May 21. Baziege.  Toulouse.  The country continues hilly, but very rich.  It is in mulberries, willows, some vines, corn, maize, pasture, beans, flax.  A great number of chateaux and good houses in the neighborhood of the canal.  The people partly in farm-houses, partly in villages.  I suspect that the farm-houses are occupied by the farmers, while the laborers (who are mostly by the day) reside in the villages.  Neither strawberries nor pease yet at Baziege or Toulouse.  Near the latter are some fields of yellow clover.

At Toulouse the canal ends.  It has four communications with the Mediterranean. 1.  Through the ponds of Thau, Frontignan, Palavas, Maguelone, and Manjo, the canal de la Radela Aigues-mortes, le canal des Salines de Pecair, and the arm of the Rhone called Bras de Fer, which ends at Fourgues, opposite to Arles, and thence down the Rhone. 2.  At Cette, by a canal of a few hundred toises, leading out of the Etang de Thau into the sea.  The vessels pass the Etang, though a length of nine thousand toises, with sails. 3.  At Agde, by the river Eraut, twenty-five hundred toises.  It has but five or six pieds of water at its mouth.  It is joined to the canal at the upper part of this communication, by a branch of a canal two hundred and seventy toises long. 4.  At Narbonne, by a canal they are now opening, which leads from the great canal near the aqueduct of the river Cesse, twenty-six hundred toises, into the Aude.  This new canal will have five lock-basins, of about twelve pieds fall each.  Then you are to cross the Aude very obliquely, and descend a branch of it six thousand toises, through four lock-basins to Narbonne, and from Narbonne down the same branch, twelve hundred toises into the Etang de Sigen, across that Etang four thousand toises, issuing at an inlet, called Grau de la Nouvelle, into the Gulf of Lyons.  But only vessels of thirty or forty tons can enter this inlet.  Of these four communications, that of Cette only leads to a deep sea-port, because the exit is there by a canal, and not a river.  Those by the Rhone, Eraut, and Aude, are blocked up by bars at the mouths of those rivers.  It is remarkable, that all the rivers running into the Mediterranean are obstructed at their entrance by bars and shallows, which often change their position.  This is the case with the Nile, Tiber, the Po, the Lez, le Lyoron, the Orbe, the Gly, the Tech, the Tet, he.  Indeed, the formation of these bars seems not confined to the mouths of the rivers, though it takes place at them more certainly.  Along almost the whole of the coast, from Marseilles towards the Pyrenees, banks of sand are thrown up parallel with the coast, which have insulated portions of the sea, that is, formed them into etangs, ponds, or sounds, through which here and there narrow and shallow inlets only are preserved by the currents of the rivers.  These