THE MUSEUM. 



13 



ered coffins and dismembered remains 

 in all directions. Travellers, ignorant 

 of the cause, have been shocked and 

 startled at the sight of the human re- 

 mains which strewed their path, and 

 have experienced somewhat of the 

 same sensation as our African explor- 

 ers did on observing the piles of skulls 

 and bones in the villages of Dahomey. 

 There is a little church at a place 

 called Hornsea, on the East Coast, 

 which is said to have been built about 

 600 years. There is a tablet in that 

 church which states that when it was 

 built it was seven miles from the sea. 

 I do not think that at present the dis- 

 tance exceeds a quarter of a mile. 

 The history of the three Sister Churches 

 is to this day familiar to the inhabi- 

 tants of the same coast. The first of 

 them was taken by the sea so many 

 years ago that there is little known 

 concerning it, but there is a very fine 

 description of the fall of the second 

 church, published in Poulson's History 

 of Holdcrness.. I do not remember 

 the church, but many years ago I used 

 often to visit the village of Owthorne, 

 and at that time, say twenty years 

 ago, a triangular piece of the church- 

 yard, with its rude mud wall, was then 

 in existence, and the beach was strewn 

 with the fragments of the churchyard. 

 It then extended abput forty yards 

 from the cliff. About eight years ago, 

 I visited Owthorne, and not a vestige 

 of the churchyard was left. Most of 

 you will have heard' of the Goodwin 

 Sands, so dangerous to mariners. This 

 place, now travelled over by our Mer- 

 cantile Marine, was six or seven cen- 

 turies ago an immense estate of 12, • 

 000 acres, the property of the Earl of 

 Godwin. On the coast of Norfolk 

 and Suffolk the towns are being driven 



back by the extensive encroachments 

 of the sea. At Cromer the last Gov- 

 ernment Survey showed that the cliff 

 had been taken at the rate of fourteen 

 feet per annum. Dunwich, on the 

 Suffolk Coast, according to Doomsday 

 Book, was once a flourishing seaport, 

 and the record shows that at this point 

 the sea must have encroached several 

 miles. There is an old document ex- 

 tant at Jersey, which is about six hun- 

 dred years old, which purports to be 

 an agreement entered into by the au- 

 thorities of that place to keep a plank 

 bridge in repair from the island to the 

 coast of France. I am unable to say 

 what engineering feats could be ac- 

 complished at that day in the shape of 

 a plank bridge, but the distance now is 

 fourteen miles. Thus you will readily 

 see what a tremendous waste of coast 

 is continually going on even in our 

 own island, which must, in a large 

 space of time, materially alter the con- 

 ditions of its surface; and you will at 

 once say then where does this im- 

 mense amount of lost land go to.'' It 

 goes to form land in other places. It 

 compensates for che land lost on one 

 shore by throwing it up on another. 

 The proce ss in doingit would take too 

 long to describe. It depends so much 

 on different conditions, for instance 

 the strength of currents, depth of wat- 

 er, and impediments such as deltas 

 and headlands, but anyone who has 

 watched the operations of water in a 

 tidal river, on a small scale, will read- 

 ily understand the process on a large 

 one. 



For instance, at Grimsby, the op- 

 posite coast to the one I have been de- 

 scribing, the accumulation of soil is so 

 great that a dredging machine has to 

 be continually kept at work to keep 



