100 MODERN FOREST ECONOMY. 



quered, and took the form of an actual outburst and 

 rupture, with consequences which may be more easily 

 imagined than described.' 



All of these evils were evils consequent on the destruc- 

 tion of woods. And as it was there, so has it been else- 

 where. 



Of what has been effected in France, Surell, to whom 

 we are indebted for the discovery and exposition of 

 the natural history of torrents, has written : ' There the 

 roads, the dwellings, the cultivated crops, have been swal- 

 lowed up by mountains of moving sand, as in the Alps 

 they have been buried by the dejections of torrents. And 

 there may be cited entire villages doomed to destruction, 

 while the time of their perishing may be predicted 

 with precision, as the scourge advances with a regular 

 step. Had it been left to itself, the department of the 

 Landes would have seen its littoral transformed by insen- 

 sible degrees into a desert of sand, interspersed with 

 perfidious marshes, which, extending themselves from 

 the Adour to the Garonne, and marching onwards towards 

 the interior of the country, were threatening to invade 

 every place up to the gates of Bordeaux, 



' When, in 1780, Bremontier, Ingenieur des ponts et 

 chaussees, after having attacked on its scientific side the 

 phenomenon of the march of dunes, came to propose a 

 regular project of plantations as the only defence which 

 could be opposed to them successfully, there were not 

 awanting those who cried out at first in regard to what 

 was called the impossibility of applying his system. 



' It is the misfortune of some men, of too positive a 

 nature, to see nothing, and believe nothing, beyond what 

 is already existing before them. To them everything, 

 save the palpable reality present to them, is a Utopia or 

 dream, as if reason did not permit us to foresee and affirm 

 with complete certainty absent facts known through the 

 logical connection which they sustain with other facts 

 already known to us. 



