idea of eastern landscapes with the picture of worn-out fields. Surrounded by Russian steppes and trans-Alpine deserts, the homes of the Germanic nations still form a Goshen of verdure and abundance. Forest protectors have not lost their earthly paradise. C.—PERVERSION. Sixteen hundred years ago the highlands of the European continent were still covered with a dense growth of primeval forests. The healthfulness and fertility of the Mediterranean coastlands surpassed that of the most favored regions of the present world, and the dependence of those blessings on the preservation of the spring-sheltering woodlands was clearly recognized by such writers as Pliny and Columella, though their own experience did not enable them to suspect all the ruinous consequences of that wholesale forest destruction, which modern science has justly denounced as the ne plus ultra folly of human improvidence. Practical experiments had, however, demonstrated such facts as the failing of springs on treeless slopes, and the violence of winter floods in districts unprotected by rain-absorbing forests, and tree culture was practiced as a regular branch of rational husbandry. But with the triumph of the Galilean church came the millennium of unnaturalism. Rational agriculture became a tradition of the past; the culture of secular science was fiercely denounced from thousands of pulpits; improvidence, “unworldliness,” and superstitious reliance on the efficacy of prayer were systematically inculcated as supreme virtues; the cultivators of the soil were treated like unclean beasts, and for a series of centuries the garden regions of the East were abandoned to the inevitable consequences of neglect and misculture. Millions of acres of fine forest lands passed into the hands of ignorant priests, who, in their greed for immediate gain, and their reckless indifference to the secular welfare of posterity, doomed their trees to the ax, entailing barrenness on regions favored by every natural advantage of soil and climate. Drouths, famines, and locust-swarms failed to impress the protest of nature. Her enemies had no concern with such worldly vanities as the study of climatic vicissitudes, and hoped to avert the consequences of their folly by an appeal to the intercession of miracle-working saints. D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.