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from a third of a mile to five miles wide which were the low-lying lands which first succumbed to the onslaught of the sea. West of Mobile Bay the keys have gotten out from ten to fifteen miles from the mainland where, being now quite beyond their depth, they are all drowned except a few of the largest which are now dignified by the name of islands.

A tragic incident in this slow drowning of a continent

occurred on

SHORE LINE JUST NORTH OF BRIDLINGTON, ENGLAND. The footpath on the cliff has to be continually set back.

the night of August 10, 1856, when a sudden storm burst upon the Gulf, lashing its waters to such a fury that L'Isle Derniere, one of the prettiest of these islands, which had been occupied as a summer resort by the richest and oldest Creole families of New Orleans, was overwhelmed with all its inhabitants. Next day nothing but a mud bank, which has been covered at high tide ever since, remained to mark the spot where beautiful L'Isle Derniere had been.

West of the mouth of the Mississippi the Gulf has encroached upon the land from fifty to one hundred miles. Here there are neither keys nor their big brothers, the islands.

One interesting evidence of the steady advance of the sea upon the southern coast was found by the engineers build

ALONG THE YORKSHIRE COAST, ENGLAND.

ing the jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi. On Belize Bayou, a former outlet of the river, was an old Spanish fort built two hundred years before. When the engineers found it the water was ten feet deep over the door-sill of the magazine. Even if the water had been level with the sill when it was laid, which isn't likely, the rate of subsidence must have been five feet a century. The magazine was level and there were no cracks in the walls, showing that it was settling evenly beneath the waters. It continued to sink while it was under observation during the building of the jetties. But the most singular feature of the land around the mouth of the Mississippi is not that it is sinking but that it also stretches like wet rawhide. It is

so elastic and untrustworthy that the jetty engineers could not maintain reliable bench marks, level heights and tide gauges for reference purposes. A carefully measured base line 700 feet long was found to have stretched twelve feet in five years.

This subsidence of the coast, according to the geologists, is caused by the great weight of the detritus deposited upon the edge of the ocean floor by the great rivers. The Mississippi and its

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WATER-WORN BLUFF AT ROCKY POINT, PLYMOUTH, MASSACHUSETTS.

tributaries which are so thick with mud that their waters look as if they needed casters to enable them to run down hill, dump 400,000,000 tons of sediment on the edge of the Gulf every year, which seems quite enough to tip up several states. Yet all the rivers of the world, and that includes the Ganges, which in the average rainy season of 122 days carries six thousand million cubic feet of earthy matter, a bulk equal to forty of the pyramids of Egypt, do not transport enough sediment to fill up the sea to any appreciable extent. If an Englishman named Taylor made no mistake in his calculations all the detritus carried by all the rivers of the world in ten thousand years would only make a layer three inches thick if it were spread evenly all over the bottom of the sea.

The rivers which empty into the Atlantic are not so turbid as the Mississippi, yet they deposit an ever increasing load of detritus on the ocean floor near their mouths. They do not choke up their entrances because the bottom of the sea sinks as rapidly as the mud accumulates.

On the other side of the Atlantic the coast line is retreating before the ceaseless onslaughts of the waves even more rapidly than here. Forty years ago the area of Great Britain was 56,964,260 acres; today the figures are 56,748,927 acres. The difference, 215,333 acres, represents the amount that has been swallowed by the sea. England alone has surrendered 524 square miles of her territory to the waves within the last thousand years. More recently the advance

of the waters has been much more rapid, averaging for the last forty years 1,523 acres a year. The ravages of the sea in 1903 were almost-unprecedented.

Many historical towns, such as Ravensburgh, where Henry IV landed in 1339, have been submerged. Off the Yorkshire coast alone there are twelve submerged towns and villages. Between Flamborough Head and Kilnsea 73,780 acres, an area equal to that of London, has been devoured by the waves since the Roman invasion. The erosion here is so continuous that the outline of the coast is never the same on two consecutive days. On the Holderness coast, a stretch of forty miles, 1,904,000 tons of material material are washed away annually. Spurn Point is about to be made an

island.

