2 INTRODUCTION 



angular fragments of rock will soon have their corners 

 rounded off and become rubbed into the form of pebbles. As 

 these pebbles are rolled to and fro upon the beach they get 

 worn smaller and smaller, until at length they are reduced to 

 the state of sand. Although this sand is at first coarse, it 

 gradually becomes finer and finer as surely as though it were 

 ground in a mill; and ultimately it is carried out to sea as 

 fine sediment and laid down upon the ocean floor. 1 



The story of the sands is not only one of the conflict of the sea 

 and rocks ; it is also a story of the winds. It is the winds that 

 have rescued them from the waves and driven them about, sifting 

 and assorting them, arranging them in graceful forms, and often 

 heaping them up into dunes which, until fastened by vegetation, 

 are themselves ever moved onward by the same force, sometimes 

 burying fertile lands, trees, and even houses in their march. 

 The sands, moreover, are in turn themselves destructive agents, 

 to whose power the many fragments which strew the beach and 

 dunes bear ample witness. The knotty sticks so commonly seen 

 on the beach are often the hearts of oak- or cedar-trees from 

 which the tiny crystals of sand have slowly cut away their less 

 solid outer growth. Everything, in fact, upon the sands is 

 " beach-worn," even to the window-glass of life-saving stations, 

 which is frequently so ground that it loses its transparency in a 

 single storm. 



The beach is also a vast sarcophagus holding myriads of the 

 dead. " If ghosts be ever laid, here lie ghosts of creatures innu- 

 merable, vexing the mind in the attempt to conceive them." 

 And there are certain sands which may be said to sing their 

 requiem, the so-called musical sands, like the " Singing Beach " 

 at Manchester-by-the-Sea, which emit sounds when struck or other- 

 wise disturbed. On some beaches these sounds resemble rumbling, 

 on others hooting ; sometimes they are bell-like and even rhyth- 

 mical. The cause of this sonorous character is not definitely 

 known, but it is possibly due to films of compressed gases which 

 separate each grain as with a cushion, and the breaking of which 



1 Huxley. 



