490 INUNDATIONS IN FRANCE. 
the month of November, when the crops had all been harvested, 
and the injury inflicted by it upon agriculturists was, therefore, 
of a character to be less severely and less immediately felt than 
the consequences of the inundation of 1856.* 
In the fifteen years between these two great floods, the popu- 
Jation and the rural improvements of the river valleys had 
much increased, common roads, bridges, and railways had been 
multiplied and extended, telegraph lines had been constructed, 
all of which shared in the general ruin, and hence greater and 
more diversified interests were affected by the catastrophe of 
1856 than by any former like calamity. The great flood of 1840 
had excited the attention and roused the sympathies of the 
French people, and the subject was invested with new interest 
by the still more formidable character of the inundations of 
1856. It was felt that these scourges had ceased to be a matter 
of merely local concern, for, although they bore most heavily 
on those whose homes and fields were situated within the im- 
mediate reach of the swelling waters, yet they frequently de- 
stroyed harvests valuable enough to be a matter of national 
interest, endangered the personal security of the population of 
important political centres, interrupted communication for days 
and even weeks together on great lines of traffic and travel— 
thus severing, as it were, all South-western France from the rest 
of the empire—and finally threatened to produce great and per- 
manent geographical changes. The well-being of the whole 
commonwealth was seen to be involved in preventing the recur- 
rence and in limiting the range of such devastations. The 
Government encouraged scientific investigation of the pheno- 
* Notwithstanding this favorable circumstance, the damage done by the 
inundation of 1840 in the valley of the Rhone was estimated at seventy-two 
millions of francs.—CuHampPrion, Les Inondations en France, iv., p. 124. 
Several smaller floods of the Rhone, experienced at a somewhat earlier sea- 
son of the year in 1846, occasioned a loss of forty-five millions of franes. 
‘¢ What if,” says Dumont, ‘ instead of happening in October, that is, between 
harvest and seedtime, they had occurred before the crops were secured? The 
damage would have been counted by hundreds of millions.”.—Des Travaua 
Publics, p. 99, note. 
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