1909.] NATURAL SCIENCES OF PHILADELPHIA. 375 



Fletcher Lake (closed and fresh; pleasure lake). 



Wesley Lake (closed and fresh; pleasure lake). 



Sunset Lake (closed and fresh; pleasure lake). 



Deal Lake (open by a closed sluice gate filled with sand and totally 

 fresh). 



Whale Pond = Takanassee Lake (open by a made channel, but 

 entirely fresh). 



Shrewsbury River (opening northward into Sandy Hook Bay and 

 navigable to large excursion steamers). 



All of these ponds, whether fresh or salt, have had essentially the 

 same physiographic history. They have all started as the outlets of 

 larger or smaller streams, which flowed sluggishly seaward from a 

 more elevated but still almost level interior. Upon reaching the 

 immediate sea coast, these streams had to contend with the sand of 

 the traveling beaches, which form an almost unbroken line for a 

 thousand miles from Montauk Point, on the eastern end of Long Island, 

 to Jupiter Inlet, in Florida. These sandy beaches never maintain the 

 same relative position, but are moved about by the ocean currents and 

 more fickle winds. Since the beaches have been inhabited by summer 

 and winter residents attempts have been made to stop the movement 

 of the sand by the construction of jetties, stone walls and revetments, 

 with some degree of success, but in the past the action of nature's forces 

 were untrammeled. The continuity of such beaches is broken only 

 by the action of a river. The Hudson River, flowing out of New York 

 Bay, breaks the beach between the Navesink Highlands and Long 

 Island. There has been a big contest for supremacy between the 

 beach and the river. Coney Island has crept out like a crooked finger 

 from the east, and Sandy Hook has traveled up several miles from the 

 south. But the great river has kept open its channel to the sea, not- 

 withstanding the fact that Fire Island Inlet has drifted to the west at 

 the average rate of three miles in sixty years, or nearly 260^feet per 

 annum. The encroachment of these bars threatens the channels 

 which lead into the Narrows and New York Bay, so that until recently 

 the largest steamers had to wait outside for the tides, while the least 

 deviation from the channel insured their grounding. All of the rivers 

 south of Sandy Hook have had a similar contest with the sand beaches. 

 The Shrewsbury and Navesink rivers have had such a struggle to keep 

 open their outlet to the sea. 4 The sandy beach, however, succeeded in 



* Consult the facsimile made from a survey map by Ratzer in 1769 and pub- 

 lished in England in 1777, where these rivers are represented as open to the sea. 

 Also the papers by Prof. Lewis M. Haupt (Annual Report State Geologist of New 

 Jersey, 1905: 27-95; 1907: 72-81), where by photographs and diagrams the 

 changes of the New Jersey coast line are well illustrated. 



