486 
DUNES NATURALLY WOODED. 
In other countries, dunes have spontaneously clothed them¬ 
selves with forests, and the rapidity with which their surface 
is covered by various species of sand plants, and finally by 
trees, where man and cattle and burrowing animals are ex¬ 
cluded from them, renders it highly probable that they would, 
as a general rule, protect themselves, if left to the undisturbed 
action of natural causes. The sand hills of the Frische Neh- 
rung, on the coast of Prussia, were formerly wooded down to 
the water’s edge, and it was only in the last century that, in 
consequence of the destruction of their forests, they became 
moving sands.* There is every reason to believe that the 
dunes of the Netherlands were clothed with trees until after 
the Roman invasion. The old geographers, in describing these 
countries, sjDeak of vast forests extending to the very brink of 
the sea; but drifting coast dunes are first mentioned by the 
chroniclers of the Middle Ages, and so far as we know they 
have assumed a destructive character in consequence of the 
improvidence of man.f The history of the dunes of Michigan, 
* “ In the Middle Ages,” says "Willibald Alexis, as quoted by Muller, 
Das Buck der Plazenwelt, i, p. 16, “the Nehrung was extending itself 
further, and the narrow opening near Lochstadt had filled itself up with 
sand. A great pine forest bound with its roots the dune sand and the 
heath uninterruptedly from Danzig to Pillau. King Frederick William I 
was once in want of money. A certain Herr von Korff promised to pro¬ 
cure it for him, without loan or taxes, if he could be allowed to remove 
something quite useless. He thinned out the forests of Prussia, which 
then, indeed, possessed little pecuniary value; but he felled the entire 
woods of the Frische Nehrung, so far as they lay within the Prussian ter¬ 
ritory. The financial operation was a success. The king had money, but 
ill the elementary operation which resulted from it, the state received irrep¬ 
arable injury. The sea winds rush over the bared hills; the Frische Haff 
is half-choked with sand; the channel between Elbing, the sea, and Konigs- 
berg is endangered, and the fisheries in the Haff injured. The operation 
of Herr von Korff brought the king 200,000 thalers. The state would 
now willingly expend millions to restore the forests again.” 
t Staking, Voormaals en Thans , p. 231. Had the dunes of the Nether¬ 
landish and French coasts, at the period of the Roman invasion, resembled 
the moving sand hills of the present day, it is inconceivable that they 
could have escaped the notice of so acute a physical geographer as Strabo: 
