sedimentary matter to the Val di Chiana originally flowed into that valley near its northern end; and the change of their channels and outlets in a southern direction, so as to raise that part of the valley by their deposits and thereby reverse its drainage, was one of the principal steps in the process of improvement.

We have seen that the north end of the Val di Chiana near the Arno had been raised by spontaneous deposit of sediment to such a height as to interpose a sufficient obstacle to all flow in that direction. If, then, the Roman dam had not been erected, or the works of the Tuscan Government undertaken, the whole of the earth, which has been arrested by those works and employed to raise the bed and reverse the declivity of the valley, would have been carried down to the Tiber and thence into the sea. The deposit thus created, would, of course, have contributed to increase the advance of the shore at the mouth of that river, which has long been going on at the rate of three mètres and nine tenths (twelve feet and nine inches) per annum.[388] It is evident that a quantity of earth, sufficient to effect the immense changes I have described in a wide valley more than thirty miles long, if deposited at the outlet of the Tiber, would have very considerably modified the outline of the coast, and have exerted no unimportant influence on the flow of that river, by raising its point of discharge and lengthening its channel.

The sediment washed into the marshes of the Maremme is not less than 12,000,000 cubic yards per annum. The escape of this quantity into the sea, which is now almost wholly prevented, would be sufficient to advance the coast line fourteen yards per year, for a distance of forty miles, computing the mean depth of the sea near the shore at twelve yards. It is true that in this case, as well as in that of other rivers, the sedimentary matter would not be distributed equally along the shore, and much of it would be carried out into deep water, or perhaps transported by the currents to distant coasts. The immediate effects of the deposit, therefore, would not be so palpable as they appear in this numerical form, but they would be equally certain, and would infallibly manifest themselves, first, perhaps, at some remote point, and afterward at or near the outlets of the rivers which produced them.

Obstruction of River Mouths.

The mouths of a large proportion of the streams known to ancient internal navigation are already blocked up by sandbars or fluviatile deposits, and the maritime approaches to river harbors frequented by the ships of Phenicia and Carthage and Greece and Rome are shoaled to a considerable distance out to sea. The inclination of almost every known river bed has been considerably reduced within the historical period, and nothing but great volume of water, or exceptional rapidity of flow, now enables a few large streams like the Amazon, the La Plata, the Ganges, and, in a less degree, the Mississippi, to carry their own deposits far enough out into deep water to prevent the formation of serious obstructions to navigation. But the degradation of their banks, and the transportation of earthy matter to the sea by their currents, are gradually filling up the estuaries even of these mighty floods, and unless the threatened evil shall be averted by the action of geological forces, or by artificial contrivances more efficient than dredging machines, the destruction of every harbor in the world which receives a considerable river must inevitably take place at no very distant date.

This result would, perhaps, have followed in some incalculably distant future, if man had not come to inhabit the earth as soon as the natural forces which had formed its surface had arrived at such an approximate equilibrium that his existence on the globe was possible; but the general effect of his industrial operations has been to accelerate it immensely. Rivers, in countries planted by nature with forests and never inhabited by man, employ the little earth and gravel they transport chiefly to raise their own beds and to form plains in their basins.[389] In their upper course, where the current is swiftest, they are most heavily charged with coarse rolled or suspended matter, and this, in floods, they deposit on their shores in the mountain valleys where they rise; in their middle course, a lighter earth is spread over the bottom of their widening basins, and forms plains of moderate extent; the fine silt which floats farther is deposited over a still broader area, or, if carried out to sea, is, in great part quickly swept far off by marine currents and dropped at last in deep water. Man's "improvement" of the soil increases the erosion from its surface; his arrangements for confining the lateral spread of the water in floods compel the rivers to transport to their mouths the earth derived from that erosion even in their upper course; and, consequently, the sediment they deposit at their outlets is not only much larger in quantity, but composed of heavier materials, which sink more readily to the bottom of the sea and are less easily removed by marine currents.

The tidal movement of the ocean, deep sea currents, and the agitation of inland waters by the wind, lift up the sands strewn over the bottom by diluvial streams or sent down by mountain torrents, and throw them up on dry land, or deposit them in sheltered bays and nooks of the coast—for the flowing is stronger than the ebbing tide, the affluent than the refluent wave. This cause of injury to harbors it is not in man's power to resist by any means at present available; but, as we have seen, something can be done to prevent the degradation of high grounds, and to diminish the quantity of earth which is annually abstracted from the mountains, from table lands, and from river banks, to raise the bottom of the sea.

