474 ES-UNDATIONS IN FRANCE. 



Physical improvement in tMs respect, then, can not be con- 

 fined to merely preventive measm-es, but, in countries subject to 

 damage by inundation, means must be contrived to obviate dan 

 gers and diminish injuries to which human hfe 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 di- 

 rectly on the causes that produce them. As every civilized coun- 

 try 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 ravages of floods, which, left 

 wholly unrestrained, would not only inflict inmiense injury upon 

 the material interests of man, but produce geographical revolu- 

 tions of no little magnitude. 



InuTidations o/* 1856 m Fra/nce. 



The month of May, 1856, was remarkable for violent and al- 

 most uninterrupted rains, and most of the river-basins of France 

 were inundated to an extraordinary height. In the valleys of 

 the Loire and its affluents, about a million of acres, including 

 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 vaUey of the Ehone, and in fact an in- 

 vasion 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 remark- 

 able as that of 1856, but it took place in the month of November, 

 when the crops had aU 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 

 itiimdation of 1856.f 



* Champion, Les Inondatwns en France, iii., p. 156, note. 



f Notwithstanding tliis favorable circumstance, the damage done by the 

 great inundation of 1840 in the valley of the Rhone was estimated at seventy 

 two millions of francs. — Champion, Les Inondations en France, iv., p. 124. 



Several smaller floods of the Bhone, experienced at a somewhat earlier sea 



