540 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



the pastor, has since then disappeared in the gulf. Great dunes 

 now cover the village of Lattenwalde, which was so laid waste 

 during the Seven Years' War by plundering, quartering of the Rus- 

 sians, infectious diseases, and fire, that the sand had only a heap 

 of ruins to cover up. The village of Kunzen, with its church 

 and seventeen homesteads, was ruined in the same way in the 

 course of the last and the beginning of the present century ; and 

 now the dune, continuing its journey, has permitted the skulls and 

 skeletons of the former churchyard on the west side to be again 

 exposed. > 



The village of Pillkoppen has had a remarkable fate. The in- 

 habitants left the place about the middle of the last century, and 

 founded New Pillkoppen, at about a mile away. Then the dune 

 went on in an unanticipated course, and old Pillkoppen has risen 

 anew since the third decade of the present century ; but the sand 

 is already again a foot high in the potato-garden of the new 

 school-house. 



A fine wood near Schwarzort has been almost systematically 

 destroyed by a dune advancing toward the southeast. It was 

 composed of primitive oaks, lindens, and firs, and was in the year 

 1800 about five kilometres long, while now the dune has hardly 

 left a kilometre and a half of it. Schumann says of this wood 

 that " in about ten years after the tree has gone into the southern 

 side of the moving dune, it emerges again from the north side. 

 But the boughs which have been dried out and withered up 

 during the interval are broken, ground up, and reduced to atoms 

 as soon as the sand has left them. The same occurs later to the 

 rotted stems. Few of these trees show more than an inch over 

 the surface of the sand ; and it is only the thicker and hardier 

 trunks that can maintain themselves so as to project from two to 

 five metres over the diminished dune. With most of them the 

 sap-wood disappears down to the surface, the bark with all, which, 

 however, is still present beneath. Frequently, the bark alone is 

 left, while the wood has rotted away. Such trees are marked 

 only by a hardly perceptible bark-ring, and the careless traveler 

 is in danger of falling into the holes they have left." The time 

 may be fixed with an approach to accuracy when the whole wood 

 shall have been destroyed, and Schwarzort itself will be threat- 

 ened. Schumann estimates the yearly progress of the dune at 

 twelve metres, and gives the last trees still eighty years before 

 they shall be overwhelmed. 



In the small islands west of Jutland, the progress of the dunes 

 is illustrated by a diminution of the islands themselves. For the 

 sea eats the shore away year by year as it is left bare, and when 

 the dunes have marched over the whole islands, and precipitated 

 themselves on the eastern side of them into the sea, the islands will 



