556 DTTEfES K^ATURALLY WOODED. 



have little reason to suppose that they were advanced enough in 

 civihzation to be likely to resort to such processes, especially at a 

 period when land could have had but a moderate value. 



In other countries, dunes have spontaneously clothed them- 

 selves with forests, and the rapidity with which their surface is 

 covered by various species of sand-plants and finally by trees, 

 where man and cattle and burrowing animals are excluded from 

 them, renders it highly probable that they would, as a general 

 rule, protect themselves if left to the undisturbed action of nat- 

 ural causes. The sand-hills of the Frische Nehrung, on the coast 

 of Prussia, were formerly wooded down to the water's edge, and 

 it was only in the last century that, in consequence of the destruc- 

 tion of their forests, they became moving sands.* There is every 

 reason to beheve that the dunes of the l^etherlands were clothed 

 with trees until after the Roman invasion. The old geographers, 

 in describing these countries, speak of vast forests extending to 

 the very brink of the sea ; but drifting coast-dunes are first men- 

 tioned by the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, and so far as we 

 know they have assumed a destructive character in consequence 

 of the improvidence of man.f The history of the dunes of Michi- 



*"In the Middle Ages," says Willibald Alexis, as quoted by Miiller, Bos 

 Buck der Pflanzenwelt, i., p. 16, "the Nehrung was extending itself further, 

 and the narrow opening near Lochstadt had filled itself up with sand. A great 

 pine forest bound with its roots the dune sand and the heath uninterruptedly 

 from Danzig to Pillau. King Frederick William I, was once in want of money. 

 A certain Herr von Korff promised to procure it for him, without loan or taxes, 

 if he could be allowed to remove something quite useless. He thinned out the 

 forests of Prussia, which then indeed possessed little pecvmiary 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 Konigs- 

 berg 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 will- 

 ingly expend millions to restore the forests again." 



f STARrNG, Voormaals en Thans, p. 231. Had the dunes of the Netherland- 

 ish and French coasts, at the period of the Roman invasion, resembled the 

 moving sand-hills of the present day, it is inconceivable that they could have 

 escaped the notice of so acute a physical geographer as Strabo ; and the abso- 

 lute silence of Caesar, Ptolemy, and the encyclopaedic Pliny, respecting them, 

 would be not less inexplicable. 



