Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/80

70 must be hauled over them, especially anything so bulky as wood. Further, scarcity of timber means the cessation of many lucrative industries which use wood for their raw material, and which are especially desirable as affording employment during portions of the year, when agriculture or the care of flocks does not call for all of the farmer's time.

3. There is the derangement of climate and rainfall. It is by no means certain that, at least, in some situations, more rain will not fall in a year upon a well-wooded than upon a bare region. Certainly, what does fall will not evaporate, and be carried away by the winds as quickly. Sudden changes of temperature, and the resulting violent winds are also less liable to occur where woods abound. A forest is a better barrier against wind than a stone wall of equal height, because it divides its force, and does not stop it all at once, causing eddies and rebounds which may do damage elsewhere.

In these and other ways many provinces of Southern France had been (before 1860) for several generations gradually growing poorer. By a misuse of the right of equal common pasturage upon the lands belonging to the communes, the richer proprietors who had large flocks could get the lion's share of the scanty store. To lighten taxes, sheep and goats were admitted from Provence and the Maritime Alps to summer pasturage, as at that season their own country was so dry and parched that they could find no food. Cézanne, in his supplement to the great work of Surell on the "Torrents of the High Alps," says these migratory flocks "obstruct the roads, and are the occasion of all kinds of disorder. They arrive at the pastures famished, and in a few days destroy the sprouting herb, the hope of the entire season. . . . One can follow the trail of the sheep of Provence by the disappearance of all vegetation. They necessarily migrate in flocks of one thousand or twelve hundred, and after reaching the pastures retain the habit—which they acquire upon the road—of crowding together and struggling for every spear of grass. In the flinty plains of the south they find very scanty fare, and, to satisfy hunger, are obliged to move stones with their noses and feet, and to dig the soil quite down to the roots of the plants which they devour. Upon the mountains they continue the same destructive habits, and one can understand what must be the effect upon the light soil, scarcely fixed upon the slopes, of such digging and tearing by these millions of animals" (pp. 245, 240).

The little ready money which the pasture-fee of these southern