INUNDATIONS IN FRANCE. 489 
Physical improvement in this respect, then, cannot be con- 
fined to merely preventive measures, but, in countries subject 
to damage by inundation, means must be contrived to obviate 
dangers and. diminish injuries to which human life and all the 
works of human industry will occasionally be exposed, in spite 
of every effort to lessen the frequency of their recurrence by 
acting directly on the causes that produce them. As every 
civilized country is, in some degree, subject to inundation by 
the overflow of rivers, the evil is a familiar one, and needs no 
general description. In discussing this branch of the subject, 
therefore, I may confine myself chiefly to the means that have 
been or may be employed to resist the force and limit the rava- 
ges of floods, which, left wholly unrestrained, would not only 
inflict immense injury upon the material interests of man, but 
produce geographical revolutions of no little magnitude. 
Inundations of 1856 in France. 
The month of May, 1856, was remarkable for violent and 
almost uninterrupted rains, and most of the river-basins of 
France were inundated to an extraordinary height. In the val- 
leys of the Loire and its affluents, about a million of acres, in- 
cluding many towns and villages, were laid under water, and 
the amount of pecuniary damage was almost incalculable.* 
The flood was not less destructive in the valley of the Rhone, 
and in fact an invasion by a hostile army could hardly have 
been more disastrous to the inhabitants of the plains than was 
this terrible deluge. There had been a flood of this latter 
river in the year 1840, which, for height and quantity of water, 
was almost as remarkable as that of 1856, but it took place in 
water. As Becquerel has observed, common road and railway ditches are 
among the most efficient conduits for the discharge of surface-water which 
man has yet constructed, and of course they are powerful agents in causing 
river inundations. All these channels are, indeed, necessary for the conye- 
nience of man, but this convenience, like every other interference with the or- 
der of nature, must often be purchased at a heavy cost. 
* Cuampion, Les Inondations en France, iii., p. 156, note. 
