256 FLOODS OF THE ARDECHE. 
continued and progressive reduction in the number of acres 
devoted to agriculture; every year will aggravate the evil, 
and in half a century France will count more ruins, and a de- 
partment the less.” 
Time has verified the predictions of De Bonville. The later 
census returns show a progressive diminution in the population 
of the departments of the Lower Alps, the Isére, Drome, 
Ariége, the Upper and the Lower Pyrenees, Lozere, the Ar- 
dennes, Doubs, the Vosges, and, in short, in all the provinces 
formerly remarkable for their forests. This diminution is not 
to be ascribed to a passion for foreign emigration, as in Ireland, 
and in parts of Germany and of Italy; it is simply a transfer 
of population from one part of the empire to another, from 
soils which human foily has rendered uninhabitable, by ruth- 
lessly depriving them of their natural advantages and securi- 
ties, to provinces where the face of the earth was so formed by 
nature as to need no such safeguards, and where, consequently, 
she preserves her outlines in spite of the wasteful improvidence 
of man.* 
Floods of the Ardéche. 
The River Ardéche, in the French department of that name, 
has a perennial current in a considerable part of its course, and 
therefore is not, technically speaking, a torrent; but the peculiar 
character and violence of its floods is due to the action of the 
torrents which discharge themselves into it in its upper valley, 
and to the rapidity of the flow of the water of precipitation 
* Between 1851 and 1856 the population of Languedoc and Provence had 
increased by 101,000 souls. The augmentation, however, was wholly in the 
provinces of the plains, where all the principal cities are found. In these 
provinces the increase was 204,000, while in the mountain provinces there was 
a diminution of 103,000. The reduction of the area of arable land is perhaps 
even more striking. In 1842 the department of the Lower Alps possessed 
99,000 hectares, or nearly 245,000 acres, of cultivated soil. In 1852 it had 
but 74,000 hectares. In other words, in ten years 25,000 hectares, or 61,000 
acres, had been washed away, or rendered worthless for cultivation, by torrents 
and the abuses of pasturage.—CLav, “tudes, pp. 66, 67. 
