PROTECTION AGAINST AVALANCHES. 291 
1846, and swept off more than 15,000 pine-trees. The path 
once opened down the flanks of the mountain, the evil is almost 
beyond remedy. The snow sometimes carries off the earth 
from the face of the rock, or, if the soil is left, fresh slides 
every winter destroy the young plantations, and the restoration 
of the wood becomes impossible. The track widens with every 
new avalanche. Dwellings and their occupants are buried in 
the snow, or swept away by the rushing mass, or by the furious 
blasts it occasions through the displacement of the air; roads 
and bridges are destroyed; rivers blocked up, which swell till 
they overflow the valley above, and then, bursting their snowy 
barrier, flood the fields below with all the horrors of a winter 
inundation.* 
* The importance of the wood in preventing avalanches is well illustrated 
by the fact that, where the forest is wanting, the inhabitants of localities ex- 
posed to snow-slides often supply the place of the trees by driving stakes 
through the snow into the ground, and thus checking its propensity to slip. 
The woods themselves are sometimes thus protected against avalanches 
originating on slopes above them, and asa further security, small trees are 
cut down along the upper line of the forest, and laid against the trunks of 
larger trees, transversely to the path of the slide, to serve as a fence or dam 
to the motion of an incipient avalanche, which may by this means be arrested 
before it acquires a destructive velocity and force. 
In the volume cited in the text, Reclus informs us that ‘‘ the village and 
the great thermal establishment of Baréges in the Pyrenees were threatened 
yearly by avalanches which precipitated themselves from a height of 1,200 
métres and at an angle of 35 degrees; so that the inhabitants had been obliged 
to leave large spaces between the different quarters of the town for the free 
passage of the descending masses. Attempts have been recently made to 
prevent these avalanches by means similar to those employed by the Swiss 
mountaineers. They cut terraces three or four yards in width across the 
mountain slopes and supported these terraces by a row of iron piles. Wattled 
fences, with here and there a wall of stone, shelter the young shoots of trees, 
which grow up by degrees under the protection of these defences. Until 
natural trees are ready to arrest the snows, these artificial supports take 
their place and do their duty very well. The only avalanche which swept 
down the slope in the year 1860, when these works were completed, did not 
amount to 350 cubic yards, while the masses which fell before this work was 
undertaken contained from 75,000 to 80,000 cubic yards..—La Terre, vol. i., 
p. 283. 