This latter cause of harbor obstruction, though an active agent, is, nevertheless, in many cases, the less powerful of the two. The earth suspended in the lower course of fluviatile currents is lighter than sea sand, river water lighter than sea water, and hence, if a land stream enters the sea with a considerable volume, its water flows over that of the sea, and bears its slime with it until it lets it fall far from shore, or, as is more frequently the case, mingles with some marine current and transports its sediment to a remote point of deposit. The earth borne out of the mouths of the Nile is in part carried over the waves which throw up sea sand on the beach, and deposited in deep water, in part drifted by the current, which sweeps east and north along the coasts of Egypt and Syria, until it finds a resting place in the northeastern angle of the Mediterranean.[390] Thus the earth loosened by the rude Abyssinian ploughshare, and washed down by the rain from the hills of Ethiopia which man has stripped of their protecting forests, contributes to raise the plains of Egypt, to shoal the maritime channels which lead to the city built by Alexander near the mouth of the Nile, and to fill up the harbors made famous by Phenician commerce.

Subterranean Waters.

I have frequently alluded to a branch of geography, the importance of which is but recently adequately recognized—the subterranean waters of the earth considered as stationary reservoirs, as flowing currents, and as filtrating fluids. The earth drinks in moisture by direct absorption from the atmosphere, by the deposition of dew, by rain and snow, by percolation from rivers and other superficial bodies of water, and sometimes by currents flowing into caves or smaller visible apertures.[391] Some of this humidity is exhaled again by the soil, some is taken up by organic growths and by inorganic compounds, some poured out upon the surface by springs and either immediately evaporated or carried down to larger streams and to the sea, some flows by subterranean courses into the bed of fresh-water rivers[392] or of the ocean, and some remains, though even here not in forever motionless repose, to fill deep cavities and underground channels.[393] In every case the aqueous vapors of the air are the ultimate source of supply, and all these hidden stores are again returned to the atmosphere by evaporation.

The proportion of the water of precipitation taken up by direct evaporation from the surface of the ground seems to have been generally exaggerated, sufficient allowance not being made for moisture carried downward, or in a lateral direction, by infiltration or by crevices in the superior rocky or earthy strata. According to Wittwer, Mariotte found that but one sixth of the precipitation in the basin of the Seine was delivered into the sea by that river, "so that five sixths remained for evaporation and consumption by the organic world."[394]

Lieutenant Maury—whose scientific reputation, though fallen, has not quite sunk to the level of his patriotism—estimates the annual amount of precipitation in the valley of the Mississippi at 620 cubic miles, the discharge of that river into the sea at 107 cubic miles, and concludes that "this would leave 513 cubic miles of water to be evaporated from this river basin annually."[395] In these and other like computations, the water carried down into the earth by capillary and larger conduits is wholly lost sight of, and no thought is bestowed upon the supply for springs, for common and artesian wells, and for underground rivers, like those in the great caves of Kentucky, which may gush up in fresh-water currents at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, or rise to the light of day in the far-off peninsula of Florida.

The progress of the emphatically modern science of geology has corrected these erroneous views, because the observations on which it depends have demonstrated not only the existence, but the movement, of water in nearly all geological formations, have collected evidence of the presence of large reservoirs at greater or less depths beneath surfaces of almost every character, and have investigated the rationale of the attendant phenomena. The distribution of these waters has been minutely studied with reference to a great number of localities, and though the actual mode of their vertical and horizontal transmission is still involved in much doubt, the laws which determine their aggregation are so well understood, that, when the geology of a given district is known, it is not difficult to determine at what depth water will be reached by the borer, and to what height it will rise.

The same principles have been successfully applied to the discovery of small subterranean collections or currents of water, and some persons have acquired, by a moderate knowledge of the superficial structure of the earth combined with long practice, a skill in the selection of favorable places for digging wells which seems to common observers little less than miraculous. The Abbé Paramelle—a French ecclesiastic who devoted himself for some years to this subject and was extensively employed as a well-finder—states, in his work on Fountains, that in the course of thirty-four years he had pointed out more than ten thousand subterranean springs, and though his geological speculations were often erroneous, the highest scientific authorities in Europe have testified to the great practical value of his methods, and the almost infallible certainty of his predictions.[396]

