THE 
GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE. 
NEW SERIES. DECADE II. VOL. IV. 
No. VII.— JULY, 1877. 
OZRIO-IIsr^.X. AETICLES. 
I. — Across Europe ano Asia. — Travelling Notes. 
By Professor John Milne, F.G.S. ; 
Imperial College of Engineering, Tokei, Japan. 
Part I. — London to St. Petersburg. 
Contents. — "Wearing away and accumulation of Land on the coasts of England and 
Denmark. — Ice-wom character of tlie coasts of Sweden and Einland probably 
due to the actiou of coast ice on a rising area. 
I LEFT London on the 3rd of August, 1875, and next morning 
was sailing down tlie 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 Spnm 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 familiär. 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 
transporting 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 
19 
DECADE II. — VOL. IV. — NO. VII. 
