178 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
and even villages, are borne down into the valleys, and the whole 
region, which presents to the eye little but a series of unstable 
slopes of black marl, has an extremely desolate appearance. 
But the damage does not stop here; for the débris is carried 
down to the comparatively level valleys and open country below, 
where it is deposited over fields, roads, railways, and villages, thus 
doing an enormous amount of harm. 
In order to mitigate these terrible evils, the French government 
has undertaken the vast enterprise of regulating the torrent beds 
by means of engineering works, and of afforesting the mountain 
slopes over an area of more than a thousand square miles, 
including nearly two thousand linear miles of torrent beds. The 
cost of such an undertaking is of course very great, but the 
circumstances warrant the expenditure. I had an opportunity of 
studying these works for a fortnight in company with M. 
Demontsey, Inspector-general in charge of them. 
A very similar condition of things prevails in the Hoshiarpur 
district of the Punjab, on which I had a short time ago to submit 
a report to the government of that Indian province. J have 
conversed with men who remember this range of hills covered 
with trees and tall grass, which were the home of the tiger and 
other wild animals; but now there is hardly a blade of grass to 
be seen, and the hills are gradually being washed away and 
deposited on the plains below. T am told that the bed of the 
Mississippi is being blocked by sand and soil brought down from 
the mountains of the “Far West” in consequence of the extensive 
clearings that have been made there during recent years. 
I have not now time to speak longer on these very interesting 
questions, but hope to be able to treat of them in more detail in 
subsequent lectures, as well as to give some account of the works 
undertaken by the French government in Gascony, to arrest the 
progress of the dunes or moving sandhills of the west coast, 
which I had an opportunity of studying a few years ago. 
But although the absence of sufficient home-grown produce has 
not hitherto caused much inconvenience, there is no doubt that, as 
time goes on, we shall have to go farther and farther afield 
for our supplies of timber ; and that, partly owing to increased 
local demand in the foreign countries whence we have been 
accustomed to draw them, and partly to the productive power 
of the forests having become impaired by over-cutting and other 
injurious treatment, our importations from several of the most 