Babinet quotes a French proverb, "Summer rain wets nothing," and explains it as meaning that the water of such rains is "almost totally taken up by evaporation." "The rains of summer," he adds, "however abundant they may be, do not penetrate the soil to a greater depth than 15 or 20 centimètres. In summer the evaporating power of the heat is five or six times as great as in winter, and this power is exerted by an atmosphere capable of containing five times as much vapor as in winter." "A stratum of snow which prevents evaporation [from the soil] causes almost all the water that composes it to filter down into the earth, and form a reserve for springs, wells, and rivers which could not be supplied by any amount of summer rain." "This latter—useful, indeed like dew, to vegetation—does not penetrate the soil and accumulate a store to feed springs and to be brought up by them to the open air."[397] This conclusion, however applicable it may be to the climate and soil of France, is too broadly stated to be accepted as a general truth, and in countries where the precipitation is small in the winter months, familiar observation shows that the quantity of water yielded by deep wells and natural springs depends not less on the rains of summer than on those of the rest of the year, and, consequently, that much of the precipitation of that season must find its way to strata too deep to lose water by evaporation.

The supply of subterranean reservoirs and currents, as well as of springs, is undoubtedly derived chiefly from infiltration, and hence it must be affected by all changes of the natural surface that accelerate or retard the drainage of the soil, or that either promote or obstruct evaporation from it. It has sufficiently appeared from what has gone before, that the spontaneous drainage of cleared ground is more rapid than that of the forest, and consequently, that the felling of the woods, as well as the draining of swamps, deprives the subterranean waters of accessions which would otherwise be conveyed to them by infiltration. The same effect is produced by artificial contrivances for drying the soil either by open ditches or by underground pipes or channels, and in proportion as the sphere of these operations is extended, the effect of them cannot fail to make itself more and more sensibly felt in the diminished supply of water furnished by wells and running springs.[398]

It is undoubtedly true that loose soils, stripped of vegetation and broken up by the plough or other processes of cultivation, may, until again carpeted by grasses or other plants, absorb more rain and snow water than when they were covered by a natural growth; but it is also true that the evaporation from such soils is augmented in a still greater proportion. Rain scarcely penetrates beneath the sod of grass ground, but runs off over the surface; and after the heaviest showers a ploughed field will often be dried by evaporation before the water can be carried off by infiltration, while the soil of a neighboring grove will remain half saturated for weeks together. Sandy soils frequently rest on a tenacious subsoil, at a moderate depth, as is usually seen in the pine plains of the United States, where pools of rain water collect in slight depressions on the surface of earth, the upper stratum of which is as porous as a sponge. In the open grounds such pools are very soon dried up by the sun and wind; in the woods they remain unevaporated long enough for the water to diffuse itself laterally until it finds, in the subsoil, crevices through which it may escape, or slopes which it may follow to their outcrop or descend along them to lower strata.

The readiness with which water not obstructed by impermeable strata diffuses itself through the earth in all directions—and, consequently, the importance of keeping up the supply of subterranean reservoirs—find a familiar illustration in the effect of paving the ground about the stems of vines and trees. The surface earth around the trunk of a tree may be made perfectly impervious to water, by flag stones and cement, for a distance greater than the spread of the roots; and yet the tree will not suffer for want of moisture, except in droughts severe enough sensibly to affect the supply in deep wells and springs. Both forest and fruit trees grow well in cities where the streets and courts are closely paved, and where even the lateral access of water to the roots is more or less obstructed by deep cellars and foundation walls. The deep-lying veins and sheets of water, supplied by infiltration from above, send up moisture by capillary attraction, and the pavement prevents the soil beneath it from losing its humidity by evaporation. Hence, city-grown trees find moisture enough for their roots, and though plagued with smoke and dust, often retain their freshness while those planted in the open fields, where sun and wind dry up the soil faster than the subterranean fountains can water it, are withering from drought. Without the help of artificial conduit or of water carrier, the Thames and the Seine refresh the ornamental trees that shade the thoroughfares of London and of Paris, and beneath the hot and reeking mould of Egypt, the Nile sends currents to the extremest border of its valley.[399]

Artesian Wells.

The existence of artesian wells depends upon that of subterranean reservoirs and rivers, and the supply yielded by borings is regulated by the abundance of such sources. The waters of the earth are, in many cases, derived from superficial currents which are seen to pour into chasms opened, as it were, expressly for their reception; and in others where no apertures in the crust of the earth have been detected, their existence is proved by the fact that artesian wells sometimes bring up from great depths seeds, leaves, and even living fish, which must have been carried down through channels large enough to admit a considerable stream. But in general, the sheets and currents of water reached by deep boring appear to be primarily due to infiltration from highlands where the water is first collected in superficial or subterranean reservoirs. By means of channels conforming to the dip of the strata, these reservoirs communicate with the lower basins, and exert upon them a fluid pressure sufficient to raise a column to the surface, whenever an orifice is opened.[400] The water delivered by an artesian well is, therefore, often derived from distant sources, and may be wholly unaffected by geographical or meteorological changes in its immediate neighborhood, while the same changes may quite dry up common wells and springs which are fed only by the local infiltration of their own narrow basins.

