Although no country has produced more able writers on the value of the forest and the general consequences of its destruction than Italy, yet the specific geographical importance of the woods, except as a protection against inundations, has not been so clearly recognized in that country 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 almost as wide and as hopeless devastation in Italy as in France; but in the French Empire the recent desolation produced by clearing the forests is more extensive, has been more suddenly effected, has occurred in less remote and obscure localities, 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, [Footnote: The great naval and commercial marines of Venice and of Genoa must have occasioned an immense consumption of lumber in the Middle Ages, and the centuries immediately succeeding those commonly embraced in that designation. The marine construction of that period employed larger timbers than the modern naval architecture of most commercial countries, but apparently without a proportional increase of strength. The old modes of ship-building have been, to a considerable extent, handed down to very recent times in the Mediterranean, and though better models and modes of construction are now employed in Italian shipyards, an American or an Englishman looks with astonishment at the huge beams and thick planks so often employed in the construction of very small vessels navigating that sea, and not yet old enough to be broken up as unseaworthy.] 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