352 



FLOODS IN THE VALLEY OF BAGNES. 



[Ch. XV. 



it could be without being changed into mud, and marks were 

 seen in various localities of its having risen on either side of 



than twenty-five feet above its ordinary 



the valley to more than twenty-nve 

 level. Many sheep and cattle were swept away, and the 

 Willey family, nine in number, who in alarm had deserted 

 their house, were destroyed on the banks of the Saco ; seven 

 of their mangled bodies were afterwards found near the 

 river, buried beneath drift-wood and mountain ruins.* Eleven 



the event, the deep channels worn by the 

 avalanches of mud and stone, and tlie immense heaps of 

 boulders and blocks of granite in the river channel, still 

 formed, savs Professor Hubbard, a picturesque feature in the 



years 



after 



t 



When 



Hubbard 



striking ; I 



remar 



although the 



smoothed 



them of so much mud 



continuous parallel and rectilinear furrows, nor any of the 

 fine scratches or strise which characterise glacial action. The 



more 



the bare 



Willey 



t 



White Mountains 



ficant, when compared to those which are occasioned by earth- 



thrown 



down into the hollow of a valley. I shall have opportunities of 

 alluding to inundations of this kind, when treating expressly 

 of earthquakes, and shall content myself at present with 

 selecting an example of a flood due to a different cause. 



>/ 



—The valley of Bagnes 



is one of the largest of the lateral embranchments of the mam 

 valley of the Ehone, above the Lake of Geneva. Its upper por- 

 tion was, in 1818, converted into a lake by the damming up 

 of a narrow pass, by avalanches of snow and ice, precipitated 

 from an elevated ^lacier into the bed of the river Dranse. In 



* Silliman's Journal, vol. xv. No. 2. 

 p. 216. Jan. 1829. 



t Ibid. vol. xxxiv. p. 115. 



I See Lyell's Second Visit to the 

 United States, vol. i. p. 69. 