In most cases, artesian wells have been bored for purely economical or industrial purposes, such as to obtain good water for domestic use or for driving light machinery, to reach saline or other mineral springs, and recently, in America, to open fountains of petroleum or rock oil. The geographical and geological effects of such abstraction of fluids from the bowels of the earth are too remote and uncertain to be here noticed;[401] but artesian wells have lately been employed in Algeria for a purpose which has even now a substantial, and may hereafter acquire a very great geographical importance. It was observed by many earlier as well as recent travellers in the East, among whom Shaw deserves special mention, that the Libyan desert, bordering upon the cultivated shores of the Mediterranean, appeared in many places to rest upon a subterranean lake at an accessible distance below the surface. The Moors are vaguely said to have bored artesian wells down to this reservoir, to obtain water for domestic use and irrigation, but I do not find such wells described by any trustworthy traveller, and the universal astonishment and incredulity with which the native tribes viewed the operations of the French engineers sent into the desert for that purpose, are a sufficient proof that this mode of reaching the subterranean waters was new to them. They were, however, aware of the existence of water below the sands, and were dexterous in digging wells—square shafts lined with a framework of palm-tree stems—to the level of the sheet. The wells so constructed, though not technically artesian wells, answer the same purpose; for the water rises to the surface and flows over it as from a spring.[402]

These wells, however, are too few and too scanty in supply to serve any other purposes than the domestic wells of other countries, and it is but recently that the transformation of desert into cultivable land by this means has been seriously attempted. The French Government has bored a large number of artesian wells in the Algerian desert within a few years, and the native sheikhs are beginning to avail themselves of the process. Every well becomes the nucleus of a settlement proportioned to the supply of water, and before the end of the year 1860, several nomade tribes had abandoned their wandering life, established themselves around the wells, and planted more than 30,000 palm trees, besides other perennial vegetables.[403] The water is found at a small depth, generally from 100 to 200 feet, and though containing too large a proportion of mineral matter to be acceptable to a European palate, it answers well for irrigation, and does not prove unwholesome to the natives.

The most obvious use of artesian wells in the desert at present is that of creating stations for the establishment of military posts and halting places for the desert traveller; but if the supply of water shall prove adequate for the indefinite extension of the system, it is probably destined to produce a greater geographical transformation than has ever been effected by any scheme of human improvement. The most striking contrast of landscape scenery that nature brings near together in time or place, is that between the greenery of the tropics, or of a northern summer, and the snowy pall of leafless winter. Next to this in startling novelty of effect, we must rank the sudden transition from the shady and verdant oasis of the desert to the bare and burning party-colored ocean of sand and rock which surrounds it.[404] The most sanguine believer in indefinite human progress hardly expects that man's cunning will accomplish the universal fufilment of the prophecy, "the desert shall blossom as the rose," in its literal sense; but sober geographers have thought the future conversion of the sand plains of Northern Africa into fruitful gardens, by means of artesian wells, not an improbable expectation. They have gone farther, and argued that, if the soil were covered with fields and forests, vegetation would call down moisture from the Libyan sky, and that the showers which are now wasted on the sea, or so often deluge Southern Europe with destructive inundation, would in part be condensed over the arid wastes of Africa, and thus, without further aid from man, bestow abundance on regions which nature seems to have condemned to perpetual desolation.

An equally bold speculation, founded on the well-known fact, that the temperature of the earth and of its internal waters increases as we descend beneath the surface, has suggested that artesian wells might supply heat for industrial and domestic purposes, for hot-house cultivation, and even for the local amelioration of climate. The success with which Count Lardarello has employed natural hot springs for the evaporation of water charged with boracic acid, and other fortunate applications of the heat of thermal sources, lend some countenance to the latter project; but both must, for the present, be ranked among the vague possibilities of science, not regarded as probable future triumphs of man over nature.

Artificial Springs.

