TORRENTS IN EUROPE. * 963 
both more complete and more accessible than that which can 
be gathered from any other source. It is not to be supposed, 
however, that the countries adjacent to France have escaped the 
consequences of a like improvidence. The southern flanks of 
the Alps, and, in a less degree, the northern slope of these 
mountains and the whole chain of the Pyrenees, afford equally 
striking examples of the evils resulting from the wanton sacrifice 
of nature’s safeguards. But I can afford space for few details, 
and as an illustration of the extent of these evils in Italy, I shall 
barely observe that it was calculated ten years ago that four- 
tenths of the area of the Ligurian provinces had been washed 
away or rendered incapable of cultivation in consequence of the 
felling of the woods.* 
Highly colored as these pictures seem, they are not exagge- 
rated, although the hasty tourist through Southern Irance, 
Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Northern Italy, finding little in his 
high-road experiences to justify them, might suppose them so. 
The lines of communication by locomotive-train and diligence 
lead generally over safer ground, and it is only when they ascend 
the Alpine passes aud traverse the mountain chains, that scenes 
somewhat resembling those just described fall under the eye of 
the ordinary traveller. But the extension of the sphere of de- 
vastation, by the degradation of the mountains and the trans- 
portation of their débris, is producing analogous effects upon 
the lower ridges of the Alps and the plains which skirt them ; 
and even now one needs but an hour’s departure from some 
great thoroughfares to reach sites where the genius of destruc- 
tion revels as wildly as in the most frightful of the abysses 
which Blanqui has painted.t+ 
* Annali di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, vol. i., p. 77. Similar in- 
stances of the erosive power of running water might be collected by hundreds 
from the narratives of travellers in warm countries. The energy of the tor- 
rents of the Himalayas is such that the brothers Schlagintweit believe that 
they will cut gorges through that lofty chain wide enough to admit the pas- 
sage of currents of warm wind from the south, and thereby modify the cli- 
mate of the countries lying to the north of the mountains. 
+ The Skalira-Tobel, for instance, near Coire. See the description of this 
