948 TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 
period the Crusaders brought home from Palestine, with much 
other knowledge gathered from the wiser Moslems, the art of 
securing the hillsides and making them productive by terracing 
and irrigation. The forests which covered the mountains se- 
cured an abundant flow of springs, and the process of clearing 
the soil went on so slowly that, for centuries, neither the want of 
timber and fuel, nor the other evils about to be depicted, were 
seriously felt. Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, these pro- 
vinces were well wooded, and famous for the fertility and 
abundance, not only of the low grounds, but of the hills. 
Such was the state of things at the close of the fifteenth cen- 
tury. The statistics of the seventeenth show that while there 
had been an increase of prosperity and population in Lower 
Provence, as well as in the correspondingly situated parts of 
the other two provinces I have mentioned, there was an alarming 
decrease both in the wealth and in the population of Upper Pro- 
vence and Dauphiny, although, by the clearing of the forests, a 
great extent of plough-land and pasturage had been added to 
the soil before reduced to cultivation. It was found, in fact, 
that the augmented violence of the torrents had swept away, or 
buried in sand and gravel, more land than had been reclaimed 
by clearing ; and the taxes computed by fires or habitations 
underwent several successive reductions in consequence of the 
gradual abandonment of the wasted soil by its starving occu- 
pants. The growth of the large towns on and near the Rhone 
and the coast, their advance in commerce and industry, and the 
not, but in his treatise, Des Haux et Fontaines, he thus recommends it, by 
way of reply to the objections of ‘‘ Théorique,” who had expressed the fear 
that ‘‘the waters which rush violently down from the heights of the moun- 
tain would bring with them much earth, sand, and other things,” and thus spoil 
the artificial fountain that ‘‘ Practique” was teaching him to make: ‘‘ And 
for hindrance of the mischiefs of great waters which may be gathered in 
few hours by great storms, when thou shalt have made ready thy parterre to 
receive the water, thou must lay great stones athwart the deep channels 
which lead to thy parterre. And so the force of the rushing currents shall be 
deadened, and thy water shall flow peacefully into his cisterns.”— Huvres 
Completes, p. 173. 
