THE EFFECT OF THE FOREST UPON WATERS 171 



soil, bare and dried up. The forests wise observers of this region. In the 



were laid waste during the revolution- eighteenth century Froidour pointed 



ary period ; the devastation of the out the fact that the forests near the 



woods, over pasturing, clearings, and banks of the Garonne had been laid 



fires have so reduced the forested hold- waste and wrote that it was urgent "to 



ings that stony and denuded slopes ap- take an interest in replanting them." 



peared in the valley instead of verdant A century later, Dralet uttered a new 



forests of fir and that "immense cry of alarm. "Several rivers formerly 



stretches of greensward, dilapidated, navigable or floatable," he wrote, in 



have given place to gray rock, like a 1813, "lack water in the summer only 



mantle worn even to the thread." The to the degree that the mountains in 



forest of Issaux, which extended in which they rise have been stripped of 



1765 over 3,580 hectares, covers only their pastures and forests." Elsewhere 



1,380 hectares. 13 he says: "If tradition and ancient doc- 



The Adour, at the beginning of the uments are consulted, it will be found 



eighteenth century, still floated the that several streams, formerly floatable 



mountain timber ; it is no longer navi- in the valleys, can no longer be used at 



gable in the province of Hautes- all, or at least until after their conflu- 



Pyrenees since the destruction of the ence with other streams in the plains ; 



immense forests of Baudean and of this misfortune has come in those parts 



Bagneres, which covered a part of its of the chain where the inhabitants have 



drainage basin. "Every autumn now made extensive clearings, while the 



all the mills in the lower valley, being rivers and streams in the valleys where 



without power, are idle for months." the forests have been respected have 



Finally, the Garonne, frequented be- kept their volume of water." 

 fore the Roman conquest by the boats The belief that the presence of for- 

 of the Gallic tribes which conveyed to ests exerts a favorable influence in 

 the markets on the two shores of the preventing floods and in sustaining 

 river the pottery made by the inhabit- springs and streams, is not a new one, 

 ants of Tolosa, later a vast emporium as we have stated. Eleven hundred 

 for merchandise, coming from Rome, years before our era Tiglath-pileser, 

 from Aries and Narbonne to Aquitaine, King of Nineveh, undertook the good 

 traveled unceasingly by associations of work of reforestation on the plains of 

 boatmen (scapharii ittricularii} , whose Mesopotamia and upon the barren 

 privileges were afterwards recognized slopes of Mount Masias. The inscrip- 

 in the twelfth century by the counts of tion carved on the rocks of Bavian near 

 Toulouse and became in the fifteenth the springs of Haser, tells us that Sen- 

 century the source of considerable for- nacherib also had forests planted. Pliny 

 tunes for the trading corporations the the Elder, the celebrated naturalist, 

 Garonne is subject to floods during pointed out in his time floods caused 

 which its volurn^ increases to 262 times by clearings: "Plerurnque vere damnosi 

 the low-water flow, and threatens the torrcntes corrivantitr detracta collibus 

 city of Toulouse with its terrible inun- silva, continere nimbos ac digercre con- 

 dations, so severely experienced in sneta" 



1875. Modern geographers do not From 1684 the engineer, Viviana, 

 hesitate to attribute this sad state of taught, in relation to the floods in the 

 affairs to the deforestation of the Arno, that the presence of forests sup- 

 Pyrenees, plemented the action of dams in holding 



But the relation that exists between back water and preventing erosion, 



the denudation of the soil and the At the beginning of the nineteenth 



change in the rate of stream-flow had century, as we have seen, Dralet at- 



been noticed for a long time by the tributed to deforestation in the Pyr- 



"Pierre Buffault, Forets et Gaves du Pays d'Aspe, Bordeaux, 1904, imn. J. Durand. 

 14 L. A. Fabre, L'Frosion pyreneenne et les alluvions de la Garonne, Paris, 1902, A. Colin. 



