by the dense foliage of the trees, is kept cool, and the process of evaporation goes on much more slowly than on open, cleared lands. It has been observed that after the clearing of mountains rivers, which seemed to have lost a part of their water, sometimes suddenly swell and that too, frequently, to a degree which causes great disaster. After violent rains or sudden melting of snow, springs which had become almost exhausted, have burst out with impetuosity and, soon after, have dried up again. The reason for this is attributed to the fact that the forest acts as a regulator of the water flow, hoarding the water when there is an abundance of it and yielding it up when called for by the streams when wanted; but the forests being cleared away and the light, spongy soil being washed off the rocks, and evaporation taking place more rapidly, the storing process is no longer carried on, and the flow of water becomes irregular, in consequence of the clearing. This would happen, although the annual amount of rainfall was not lessened. The water supplied by rain or melting snow all runs off, after the forests are cleared, rapidly, causing torrents and floods, leaving the source of supply exhausted and, in consequence, the springs and streams run dry. The fact that floods are caused by cutting off forests is not of modern observation--it is nearly as old as the Christian era. The elder Pliny wrote in the first century, A. D.: "Destructive torrents are generally formed when hills are stripped of the trees." How violent torrents and disastrous floods have devastated the valleys of France, Italy, Austria, Spain and Switzerland is well known, and the facts are often cited. Recurring frequently for many years past since the forests were cut off they have devastated large areas of land, causing immense losses, both of property and human life. Reference has been made to this state of things in the foregoing pages, and we can do little more than to give here a passing glance to the mass of facts collected on this topic. Blanqui, as quoted by Marsh says that: "In a single day of flood the Ardêche, a river too insignificant to be known except in the local topography of France, contributed to the Rhone once and a half, and for three consecutive days one and one-third as much as the average delivery of the Nile, although the basin of Nile contains one million square miles or more than one thousand times as much as that of the Ardêche. * * * The water in Beaume, a tributary of the Ardêche, rose in 1772, thirty-five feet

* * *

above low-water, but the stream was fordable on the evening of the same day." And, again: "The Alps of Provence present a terrible aspect. In the more equable climate of northern France, one can form no conception of those parched mountain gorges where not even a bush can be found to shelter a bird, where, at most, the wanderer sees in summer here and there a withered lavender, where all the springs are dried up, and where a dead silence, hardly broken by the hum of an insect, prevails. But if a storm bursts forth, masses of water suddenly shoot from the mountain heights into the shattered gulfs, waste without irrigating, deluge without refreshing the soil they overflow in their swift descent, and leave it even more seared than it was from the want of moisture. Man at last retires from the fearful desert, and I have, the present season, found not a living soul in districts where I remember to have enjoyed hospitality thirty years ago. The clear, brilliant Alpine sky of Embrun and Gap, of Barcelonette and of Digne, which for months is without a cloud, produces droughts interrupted only by diluvial rains like those of the tropics. The abuse of the right of pasturage and the felling of the woods have stripped the soil of all its grass and all its trees, and the scorching sun bakes it to the consistence of porphyry. When moistened by the rain, as it has neither support nor cohesion, it rolls down to the valleys sometimes in floods, resembling black, yellow or reddish lava, sometimes in streams of pebbles and even huge blocks of stone, which pour down with a frightful roar, and in their swift course exhibit the most convulsive movements. If you overlook, from an eminence, one of these landscapes furrowed with so many ravines, it presents only images of desolation and death. Vast deposits of flinty pebbles, many feet in thickness, which have rolled down and spread far over the plain surround large trees, bury even their tops and rise above them, leaving to the husbandman no longer a ray of hope. One can imagine no sadder spectacle than the deep fissures in the flanks of the mountains which seem to have burst forth in eruption to cover the plains with their ruins. These gorges under the influence of the sun which cracks and shivers to frag ments the very rocks, and of the rain which sweeps them down penetrate deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain while the beds of the torrents issuing from them are sometimes raised severa. feet in a single year by the debris, so that they reach the

level of the bridges which, of course, are then carried off. The torrent beds are recognized at a great distance, as they issue from the mountains, and they spread themselves over the low grounds in fan-shaped expansions, like a mantel of stone, sometimes ten thousand feet wide, rising high at the center and curving towards the circumference till their lower edges meet the plain. Such is their aspect in dry weather. But no tongue can give an adequate description of their devastations in one of those sudden floods which resemble in almost none of their phenomena the action of ordinary river water. They are now no longer over-flowing brooks, but real seas tumbling down in cataracts and rolling before them blocks of stone which are hurled forward by the shock of the waves like balls shot out by the explosion of gunpowder. This is but an imperfect sketch of this scourge of the Alps. Its devastations are increasing with the progress of clearing, and every day turning a portion of our frontier departments into barren wastes.”

