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igan and elsewhere, long tracts of drifting sand that have done 

 serious local damage. To stop this extension, considerable 

 expenditures have already been made in several States to cover 

 their surface with a vegetable growth. 



But this reclamation of barrens and sand dunes has been 

 carried on most extensively and successfully in France. These 

 sand hills or dunes as they are called, stretched over a hundred 

 miles along the coast of the Bay of Biscay, between the rivers 

 Adour and Gironde. Banging from 180 to 320 feet above 

 the level of the sea, they are composed of white silicious 

 sand rounded and reduced to minute grains by trituration. 

 These grains are still too heavy to be borne aloft by the winds 

 and scattered afar like the ashes of volcanoes. On the Atlantic 

 shore of France, the prevailing and most violent winds are from 

 the west and southwest. Hence at low tide, the sands dried by 

 the sun and the wind were driven as along an inclined plane 

 up the slopes which descend seaward and thus formed these 

 growing dunes, which moving inland created great desolation. 



Nearly a century ago Bremontier published a memoir on the 

 reclamation of sand dunes. Under the patronage of the French 

 Government, he successfully introduced the planting of the 

 maritime pine along the Atlantic coast of Gascony. These 

 plantations have been perseveringly continued from that time 

 to the present, and now cover over 100,000 acres in that single 

 district. Not only has this wide area been reclaimed and made 

 productive soil, but a still greater extent of fertile land has 

 been rescued from the destruction threatened by the advancing 

 sand hills. In speaking of the monument erected to Bremontier 

 in this now stately forest, Marsh says : " He deserves to be 

 reckoned among the greatest benefactors of the race." 



In planting the dunes, a barrier along the shore was found 

 necessary at first to protect the young trees from the rolling 

 sands which otherwise would bury them. A double line of 

 paling was erected parallel to the shore and a hundred meters 

 from high water mark the second line being a hundred meters 

 further inland. This paling is made of planks sharpened at 

 the lower end and driven into the sand. Spaces of an inch 

 between the planks allow sand enough to pass through to bank 

 up equally on both sides and relieve somewhat the force of the 



