As I have before remarked, I have taken my illustrations of the action of torrents and mountain streams principally from French authorities, because the facts recorded by them are chiefly of recent occurrence, and as they have been collected with much care and described with great fulness of detail, the information furnished by them is not only more trustworthy, but both more complete and more accessible than that which can be gathered from any other source. It is not to be supposed, however, that the countries adjacent to France have escaped the consequences of a like improvidence. The southern flanks of the Alps, and, in a less degree, the northern slope of these mountains and the whole chain of the Pyrenees, afford equally striking examples of the evils resulting from the wanton sacrifice of nature's safeguards. But I can afford space for few details, and as an illustration of the extent of these evils in Italy, I shall barely observe that it was calculated ten years ago that four-tenths of the area of the Ligurian provinces had been washed away or rendered incapable of cultivation in consequence of the felling of the woods. [Footnote: Annali di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, vol. i., p. 77. Similar instances of the erosive power of running water might be collected by hundreds from the narratives of travellers in warm countries. The energy of the torrents of the Himalayas is such that the brothers Schlagintweit believe that they will cut gorges through that lofty chain wide enough to admit the passage of currents of warm wind from the south, and thereby modify the climate of the countries lying to the north of the mountains.] Highly colored as these pictures seem, they are not exaggerated, although the hasty tourist through Southern France, Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Northern Italy, finding little in his high-road experiences to justify them, might suppose them so. The lines of communication by locomotive-train and diligence lead generally over safer ground, and it is only when they ascend the Alpine passes and traverse the mountain chains, that scenes somewhat resembling those just described fall under the eye of the ordinary traveller. But the extension of the sphere of devastation, by the degradation of the mountains and the transportation of their debris, is producing analogous effects upon the lower ridges of the Alps and the plains which skirt them; and even now one needs but an hour's departure from some great thoroughfares to reach sites where the genius of destruction revels as wildly as in the most frightful of the abysses which Blanqui has painted. [Footnote: The Skalara-Tobel, for instance, near Coire. See the description of this and other like scenes in Berlepsch, Die Alpen, pp. 169 et seqq., or in Stephen's English translation.