IMPORTANCE OF SUMMER RAINS. 915 
It may be proper to observe here that in Italy, and in many 
parts of Spain and France, the Alps, the Apennines, and the 
Pyrenees, not to speak of less important mountains, perform 
the functions which provident nature has in other regions assign- 
ed to the forest, that is, they act as reservoirs wherein is accu- 
mulated in winter a supply of moisture to nourish the parched 
plains during the droughts of summer. Hence, however enor- 
mous may be the evils which have accrued to the above-men- 
tioned countries from the destruction of the woods, the absolute 
desolation which would otherwise have smitten them through the 
folly of man, has been partially prevented by those natural 
dispositions, by means of which there are stored up in the 
glaciers, in the snow-fields, and in the basins of mountains and 
valleys, vast deposits of condensed moisture which are after- 
wards distributed in a liquid form during the season in which 
the atmosphere furnishes a slender supply of the beneficent 
fluid so indispensable to vegetable and animal life.* 
Summer Lains, Importance of. 
Babinet quotes a French proverb: “Summer rain wets 
nothing,” and explains it by saying that at that season the rain- 
of the soil in natural forests, have been, I understand, denied by Mr. T. Mee- 
han, a distinguished American naturalist, in a paper which I have not seen. 
He is quoted as maintaining, among other highly questionable propositions, 
that no ground is ‘‘ so dry in its subsoil as that which sustains a forest on its 
surface.” In open, artificially planted woods, with a smooth and regular sur- 
face, and especially in forests where the fallen leaves and branches are annu- 
ally burnt or carried off, both the superficial and the subjacent strata may, 
under certain circumstances, become dry, but this rarely, if ever, happensin a 
wood of spontaneous growth, undeprived of the protection afforded by its own 
droppings, and of the natural accidents of surface which tend to the retention 
of water. See, on this point, a very able article by Mr. Henry Stewart, in 
the New York Tribune of November 25, 1873. 
* The accumulation of snow and ice upon the Alps and other mountains— 
which often fills up valleys to the height of hundreds of feet—is due not 
only to the fall of congealed and crystallized vapor in the form of snow, to the 
condensation of atmospheric vapor on the surface of snow-fields and glaciers, 
and to a temperature which prevents the rapid melting of snow, but also to 
