250 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



had swallowed up its foundations, and the sea gained so rapidly 

 that, fifty years later, the spot where they lay was seven hundred 

 feet from the shore." 



" The most prominent geological landmark on the coast of Hol- 

 land is the Huis te Britten, Arx Br itannica, a fortress built by the 

 Romans, in the time of Caligula, on the mainland, near the mouth 

 of the Rhine. At the close of the seventeenth century the sea had 

 advanced sixteen hundred paces beyond it." — Marsh, The Earth 

 as Modified by Man's Action. 



"At Agger, near the end of the Liimfjord, in Jutland, the 

 coast was washed away, between the years 1815 and 1839, at the 

 rate of more than eighteen feet a year. . . . The sea is encroach- 

 ing generally upon the whole line of the coast." — Ibid. 



Facts like these have driven the Governments of Denmark, 

 Prussia, Holland, and France to a careful consideration and study 

 of the subject ; and in all these countries a system of coast im- 

 provement has been adopted. This system does not imply a 

 conflict with Nature, but rather a return to her earlier plan. 



The sand-hills on the Prussian coast, up to the middle of the 

 last century, were wooded to the water's edge. Old geographers, 

 writing of the Netherlands, mention vast forests reaching to the 

 sea. Of the fate of a Prussian forest we have the following record : 



" A great pine forest bound with its roots the dune sand and 

 the heath uninterruptedly from Dantzic to Pillau. King Frederick 

 William I was once in want of money. A certain Herr von Korff 

 promised to procure it for him if he could be allowed to remove 

 something quite useless. He thinned out the forests of Prussia, 

 which then, indeed, possessed little pecuniary value ; but he felled 

 the entire woods of the Frische Nehrung, so far as they lay within 

 the Prussian territory. The financial operation was a success. The 

 king had money ; but, in the material effects which resulted from 

 it, the state received irreparable injury. The sea winds rush over 

 the bared hills ; the Frische Haff is half choked with sand ; the 

 channel between Elbing, the sea, and Konigsberg is endangered, 

 and the fisheries in the Haff injured. The operation of Herr von 

 Korff brought the King 200,000 thalers. The state would now 

 willingly expend millions to restore the forests." — Das Buch der 

 Pflanzenwelt. 



It is estimated that about one million acres on the Atlantic and 

 Baltic shores of Europe have become, since the destruction of the 

 forests, a moving desert of sand dunes, rolling inland, burying 

 the fertile soil, and rendering the land barren by the sand showers 

 sprinkled over it ; while, following the landward roll of the dunes, 

 came the resistless march of the victorious sea. 



The endeavor, then, of these threatened countries has been to 

 regain, by slow degrees, the protection of the forests so rashly 



