"In 1766, the assessor Serraire said to the Assembly: 'As to the damage caused by brooks and torrents, it is impossible to deny its extent. Upper Provence is in danger of total destruction, and the waters which lay it waste threaten also the ruin of the most valuable grounds on the plain below. Villages have been almost submerged by torrents which formerly had not even names, and large towns are on the point of destruction from the same cause.'" In 1776, Viscount Puget thus reported: "The mere aspect of Upper Provence is calculated to appal the patriotic magistrate. One sees only lofty mountains, deep valleys with precipitous sides, rivers with broad beds and little water, impetuous torrents, which in floods lay waste the cultivated land upon their banks and roll huge rocks along their channels; steep and parched hillsides, the melancholy consequences of indiscriminate clearing; villages whose inhabitants, finding no longer the means of subsistence, are emigrating day by day; houses dilapidated to huts, and but a miserable remnant of population." "In a document of the year 1771, the ravages of the torrents were compared to the effects of an earthquake, half the soil in many communes seeming to have been swallowed up. "Our mountains," said the administrators of the province of the Lower Alps in 1792, "present nothing but a surface of stony tufa; clearing is still going on, and the little rivulets are becoming torrents. Many communes have lost their harvests, their flocks, and their houses by floods. The washing down of the mountains is to be ascribed to the clearings and the practice of burning them over." These complaints, it will be seen, all date before the Revolution, but the desolation they describe has since advanced with still swifter steps. Surell--whose valuable work, _Etude sur les Torrents des Hautes Alpes_, published in 1841, presents the most appalling picture of the desolations of the torrent, and, at the same time, the most careful studies of the history and essential character of this great evil--in speaking of the valley of Devoluy, on page 152, says: "Everything concurs to show that it was anciently wooded. In its peat bogs are found buried trunks of trees, monuments of its former vegetation. In the framework of old houses, one sees enormous timber, which is no longer to be found in the district. Many localities, now completely bare, still retain the name of 'wood,' and one of them is called, in old deeds, _Comba nigra_ [Black forest or dell], on account of its dense woods. These and many other proofs confirm the local traditions which are unanimous on this point. "There, as everywhere in the Upper Alps, the clearings began on the flanks of the mountains, and were gradually extended into the valleys and then to the highest accessible peaks. Then followed the Revolution, and caused the destruction of the remainder of the trees which had thus far escaped the woodman's axe."