416 PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 



water-course becomes dry, and exhibits a pavement covered with blocks of stone, variously 

 distributed, which the current has conveyed from the upland regions, to be transported 

 farther when its flow is renewed. 



Many remarkable cases of change produced by streams in flood might be quoted from 

 the records of ancient and modern times. One of the rivers of the Roman plain, the 

 Anio, now called the Teverone, has repeatedly committed extensive ravages in that land 

 of classic recollections. Silius Italicus speaks of its gentle flow into the Tiber, but 

 Horace gives it the epithet of pr&ceps, impetuous or headlong, having eye probably to its 

 appearance in inundation. The patrician families of Rome retired to villas upon its 

 banks in summer, attracted by the coolness of its waters, a quality mentioned by Virgil, 

 and by the striking scenery, as at Tivoli, where the beautiful remains of the temple of 

 Vesta, and the fall of the river, constitute a picture which has few equals. In the time of 

 the younger Pliny, there was a flood on the Anio, which is the subject of one of his letters 

 to Macrinus : "Is the season with you as rude and boisterous as it is with us ? All 

 here is tempest and inundation ; 'the Tiber has swelled its channel, and overflowed its 

 banks far and wide ; though the wise precaution of the Emperor had guarded against this 

 evil, by cutting several outlets to the river ; it has nevertheless flooded all the fields and 

 valleys, and entirely overspread the whole face of the flat country. It seems to have 

 gone out to meet those rivers which it used to receive and carry off in one intermingled 

 stream ; and has driven them back to deluge those countries it could not reach itself. 

 That most delightful of rivers, the Anio, which seems invited and detained in its course 

 by the charming villas that are situated upon its banks, has almost entirely rooted 

 up and carried away the woods which shaded its borders. It has overthrown whole 

 mountains, and in endeavouring to find a passage through the ruins that obstructed its 

 way, has forced down houses, and rises over the desolation it has occasioned. The 

 inhabitants of the hill countries, who are situated above the reach of this inundation, have 

 been the melancholy spectators of its dreadful effects, having seen costly furniture, 

 instruments of husbandry, ploughs, and oxen with their drivers, whole herds of cattle, 

 together with the trunks of trees, and beams of the neighbouring villas, floating about in 

 different parts. Nor indeed have these higher places themselves, to which the waters 

 could not rise, escaped the calamity. A continued heavy rain, as destructive as the river 

 itself, poured down in torrents upon them, and has destroyed all the enclosures which 

 divided that fertile country. It has damaged likewise, and even overturned, some of the 

 public buildings, where numbers had been miserably buried in the ruins." Such is Pliny's 

 account of a rise of the Anio, probably in the first century of the Christian era. It is an 

 interesting illustration of the constancy of natural phenomena, that after the lapse of 

 some seventeen centuries, in the year 1826, the scene upon its banks might be described 

 in nearly the words of the preceding relation. After heavy rains in November the river 

 broke its bounds, at the same time permanently widening its own channel in many 

 places, by the power of the current undermining and destroying the cliffs along its course. 

 A considerable eminence, on which stood the church of St. Lucia, and near forty houses 

 of the town of Tivoli, were carried away, and the precipice crowned with the relics of 

 Vesta's temple might have shared the same fate, had the flood risen a few feet higher. 



During the storm of 1829, which ravaged Morayshire and some of the neighbouring 

 countries, a storm, which bore a more remarkable resemblance to a tropical hurricane 

 than any which has visited our climate, at least in recent times, some striking examples 

 occurred of the power of a strong current, in detaching fragments of rock, apparently 

 firmly fixed in their native beds, bearing them away in a mass, and the whole district 

 subject to the influence of the swollen waters of the Spey, Findhorn, Divie, Dee, and 

 Dow, was, at various points, largely modified in its physical aspect. The heavy con- 



