SIR: In this month, just thirty years ago, I was at Naples, and the days were nearly as dark as these, but with clouds and rain, not fog. The streets leading down from St. Elmo became beds of torrents. A story went about--true or not I do not know, but credible enough--of a child's having been carried off by the gutter and drowned at the bottom of the hill. At last came indeed what, in those simple times, people thought a serious loss of life. A heavy storm burst one night above a village on the flank of the Monte St. Angelo, a mile or two south of Pompeii. The limestones slope steeply there under about three feet of block earth. The water peeled a piece of the rock of its earth, as one would peel an orange, and brought down three or four acres of the good soil in a heap on the village at midnight, driving in the upper walls, and briefly burying some fourteen or fifteen people in their sleep--and, as I say, in those times there was some talk even about fourteen or fifteen. But the same kind of thing takes place, of course, more or less, among the hills in almost every violent storm, generally with the double result of ruining more ground below than is removed from the rocks above; for the frantic streams mostly finish their work with a heap of gravel and blocks of stone like that which came down the ravine below the glacier of Greppond about ten years ago, and destroyed, for at least fifty years to come, some of quite the best land in Chamouni. In slower, but ceaseless process of ruin, the Po, Arno, and Tiber steadily remove the soil from the hills, and carry it down to their deltas. The Venetians have contended now for a thousand years in vain even with the Brenta and the minor streams that enter their lagoons, and have only kept their canals clear by turning the river south to Malamocco with embankments which have unhealthily checked the drainage of all the flat country about Padua. And this constant mischief takes place, be it observed, irrespective of inundation. All that Florence, Pisa, and Rome have suffered and suffer periodically from floods is so much mischief added to that of increasing maremmas, spoiled harborages, and lost mountain-ground. There is yet one further evil. The snow on the bared rock slips lower and melts faster; snow, which in mossy or grass ground would have lain long, and furnished steadily flowing streams far on into summer, fall or melt from the bare rock in avalanche and flood, and spend in desolation in a few days what would have been nourishment for half the year. And against all this there are no remedies possible in any sudden or external action. It is the law of the Heaven which sends flood and food, that national prosperity can only be achieved by national forethought and unity of purpose.