﻿THE 



GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. 



NEW SERIES. DECADE II. VOL. IV. 



No. VII.— JULY, 1877. 



OE,IC3-II>q".A_3L JLI^TIGXJ:BS. 



I. — Across Europe and Asia. — Travelling Notes. 



By Professor John Milne, F.G.S. ; 

 Imperial College of Engineering, Tokei, Japan. 



Part I. — London to St. Petersburg. 



Contexts. — "Wearing away and accumulation of laud on the coasts of England and 

 Denmark.— Ice-worn character of the coasts of Sweden and Finland probably 

 due to the action of coast ice on a rising area. 



LEFT London on the 3rd of August, 1875, and next morning 

 was sailing down the muddy estuarine waters of the Humber 

 towards the German Ocean en route for Gottenborg. On either side 

 was a long line of flat coast. Before us was S^Durn Point, which, 

 by the action of the sea, is being fast carried away. The denudation 

 of the eastern coast of England, and the steady encroachment of 

 the sea, which has swallowed up towns and forced others to move 

 inland, is a subject with which all geologists are familiar. Here, 

 where the materials are soft, the rate of waste is rapid enough to 

 become a marked event in the lifetime of an inhabitant. The little 

 town of the Banks has disappeared, and a lighthouse at the entrance 

 to the river has been forced to migrate towards the land. 



Although the tides and currents of the sea are destroying and 

 transjDorting the materials of many coasts to form beds of silt and 

 other matter upon the ocean bottom, there are cases where their 

 action upon a coast is reproductive, — an example of which is to be 

 seen at the northern extremity of Denmark, called the Skagen or Skaw 

 promontory. We sighted this after leaving Spurn. At a distance 

 this point looked like a low white shore. About two miles and a half 

 from the end I could see a buoy, marking the end of a shoal. This 

 shoal the captain told me, when first he knew it, between twenty 

 and thirty years ago, instead of being two miles and a half long, 

 was then only one mile long. The point itself, which I believe is 

 made up of shingle, sand, and other drifted material, also appears to 

 be lengthening, as is indicated by an old lighthouse standing almost 

 a mile back from the new one which has supplanted it at the end of 

 the point. The materials for such rapid growth as is here exhibited 

 appear to have come down the Baltic, the islands lying in a line with 



DECADE II. — YOL. IV. — NO. Til. 19 



