934 INFLUENCE OF THE FOREST ON FLOODS. 
The value of the forest as a mechanical check to a too rapid 
discharge of rain-water was exemplified in numerous instances 
in the great floods of 1866 and 1868, in France and Switzerland, 
and I refer to the observations made on those occasions as of 
special importance because no previous inundations in those 
countries had been so carefully watched and so well described 
by competent investigators. In the French Department of 
Lozére, which was among those most severely injured by the 
inundation of 1866—an inundation caused by diluvial rains, 
not by melted snow—it was everywhere remarked that “ grounds 
covered with wood sustained no damage even on the steepest 
slopes, while in cleared and cultivated fields the very soil 
was washed away and the rocks laid bare by the pouring 
rains 
The Italian journals of the day state that the province of 
Brescia and a part of that of Bergamo, which have heretofore 
been exposed to enormous injury, after every heavy rain, from 
floods of the four principal streams which traverse them, in a 
great degree escaped damage in the terrible inundation of Oc- 
tober, 1872, and their immunity is ascribed to the forestal im- 
provements executed by the former province, within ten or 
twelve years, in the Val Camonica and in the upper basins of 
the other rivers which drain that territory. Similar facts were 
noticed in the extraordinary floods of September and October, 
1868, in the valley of the Upper Rhine, and Coaz makes the 
interesting observation that not even dense greensward was 
so efficient a protection to the earth as trees, because the 
plants, are more frequent than in the native groves of America. See, on eryp- 
togamic and other wood plants, RossMAssLER, Der Wald, pp. 82 et segg., and 
on the importance of such vegetables in checking the flow of water, MENGOTT?, 
Idraulica Fisica e Sperimentale, chapters xvi. and xvii. No writer known to 
me has so well illustrated this function of forest vegetation as Mengotti, though 
both he and Rossmissler ascribe to plants a power of absorbing water from 
the atmosphere which they do not possess, or rather can only rarely exer- 
cise. 
* See, for other like observations, an article entitled Le Reboisement et les 
Inondations, in the Revue des Laux et Foréts of September, 1868, 
