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---continuation commentary #16b---- When the forest lies far from the inhabitant's dwelling, or when a first settlement is being established there, the farmer must construct flimsy shacks for his workmen in the forests' shadows, which are then abandoned when the forest has been altogether cut away; provisions cannot be obtained except through commerce with the neighboring areas. For all these reasons it makes sense that this band is quite often seized with fevers, dysentery or other sicknesses, or, if the time of the dry season has been set as a limit, that they are unable to extirpate the forest completely; if this happens, a number of trunks remain standing amidst the ruin of the others, to be cast down and burned later with more difficulty.
Elsewhere it happens that the timber is felled but not burned. For the flames are frequently checked by a changed wind or the onset of a storm, and a great many trunks untouched by the fire are left in the fields; these later, after rot has set in, burn with more trouble.This is without fail thought a great inconvenience, because an orderly planting arrangement is destroyed when immense trunks lie scattered about here and there. Yet even when the job has come off very well, the farmer has not procured for himself a field that can be deemed sufficiently suitable for cultivation. Rather, ground of this kind appears not at all flat, but generally disordered, broken up here and there with rises and dips; many wooden trunk roots snake through the ground, from which the more or less carbonized bottom parts of trees jut up at random. From time to time you see even great trees that, left behind in the tumult and touched by the fire only at their outermost edges, attest for many years to come the rough manner in which the forest was laid waste. In some places the soil is nourished
by the ash and carbon produced when the forests burn; in others it remains
as before. And so, in fields acquired by this rather perverse method,
the farmer sows useful plants, not knowing whether they will always find
the same soil conditions, nor seeing to it that they receive the sun's
kind rays or the salubrious alternations of the winds (risking excess
moisture and rot), nor taking care, by digging ditches in the area, to
bring healthful water to the crops or to lead excess away. For the rest,
since soil of this kind has through many centuries been used, as it were,
to produce only the primary vegetation of the forest, it is certainly
capable of raising up, with its abundant nutrients, a new kind of plants
alien to it; and so at the start, for three or four years, the cultivators
reap a plentiful harvest. But when the juices which these plants draw
away most begin to fail, the harvest too turns out more meagre, and the
farmer abandons the soil he had made his by ruining countless trees of
the greatest antiquity, soon to work the same devastation elsewhere.
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