Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 October 1877 — GARDEN OF EDEN. [ARTICLE]

GARDEN OF EDEN.

Present State of the Earthly Paradise— What the Destruction of Forests Has Caused. [From the Popular Science Monthly.] Prince de Ligne, countryman and contemporary of Maria Theresa, wrote an essay ‘‘ On Location of .the Earthly Paradise,” and, after some reflections on hygienic influence of different climates, cans attention to the fact that “ paradise traditions, in locating the Garden of Eden, differ only in regard to longitude, but not to latitude. The latitude keeps always near the snow boundary, a line just south of the regions where snow may fall, but will not stay on the ground. It passes through Thibet, Cashmere, Northern Persia and Asia Minor, and reaches the meridian of Europe near the center of the Mediterranean.” The nations that “ celebrated life as a festival” have lived along this line, and we may doubt if in the most favored regions of the New World human industry, with all the aids of modern science, will ever reunite the opportunities of happiness which nature once lavished on lands that now only entail misery on their cultivators. All over Spain and Portugal, Southern Italy, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, Persia and Western Afghanistan, and throughout Northern. Africa, ana from Morocco to the valley of the Nile, the aridity of the soil makes the struggle for existence so hard that, to a vast majority of the inhabitants, life, from a blessing has been converted into a curse.

Southern Spain, from Gibraltar to the headwaters of the Tagus, maintains now only about one-tenth of its former population - ! Greece about one-twentieth. As late as A D. 670, a good while after the‘rise of the Mohammedan power, the country now known as Tripoli, and distinct from Sahara only through the elevation of its mountains, was the seat of eighty-five Christian Bishops, and had a population of 6,000,000, of which number three-quarters of 1 per cent, are now left! The climate which, according to authentic description, must once have resembled that of our Southern Alleghenies, is now so nearly intolerable that even the inhumanity of an African despot forbears to exact open-air labor from 9 a. m. to 5 p. m. Steamboats that pass near the Tripolitan coast in (i the summer, on the way from Genoa to Cairo, have to keep up a continual shower of artificial rain to save their deck-hands from being overcome by the furnace-air that breathes from the barren hills of the opposite coast. The rivers of some of these countries have shrunk to the size of their former tributaries, and from Gibraltar to Samarcand the annual rainfall has decreased till the failure of crops has become a chronic complaint. And all this change is due to the insane destruction of forests. The great Caucasian sylvania that once adorned the birth-land of the white race from the Western Pyrenees to the foothills of the Himalayas has disappeared ; of the forest area of Italy and Spaiu, in the days of the elder Pliny, about two acres in a hundred are left; in Greece, hardly one. But even the nakedness of the most fertile tracts of Southern Europe is exceeded by the utter desolation of the Ottoman provinces.