INFLUENCE OF FORESTS ON CLIMATE.

Kumara Times, Issue 870, 15 July 1879, Page 4

INFLUENCE OF FORESTS ON CLIMATE.

Many rivers have totally disappeared (says a writer in Once a Week), or have been reduced to mere streams by an irrational and heinous felling of the forests. In the north-east of Germany the Narp and Gold rivers exist only in name. The classic lands of antiquity are rich in sad lessons of deforestation. The springs and brooks of Palestine are dry, and the fruitfulness of the land has disappeared. The Jordan is four feet lower than it was in the New Testament days. Greece and Spain suffer severely to this day from the effects of destroying their forests. Many parts of the kingdom of Wurtemburg have been rendered almost barren by the felling of trees. In Hun gary the periodically returning drought is universally attiibuted to the extermination of the forests. We attribute the present unfruitfulness of Asia Minor and Greece to the destruction of the woods • steppes, ruins, and tombs have taken the plsce of what was the highest culture. Sardinia and Sicily were once the granaries of Italy, but have long since lost the fruitfulness sung of by the ancient poets. On the other hand man can im prove the condition of land in which he lives, more slowly indeed, but as certainly, by cultivating and preserving the forests. In earlier years reliable authorities have told us that in the Delta of Upper Egypt there were only five or six days of rain a year, but that since the time when Mehemet Ali e-msed some 20,000 trees to be planted, the number days of rain in the year has increased to forty-five or forty-six. The 8m z Canal has produced remarkable result e, laamila is built on what was a sandj desert, but since the ground has become saturated with canal water, trees, bushes, and other plants have sprung up as if by magic, and with the reappearance of the vegetation the climate has changed. Eour or five years ago rain was unknown in those regions, while from May, 1868 to May 1869, fourteen days were recorded ; and one- such a rainstorm that the natives' looked upon it as a supernatural event. Austria herself has a very striking instance of a change o{ climate being produced by deforestation and replanting. We refer to that stretch of miles of country over which the railroad passes near Trieste, as you go from Austria to Italy, bleak, barren, stony, with hardly earth sufficient for a weed to take root in, a stretch of barrenness on which some dread anathema seems to rest. It is a curse that rests on it called down from Heaven by man. Five hundred years ago an immense forest stood on the ground where now is nothing but a sea of stone. Venetians came and hewed down the forest iu order to procure wood for piles and mercantile purposes.