Geology of Norfolk. 
473 
We have already mentioned the closing of the breaches in the 
sand-hills by means of sand and shingle as one of the triumphs of 
applied geology in the hands of Smith. For three years he 
laboured in vain to prevail on the Commissioners of these marshes 
to substitute such simple means for the piles of masonry and the 
forests of timber which they were employing in vain. At length 
he induced some of them to accompany him to the shore, where 
he pointed out the mode in which nature had formed the barrier, 
and by which he proposed to aid nature in sustaining it. He 
showed them how a shallow sea agitated by violent storms tore 
up the materials of its bottom, and impelled them on the shore, 
projecting a portion beyond the reach of the retiring wave. 
He pointed out how the ordinary action of the tide during inter- 
vals of tranquillity arranged the materials thus thrown up in 
a gradual slope, in rolling up which the waves spent their force 
and found a barrier of their own formation more efficacious in 
withstanding their fury than solid constructions which opposed to 
them an abrupt resistance. The arguments thus supported were 
irresistible, and the astonished Commissioners exclaimed — "Oh, 
that none of us should have thought of this before !" Smith, now 
allowed full scope to follow his own plans, employed a number 
of carts to draw the blown sand from the highest part of the 
neighbouring sand-hills, arranging it in a slope of one to twelve 
on the side of the sea, and one to three or four on the side of the 
land, sealing down the sand, as he proceeded, by a covering of the 
heaviest shingle which he could procure near the spot, and which 
he had observed to remain unmoved during: the most violent jjales. 
In less than a year the breach, more than a mile in length, was 
stopped, and the ordinary operations commenced of drawing off 
the surface-water by machinery — for these marshes lie below the 
ordinary level of high water, and have a very limited fall at low 
water. The measures which Smith proposed for their further 
improvement have not been followed up ; but his unresisting 
slopes have withstood the heaviest storms of the German Ocean 
for more than forty years ; and on the practice or neglect of the 
lessons which he taught the Commissioners in this department of 
agricultural engineering depends the existence not only of the 
rich alluvial tract of the Yare and the Waveney, in Norfolk and 
Suffolk, but ultimately the question whether Yarmouth itself, the 
site of which was a sandbank separated from the mainland before 
A.D. 900, shall, in the course of those changes now in progress, of 
which Geology takes cognisance, remain a flourishing town, or 
return to the state of a sandbank again.* 
* Such is the account of the operations given by Professor Phillips, 
in Ihe 'Menioirs of William Smith,' from the voluminous notes of his 
