market at Gary, the model industrial town recently built by the United States Steel Company, where it has been used to fill in a great swamp.

Drifting dunes have done immense damage all along the Pacific coast, from the Columbia River southward to Golden Gate Park, in California. Likewise on Cape Cod, and in the southern half of Long Island. Where, on the seashore, the prevailing winds are from the water, the beach sands tend to form hills, which are transported continually further and further inland. Such hills may be from thirty to one hundred feet high, and sometimes they reach an elevation of two hundred feet.

The worst situation on the Atlantic coast is found on Cape Henry and Cape Hatteras, where the traveling dunes are covering valuable timber lands and swallowing up many houses. The lifesaving stations maintained by the government in those localities have a hard fight for survival.

All along the coast of southern Virginia and North Carolina stretches, for

scores of miles, a chain of immense dunes, which is slowly moving away from the shore and over the land, devouring everything in its path. Even the forts on the coast, though so formidable in defense against any human enemy, have suffered so much damage by invasion from sand, in some instances, that the War Department has been obliged to appeal to the scientific bureaus of the government, particularly the Forest Service, for means wherewith to protect themselves against this creeping foe.

In Europe the dune problem is a very old one. Within historic times, in that part of the world, drifting sand hills have buried numerous villages and extensive forests, checked the courses of rivers, and turned many fertile regions into deserts. Bordering the Bay of Biscay, in France, is a belt of dunes which covers 250,000 square miles. But Europe has found a solution for the problem in a certain species of tree, called the "shore pine" (Pinus maritimus), seedlings of which, when planted in the shifting sands, grow rapidly, and hold them per

planted it on sand dunes all the way from Virginia to Florida, but in vain. And, most unfortunately, we have no tree of our own that appears to serve the same purpose.

It often happens that a drifting dune, traveling inland from the shore, leaves between it and the beach line a bare space where grasses take root and trees later on grow up. The trees afford protection against the wind, and thus the sand hill, deprived of its motive power, so to speak, ceases to march. Grasses and other plants overgrow its surface, and it becomes stationary and permanent

But this growth was destroyed, mainly through the instrumentality of fire, and consequently today, chiefly by reason of his own carelessness, man finds himself threatened by an enemy with which it is extremely difficult to deal.

In some instances it is practicable to restrain and control the shifting sands by planting them with sand-binding grasses-such, for example, as the "marram," or common beach grass, which spreads rapidly by runners radiating out from its firmly-rooted bunches. The creeping roots, which attain a length of twenty to thirty feet, form a densely in

terwoven mat beneath the surface, penetrating deeply, and knitting the sand together in a network of almost unbreakable fibers.

This serves to anchor the sand sufficiently to give an opportunity for the growth of the waxberry, which, once planted and made to thrive, affords adequate protection for certain shrubsnotably the red rose, which spreads almost as a vine over spots of bare sand. Virginia creeper, with its strong and woody stems, is next established on the dune, after which hardy trees may be planted, thus insuring its permanency.

Experience has shown that grass alone is not sufficient to accomplish the purpose. On the contrary, it actually helps in many instances to build dunes. Along many parts of the Atlantic coast are to be found sand hills, of the bigness of a house or thereabouts, which owe their development mainly to grass. As the grass grew, it offered something compact for the sand to accumulate upon, and thus the humble vegetation was a help rather than a hindrance to the sand hill.

Such a hill, however, is not a menace, but merely a useless disfigurement of the

landscape. The traveling dunes are the kind that do the damage, and with the really active ones it seems to be impossible to deal effectively. Some means of fighting them must nevertheless be found, because the areas of waste created by these desert-makers are steadily increasing. As the lands along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and along the inland lakes and rivers, become more valuable, our government will find it necessary to pass laws and expend large sums of money for holding and planting the dunes, just as France, Germany, Holland, and Denmark have already been forced to do.

A dead dune, as distinguished from a "live" one, is simply a sand hill on which nature has succeeded in establishing vegetation. The problem is to find some means whereby the same thing can be accomplished artificially. At the present time, in places where the trouble is not very bad, a good deal is being done in this direction by planting sand-binding grasses-a kind of work which has been conducted on Cape Cod, in a more or less desultory manner, for more than a century. In early days the very existence of the village of Provincetown,

Mass., was threatened by sand storms, which were eventually done away with by the systematic setting out of beach grass-a local ordinance even allowing the authorities to go into a man's yard and plant the grass, if he would not attend to the matter himself.

The marram, or "sand reed," as it is sometimes called, is the conspicuous species of beach grass all the way along the Atlantic coast from New Hampshire to Maryland, its long-leaved stems growing in tufts from two to four feet high. For planting purposes, its creeping roots, which are really underground stems, are sometimes cut into joints, each of which will start a new plant. Wherever there are dunes, sand-binding grasses are to be found plentifully. Thus marram and "wild rye" are abundant along the shores of the Great Lakes. South of Maryland, on the shores of the Atlantic, the marram is replaced by "bitter panic" grassso called because its leaves when chewed have a bitter taste. Further south occurs the "water oak," which bears large spikes of beautiful flowers.

When dry land begins to flow like water, trouble is likely to follow; and this is literally what happens in the case

of the drifting dunes. Even out of the mischiefs of life, however, ingenious man often manages to make a profit in one way or another, and here is no exception to the rule. Not very many years have elapsed since it occurred to a shrewd Quaker to dig up the dune on the sea-front of his Long Island farm, load it on barges, and send it to New York for sale to building contractors. It is said that he got quite a little fortune out of it.

Immense quantities of sand are consumed in the making of concrete, mortar, and sand bricks. Whence it comes about that, at the present time, many areas of dunes in the vicinity of New York City, and especially on the south shore of Long Island, are proving veritable gold mines to their owners. They are worked with the aid of costly machinery, the material being dried, screened to free it from impurities, and carried by endless belts to waiting boats, into which it is dumped through hoppers. When a boat is loaded full, it casts off and starts for New York, delivering at the city dock its burden of sand in a perfectly clean and pure condition ready for use.

-LONGFELLOW.