952, TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 
same character 1o the provinces of Dauphiny, Provence, and 
Auvergne, and, though he visited, with the eye of an attentive 
and practised observer, many of the scenes since blasted with 
the wild desolation described by Blanqui, the Durance and a 
part of the course of the Loire are the only streams he men- 
tions as inflicting serious injury by their floods. The ravages 
of the torrents had, indeed, as we have seen, commenced earlier 
in some other localities, but we are authorized to infer that they 
were, in Young’s time, too limited in range, and relatively too 
insignificant, to require notice in a general view of the pro- 
vinces where they have now ruined so large a proportion of 
the soil. 
But I resume my citations. 
“T do not exaggerate,” says Blanqui. “ When I shall have 
finished my description and designated localities by their 
names, there will rise, I am sure, more than one voice from the 
spots themselves, to attest the rigorous exactness of this picture 
of their wretchedness. I have never seen its equal even in the 
Kabyle villages of the province of Constantine ; for there you 
can travel on horseback, and you find grass in the spring, 
whereas in more than fifty communes in the Alps there is abso- 
lutely nothing. 
“The clear, brilliant, Alpine sky of Embrun, of Gap, of 
Barcelonette, and of Digne, which for months is without a 
cloud, produces droughts interrupted only by diluvial rains 
like those of the tropics. The abuse of the right of pasturage 
and the felling of the woods have stripped the soil of all its 
grass and all its trees, and the scorching sun bakes it to the 
consistence of porphyry. When moistened by the rain, as it 
has neither support nor cohesion, it rolls down to the valleys, 
sometimes in floods resembling black, yellow, or reddish lava, 
sometimes in streams of pebbles, and even huge blocks of 
stone, which pour down with a frightful roar, and in their 
magnificent valley nature had been prodigal of her gifts. Its inhabitants have 
blindly revelled in her favors, and fallen asleep in the midst of her profusion,” 
—BECQUEREL, .Des Climats, etc., p. 514. 
