TORRENTS IN FRANCE. 
247 
and cultivated grounds to be seen, there is now but a vast 
torrent: there is not one of our mountains which has not at 
least one torrent, and new ones are daily forming. 
“ An indirect proof of the diminution of the soil is to be 
found in the depopulation of the country. In 1852, I re¬ 
ported to the General Council that, according to the census 
of that year, the population of the department of the Lower 
Alps had fallen off no less than 5,000 souls in the five years 
between 1846 and 1851. 
“ Unless prompt and energetic measures are taken, it is 
easy to fix the epoch when the French Alps will be but a 
desert. The interval between 1851 and 1856 will show a 
further decrease of population. In 1862, the ministry will 
announce a continued and progressive reduction in the num¬ 
ber of acres devoted to agriculture ; every year will aggravate 
the evil, and, in a half century, France will count more ruins, 
and a department the less.” 
Time has verified the predictions of De Bonville. The later 
census returns show a progressive diminution in the popula¬ 
tion of the departments of the Lower Alps, the Is&re, the 
Drome, Ariege, the Upper and the Lower Pyrenees, the 
Lozere, the Ardennes, the Doubs, the Yosges, and, in short, in 
all the provinces formerly remarkable for their forests. This 
diminution is not to be ascribed to a passion for foreign emi¬ 
gration, as in Ireland, and in parts of Germany and of Italy; 
it is simply a transfer of population from one part of the 
empire to another, from soils which human folly has rendered 
uninhabitable, by ruthlessly depriving them of their natural 
advantages and securities, to provinces where the face of the 
earth was so formed by nature as to need no such safeguards, 
and where, consequently, she preserves her outlines in spite of 
the wasteful improvidence of man.* 
covered with gravel and pebbles not less than 130,000 acres, “ which, but 
for its inundations, would have been the finest land in the province.”— 
Artiiur Young, Travels in France , vol. i, ch. i. 
* Between 1851 and 1856 the population of Languedoc and Provence 
had increased by 101,000 souls. The augmentation, however, was wholfy 
