282 EFFECTS OP CALX ON HEALTH IN FRANCE. 



"Although it may not have been yet uttered by others, this 

 opinion appears founded on strong probabilities, on strong analogies 

 and precise facts, all of which appear to give it a sufficient cer- 

 tainty. 



" It is known that the calcareous principle is one of . the most 

 powerful agents to resist putrefaction. It is employed to make 

 healthy places inhabited by men and animals, in which sickness or 

 contagion is feared j it serves to neutralize the emanations of dead 

 bodies undergoing putrefaction ; it destroys the deleterious exhala- 

 tions which escape from privies, and which sometimes cause the 

 death of those who are employed to cleanse them. 



"It even seems that calcareous countries are unhealthy only 

 when they are interspersed with marshes, or when some causes, 

 foreign to the soil and climate, determine the unhealthiness, as in 

 countries on the borders of the sea, where the flowing of the tide 

 and the mingling of salt and fresh waters infect the air, by the dele- 

 terious emanations of their combination. This cause of unhealthi- 

 ness is regarded as a certain fact ; for salubrity is generally seen to 

 appear whenever this mixture of waters is prevented. 



" In the valleys of rivers bordered by calcareous mountains, 

 which enclose unhealthy countries in their interior, insalubrity 

 commences there only as the calcareous soil, which is attached to 

 the mountain, gives place to silicious soil. In the same plain, 

 and far from a mountain, salubrity is seen to diminish in the same 

 proportion that the calcareous soil of the surface does ; and the 

 communes of Brcsse, which have an abundance of marly or calca- 

 reous soils, are much more remarkable for their salubrity than those 

 on the white lands (terrain blanc*~). While the ponds of Dombe, 

 which are on the silicious soil, appear to be one of the greatest 

 causes of unhealthiness, those of Bresse, which are on calcareous 

 lands, do not show such effects in the country where they are found ; 

 so, likewise, the ponds of the country situated between the Veyle 

 and the Reyssouze, to the north-west of Bourg, which are generally 

 on calcareous soil, do not appear to injure the healthiness of the 

 country in any manner. 



" For the support of this system, we will also cite the ponds of 

 Berri on calcareous soil, whose emanations have nothing unhealthy j 

 the laying dry of the ponds of Parraay, in the canton of Lignieres, 

 has added nothing to the healthiness of a calcareous country na- 



* The reader of M. Puvis's essays on lime and marl, -which -were inserted 

 in Tol. iii. of Farmers' Register, may remember that this provincial term 

 and others (plateaux argiUo-silicieux, &c.) were there used to designate a 

 peculiar kind of soil, destitute of calcareous matter, stiff, intractable, and 

 poor and which seems precisely of the character of the poor ridge lands 

 of lower Virginia, to which calcareous manures are so peculiarly adapted. 

 Translator, 



