EVILS rOLLOWINa DESTRUCTION OE FOEESTS. 63 



in river beds in which these forests could exercise upon 

 them but little influence. 



Such floods are not peculiar to the Continent of Europe : 

 elsewhere, under like conditions, like floods have occurred. 



Captain Hall, in his Manual of South African Geography, 

 says (p. 95)— 'In Great and Little Namaqualand, the 

 Kalihara Desert, and the whole of the region situated on 

 the southern , slope of the Nieuweveld and Roggeveld 

 Mountains, whole years may elapse without the pheno- 

 mena of a running stream, and yet the magnitude of the 

 dry water-courses of the Buffalo, Hartebeest, and Oup or 

 Borradaile River, all tributaries of the Orange, show how 

 immense must be the torrents that sometimes sweep along 

 them. The writer of this has seen the bed of the Great 

 Fish River perfectly dry, and within twenty-four hours a 

 torrent thirty feet deep and several hundred feet wide was 

 roaring through it. In February 1848 the Kat River 

 suddenly rose upwards of fifty feet in the course of a few 

 hours, sweeping seventeen feet above the roadway of a 

 stone bridge at Fort Beaufort, supposed to have been built 

 high' enough to leave a clear waterway to the highest flood 

 ever before remembered. The Gamtoos, Gauritz, and all 

 the other rivers draining the Karroo,, are also subject to 

 very sudden rises, although generally but dry water chan- 

 nels. The periodical rains falling in the mountains near 

 its sources, between September and March, also swell the 

 Orange River to a great extent, and large portions of land 

 along its banks are then inundated.' 



In an ofiicial report which I made to the Government of 

 the Colony in 1864, it is stated : — ' I have seen the Tarka, 

 the Fish River, the Keiskamma, and the Buffalo in their 

 might. I have crossed the bed of the first-mentioned in a 

 box suspended from a rope stretching from trees on the 

 opposite banks, while the river torrent was tearing along 

 below, twenty-two feet deep,as ascertained by measurement, 

 where forty-eight hours before the depth was only eighteen 

 inches. I have been told by a gentleman who had given 



F 



