The eminence of Italian theoretical hydrographers and the great ability of Italian hydraulic engineers are well known, but the specific geographical importance of the woods has not been so clearly recognized in Italy as in the states bordering it on the north and west. It is true that the face of nature has been as completely revolutionized by man, and that the action of torrents has created as wide and as hopeless devastation in that country as in France; but in the French Empire the desolation produced by clearing the forests is more recent,[205] has been more suddenly effected, and, therefore, excites a livelier and more general interest than in Italy, where public opinion does not so readily connect the effect with its true cause. Italy, too, from ancient habit, employs little wood in architectural construction; for generations she has maintained no military or commercial marine large enough to require exhaustive quantities of timber,[206] and the mildness of her climate makes small demands on the woods for fuel. Besides these circumstances, it must be remembered that the sciences of observation did not become knowledges of practical application till after the mischief was already mainly done and even forgotten in Alpine Italy, while its evils were just beginning to be sensibly felt in France when the claims of natural philosophy as a liberal study were first acknowledged in modern Europe. The former political condition of the Italian Peninsula would have effectually prevented the adoption of a general system of forest economy, however clearly the importance of a wise administration of this great public interest might have been understood. The woods which controlled and regulated the flow of the river sources were very often in one jurisdiction, the plains to be irrigated, or to be inundated by floods and desolated by torrents, in another. Concert of action on such a subject between a multitude of jealous petty sovereignties was obviously impossible, and nothing but the union of all the Italian states under a single government can render practicable the establishment of such arrangements for the conservation and restoration of the forests and the regulation of the flow of the waters as are necessary for the full development of the yet unexhausted resources of that fairest of lands, and even for the permanent maintenance of the present condition of its physical geography.