250 FLOODS OF THE AEDECHE. 



able for their forests. This dimimition is not to be ascribed to a 

 passion for foreign emigration, as in Ireland, and in parts of Ger- 

 many and of Italy ; it is simply a transfer of population from one 

 part of the empire to another, from soils which human folly has 

 rendered uninhabitable, by ruthlessly depriving them of their nat- 

 ural advantages and securities, to provinces where the face of the 

 earth was so formed by nature as to need no such safeguards, and 

 where, consequently, she preserves her outlines in spite of the 

 wasteful improvidence of man.* 



Floods of the Ardeche. 



The River Ardeche, in the French department of that name, 

 has a perennial current in a considerable part of its course, and 

 therefore is not, technically speaking, a torrent ; but the pecuhar 

 character and violence of its floods is due to the action of the tor- 

 rents which discharge themselves into it in its upper vaUey, and 

 to the rapidity of the flow of the water of precipitation from the 

 surface of a basin now almost bared of its once luxuriant woods.f 

 A notice of these floods may therefore not inappropriately be in- 

 troduced in this place. 



The floods of the Ardeche and other mountain streams are at- 



* Between 1851 and 1856 the population of Languedoc and Provence had 

 increased by 101,000 souls. The augmentation, however, was wholly in the 

 provinces of the plains, where all the principal cities are found. In these 

 provinces the increase was 204,000, while in the mountain provinces there was 

 a diminution of 103,000. The reduction of the area of arable land is perhaps 

 even more striliing. In 1842 the department of the Lower Alps possessed 99,- 

 000 hectares, or nearly 245,000 acres, of cultivated soil. In 1852 it had but 

 74,000 hectares. In other words, in ten years 25,000 hectares, or 61,000 acres, 

 had been washed away, or rendered worthless for cultivation, by torrents and 

 the abuses of pasturage.— Clave, Mudes, pp. 66, 67. 



f The original forests in which the basin of the Ardeche was rich have been 

 rapidly disappearing for many years, and the terrific violence of the inunda- 

 tions which are now laying it waste is ascribed, by the ablest investigators, to 

 that cause. In an article inserted in the Annales Forestihres for 1843, quoted 

 by Hohenstein, Ber Wold, p. 177, it is said that about one-third of the area of 

 the department had already become absolutely barren, in consequence of clear- 

 ing, and that the destruction of the woods was still going on with great rapid- 

 ity. New torrents were constantly forming, and they were estimated to have 

 covered more than 70,000 acres of good land, or one-eighth of the surface of 

 the department, with sand and gravel. 



