Pliny Praises The Chestnuts Of Tarentum; I Question Whether The Tree
Could Survive The Hot Climate Of To-Day.
Nobody could induce "splendid
beeches" to grow in the lowlands of Latium, yet Theophrastus, a
botanist, says that they were drawn from this region for shipbuilding
purposes.
This gradual desiccation has probably gone on for long ages;
so Signor Cavara has discovered old trunks of white fir in districts of
the Apennines where such a plant could not possibly grow to-day.
A change to a dry and warm atmosphere is naturally propitious to
malaria, granted sufficient water remains to propagate the mosquito. And
the mosquito contents itself with very little - the merest teacup fui.
Returning to old Calabria, we find the woods of Locri praised by
Proclus - woods that must have been of coniferous timber, since Virgil
lauds their resinous pitch. Now the Aleppo pine produces pitch, and
would still flourish there, as it does in the lowlands between Taranto
and Metaponto; the classical Sila pitch-trees, however, could not grow
at this level any more. Corroborative evidence can be drawn from
Theocritus, who mentions heath and arbutus as thriving in the marine
thickets near Cotrone - mountain shrubs, nowadays, that have taken refuge
in cooler uplands, together with the wood-pigeon which haunted the same
jungles. It is true that he hints at marshes near Cotrone, and, indeed,
large tracts of south Italy are described as marshy by the ancients;
they may well have harboured the anopheles mosquito from time
immemorial, but it does not follow that they were malarious.
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