LANDSLIPS AND AVAIjANOHES. 247 



clay, and inclining rapidly towards the village. Much earth remained upon 

 the rock, in irregular masses, but the woods had been felled, and the water 

 had free access to the surface, and to the crevices which sun and frost had 

 already produced in the rock, and, of course, to the slimy stratum beneath. 

 The whole summer of 1806 had been very wet, and an almost incessant 

 deluge of rain had fallen the day preceding the catastrophe, as well as on 

 that of its occurrence. All conditions, then, were favourable to the sliding 

 of the rock, and, in obedience to the laws of gravitation, it precipitated 

 itself into the valley as soon as its adhesion to the earth beneath it was 

 destroyed by the conversion of the latter into a viscous paste. The mass 

 that fell measured between two and a half and three miles in length by one 

 thousand feet in width, and its average thickness is thought to have been 

 about a hundred feet. The highest portion of the mountain was more 

 than three thousand feet above the village, and the momentum acquired 

 by the rocks and earth in their descent carried huge blocks of stone far up 

 the opposite slope of the Rigi. 



" The Piz, which fell into the Cordevole, rested on a steeply inclined stra- 

 tum of limestone, with a thin layer of calcareous marl intervening, which, 

 by long exposure to frost and the infiltration of water, had lost its original 

 consistence, and become a loose and slippery mass instead of a cohesive and 

 tenacious bed." 



He then goes on to say, — " In Switzerland and other snowy and 

 mountainous countries, forests render a most important service by pre- 

 venting the formation and fall of destructive avalanches, and in many parts 

 of the Alps exposed to this catastrophe the woods are protected, though 

 too often ineffectually, by law. No forest, indeed, could arrest a large 

 avalanche once in full motion, but the mechanical resistance afforded by 

 the trees prevents their formation, both by obstructing the wind, which 

 gives to the dry snow of the Stauh-Lawine, or dust avalanche, its first 

 impulse, and by checking the disposition of moist snow to gather itself into 

 what is called the Rtitsch-Lawine, or sliding avalanche. Marschand states 

 that the very first winter after the felling of the trees on the higher part of 

 the declivity between Saanen and Gsteig, where the snow had never been 

 known to slide, an avalanche formed itself in the clearing, thundered 

 down the mountain, and overthrew and carried with it a hitherto un- 

 violated forest to the amount of nearly a million cubic feet of timber. 

 Elis^e Reclus informs us, in his remarkable work La Terre, vol.' i. p. 212, 

 that a mountain, which rises to the south of the Pyrensean village Ara- 

 guanet in the upper valley of the -Neste, having been partially stripped of 

 its woods, a formidable avalanche rushed down from a plateau above in 

 1846, and swept off more than 15,000 pine-trees. The path once opened 

 down the flanks of the mountain, the evil is almost beyond remedy. The 

 snow sometimes carries off the earth from the face of the rock, or, if the 

 soil is left, fresh slides every winter destroy the young plantations, and the 

 restoration of the wood becomes impossible. The track widens with every 

 new avalanche. Dwellings and their occupants are buried in the snow, or 

 swept away by the rushing mass, or by the furious blasts it occasions through 

 the displa"cement of the air; roads and bridges are destroyed; rivers 

 blocked up, which swell till they overflow the valley above, and then, 

 bursting their snowy barrier, flood the fields below with all the horrors of a 

 winter inundation." 



And he adds in a foot-note, — " The importance of the wood in preventing 



