THE LIIMFJORD. 
491 
At Agger, near the western end of the Liimfjord, in Jut¬ 
land, the coast was washed away, between the years 1815 and 
1839, at the rate of more than eighteen feet a year. The ad¬ 
vance of the sea appears to have been something less rapid 
for a century betore; but from 1840 to 1857, it gained upon 
the land no less than thirty feet a year. At other points of 
the shore of Jutland, the loss is smaller, but the sea is encroach¬ 
ing generally upon the whole line of the coast.* 
The Liimfjord. 
The irruption of the sea into the fresh-water lagoon of 
Liimfjord in Jutland, in 1825—one of the most remarkable 
encroachments of the ocean in modern times—is expressly as¬ 
cribed to “ mismanagement of the dunes ” on the narrow neck 
of land which separated the fjord from the North Sea. At 
earlier periods, the sea had swept across the isthmus, and even 
burst through it, but the channel had been filled up again, 
sometimes by artificial means, sometimes by the operation of 
natural causes, and on all these occasions effects were produced 
very similar to those resulting from the formation of the new 
channel in 1825, which still remains open.f Within compara¬ 
tively recent historical ages, the Liimfjord has thus been several 
times alternately filled with fresh and with saltwater, and man 
has produced, by neglecting the dunes, or at least might have 
prevented by maintaining them, changes identical with those 
which are usually ascribed to the action of great geological 
causes, and sometimes supposed to have required vast periods 
of time for their accomplishment. 
“ This breach,” says Forchhammer, “ which converted the 
Liimfjord into a sound, and the northern part of Jutland into 
an island, occasioned remarkable changes. The first and most 
* Andresen, Om Klitformationen, pp. 68-72. 
t Id., pp. 231, 232. Andresen’s work, though printed in 1861, was finished 
in 1859. Lyell (Antiquity of Man, 1863, p. 14) says: “ Even in the course 
of the present century, the salt waters have made one eruption into the 
Baltic by the Liimfjord, although they havo been now again excluded.” 
