510 
INLAND SANDS. 
siderable distances from the coast. Few regions have suffered 
so much from this cause in proportion to their extent, as the 
peninsula of Jutland. So long as the woods, with which nature 
had planted the Danish dunes, were spared, they seem to have 
heen stationary, and we have no historical evidence, of an earlier 
date than the sixteenth century, that they had become in any 
way injurious. From that period, there are frequent notices of 
the invasions of cultivated grounds by the sands; and excava¬ 
tions are constantly bringing to light proof of human habita¬ 
tion and of agricultural industry, in former ages, on soils now 
buried beneath deep drifts from the dunes and beaches of the 
sea coast.* 
Extensive tracts of valuable plain land in the Netherlands 
and in France have been covered in the same way with a layer 
of sand deep enough to render them infertile, and they can be 
restored to cultivation only by processes analogous to those 
employed for fixing and improving the dunes.f Diluvial sand 
plains, also, have been reclaimed by these methods in the 
Duchy of Austria, between Yienna and the Semmering ridge, 
in Jutland, and in the great champaign country of Northern 
Germany, especially the Mark Brandenburg, where artificial 
forests can be propagated with great ease, and where, conse¬ 
quently, this branch of industry has been pursued on a great 
scale, and with highly beneficial results, both as respects the 
supply of forest products and the preparation of the soil for 
agricultural use. 
As a general rule, inland sands are looser, dryer, and more 
inclined to drift, than those of the sea coast, where the moist 
and saline atmosphere of the ocean keeps them always more 
or less humid and cohesive. No shore dunes are so movable 
as the medanos of Peru described in a passage quoted from Pop- 
* For details, consult Andersen, Orn Klitformationen , pp. 223, 236. 
t When the deposit is not very deep, and the adjacent land lying to the 
leeward of the prevailing winds is covered with water, or otherwise worth¬ 
less, the surface is sometimes freed from the drifts by repeated harrowings, 
which loosen the sand, so that the wind takes it up and transports it to 
grounds where accumulations of it are less injurious. 
