The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1875-07-11

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From the copious extracts from our Euro
pean files, elsewhere given, our readers may
learn the full extent of the calamity that has
fallen upon France in the recent floods and
inundations. Nearly one-sixth OF the surface
of that beautiful country has been swept by
the destructive element, and the ruin caused is
not to be measured, as it might with US, mainly
by its geographical extent, for there there
is no wilderness. 1t is land full of cities,
some of which were old when the Romans
were there; land that huns with industry
like hive; where villages, by the way, come
oftener than milestones with us where the
fields are worked as we scarcely work our
gardens, and where the swarming people
make themselves o home in what would
scarcely answer our extrayagant fancies for
henroost. In such country it is evident
that to submerge square mile will cause
more grievous ruin and more heartrending
misery than it might to blot out half dozen
of some of our sparsely- peopled counties.
The Department of the Saone and the Loire
is in about the middle of France from north to
south, while from east to west 1t is at the
inner edge of the eastern third. 1t is named
from the fact that the rivers Saone aud Loire
have their head waters within it's limits. The
Saone flows southwark into the Rhone
at Lyons, and the latter continues
almost the same southwark line to
the Mediterranean. Toe Loire flows
north and west to the Atlantic. West of the
Rhone and south of the Loire lie tho noun
talns, whose highest point is at Puy-de-Dome,
in Auvergne, and these mountains torn the
northern as the Pyrenees themselves form
the southern wall of the vast valley of
Aquitania, including the countries known in
the Middle Ages as Languedoc, Gascony and
Guienne, and not less than twenty depart
ments of modern France. In geographical
extent this country is not, for instance, COM
parable with the Mississippi Valley; but the
calamity caused by its devastation is scarcely
less than would have been caused if the Father
of Waters had risen as did the whole system
Of rivers that drain that district.
The Garonne is the principal river. and
runs through the valley from southeast to
northwest, wide, full stream, in a country
level for many miles from its banks at GER
tain points, and seeming there more like
gigantic canal than a river. 1t receives from
the Pyrenees, on one hand, hundreds of tur-
bulent torrents pouring down the mountain
gulches, and, on the other, the whole water
shed of the southern slope of the high land
between it and the Loire, including such con-
siderable rivers as the Tarn, Lot and the
Dordogne, out of Auvergne. 1t is scarcely to
be wondered at therefore, that with such
rains as lately fell in France river fed by
tributaries SO numerous should have flooded
the country. For months they had had
there such o drought as we have had
here, and it would seem as if some
principle of compensation in nature had
suddenly launched upon them all their
arrears of rain. 1t may prove that they have
had no more than was their due the season
round but Nney had in three days what should
have been distributed over three months.
Absorption and evaporation did not assist in
the disposition of it; the river bed was not
ample enough to carry it away, and it spread
out and threatened to food the country up to
the mountain walls north aud south.
No estimate by money values can measure
the loss. Cities are ruined, villages swept
away, all the cattle of the people-the noisy
multitude of the farm enclosure-are all gone;
and how much the people have suffered in
their lives is as yet only guessed at. People
who report it tell of the corpses that go con-
stantly floating down the river and of wide
journeys made without the encounter of
single living person. At Toulouse the river
washed out the contents of the tombs in
of their graves seemed more CHASTITY than the
freshly slain victims of the river 1t is per-
haps the most dreadful calamity of the sort
that has been experienced in modern times