222 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



too early or carefully attended to. Morals in a child are in a very 

 rudimentary condition, and much depends on the mother as to 

 whether they are to develop and give strength to the character, or 

 whether they are to wither away, like unused organs of the body. 

 Truthfulness, courage, and unselfishness are blossoms of charac- 

 ter growing from but small seeds ; let them be nourished in the 

 warmth and sunshine of love and sympathy, and watchfully pro- 

 tected from choking weeds, and at last will come the crowning of 

 a fine character, without which all the book-learning in the world 

 is but a parrot's jargon. Nineteenth Century. 



-+0- 



THE STRUGGLE OF SEA AND LAND. 



By Dr. VINZENZ HILBER, of Graz. 



WE stand on a bluff at the sea-shore. The surf is undermining 

 it. That deep cutting into the bank is its work. An over- 

 hanging mass of earth is thrown down and becomes the toy of the 

 waves, which reduce it to gravel. This in its turn becomes am- 

 munition to be hurled against the shore. Wherever this process 

 is going on, the land falls back before the advancing sea, and con- 

 siderable results are evident in a short time. The Island of Heli- 

 goland has been reduced, within a thousand years, from a con- 

 siderable island to a mere rock. The strings of rocky islands 

 along many coasts are remnants of destroyed shore-land. Thus 

 the land yields with hardly a struggle to the supremacy of the 

 sea. Loose alluvial terrains give way in a body. The Zuyder Zee 

 so came into being five hundred years ago, and Holland, part of 

 which is below the level of the sea, would have been likewise 

 overflown if it had not been defended by artificial dikes. Sub- 

 sidences of ground have also been sometimes observed during 

 earthquakes. 



In other places the sea gives way. Rivers carry out masses 

 of detritus and deposit them along the shores, causing the land 

 to advance. By the operation of this process Roman ports on the 

 eastern coast of Italy have been left away inland, and whole al- 

 luvial districts of the upper Italian plain have been wrested from 

 the sea. 



No doubt a very long time is required for important changes 

 in the sea-lines to be produced by these processes ; hence we must 

 widen our view if we would find a solution of the problems which 

 the history of the primitive seas offers us. 



When the Alpine traveler finds sea-shells included in the rocks 

 on high peaks, he says that the strata of the mountain are ocean 

 deposits. In the great foldings of the rocks which he can follow 



