PROTECTION AGAINST AVALANCHES. 283 



Lawine^ or dust-avalanche, its first impulse, and by checking the 

 •disposition of moist snow to gather itself into what is called the 

 RutsclirLawine^ or sliding avalanche, Marchand states that, the 

 very first winter after the felling of the trees on the higher part 

 of a declivity between Saanen and Gsteig where the snow had 

 never been known to shde, an avalanche formed itself in the 

 clearing, thundered down the mountain, and overthrew and car- 

 ried with it a hitherto unviolated forest to the amount of nearly 

 a million cubic feet of timber.* Elisee Reclus informs us in his 

 remarkable work. La Terre, vol. i., p. 212, that a mountain, 

 which rises to the south of the Pyrensean village Araguanet in 

 the upper valley of the K^este, having been partially stripped of 

 its woods, a formidable avalanche rushed down from a plateau 

 above in 18-i6, 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. Dwelhngs and their occupants are buried in the 

 snow, or swept away by the rusliing 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 bar- 

 rier, flood the fields below with all the horrors of a winter inun- 

 dation, f 



* Entwaldung der Oehirge, p. 41. 



f The importance of the wood in preventing avalanches is -n-ell 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 orig- 

 inating on slopes above them, and as a 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 Bareges in the Pyrenees were threatened yearly 

 by avalanches which precipitated themselves from a height of 1,200 mttrea 

 Bnd at an angle of 35 degrees ; so that the inhabitants had been obliged to 



