Much Of The Healthy Physical Conditions May Have Remained Into The
Middle Ages Or Even Later; It Is Strange To
Read, for example, in
Edrisius, of the pitch and tar that were exported to all parts from the
Bradano river,
Or of the torrential Sinno that "ships enter this
river - it offers excellent anchorage"; odd, too, to hear of coral
fisheries as late as the seventeenth century at Rocella Ionica, where
the waves now slumber on an even and sandy beach.
But malaria had made insidious strides, meanwhile. Dr. Genovese thinks
that by the year 1691 the entire coast was malarious and abandoned like
now, though only within the last two centuries has man actively
co-operated in its dissemination. So long as the woodlands on the plains
are cut down or grazed by goats, relatively little damage is done; but
it spells ruin to denude, in a country like this, the steep slopes of
their timber. Whoever wishes to know what mischief the goats, those
picturesque but pernicious quadrupeds, can do to a mountainous country,
should study the history of St. Helena. [Footnote: By J. C. Melliss
(London, 1875).] Thanks to the goats, Maltese fever has lately been
introduced into Calabria. Man, with his charcoal-burning, has completed
the disaster. What happens? The friable rock, no longer sustained by
plant-life, crashes down with each thunderstorm, blocks up the valleys,
devastating large tracts of fertile land; it creates swamps in the
lowlands, and impedes the outflow of water to the sea.
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