DESTRUCTIVE ACTION OF TORRENTS. 
231 
then, the too rapid flow of the surface waters occasioned no 
other evil than to produce, once in ten years upon the average, 
an inundation which should destroy the harvest of the low 
grounds along the rivers, the damage would be too inconsid¬ 
erable, and of too transitory a character, to warrant the incon¬ 
veniences and the expense involved in the measures which the 
most competent judges in many parts of Europe believe the 
respective governments ought to take to obviate it. 
Destructive Action of Torrents. 
But the great, the irreparable, the appalling mischiefs 
which have already resulted, and threaten to ensue on a still 
more extensive scale hereafter, from too rapid superficial drain¬ 
age, are of a properly geographical character, and consist 
primarily in erosion, displacement, and transportation of the 
superficial strata, vegetable and mineral—of the integuments, 
so to speak, with which nature has clothed the skeleton frame¬ 
work of the globe. It is difficult to convey by description an 
idea of the desolation of the regions most exposed to the rav¬ 
ages of torrent and of flood ; and the thousands, who, in these 
days of travel, are whirled by steam near or even through the 
theatres of these calamities, have but rare and imperfect oppor¬ 
tunities of observing the destructive causes in action. Still 
more rarely can they compare the past with the actual condi¬ 
tion of the provinces in cpiestion, and trace the progress of 
their conversion from forest-crowned hills, luxuriant pasture 
to deny, as some writers have done, that the slime has any fertilizing prop¬ 
erties at all, is as great an error as the opposite one of ascribing all the 
agricultural wealth of Egypt to that single cause of productiveness. Fine 
soils deposited by water are almost uniformly rich in all climates; those 
brought down by rivers, carried out into salt water, and then returned 
again by the tide, seem to be more permanently fertile than any others. 
The polders of the Netherland coast are of this character, and the meadows 
in Lincolnshire, which have been covered with slime by warping , as it is 
called, or admitting water over them at high tide, are remarkably pro¬ 
ductive. 
