150 



THE AMEKICAN MONTHLY 



[August, 



often fatal to the mariner. Thrice 

 has our great poet named the ' Good- 

 wins,' and in ' The Merchant of Ven- 

 ice ' it is spoken of as 'a very danger- 

 ous flat and fatal, where the carcasses 

 of many a tall ship lie buried.' 



Then there are the vast sandy des- 

 erts, like dry oceans, also disturbed 

 with moving waves and storms, over- 

 whelming whole caravans of mer- 

 chants or of pilgrims, who leave be- 

 hind them a trail of whitened bones. 

 Besides which it has its floods, as we 

 call those moving sands lifted by the 

 wind, and which in Egypt have en- 

 croached upon that fertile oasis, bury- 

 ing many of its ancient and renowned 

 cities, whose monuments would seem 

 almost to defy the hand of time. Nor 

 are we without these phenomena in 

 our own country, as the entombed 

 church of Piranzabuloe, in Cornwall, 

 testifies. But one of the most re- 

 markable of these sand floods oc- 

 curred in 1688, on the borders of 

 Suffolk and Norfolk, and which is 

 fully described by a gentleman named 

 Wright, a great sufferer by its de- 

 structive influence, in the early num- 

 bers of the Philosophical Ti^ansac- 

 tions of the Royal Society. It is too 

 long to insert here in full. I will there- 

 fore briefly give you some of the facts. 

 It began at the small town of Laken- 

 heath, where some sand-hills, covered 

 with scanty herbage, got denuded of 

 this by the wind blowing tempestu- 

 ously from the southwest. These 

 sands, lying on the chalk, belong, as 

 I believe, to the series called by geolo- 

 gists the ' Thanet sands.' At first, 

 about ten acres of ground got covered, 

 but before the flood had advanced 

 four miles it had overwhelmed one 

 thousand. This visitation continued 

 for many years, in spite of all at- 

 tempts to arrest its progress. After 

 twelve years had passed away, its 

 first real obstacle was descending a 

 valley, but it then ascended the oppo- 

 site hill, entered the town of Down- 

 • ham, destroying several houses. The 

 house of the naiTator was almost 

 buried in sand, which had mounted 



up to the very eaves of his outhouses. 

 It partially filled the little river Ouse. 

 and interfered with its navigation ; 

 and it was only conquered by years 

 of sedulous care and enormous labor. 



But it is in the formation of this 

 earth's crust that the mighty power 

 of sand is shown in enormous sedi- 

 mentary deposits, the Old Red itself 

 being estimated at 10,000 feet in thick- 

 ness, added to which are others still 

 earlier, and many that carry us up- 

 wards to the Tertiary system, where 

 I propose particulary to enter and 

 discviss our subject. What is this 

 sand, so ubiquitous, so vast in its 

 aggregations ? A writer on ' Beach 

 Pebbles ' put the question to a travel- 

 ler from the great desert, in respect 

 to which he answered, ' Powdered 

 quartz.' 



But it is the sand of our coasts in 

 which the special problem for discus- 

 sion lays, and more particularly that 

 on our eastern and southern shores, 

 where are beaches of shingle fed from 

 the debris of the upper chalk. 



If we take a diagonal line from the 

 estuary of the Exe to the Humber, 

 east of it lays the large chalk forma- 

 tion of England. Sometimes it shows 

 itself in rearing lofty white cliff's, by 

 which our country obtained the name 

 of ' Albion ; ' at others it is only 

 known by its ruins, and these have 

 an extensive admixture of other de- 

 posits. Nevertheless, its bones, it 

 may be said, are everywhere left be- 

 hind in the dense flint shingle. These 

 beaches are often many square miles 

 in extent, shutting up ancient estua- 

 ries, which are known to have been 

 navigable in historic times. But be- 

 sides these accumulations by the sea- 

 shore, we are well familiar in the 

 great London basin of deposits of this 

 same shingle with intercalated layers 

 of sand, and the gravel, with its fer- 

 ruginous hvie, known to all for its use 

 in our garden walks. This last, the 

 most superficial of such deposits, caps 

 the London clay over a large part ot 

 the metropolitan area. There is an- 

 other earlier, known as the Bagshot 



