According to Hummel, the desolation of the Karst, the high plateau lying north of Trieste, now one of the most parched and barren districts in Europe, is owing to the felling of the woods, centuries ago, to build the navies of Venice. "Where the miserable peasant of the Karst now sees nothing but bare rock swept and scoured by the raging Bora, the fury of this wind was once subdued by mighty firs, which Venice recklessly cut down to build her fleets."--Physische Geographie, p. 32.] by that of Genoa as early at least as the seventeenth; and both these Governments, as well as several others, passed laws requiring the proprietors of mountain-lands to replant the woods. These, however, seem to have been little observed, and it is generally true that the present condition of the forest in Italy is much less due to the want of wise legislation for its protection than to the laxity of the Governments in enforcing their laws. It is very common in Italy to ascribe to the French occupation under the first Empire all the improvements and all the abuses of recent times, according to the political sympathies of the individual; and the French are often said to have prostrated every forest which has disappeared within this century. But, however this may be, no energetic system of repression or restoration was adopted by any of the Italian States after the downfall of the Empire, and the taxes on forest property in some of them were so burdensome that rural municipalities sometimes proposed to cede their common woods to the Government, without any other compensation than the remission of the taxes imposed on forest-lands. [Footnote: See the Politecnico for the month of May, 1862, p. 234.] Under such circumstances, woodlands would soon become disafforested, and where facilities of transportation and a good demand for timber have increased the inducements to fell it, as upon the borders of the Mediterranean, the destruction of the forest and all the evils which attend it have gone on at a seriously alarming rate. Gallenga gives a striking account of the wanton destruction of the forests in Northern Italy within his personal recollection, [Footnote: "Far away in the darkest recesses of the mountains a kind of universal conspiracy seems to have been got up among these Alpine people,--a destructive mania to hew and sweep down everything that stands on roots."--Country Life in Piedmont, p. 134. "There are huge pyramids of mountains now bare and bleak from base to summit, which men still living and still young remember seeing richly mantled with all but primeval forests."--Ibid., p. 135.] and there are few Italians past middle life whose own memory will not supply similar reminiscences. The clearing of the mountain valleys of the provinces of Bergamo and of Bescia is recent, and Lombardini informs us the felling of the woods in the Valtelline commenced little more than forty years ago.