548 SAND CARRIED DOWN TO THE SEA. 
Netherlands “move sand only by a very slow displacement of 
sand-banks, and do not carry it with them as a suspended or 
floating material.” The sands of the German Ocean he holds 
to be a product of the “ great North German drift,’ deposited 
where they now lie before the commencement of the present 
geological period, and he maintains similar opinions with regard 
to the sands thrown up by the Mediterranean at the mouths of 
the Nile and on the Barbary coast.* 
Sand now carried to the Sea. 
There are, however, cases where mountain streams still bear 
to the sea perhaps relatively small, but certainly absolutely 
large, amounts of disintegrated rock.t The quantity of sand 
* De Bodem van Nederland, i., p. 339. 
+ The conditions favorable to the production of sand from disintegrated 
rock, by causes now in action, are perhaps nowhere more perfectly realized 
than in the Sinaitic Peninsula. The mountains are steep and lofty, unpro- 
tected by vegetation or even by a coating of earth, and the rocks which com- 
pose them are in a shattered and fragmentary condition. They are furrowed 
by deep and precipitous ravines, with beds sufficiently inclined for the rapid 
flow of water, and generally without basins in which the larger blocks of stone 
rolled by the torrents can be dropped and left in repose; there are severe 
frosts and much snow on the higher summits and ridges, and the winter rains 
are abundant and heavy. The mountains are principally of igneous formation, 
but many of the less elevated peaks are capped with sandstone, and on the 
eastern slope of the peninsula you may sometimes see, at a single glance, 
several lofty pyramids of granite, separated by considerable intervals, and all 
surmounted by horizontally stratified deposits of sandstone often only a few 
yards square, which correspond to each other in height, are evidently contem- 
poraneous in origin, and were once connected in continuous beds, The degra- 
dation of the rock on which this formation rests is constantly bringing down 
masses of it, and mingling them with the basaltic, porphyritic, granitic, and 
calcareous fragments which the torrents carry down to the valleys, and, through 
them, in a state of greater or less disintegration, to the sea. The quantity of 
sand annually washed into the Red Sea by the larger torrents of the Lesser 
Peninsula, is probably at least equal to that contributed to the ocean by any 
streams draining basins of no greater extent. Absolutely considered, then, the 
mass may be said to be large, but it is apparently very small as compared with 
the sand thrown up by the German Ocean and the Atlantic on the coasts of 
Denmark and of France. There are, indeed, in Arabia Petraea, many torrents 
