PKOTEOTION OF DUNES. 657 



gan, 80 far as I have been able to learn from my own observation 

 or that of others, is the same. Thirty years ago, when that region 

 was scarcely inhabited, they were generally corvered with a thick 

 growth of trees, chiefly pines and underwood, and there was lit- 

 tle appearance of undermining and wash on the lake side, or of 

 shifting of the sands, except where the trees had been cut or 

 turned up by the roots.* 



Nature, as she builds up dunes for the protection of the sea- 

 shore, provides, with similar conservatism, for the preservation of 

 the dunes themselves ; so that, without the interference of man, 

 these hillocks would be, not perhaps absolutely perpetual, but very 

 lasting in duration, and very slowly altered in form or position. 

 "Wlien once covered with the trees, shrubs and herbaceous 

 growths adapted to such localities, dunes undergo no apparent 

 change, except from the slow occasional undermining of the outer 

 tier, and from the accidental exposure of their interior, through 

 the burrowing of animals or the upturning of trees with their 

 roots ; and all these causes of displacement are very much less de- 

 structive when a vegetable covering exists in the immediate 

 neighborhood of the breach. 



Protection of Dunes. 



Before the occupation of the coasts by man, dunes, at all points 

 where they have been observed, seem to have been protected in 

 their rear by forests, which served to break the force of the winds 

 in both directions,f and to have spontaneously clothed themselves 



*The sands of Cape Cod were partially, if not completely, covered with 

 vegetation by nature. Dr. D wight, describing the dunes as they were in 1800, 

 says : " Some of them are covered with beach grass ; some fringed with whor- 

 tleberry bushes ; and some tufted with a small and singular growth of oaks. 

 .... The parts of this barrier which are covered with whortleberry bushes 

 and with oaks, have been either not at all or very little blown. The oaks, par- 

 ticularly, appear to be the continuation of the forests originally formed on this 



spot They wore all the marks of extreme age ; were, in some instances, 



already decayed, and in others decaying ; were hoary with moss, and were 

 deformed by branches, broken and wasted, not by violence, but by time." — 

 Travels, iii., p. 91. 



f BergsOe {Reventlovs Virksomhed, ii., 3) states that the dunes on the west 

 coast of Jutland were stationary before the destruction of the forests to the 

 east of them. The felling of the tall trees removed the resistance to the lower 

 current? of the westerly winds, and the sands have since buried a great extent 

 of fertile soO. See also same work, ii., p. 124. 



