yo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



must be hauled over them, especially anything so bulky as wood.* 

 Further, scarcity of timber means the cessation of many lucrative in- 

 dustries which use wood for their raw material, and which are espe- 

 cially desirable as affording employment during portions of the year, 

 when agriculture or the care of flocks does not call for all of the farm- 

 er's time. 



3. There is the derangement of climate and rainfall. It is by no 

 means certain that, at least, in some situations, more rain will not fall 

 in a year upon a well-wooded than upon a bare region. Certainly, 

 what does fall will not evai^orate, and be carried away by the winds 

 as quickly. Sudden changes of temperature, and the resulting vio- 

 lent winds are also less liable to occur where woods abound. A 

 forest is a better barrier against wind than a stone wall of equal 

 height, because it divides its force, and does not stop it all at once, 

 causing eddies and rebounds which may do damage elsewhere. 



In these and other ways many provinces of Southern France had 

 been (before 1860) for several generations gradually growing poorer. 

 By a misuse of the right of equal common pasturage upon the lands 

 belonging to the communes, the richer proprietors who had large 

 flocks could get the lion's share of the scanty store. To lighten 

 taxes, sheep and goats were admitted from Provence and the Mari- 

 time Alps to summer pasturage, as at that season their own country 

 was so dry and parched that they could find no food. Cezanne, in his 

 supplement to the great work of Surell on the " Torrents of the High 

 Alps," says these migratory flocks " obstruct the roads, and are the 

 occasion of all kinds of disorder. They arrive at the pastures famished, 

 and in a few days destroy the sprouting herb, the hope of the entire 

 season. . . . One can follow the trail of the sheep of Provence by the 

 disappearance of all vegetation. They necessarily migrate in flocks of 

 one thousand or twelve hundred, and after reaching the pastures retain 

 the habit — which they acquire upon the road — of crowding together and 

 struggling for every spear of grass. In the flinty plains of the south 

 they find very scanty fare, and, to satisfy hunger, are obliged to move 

 stones with their noses and feet, and to dig the soil quite down to 

 the roots of the plants which they devour. Upon the mountains they 

 continue the same destructive habits, and one can understand what 

 must be the effect upon the light soil, scarcely fixed upon the slopes, 

 of such diorgins: and tearing bv these millions of animals " (pp. 245, 

 246). 



The little ready money which the pasture-fee of these southern 



* Ladoucette, in hig "Histoire, Topographie, Antiquites, Usages, Dialectes des Hautes 

 Alpes," says that the peasant of Devoluy often goes a distance of five hours, over rocks 

 and precipices, for a single man's load of wood ; and that the justice of the peace for 

 that cantonment had, in the course of forty-three years, but once heard the voice of the 

 nightingale. Thanks to reforesting, wood and nightingales' songs are there now in abun- 

 dance. 



