Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/556

540 the pastor, has since then disappeared in the gulf. Great dunes now cover the village of Lattenwalde, which was so laid waste during the Seven Years' War by plundering, quartering of the Russians, infectious diseases, and fire, that the sand had only a heap of ruins to cover up. The village of Kunzen, with its church and seventeen homesteads, was ruined in the same way in the course of the last and the beginning of the present century; and now the dune, continuing its journey, has permitted the skulls and skeletons of the former churchyard on the west side to be again exposed.

The village of Pillkoppen has had a remarkable fate. The inhabitants left the place about the middle of the last century, and founded New Pillkoppen, at about a mile away. Then the dune went on in an unanticipated course, and old Pillkoppen has risen anew since the third decade of the present century; but the sand is already again a foot high in the potato-garden of the new school-house.

A fine wood near Schwarzort has been almost systematically destroyed by a dune advancing toward the southeast. It was composed of primitive oaks, lindens, and firs, and was in the year 1800 about five kilometres long, while now the dune has hardly left a kilometre and a half of it. Schumann says of this wood that "in about ten years after the tree has gone into the southern side of the moving dune, it emerges again from the north side. But the boughs which have been dried out and withered up during the interval are broken, ground up, and reduced to atoms as soon as the sand has left them. The same occurs later to the rotted stems. Few of these trees show more than an inch over the surface of the sand; and it is only the thicker and hardier trunks that can maintain themselves so as to project from two to five metres over the diminished dune. With most of them the sap-wood disappears down to the surface, the bark with all, which, however, is still present beneath. Frequently, the bark alone is left, while the wood has rotted away. Such trees are marked only by a hardly perceptible bark-ring, and the careless traveler is in danger of falling into the holes they have left." The time may be fixed with an approach to accuracy when the whole wood shall have been destroyed, and Schwarzort itself will be threatened. Schumann estimates the yearly progress of the dune at twelve metres, and gives the last trees still eighty years before they shall be overwhelmed.

In the small islands west of Jutland, the progress of the dunes is illustrated by a diminution of the islands themselves. For the sea eats the shore away year by year as it is left bare, and when the dunes have marched over the whole islands, and precipitated themselves on the eastern side of them into the sea, the islands will