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THE SEA'S FURIOUS ATTACK ON THE CITY OF DEAL, ENGLAND, NOW SERIOUSLY THREATENED.

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twelfths of the island of Nordstrand has been ground away by the attrition of the waves, and the rest is going fast. There is forty feet of water where the center of the island used to be, and of the twenty-four islets which once surrounded. it none remains.

Holland, which was chiefly stolen from the sea, and where people by the hundred thousand have been drowned repeatedly in inundations in the last sixteen hundred years, still threatens to return to its former estate. Careful measurements made by the Dutch Government show that in

tide driven on by a gale broke through the sandhills. Katwyk, once far from the sea, is now on the shore. At Scheveningen, where half the village was overwhelmed by the sea in 1570, a church once in the middle of the town is now on the beach. Several other villages which appeared on the maps of 1571 are now three-quarters of a mile out to sea. Greenland is subsiding and even Australia is being worn away so much that the scanty population of the island continent is obliged to construct expensive works on all sides to protect its seaports.

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NATURAL BRIDGE NEAR MOUTH OF MEDDER CREEK, SANTA CRUZ COUNTY CALIFORNIA.

the last half century the loss of beach in the north of Holland has been a strip of an average width of 156 feet, and in the south of Holland 108 feet. The coast is subsiding at the rate of four inches to thirty inches a century. catastrophe was narrowly missed in December, 1894, when an unusually high

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Still, this gloomy picture of destruction. need arouse no apprehensions in the breasts of the present generation. Taking it by and large it will be several thousand years, which is plenty long enough for our immediate interests, before Mother Earth will find it necessary to hang out the sign "Standing Room Only."

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Railroads Race to the the North

By Aubrey Fullerton

HE mushers and the huskies have been driven back to the wilderness, and very soon they will be done out of even that. What was wilderness five years ago is now a harvest-land, and what is wilderness now will shortly be as all the rest is. The railroads are doing it.

In the days of the old fur-trading the dog-trains came to Detroit and St. Paul; twenty years ago one was only occasionally seen at Winnipeg; not long since they stopped coming to Edmonton, three hundred and fifty miles north of the boundary; and now it is only in the country that we call the North-land that they are to be seen at all.

But even the North is being narrowed. The railroads are reaching up and up, and the mushers and dog-trains are being driven back to the side trails where railroads will never be.

There never was so much and so ambitious railway enterprise in the North-West as there is at this moment. Five thousand miles of road are under contract in the country between the Great Lakes and the Rockies, on the

THE TRACK AND THE POLE. Two symbols of progress in the wilderness.

Canadian side of the border. It is within easy memory when this entire region. was trackless, a virgin reach of unused land, and now it is being networked by new main lines and branch lines that will soon leave no part of it out of reach. This represents the activity of four great railway systems already in operation or fully organized. Smaller and more local undertakings are in project in the same territory by a number of embryo companies, and some daring schemes are shaping also in the far north, toward the Arctic Circle. The pathfinder and pioneer in one is today the railway surveyor.

The

The largest single enterprise now under way by any railroad interests in America is the building of the Grand Trunk Pacific right across Canada. A new transcontinental highway that will add 3,600 miles to a nation's railway mileage means brain and brawn. eastern section of this road-that is, the half east of Winnipeg, which is being constructed as a national road by the Canadian Government-will cost $30,000 a mile and will include such engineering feats as the crossing of the St. Lawrence River at Quebec with the largest single

span bridge in the world, and the overthrow by a tunnelful of dynamite of a mountain-side at La Tuque, in the northern Quebec wilderness. Nine hundred miles of this section are now under contract, one-fourth of which has been awarded to the Grand Trunk Pacific itself, whose right to tender was provided by the terms of charter.

The picturesque part of the new transcontinental, however, is its

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ATHABASCA RIVER, ON THE YELLOWHEAD ROUTE OF THE GRAND TRUNK PACIFIC.

prairie and mountain mileage, west of Winnipeg, all of which the company is building on its own responsibility but with Government guarantee of its bonds. Track-laying is already under way in the section between Winnipeg and Edmonton, and 1907 harvest-freight will be moved over it to meet the lake boats at Port Arthur.

In terms of human interest the building of this prairie section means one hundred new towns to be begun within a year; for there is to be a railway station every seven miles, and wherever there is a railway station there will be a town. It means that in this northern hinterland there is shortly to be, is being even now, enacted the great drama that has already made the plains to the south, and forty years ago the Western States, a man's land instead of a no-man's land. The coming of the people is the sequel to the laying of the steel.

The course of the new transcontinental across the prairie was pretty well decided on two years ago, the entire route from the Atlantic coast being chosen through new and as yet undeveloped country; but the mountain section, west of Edmonton, was until only a few months ago a puzzle.

A second hunt for the Northwest Passage-a land-hunt instead of water-had as its object to find where the road could most easily cross the Rockies.

There are in all some ten or twelve points where the Canadian Rockies can be crossed. Nature cut these passes through the mountains at fairly regular intervals; two have already been used for railway routes in the southern part of the range, and others equally suitable are spread along the mountain-line to the north. A choice of four or five was before the Grand Trunk Pacific, and this narrowed down, after its engineers had examined them all and had run their surveys through every feasible or possible route, to a choice of two. It was to be either the Pine River or the Yellowhead.

The hunt for the mountain passage became exciting. It turned out to be a race, for another road with transcontinental ambitions headed at the same time and in the same direction and with the same end in view. It was a quiet, dogged, yet spectacular race, as surveyors' races always are. The Grand Trunk Pacific won, and in November last filed at Ottawa complete plans of a route through the Yellowhead, from Edmonton

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