There is an anchorage off Selsey, Sussex, still called "The Park" because it was a royal deer park in the reign of Henry VIII. The Goodwin sands, so much dreaded by navigators, was the 4,000-acre estate of Earl Godwin until it was inundated by a great wave in 1099. In June, 1898, the sea advanced inland two hundred yards at Cromer during a single gale. Between Cromer and Happisburg, a stretch of sixteen miles, the annual loss is twelve acres. All along the coast the same destructive process is going on continuously. The Shetland Islands, off the coast of Scotland, are composed of very hard rocks; yet so violent is the action of the waves and currents that what were once islands are mere clusters of rocks.

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ALL THAT IS LEFT OF ENGLAND'S ANCIENT CITY OF RECULVER ARE THESE TWO TOWERS OF

THE CATHEDRAL.

The rest has been swallowed by the waves.

Near Sheringham twenty feet of water now roll above a place where a cliff fifty feet high with houses on it stood a century ago. Minster church in Kent, two miles from the shore a century ago, is now on the beach.

Once there was a deep indentation on the coast of Kent, known as Herne Bay. The waves have whittled down the headlands until there is now a straight line. where the bay was. From 1872 to 1896, 1,300 feet were washed away. Reculver, between Herne Bay and Margate, in Roman days was an important military post one mile from the sea. The town

site is under water now. The coast of Sussex is being steadily worn away. Sometimes tracts of twenty to four hundred acres go at once. At Lyme Regis the cliffs are worn away at the rate of three feet a year. Near Penzance in Cornwall, St. Michael's Mount, now an insular rock, once stood in a forest several miles from the sea. On the coast of Wales the sea is advancing inland at the rate of six feet a year.

Ireland is also being rapidly dissolved into the ocean. In the southeast corner

of Waterford County the coast is ground away at the rate of eight feet a year, on the average, but sometimes a single storm comes along which takes away a slice one hundred feet wide at once. At Ardmore the sea kept taking the public highway as fast as it was laid out until at last all attempts to keep a road open along the shore was abandoned.

The most serious aspect of this continuous shrinkage of the United Kingdom is that there seems to be no way to check it. At Clanshanning, Ireland, a sea wall was built a dozen years ago and promptly demolished. Since then the sea has been allowed to take its course. Along the Holderness coast in England protective works have been put up at a cost of $15,000 a mile, which is three times the value of the land protected. At Bridlington it has cost $500,000 to protect one mile of coast. When sea walls and groynes are put up at one point the waves simply redouble their efforts on the coast to leeward.

Of course the local authorities could not undertake to build a continuous line of defenses against the sea entirely

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OCEAN BALKED FOR THE TIME BEING BY SEA WALL AT BAGNOR, ENGLAND.

tions for government aid and quoted decisions and precedents running back hundreds of years to prove that it was the King's duty to guard the coasts from attacks by Nature as zealously as he would from a mortal enemy. On the other hand, the communities which have already spent large sums to protect their own particular bits of coast are waging strenuous campaigns to convince the commission that they should not be expected to chip in to help protect some other fellow's shores.

Across the English channel the problem of saving the country from the sea is quite as serious as in England. Belgium spent $14,360,850 for protection from the waves from 1902 to 1904 and is now preparing to build a sea wall along the entire coast, fifty miles in extent,

gulfed at Cap de la Heve and a number of lives were lost Five million cubic meters of rock are dissolved in the brine annually on the coast of Normandy. The National Government of France takes the comfortable position that while the coast belongs to the Nation, its protection is a matter for individual enterprise; and that where land is washed away the individual owner must stand the loss, while if any land should be added by the action of the waves and currents it belongs to the state. Under this agreeable arrangement, which also obtains in Belgium and Italy, those who are unfortunate enough. to own land on the coast are not skimping on their grocery bills to save money for coast protection.

Germany is spending millions to check the advance of the Baltic Sea upon the

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