238 ACTION OP FORESTS ON THE FLOW OF RIVERS. 



themselves, so to speak, in their very birth, and through the effect 

 alone of that equilibrium to which reference has already been made. 



" Stability cannot establish itself so speedily on beds which are 

 scarcely formed, and in the midst of lands which offer still so much 

 food for erosion by the waters ; it is a work which demands time, and 

 which is never entirely consummated until the mountain has been 

 gnawed away to the quick, to its last ridge. 



" Amongst the great number of extinct torrents, of which the 

 basins are wooded, there are some, the forests of which have been 

 subjected to the commune rigime, and have fallen in part under the 

 axe of the inhabitants. Very well, the result of this destruction of 

 trees has been to rekindle the violence of the torrents, which only 

 slumbered. There have been seen thus peaceful streams give place 

 to furious torrents, which the faU of the wood had re-awakened from 

 their long sleep, and which vomited forth new masses of dejection on 

 beds of deposit, which had been cultivated without suspicion from 

 time immemorial. This is what has been remarked more especially 

 after the excessive destruction of woods which followed the first years 

 of the Revolution ; the devastations of many great torrents only date 

 from this epoch." 



And once more, " This last fact completes all that need be said in 

 regard to the influence of forests. In seeming these show themselves 

 almost everywhere on the body of extinct torrents, one may suppose 

 that these had first died, and that the woods had then seized upon 

 them when the extinction had been completed, and when the soil of 

 the neighbourhood became stable, permitted vegetation to develop 

 itself in safety : the forest would then only have been one of the 

 effects of the extinction of these, instead of being the cause of it. 

 But then the destruction of the woods would only have restored 

 things to their primitive state, and the torrents ought to have been 

 able to continue extinct after the taking away of the woods as it was 

 before their appearance there— and this is exactly what does not 

 happen. It has sufficed to clear away the woods to see the devasta- 

 tions immediately reappear. It must be then the forests which, by 

 their permanent appearance on the soil, hindered the devastations, 

 and it is the forests, in taking possession of the soil, which have 

 caused them to cease — and the extinction of the torrents is so com- 

 pletely their work that it begins, continues, and disappears with 

 them, the effect ceasing immediately with the cause. 



" One sees by this that the action of forests is not confined to pre- 

 ventiiig the creation of new ton-ents, but that it is sufficiently 



