INUNDATIONS IN FRANCE. 475 



In the fifteen years between these tvro great floods, the popu- 

 lation and the rural improvements of the river valleys had much 

 increased, common roads, bridges and railways had been multi- 

 pUed 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 Kke 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 witliin the immediate reach 

 of the swelling waters, yet they frequently destroyed harvests 

 valuable enough to be a matter of national interest, endangered 

 the personal security of the population of important political cen- 

 tres, interrupted communication for days and even weeks togeth- 

 er on great hnes of traffic and travel — thus severing, as it were, 

 all Southwestern France from the rest of the empire — and finally 

 threatened to produce great and permanent geographical changes. 

 The well-being of the whole commonwealth was seen to be in- 

 volved in preventing the recurrence and in limiting the range of 

 such devastations. The Government encouraged scientific inves- 

 tigation of the phenomena and their laws. Their causes, their 

 history, their immediate and remote consequences, and the possi- 

 ble safeguards to be employed against them, have been carefully 

 studied by the most eminent physicists, as well as by the ablest 

 theoretical and practical engineers of France. Many hitherto 

 unobserved facts have been collected, many new hypotheses sug- 

 gested, and many plans, more or less original in character, have 

 been devised for combating the evil ; but thus far, the most com- 

 petent judges are not well agreed as to the mode, or even the pos- 

 sibility, of applying an effectual remedy.* 



son of the year in 1846, occasioned a loss of forty-five millions of francs. 

 " What if," says Dumont, " instead of happening in October, that is, between 

 harvest and seedtime, these floods had occurred before the crops were secured T 

 The damage would have been counted by hundreds of millions." — Des Tra- 

 vaux Publics, p. 99, note. 



* The Telegraph has furnished a means, not indeed of preventing inundar 



