288 MOUNTAIN SLIDES. 
a few years, was buried by a vast land-slip, probably about the 
time of Probus, but no historical record of the event has sur- 
vived to us. 
On the 14th of February, 1855, the hill of Belmonte, a little 
below the parish of San Stefano, in Tuscany, slid into the val- 
ley of the Tiber, which consequently flooded the village to the 
depth of fifty feet, and was finally drained off by a tunnel. 
The mass of débris is stated to have been about 3,500 feet long, 
1,000 wide, and not less than 600 high.* 
Occurrences of this sort have been so numerous in the Alps and 
Apennines, that almost every Italian mountain commune has its 
tradition, its record, or its still visible traces of a great land-slip 
within its own limits. The old chroniclers contain frequent 
notices of such calamities, and Giovanni Villani even records 
the destruction of fifty houses and the loss of many lives by a 
slide of what seems to have been a spur of the hill of San 
Giorgio in the city of Florence, in the year 1284.t 
Such displacements of earth and rocky strata rise to the mag- 
nitude of geological convulsions, but they are of so rare occur- 
rence in countries still covered by the primitive forest, so com- 
mon where the mountains have been stripped of their native 
covering, and, in many cases, so easily explicable by the drench- 
ing of incohesive earth from rain, or the free admission of 
water between the strata of rocks—both of which a coating 
of vegetation would have prevented—that we are justified in 
ascribing them for the most part to the same cause as that to 
which the destructive effects of mountain torrents are chiefly 
due—the felling of the woods. 
* Brancui, Appendix to the Italian translation of Mrs. SOMERVILLE’S 
Physical Geography, p. ¥Xxvi. 
+ Cronica di GIOVANNI VILLANI, lib. vii., cap. 97. For descriptions of 
other slides in Italy, see same author, lib. xi., cap. 26; FANFANI, Antologia 
Italiana, parte ii., p. 95; GIULIANI, Linguaggio vivente della Toscana, 1865, 
lettera 63, 
{ There is good reason for thinking that many of the earth and rock slides 
in the Alps occurred at an earlier period than the origin of the forest vegeta- 
tion which, in later ages, covered the flanks of those mountains. See Bericht 
