166 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
past winter, the whole of the low-lying lands of England have been 
submerged. Now, in March, the railway trains have just ceased 
-carrying boats on some lines; and in Scotland we hear of 
thousands of acres of the richest land lying fallow for the year 
owing to the utter impossibility of working the soil in its present 
water-logged condition. 
Articles in the papers may repeat ad nauseam that engineers 
are to blame for this state of things, and there can be no doubt 
that much more might have been done to regulate the water 
supply of the country than has yet been effected ; but, on the 
other hand, engineers may fairly retort “ Forewarned would be 
forearmed,” and ask why meteorologists did not give them some 
hint of the deluges which were impending. 
Meldrum and others have of late devoted much attention to 
the investigation of a supposed periodicity of rain according 
with that of sunspot frequency, with some measure of success, 
but no one yet has, in his wildest dreams, imagined that he could 
forecast the amount of rainfall for a given district in England 
at the epoch of the next sunspot maximum. 
Talking about floods, however, there is one matter which 
deserves most serious consideration, and is far from encouraging 
for our future prospects. This is that, as a result of civilization, 
floods are increasing in their intensity, the rainfall being sup- 
posed to be unchanged in amount. This appears most unmis- 
takably from the reasoning of M. Wex, the well-known hydraulic 
engineer of Vienna, and he is supported by other authorities. 
Kivers such as the Danube or Volga are gradually, but surely, 
becoming less and less navigable in the upper part of their course, 
while the floods in the lower part are becoming more and more 
disastrous. The reason of this is that the reckless clearing of 
forest land has altered the whole condition of the water flow of 
the country. The land, bared of its forest, can no longer retain 
the rain water which falls on it, and yield it slowly for the 
supply of springs. The rain pours in torrents down the hill 
sides, sweeping before it soil, gravel, and boulders, which it 
deposits in the calmer waters of the river bed, creating shoals 
unknown in more fortunate times ; while, at the same time, this 
rapid discharge of the water from the surface causes a delivery 
within a few days which would have taken weeks or months to 
complete itself under more primitive conditions. The water 
which should have lain in the ground as provision against the 
summer drought is discharged at once, to the immediate detri- 
ment of the lower country inundated by the rapid rise of the 
river, and to the prospective loss of the upper country, owing to 
the deficiency of water for navigation, or for the purposes of 
agricultural irrigation. 
In this country our forests disappeared long enough ago, but 