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Equally serious consequences have followed the destruction of forests in Italy. It has been calculated that four-tenths of the area of the Ligurian provinces have been washed away or rendered incapable of cultivation by the felling of the woods. According to Hummel the desolation of the Karst, the high plateau lying north of Trieste, for many years one of the most parched and barren districts in Europe, is owing to the felling of its woods to build the navies of Venice. Energetic efforts are being made by the Austrian government to reclaim this region from desolation by reforestation, and something in this direction has already been accomplished.

It is needless, however, to multiply instances which might be cited indefinitely; they are alluded to here merely to point out the danger that, if not provided against, threatens our own country. The same disasters may befall us as those which have brought such distress on the countries of Europe, unless we heed the warning given. We have had warnings, indeed, already, from within our own borders. That such consequences are quite possible in the United States has been shown by disastrous floods in Pennsylvania, where streams have risen so rapidly that people were glad to escape with their lives, and millions of dollars worth of property has been destroyed. It is stated on good authority that such changes have taken place in the flow of the Milwaukee river, from the

clearings around its headwaters, that while the mills and factories have been obliged in the dry season to resort to steam to supply the growing deficiency of water power, in the spring time floods sweep down the river with such fury as to carry away bridges and dams heretofore regarded secure against any force that the water was likely to bring; and what is true of that river is true of all the water-courses in Minnesota, from whose banks the forests have been cut off. "My engagements," writes Dr. B. G. Northrop, "led me along the valley of the Ohio river, soon after the destructive floods of 1883 and 1884. Aside from the more serious loss of life, the destruction of property in that valley alone, in 1883, was estimated at sixty million dollars. If there were less loss last spring (1884), when the flood was five feet higher and above all known. precedent, it was because there remained less property to be destroyed; even then four hundred houses were seen floating by a single point. On a similar trip last spring I found great floods in the Cumberland, Tennessee, Mississippi and other rivers." Not many years ago a million dollars or more of property was destroyed at Rochester by a flood, regarded as unquestionably occasioned by the extensive clearings around the sources of the Genesee river. The heavy rains and warm winds, which rapidly melted the snow and supplied the floods at that time, could not have had so immediate an effect in a wooded country. "The connection between the denudation of forests and the floods of recent years," wrote the late Dr. Franklin B. Hough, a short time before his death, "cannot be mistaken." Again, Dr. Hough wrote, several years before: "This growing tendency to floods and droughts can be directly ascribed to the clearing up of woodlands, by which the rains quickly find their way into the streams, after swelling them into destructive floods, instead of sinking into the earth, to reappear as springs. The connection between forests and floods, that Dr. Hough speaks of, has long been understood in Europe and acted upon, to coun teract the disastrous results of deforestation, by planting forests. Effective measures have been adopted by nearly all the European governments to re-establish forests by means of plantations, and at the present day millions of acres are covered with a vigorous forest growth, where once sterility and desolation held sway. The result has equaled the expectations and proved the wisdom of the policy adopted What effect, generally reforestation has wrought may

be gathered from a single typical example. There stood a forest in the Commune of Labruguière, in the Department of Tarn, France, of more than 4,500 acres, owned by the commune, which was noted for its opposition to the forest regulations. The cutting of timber recklessly and the abuse of pasturage had converted the forest into an immense waste, so that the property would hardly pay the cost of guarding it. On the edge of the forest were located several fulling mills, whose wheels were turned by the water of the little Caunan brook, which had its rise in the forest and drained two thirds of its surface. When the forest was cut off and the soil denuded the waters of the brook after each rain swept violently down the valley, bringing great quantities of gravel, which still encumbers the channel of the stream. The mills were often compelled to stop in rainy seasons by the violence of the floods, and again, in summer there came such severe droughts that the wheels stood idle for want of water. The authorities began to instruct the population as to their true interests and finally induced them to inaugurate a system of reforestation by tree planting, which was well managed, and the new forest has now for some years been in vigorous growth. "In proportion as replanting went on," says the sub-inspector of these forests in his report, "the precarious use of the mills ceased and the region of the water-courses was greatly modified. They no longer swelled into sudden and violent floods, compelling the mills to stop, but a rise of water did not begin until six or eight hours after the falling of the rain; the streams rose steadily to their maximum and fell in the same way." Nor were the milis obliged to stop work for want of water, "of which there was always enough to run two or three mills. All other circumstances (except reforestation) had remained the same, and, therefore, we can only attribute to the regrowth of the forest the changes that occurred, namely, diminution of flood at the time of rain and an increase of the flow of water at other times."

The Rev. S. W. Powell, of Brooklyn, N. Y., has recently translated from the French a valuable little treatise, entitled Les Etudes de Maître Pierre sur l'Agriculture et les Forêts* (to which we shall rave occasion to refer again a few pages further on), in the introduction to which he has given an interesting account of the

*The Studies of Master Peter on Agriculture and Forests.