What Carolus Magnus, the Chinese, the Spaniards, the duke of Saxony and many other states have decreed in this case, read Arniseus, cap. 19; Boterus, libro 8, cap. 2; Osorius de Rubus gest.  Eman. lib. 11. When a country is overstocked with people, as a pasture is oft overlaid with cattle, they had wont in former times to disburden themselves, by sending out colonies, or by wars, as those old Romans; or by employing them at home about some public buildings, as bridges, roadways, for which those Romans were famous in this island; as Augustus Caesar did in Rome, the Spaniards in their Indian mines, as at Potosi in Peru, where some 30,000 men are still at work, 6000 furnaces ever boiling, &c. [578]aqueducts, bridges, havens, those stupend works of Trajan, Claudius, at [579]Ostium, Dioclesiani Therma, Fucinus Lacus, that Piraeum in Athens, made by Themistocles, ampitheatrums of curious marble, as at Verona, Civitas Philippi, and Heraclea in Thrace, those Appian and Flaminian ways, prodigious works all may witness; and rather than they should be [580]idle, as those [581] Egyptian Pharaohs, Maris, and Sesostris did, to task their subjects to build unnecessary pyramids, obelisks, labyrinths, channels, lakes, gigantic works all, to divert them from rebellion, riot, drunkenness, [582]_Quo scilicet alantur et ne vagando laborare desuescant_.

Another eyesore is that want of conduct and navigable rivers, a great blemish as [583]Boterus, [584]Hippolitus a Collibus, and other politicians hold, if it be neglected in a commonwealth.  Admirable cost and charge is bestowed in the Low Countries on this behalf, in the duchy of Milan, territory of Padua, in [585]France, Italy, China, and so likewise about corrivations of water to moisten and refresh barren grounds, to drain fens, bogs, and moors.  Massinissa made many inward parts of Barbary and Numidia in Africa, before his time incult and horrid, fruitful and bartable by this means.  Great industry is generally used all over the eastern countries in this kind, especially in Egypt, about Babylon and Damascus, as Vertomannus and [586]Gotardus Arthus relate; about Barcelona, Segovia, Murcia, and many other places of Spain, Milan in Italy; by reason of which, their soil is much impoverished, and infinite commodities arise to the inhabitants.

The Turks of late attempted to cut that Isthmus betwixt Africa and Asia, which [587]Sesostris and Darius, and some Pharaohs of Egypt had formerly undertaken, but with ill success, as [588]Diodorus Siculus records, and Pliny, for that Red Sea being three [589]cubits higher than Egypt, would have drowned all the country, caepto destiterant, they left off; yet as the same [590]Diodorus writes, Ptolemy renewed the work many years after, and absolved in it a more opportune place.