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Updated: June 28, 2025
Returning home from our splendid dinner and agreeable day passed at Conte Mannucci's country-seat, while our noble friends amused me with various chat, I thought some unaccountable sparks of fire seemed to strike up and down the hedges as if in perpetual motion, but checked the fancy concluding it a trick of the imagination only; till the evening, which shuts in strangely quick here in Tuscany, grew dark, and exhibited an appearance wholly new to me; whose surprise that no flame followed these wandering fires was not small, when I recollected the state of desiccation that nature suffered, and had done for some months.
Not a thing is forgotten: the round belly with the largest volume and the smallest surface; the hard rind which acts as a preservative against premature desiccation; the terminal nipple where the egg is lodged in a hatching-chamber; and, at the end of the nipple, the felt stopper which admits the air needed by the germ. The Sacred Beetle and Others: chap. xvi.
There is no fact in meteorology better established indeed, it is almost the only one on which meteorologists are agreed than that the carriage of an umbrella produces desiccation of the air; while if it be left at home, aqueous vapour is largely produced, and is soon deposited in the form of rain.
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.
Other parts, fourteen miles below the Kuruman gardens, are pointed out as having contained, within the memory of people now living, hippopotami, and pools sufficient to drown both men and cattle. This failure of water must be chiefly ascribed to the general desiccation of the country, but partly also to the amount of irrigation carried on along both banks of the stream at the mission station.
There is no fact in meteorology better established indeed, it is almost the only one on which meteorologists are agreed than that the carriage of an umbrella produces desiccation of the air; while if it be left at home, aqueous vapour is largely produced, and is soon deposited in the form of rain.
This is another of the proofs of desiccation met with so abundantly throughout the whole country. A number of dead trees lie on this space, some of them imbedded in the mud right in the water.
The whole mass falls into wooden boxes attached to a long table, at which sit the negro workers, who separate the coffee from the husk, and put it into flat copper pans. In these it is carefully and skilfully turned about over a slow fire, until desiccation is complete.
The air which we breathe is loaded with impalpable dust that awaits, for ages perhaps, proper conditions of heat and moisture to give it an ephemeral life that it will lose and acquire by turns. In 1707, Spallanzani found it possible, eleven times in succession, to suspend the life of rotifers submitted to desiccation, and to call it back again by moistening this organic dust with water.
Understanding the nature and the causes of the desiccation of their planet, and possessing engineering science and capabilities far in advance of ours, they may be conceived to have grappled with the stupendous problem of keeping their world in a habitable condition as long as possible.
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