36 SEASIDE DIVINITY. 



the soil they deposit at last to become sufficiently 

 dry to bear grass and be pastured by cattle. 

 The estuaries of great rivers, by the joint action 

 of the tides and the streams, become soon too 

 shallow for navigation, unless some artificial pro- 

 cess be employed to deepen them. Sea-beaches 

 are perceived to undergo great alteration, pro- 

 bably by some unperceived change in the neigh- 

 bouring headlands ; in some cases those which 

 were formed of hard clay becoming covered with 

 sand, shells, and pebbles, and the opposite process 

 occurring. If such modifications have been wit- 

 nessed in a single lifetime, or if they have been 

 known with certainty to have occurred within a 

 generation or two, or even within the space of a few 

 hundreds of years, it cannot be doubted that the 

 same agencies, acting incessantly for many cen- 

 turies, nay, many thousands of years, must have 

 produced very great alterations. Geological in- 

 vestigations clearly prove that very great and 

 remarkable mutations have occurred and are still 

 taking place in many parts of our sea-shores. 

 Those mutations afford a subject of study ex- 

 tremely interesting and instructive. We shall 

 advert to some of the most remarkable. 



Many very remarkable changes on our shores 

 have been produced by the perpetual action of 

 the waves of the sea. Such changes are frequently 

 to be observed in places where the shores are low 

 and formed of materials easily acted on by the 

 forces of currents and storms. From such 

 agencies even the hardest and most solid rocks 



