* Among the powerful causes of earthly damage it seems to me that rivers, with their ruinous inundations, hold the primacy, and not fire, as some have wished, because fire ends its devouring where its nourishment fails.

Among the irreparable and harmful furies, certainly the inundation of ruinous rivers must be set before every other horrible and fearful movement, and not, as some have wished, that the conflagration of fire surpasses that inundation. On the contrary I find, for fire consumes what nourishes it and consumes itself together with its nourishment. The movement of water, which is sustained by the sloping valleys, also ends and dies together with the lowest point of the valley; but fire is caused by nourishment, and the motion of water by lowness. The nourishment of fire is disunited, and disunited and separate is the harm, and fire dies where nourishment fails. And the declivity of the valleys is united, and united is the harm with the ruinous course of the river, until, in company with its valleys, it will end in the sea, the universal lowness and sole repose of the wandering waters of rivers. But with what words could I describe the nefarious and fearful evils against which no human defence avails? For with swollen and proud waves it undermines the high mountains, tears down the strongest banks, uproots the deep-rooted trees, and with rapacious waves, muddied, carries off from the cultivated fields the intolerable labours of wretched and weary farmers. It leaves the valleys denuded and vile through the poverty left behind.

Among the irreparable and harmful furies, certainly the inundation of ruinous rivers must be set before every other horrible and fearful destruction. But with what tongue or with what words could I express, or tell, the nefarious ruins, the incredible tearings-down, the inexorable rapacities, made by the deluges of rapacious rivers, against which no human defence avails?

Tearing rivers.