A more plausible and inviting scheme is that of the creation of perennial springs by husbanding rain and snow water, storing it up in artificial reservoirs of earth, and filtering it through purifying strata, in analogy with the operations of nature. The sagacious Palissy—starting from the theory that all springs are primarily derived from precipitation, and reasoning justly on the accumulation and movement of water in the earth—proposed to reduce theory to practice, and to imitate the natural processes by which rain is absorbed by the earth and given out again in running fountains. "When I had long and diligently considered the cause of the springing of natural fountains and the places where they be wont to issue," says he, "I did plainly perceive, at last, that they do proceed and are engendered of nought but the rains. And it is this, look you, which hath moved me to enterprise the gathering together of rain water after the manner of nature, and the most closely according to her fashion that I am able; and I am well assured that by following the formulary of the Supreme Contriver of fountains, I can make springs, the water whereof shall be as good and pure and clear as of such which be natural."[405] Palissy discusses the subject of the origin of springs at length and with much ability, dwelling specially on infiltration, and, among other things, thus explains the frequency of springs in mountainous regions: "Having well considered the which, thou mayest plainly see the reason why there be more springs and rivulets proceeding from the mountains than from the rest of the earth; which is for no other cause but that the rocks and mountains do retain the water of the rains like vessels of brass. And the said waters falling upon the said mountains descend continually through the earth, and through crevices, and stop not till they find some place that is bottomed with stone or close and thick rocks; and they rest upon such bottom until they find some channel or other manner of issue, and then they flow out in springs or brooks or rivers, according to the greatness of the reservoirs and of the outlets thereof."[406]

After a full exposition of his theory, Palissy proceeds to describe his method of creating springs, which is substantially the same as that lately proposed by Babinet in the following terms: "Choose a piece of ground containing four or five acres, with a sandy soil, and with a gentle slope to determine the flow of the water. Along its upper line, dig a trench five or six feet deep and six feet wide. Level the bottom of the trench, and make it impermeable by paving, by macadamizing, by bitumen, or, more simply and cheaply, by a layer of clay. By the side of this trench dig another, and throw the earth from it into the first, and so on until you have rendered the subsoil of the whole parcel impermeable to rain water. Build a wall along the lower line with an aperture in the middle for the water, and plant fruit or other low trees upon the whole, to shade the ground and check the currents of air which promote evaporation. This will infallibly give you a good spring which will flow without intermission and supply the wants of a whole hamlet or a large chateau."[407] Babinet states that the whole amount of precipitation on a reservoir of the proposed area, in the climate of Paris, would be about 13,000 cubic yards, not above one half of which, he thinks, would be lost, and, of course, the other half would remain available to supply the spring. I much doubt whether this expectation would be realized in practice, in its whole extent; for if Babinet is right in supposing that the summer rain is wholly evaporated, the winter rains, being much less in quantity, would hardly suffice to keep the earth saturated and give off so large a surplus.

The method of Palissy, though, as I have said, similar in principle to that of Babinet, would be cheaper of execution, and, at the same time, more efficient. He proposes the construction of relatively small filtering receptacles, into which he would conduct the rain falling upon a large area of rocky hillside, or other sloping ground not readily absorbing water. This process would, in all probability, be a very successful, as well as an inexpensive, mode of economizing atmospheric precipitation, and compelling the rain and snow to form perennial fountains at will.

Economizing Precipitation.

The methods suggested by Palissy and by Babinet are of limited application, and designed only to supply a sufficient quantity of water for the domestic use of small villages or large private establishments. Dumas has proposed a much more extensive system for collecting and retaining the whole precipitation in considerable valleys, and storing it in reservoirs, whence it is to be drawn for household and mechanical purposes, for irrigation, and, in short, for all the uses to which the water of natural springs and brooks is applicable. His plan consists in draining both surface and subsoil, by means of conduits differing in construction according to local circumstances, but in the main not unlike those employed in improved agriculture, collecting the water in a central channel, securing its proper filterage, checking its too rapid flow by barriers at convenient points, and finally receiving the whole in spacious covered reservoirs, from which it may be discharged in a constant flow or at intervals as convenience may dictate.[408]

There is no reasonable doubt that a very wide employment of these various contrivances for economizing and supplying water is practicable, and the expediency of resorting to them is almost purely an economical question. There appears to be no serious reason to apprehend collateral evils from them, and in fact all of them, except artesian wells, are simply indirect methods of returning to the original arrangements of nature, or, in other words, of restoring the fluid circulation of the globe; for when the earth was covered with the forest, perennial springs gushed from the foot of every hill, brooks flowed down the bed of every valley. The partial recovery of the fountains and rivulets which once abundantly watered the face of the agricultural world seems practicable by such means, even without any general replanting of the forests; and the cost of one year's warfare, if judiciously expended in a combination of both methods of improvement, would secure, to almost every country that man has exhausted, an amelioration of climate, a renovated fertility of soil, and a general physical improvement, which might almost be characterized as a new creation.

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CHAPTER V