570 DUNES OF DENMAEK. 



forests trees, wMcli liave since proved so valuable a means of 

 fixing tlie dunes and rendering them productive, were com- 

 menced, and have been continued ever since.* During this lat- 

 ter period, Bremontier, without any knowledge of what was 

 doing in Denmark, experimented upon the cultivation of forest 

 trees on the dunes of Gascony, and perfected a system, which, 

 with some improvements in matters of detail, is still largely pur- 

 sued on those shores. The example of Denmark was soon fol- 

 lowed in the neighboring kingdom of Prussia, and in the JS^ether- 

 lands ; and, as we shall see hereafter, these improvements have 

 been everywhere crowned with most flattering success. 



Under the administration of Reventlov, a httle before the close 

 of the last century, the Danish Government organized a regular 

 system of improvement in the economy of the dunes. They 

 were planted with the arundo and other vegetables of similar 

 habits, protected against trespassers, and at last partly covered 

 with forest trees. By these means much waste soil has been con- 

 verted into arable ground, a large growth of valuable timber 

 obtained, and the further spread of the drifts, which threatened 

 to lay waste the whole peninsula of Jutland, to a considerable 

 extent arrested. 



In France, the operations for fixing and reclaiming the dunes — 

 which began under the direction of Bremontier about the same 



stantially abandoned. A hundred years ago, before the valley of the Missis- 

 sippi or even the rich plains of Central and Western New York were opened 

 to the white settler, the value of land was relatively much greater in New 

 England than it is at present, and consequently some rural improvements 

 were then worth making, which would not now yield sufficient returns to 

 tempt the investment of capital. The money and the time required to sub- 

 due and render productive twenty acres of sea-sand on Cape Cod, would buy 

 a " section " and rear a family in Illinois. The son of the Pilgrim, therefore, 

 abandons the sand-hills, and seeks a better fortune on the fertile prairies of 

 the West. See D wight. Travels, i., pp. 93, 93. 



* Andresen, Om Klitformationen, pp. 237, 240. In the article Bune, in 

 Professor Boccardo's valuable Diziormrio dell' Economia PoUtica, it is said 

 that Cassini adopted successful processes for checking the advance of the 

 dunes at Boulogne sur Mer, and that his methods of plantation are still fol- 

 lowed. According to Nutzhorn, Skov og Land, p. 7, a German named R5hl, 

 employed by the Danish Government, introduced into Northern and Western 

 Seeland methods analogous to those of Bremontier as early as 1780. 



