[3] “Forests and Human Progress” by Raphael Zon, published in New York, _Geographical Review_, September 1920: “In Central Europe the period of the greatest clearing of forest land for settlement was practically completed by the end of the thirteenth century.” [4] “... tardo, suspiccioso, e raro.”—“Paradiso,” canto xii, line 39. CHAPTER II. LANGUEDOC AND THE ALBIGENSES. I have chosen to call the district in question “Languedoc” because the literature which was the mark of its distinctive culture was written in the “langue d’Oc” (in contra-distinction to the North French langue d’Oïl which later became the master idiom), and because the actual fighting to be described in the fourth chapter took place within (or just outside) the territories later known as the Province of Languedoc under the French monarchy, until the old administrative divisions were wiped out by the Revolution. I have rejected the various more definite names given by recent historians to the heretical movement in question because the word “Albigenses” is in general usage, and because I believe that general usage ought not to be lightly disturbed by the preciosity of individual scholars careless of the bewilderment of the non-specialist reader. First, then, of the general physical characteristics of the country with which we are concerned. The southern half of France is definitely bounded by great mountain chains. The Alps separate it from Italy, the Pyrenees from Spain. It is true that there is a little room for doubt in the Roussillon and around Nice where the Pyrenees and the Alps respectively approach the Mediterranean Sea, but, on the whole, the natural boundaries are quite clear, and modern France in establishing them has resumed the natural frontiers of ancient Gaul, one of those major divisions of Europe that go back beyond recorded history. This southern part of France, besides the mountains which limit it, contains within itself a lesser mountain mass central to itself, the Cévennes. It contains two principal river basins, on the east that of the Rhône, which flows almost due south to the Mediterranean, draining the country between the Cévennes and the Alps; on the west that of the Garonne, which flows in a general direction north-west to the Atlantic, draining the country between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees. It contains also a curved strip of coastal plain from the mouths of the Rhône west and south to the eastern Pyrenees, and between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees a region of moderate uplands, broken by a single notch, so low that the highest point of its watershed between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean lies below the 200-metre line.