958 FI.OODS OF THE ARDECHE. 
cubic yards to the second, and between twelve o’clock at noon 
on the 10th of September of that year and ten o’clock the next 
morning, the water discharged through the passage in question 
amounted to more than 450,000,000 cubic yards. This quan- 
tity, distributed equally through the basin of the river, would 
cover its entire area to a depth of more than five inches. 
The Ardéche rises so suddenly that, in the inundation of 
1846, the women who were washing in the bed of the river had 
not time to save their linen, and barely escaped with their 
lives, though they instantly fled upon hearing the roar of the 
approaching flood. Its waters and those of its affluents fall 
almost as rapidly, for in less than twenty-four hours after the 
rain has ceased in the Cévennes, where it rises, the Ardeche 
returns within its ordinary channel, even at its junction with 
the Rhone. In the flood of 1772, the water at La Geaume de 
Ruoms, on the Beaume, a tributary of the Ardeche, rose thirty- 
five feet above low water, but the stream was again fordable 
on the evening of the same day. The inundation of 1827 was, 
in this respect, exceptional, for it continued three days, during 
which period the Ardéche poured into the Rhone 1,805,000,000 
cubic yards of water. 
The Nile delivers into the sea 101,000 cubic feet or 3,741 
cubic yards per second, on an average of the whole year.* 
This is equal to 323,222,400 cubic yards per day. In a single 
day of fiood, then, the Ardéche, a river too insignificant to be 
* Sir Jonn F. W. HeRscuen, citing Talabot as his authority, Physical 
Geography (24). 
In an elaborate paper on “Irrigation,” printed in the United States Patent 
Report for 1860, p. 169, it is stated that the volume of water poured into the 
Mediterranean by the Nile in twenty-four hours, at low water, is 150,566,- 
392,368 cubic métres; at high water, 705,514,667,440 cubic métres. Taking 
the mean of these two numbers, the average daily delivery of the Nile would 
be 428,081,059,808 cubic métres, or more than 550,000,000,000 cubic yards. 
There is some enormous mistake, probably a typographical error, in this state- 
ment, which makes the delivery of the Nile seventeen hundred times as great 
as computed by Talabot, and more than physical geographers haye estimated 
the quantity supplied by all the rivers on the face of the globe. 
