21S 



HAEDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



[Oct. 1, 1866. 



pace, and if not arrested in their course, fields are 

 rendered barren, plantations buried, and the dwel- 

 ling of man overwhelmed. Instances of this on a 

 scale of alarming magnitude may be found on the 

 coasts of Erance, Prussia, and Denmark, and the 

 total area of the sand-dunes of Western Europe has 

 been estimated at nearly a million acres. This 

 enormous extent of sand-covered soil would have 

 been far less had man learned to imitate nature — a 

 lesson which lie has had to be taught in the bitter 

 school of experience. Where human agency has 

 not interfered, the sand-dune and its counterbalance, 

 if we may so speak, may often be found side by side. 

 The rampart heaped up by winds and waves needs 

 but to be consolidated to become a benefit instead 

 of an injury. This is accomplished by the quiet but 

 mighty influence of vegetable life. 



A goodly number of plants hasten to make the 

 arid ridge their chosen habitat. Chief among tliem 

 is the Sand Reed (AmmopJiila arenaria), provincially 

 known as the Marram or Bent, a humble rush, 

 growing to a height of but a couple of feet, but 

 sending its root-fibres to a distance twenty or thirty 

 times as great beneath the ground, binding together 

 the loose and incoherent soil. It flourishes only in 

 an atmosphere charged with saline particles ; and 

 the seemingly barren sand is to it a rich and nutri- 

 tive earth. Having accomplished its special work, 

 that of arresting the drifting mass, this lowly plant 

 withers and dies, and adds to the soil its quota of 

 fertilizing matter, preparing the ground for other 

 races of vegetable organisms, so that at length "the 

 wilderness" may "become a fruitful field," even 

 by means of agencies apparently so inadequate. 

 But man's interference with these natural compen- 

 sations has furnished a singular and instructive 

 chapter in the history of physical geography. The 

 sand reed is found to possess various economic pro- 

 perties. Cattle feed on its leaves, and poultry upon 

 its seeds, which have also been made into a coarse 

 kind of bread ; its fibres yield material for cordage, 

 its roots are fitted for fuel, and the entire plant is 

 used for thatching. With a degree of blind impro- 

 vidence scarcely credible, the plants thus given to 

 check impending injury to field and dwelling, are 

 recklessly torn up by the roots to satisfy the ne- 

 cessity or convenience of the moment. 



This practice has been continued for centuries ; 

 and there is reason for supposing that the present 

 condition of the coasts of Erance, Prussia, and the 

 Netherlands, already alluded to, is due to the des- 

 truction of dune-plants in past ages. 



"Before the occupation of the coast," says a 

 writer,* to whom we are indebted for several of the 

 foregoing facts, "by civilized, and therefore destruc- 

 tive, man, dunes, at all points where they have been 

 observed, seem to have been protected in their rear 



* Hon. G. P. Marsh. "Man and Nature." 1864. 



by forests, which serve to break the force of the 

 winds in both directions, and to have spontaneously 

 clothed themselves with a dense growth of the 

 various plants, grasses, shrubs, and trees, which 

 nature has assigned to such soils. It is observed 

 in Europe that dunes, though now without the 

 shelter of a forest country behind them, begin to 

 protect themselves as soon as human trespassers 

 are excluded, and grazing animals denied access to 

 them." 



Among the dunes of our own island, those of 

 Cornwall have acquired an interest in antiquarian 

 eyes, from the disinterment some thirty years since 

 of an ancient church and oratory at Perranzabulo, 

 which the drift had hid for centuries. The Scottish 

 coast also furnishes some remarkable deposits ; in 

 one of them lies buried what Hugh Miller graphi- 

 cally termed " an ancient fossil barony," with re- 

 mains of a manor house and its humbler surrounding 

 cottages ; and it would appear that the catastrophe 

 thus geologically recorded was due to the wasteful 

 ignorance of the former peasantry of the district. 

 Eor an act of Parliament of the time of William III. 

 details the mischief occasioned by the " bad practice 

 of pulling the bent and juniper," and strictly pro- 

 hibits such destructive acts in future. Similar 

 legislative measures have had to be adopted in con- 

 tinental countries. In one instance, however, the 

 fault was certainly not with the people. King 

 Friedrich Wilhelm the Eirst of Prussia being sadly 

 in want of cash, a certain Herr von Korff— a de- 

 voted Bismarck of the olden time — offered to fill 

 the royal purse to overflowing if he were allowed 

 to remove something quite useless. The delighted 

 monarch at once gave his royal consent (as who 

 would not to such a proposal ?) and the loyal Hen- 

 proceeded to strip the sand-hills of the "Erische 

 Nehrung " on the coast, of the forests which clothed 

 and consolidated them. He sold the timber, raised 

 the money, relieved his sovereign, set free the sands 

 to march inland, fill harbours and channels, and 

 damage fisheries, and thus completed an enterprise 

 which the state would now give millions to uudo. 

 It is only of late years that nations have woke up 

 to a sense of the folly and danger of an indiscrimi- 

 nate destruction of vegetable life. On the Continent 

 the nature, laws of formation, and means of control 

 of sand-dunes have been carefully studied, and 

 various reparative measures adopted, mostly at public 

 expense. The natural vegetation of dunes appears 

 to be remarkably extensive ; those of Jutland having 

 been found to yield above two hundred and thirty 

 species, and those of the Prussian coast two-thirds 

 as many. 



Practical men have anxiously investigated the 

 best methods of stimulating and accelerating these 

 growths, and both in the Old and New World the 

 sand-reed and plants of similar habit have been ex- 

 tensively planted on moving dunes, and afterwards, 



