PERMANENCE OF DUNE8. 
487 
so far as I have been able to learn from my own observation, 
or that of others, is the same. Thirty years ago, when that 
region was scarcely inhabited, they were generally covered 
with a thick growth of trees, chiefly pines, and underwood, and 
there was little appearance of undermining and wash on the 
lake side, or of shifting of the sands, except where the trees 
had been cut or turned up by the roots.* 
Nature, as she builds up dunes for the protection of the sea 
shore, provides, with similar conservatism, for the preservation 
of the dunes themselves; so that, without the interference of 
man, these hillocks would be, not perhaps absolutely perpetual, 
but very lasting in duration, and very slowly altered in form or 
position. When once covered with the trees, shrubs, and her¬ 
baceous growths adapted to such localities, dunes undergo no 
apparent change, except the slow occasional undermining of 
and the absolute silence of Caesar, Ptolemy, and the encyclopaedic Pliny, 
respecting them, would be not less inexplicable. 
The Old Northern language, the ancient tongue of Denmark, though 
rich in terms descriptive of natural scenery, had no name for dune, nor do 
I think the sand hills of the coast are anywhere noticed in Icelandic liter¬ 
ature. The modern Icelanders, in treating of the dunes of Jutland, call 
them iclettr , hill, cliff, and the Danish Telit is from that source. The word 
Dune is also of recent introduction into German. Had the dunes been 
distinguished from other hillocks, in ancient times, by so remarkable a 
feathre as the propensity to drift, they would certainly have acquired a 
specific name in both Old Northern and German. So long as they were 
wooded knolls, they needed no peculiar name; when they became for¬ 
midable, from the destruction of the woods which confined them, they 
acquired a designation. 
* The sands of Cape Cod were partially, if not completely, covered 
with vegetation by nature. Dr. Dwight, describing the dunes as they 
were in 1800, says : “ Some of them are covered with beach grass ; some 
fringed with whortleberry bushes ; and some tufted with a small and sin¬ 
gular growth of oaks. * * * The parts of this barrier, which are cov¬ 
ered with whortleberry bushes and with oaks, have been either not at all, 
or very little blown. The oaks, particularly, appear to be the continuation 
of the forests originally formed on this spot. * * * They wore all the 
marks of extreme age; were, in some instances, already decayed, and in 
others decaying ; were hoary with moss, and were deformed by branches, 
broken and wasted, not by violence, but by time.”— Travels , iii, p. 91. 
