The usual productions of this part are heath, broom, fern, and other plants, with prickly thorns: these hardy shrubs seem fitted, by their sterility, to the variable climate which they inhabit.
"In effect, the snows of winter, covering the summits of the Pyrenees for too long a time, prolong the cold of this rigorous season sometimes to the middle of spring; then come the frosts which destroy the hopes of the vine-grower.
"'_Storms are very frequent in Bearn_,' says M.Lebret, intendant of Bearn in 1700; he might have added," continues Palassou, "to the list of dangers to the harvests--_the frequent and destructive fogs_ to which the country is subject.
"In the landes of the Pont-Long, I have often seen, in the environs of Pau, fogs rise from those grounds covered with fern, broom, and other naturally growing plants, while in parts more cultivated it was clear.
* * * The agriculturists of Bearn have not attempted to till the lands in the neighbourhood of Pau, finding them too stubborn to give hopes of return, and _the climate being so very variable_; cultivated produce being peculiarly sensible to the effects of an air which _is one day burning and the next icy_.
"One might write whole volumes if it was the object to relate all the effects of storms which, accompanied with hail, devastate the countries in the neighbourhood of the Pyrenees.

It will be sufficient to recount what has come under my own observation.

During one violent storm of thunder and lightning, the hail-stones were _as large as hens' eggs_, and desolated the whole range over which it swept.

It was immediately followed by a second, less furious, but which did immense damage; and others, little less terrific, followed in the course of the month--June." Palassou here goes on to describe several dreadful storms of peculiar fury, which were more than usually destructive, and are common in these regions.

He considers, that the cutting down of the forests on the mountains, which formerly sheltered the plains and valleys, has contributed to increase the storms in latter years.