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LUTHER BURBANK, WHO HAS MADE THE CACTUS EDIBLE, GRASS GROW IN THE
AND CREATED, ALONG WITH SCORES OF VARIETIES OF FRUITS AND

FLOWERS, THE WHITE BLACKBERRY.

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By Charles Frederick Carter

DOW that a Royal Commission on Coast Erosion is trying to find some way to save enough of England from the waves to supply a site for headquarters from which to govern the rest of the British Empire, it may be remarked without any appearance of seeking to bear seaside real estate that the final revisions of geography were not made by the great cataclysms of the remote past. The hungry sea, forever gnawing at their coasts, is working changes in continents and islands which, measured by geological standards, are rapid.

If processes now active should be continued uninterruptedly the time is near at hand, by the geological calendar, when some extraordinary transformations will have been wrought on the face of the earth. If it were possible for mortal

perception to penetrate the future, perhaps steamships might be seen plowing the waters over the very spots where Galveston, New Orleans, Savannah and Charleston now stand, on their way to wharves far inland from the present coast line. Perhaps the long swell of the ocean might be seen rolling across what are now Long Island and Manhattan Island to break upon the Palisades. Perhaps Holland might once more form a part of the floor of the North Sea. Berlin and Paris might be the chief seaports of Germany and France instead of Hamburg and Havre, long since submerged.

This is not a prophecy, nor are the possibilities outlined so preposterous as at first glance they might appear. Many more marvelous metamorphoses have taken place in this hoary old world since it first began its circuit round the sun. Plato tells a story which is corroborated by a vast amount of circumstantial evidence at least as worthy of credence as

Copyright, 1907, by Technical World Company.

(595)

expert medical testimony at a murder trial, of an island continent in the ocean off the entrance to the Mediterranean which was the cradle of civilization. Its people were the conquerors of Europe and Egypt, the colonizers of the Americas, the progenitors of the Mound-builders and the Aztecs. This island, which Plato called Atlantis, with all its inhabitants was swallowed by the sea at a single gulp in one dread day and night.

Then there are the British Isles which are proved by circumstantial evidence to have been, once upon a time, a part of the continent of Europe. The waves of the Atlantic, pounding ceaselessly away, at last gouged a channel through some low-lying lands between Dover and Calais and isolated the islands as a pack of wolves by patient maneuvering might cut out a calf from the herd. And there is Australasia, which is but the meager remnants of a once vast continent which was swallowed by the insatiable waters.

But leaving out of consideration circumstantial evidence, dug up by those who have nothing better to do than to go nosing about trying to pry into Nature's secrets, of transformations in prehistoric times, there still remain changes in modern coastlines great enough to be of more than passing interest. Some of the most striking of these changes are along our own water front.

Inaccuracy and exaggeration by engineers the fellows who drive tunnels from opposite sides of rivers and mountains and make the ends meet in the black bowels of the earth something less than the fraction of a hair's breadth out of alignment-would be unthinkable, wouldn't they? Well, the engineers of · the United States Coast Survey who mapped the coast of Long Beach for twelve miles south of Barnegat Inlet in 1839 found upon going over the ground in 1871 that the sea in thirty-two years had advanced inland an average of 545 feet for the entire distance, and in some places as much as 930 feet. Also they found that beginning at the mouth of Dennis Creek in Cape May County the sea had swallowed 2,310 feet of that stream and 1,880 feet of East and West creeks. When the sea can exhibit an official record of progress at the rate of twenty-three feet a year it almost be

comes eligible to compete with some urban rapid transit systems.

All this happened a generation ago? Yes, but just wait a minute. Dr. George H. Cook, formerly State Geologist of New Jersey, estimated that the coast of the state was subsiding at the rate of two feet a century, or a quarter of an inch a year. The mean seaward slope of the coastal plain being six feet to the mile, this would give a third of a mile per century as the rate of the sea's encroachment upon the land. Dr. Cook being a mere geologist, engineers could not accept his unsupported statement about the rate of subsidence. So the United States coast survey established bench marks and put up self-registering tide gauges to test the matter. This was a work of years, of course.

Now here is where we get up to date. When the Government employes wearied of the tide gauges the New York City topographical engineers took up the observations. Recently the story the tide gauges told was compared and verified and corrected and tested and analyzed for the whole series of years. When the final result was before them the city engineers had to admit that Dr. Cook had only erred .55 of a foot per century so far as the subsidence of the coasts of New York Harbor were concerned, which wasn't at all bad for a geologist. In other words, they found that while the tide gauges varied somewhat at different points, the apparent average increase at half tide level was 1.45 feet per century. Mind you, they said apparent. An engineer wouldn't admit that coal was black until he had brought his theodolite to bear upon it and had worked out the result with a table of logarithms. And anyway, they said, this did not mean that the sea was really rising; it must be the land sinking if anything was happening. In other words, the patient's leg is fractured, not broken. With this as a basis any one who is good at figures can compute the exact time when the Flatiron Building will be submerged.

It is not necessary to be an engineer or even a geologist to be able to perceive that the sea is advancing upon the eastern and southern coasts of the United States. Submerged stumps, some of them of trees cut down by man, and

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ARCH MADE BY NATURE ON CALIFORNIA COAST, FOUR MILES NORTH OF SANTA MONICA.

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