228 
OBSERVATIONS OF BELGRAND. 
forms in the Northern United States in summer. Ilence, in 
the former countries, the winter floods have not the character¬ 
istics which mark them in the latter, nor is the conservative 
influence of the woods in winter relatively so important, 
though it is equally unquestionable. 
If the summer floods in the United States are attended 
with less pecuniary damage than those of the Loire and other 
rivers of France, the Po and its tributaries in Italy, the Emme 
and her sister torrents which devastate the valleys of Switzer¬ 
land, it is partly because the banks of American rivers are not 
yet lined with towns, their shores and the bottoms which skirt 
them not yet covered with improvements whose cost is counted 
by millions, and, consequently, a smaller amount of property 
is exposed to injury by inundation. But the comparative 
exemption of the American people from the terrible calamities 
which the overflow of rivers has brought on some of the fairest 
portions of the Old World, is, in a still greater degree, to be 
ascribed to the fact that, with all our thoughtless improvidence, 
we have not yet bared all the sources of our streams, not yet 
overthrown all the barriers which nature has erected to restrain 
her own destructive energies. Let us be wise in time, and 
profit by the errors of our older brethren ! 
The influence of the forest in preventing inundations has 
been very generally recognized, both as a theoretical inference 
and as a fact of observation; but Belgrand and his commen¬ 
tator Valles have deduced an opposite result from various facts 
of experience and from scientific considerations. They con¬ 
tend that the superficial drainage is more regular from cleared 
than from wooded ground, and that clearing diminishes rather 
than augments the intensity of inundations. Neither of these 
conclusions is warranted by their data or their reasoning, and 
they rest partly upon facts, which, truly interpreted, are not 
inconsistent with the received opinions on these subjects, 
partly upon assumptions which are contradicted by experience. 
Two of these latter are, first, that the fallen leaves in the for¬ 
est constitute an impermeable covering of the soil over, not 
through, which the water of rains and of melting snows flows 
