378 THE LESSONS OF GALVESTON 



Several lessons of the Galveston horror are well worth reading and 

 pondering: 



The first lesson is tlie old, old one of experience summed in parable, 

 which bans the building of a house on sand. Galveston was founded 

 on a sand bank — a mere wave-built ca}' or key — made b}"^ the waves 

 of average storms during a few centuries. Up to its highest point 

 (less than a dozen feet above low tide) the earth of the island com- 

 I)rised absolutely nothing but wave-cast sand and silt, and to a depth 

 of at least half a mile in vertical measure there is no solid rock; the 

 strata are loose sands and silts and mud beds, nowhere firm enough 

 to afford a sure foundation. Geologicalh' the deposits are those of 

 the Pleistocene Columbia formation to a depth of several hundred 

 feet, and these are underlain by lithologically similar deposits of sev- 

 eral Tertiary formations. The successive formations from the Colum- 

 bia downward are mechanical deposits ; they are not cemented with 

 calcareous or silicious substances, like some of the formations of the 

 eastern Gulf coast, nor are the}^ bound together by coralline masses 

 like some of the West India littorals ; the}' include little material save 

 water-logged muds and silts, semi-solidified by pressure at depths, 

 but nowhere lithified into firm ledges. And what is true of Galves- 

 ton is measurably true of the entire western Gulf coast from Vera 

 Cruz to the Mississippi passes; no worse coast-stretch for foundations 

 exits in the world, and none other so l)ad is of anything like equal 

 extent. 



The second lesson is but the first raised from the plane of ex- 

 perience alone to that of recognition of natural agencies : The sand 

 bank on which Galveston was built is something more than a simple 

 heap of silicious grains and dust ; it is a record of past wave-work 

 which might well have deterred the founders of the cit}'. The most 

 conspicuous work of waves and wind-driven sea-currents is the build- 

 ing of bars of sand or gravel gathered from neighboring shore- 

 stretches or washed up from shallow bottoms ; only less cons]>icuous 

 is the work of these agents in carving sea-cliffs. Both modes of work 

 are preeminently characteristic ; there is not a mile of our eastern 

 and southern coasts, from St Croix River bounding Maine to the Rio 

 Grande beyond Texas, without one or tlie other of these products of 

 sea-work. On some coast-stretches, like that of southern New Jersey, 

 the bars and sea-cliffs alternate, the one stretching across the mouths 

 of valleys embouching toward the sea, the other truncating the divides 

 between the valleys; along higher and rockier shores, like those of 



