2 INTRODUCTION 
angular fragments of rock will soon have their corners 
rounded off and become rubbed into the form of pebbles. As 
these pebbles are rolled to and fro upon the beach they get 
worn smaller and smaller, until at length they are reduced to 
the state of sand. Although this sand is at first coarse, it 
gradually becomes finer and finer as surely as though it were 
ground in a mill; and ultimately it is carried out to sea as 
fine sediment and laid down upon the ocean floor.? 
The story of the sands is not only one of the conflict of the sea 
and rocks; it is also a story of the winds. It is the winds that 
have rescued them from the waves and driven them about, sifting 
and assorting them, arranging them in graceful forms, and often 
heaping them up into dunes which, until fastened by vegetation, 
are themselves ever moved onward by the same force, sometimes 
burying fertile lands, trees, and even houses in their march. 
The sands, moreover, are in turn themselves destructive agents, 
to whose power the many fragments which strew the beach and 
dunes bear ample witness. The knotty sticks so commonly seen 
on the beach are often the hearts of oak- or cedar-trees from 
which the tiny.crystals of sand have slowly cut away their less 
solid outer growth. Everything, in fact, upon the sands is 
“each-worn,” even to the window-glass of life-saving stations, 
which is frequently so ground that it loses its transparency in a 
single storm. 
The beach is also a vast siciopncas holding myriads of the 
dead. ‘If ghosts be ever laid, here lie ghosts of creatures innu- 
merable, vexing the mind = the attempt to conceive them.” 
And there are certain sands which may be said to sing their 
requiem, the so-called musical sands, like the “Singing Beach” 
at Manchester-by-the-Sea, which emit sounds when struck or other- 
wise disturbed. On some beaches these sounds resemble rumbling, 
on others hooting; sometimes they are bell-like and even rhyth- 
mical. The cause of this sonorous character is not definitely 
known, but it is possibly due to films of compressed gases which 
separate each grain as with a cushion, and the breaking of which 
1 Huxley. 
