Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/757

Rh of New Jersey, Virginia, and the Carolinas, on the famed sea islands of Georgia, and on the coast of eastern Florida.

Much alike are these peninsulas and islands wherever we view them along the coast. The chief variation is in the vegetation which clothes them. The beaches of Long Island are almost barren, but from New Jersey southward many are covered with dense forests which vary in their trees according to the latitude. At Sandy Hook, oaks, red cedars, hollies, maples, and sassafras trees grow in wonderful luxuriance. On Seven-Mile Beach and Holly Beach the swamp magnolia abounds among the others. In the Carolinas the palmetto appears, often ragged in outline and blighted by the winter frosts. In northern Florida the palmettos are more numerous and show the influence of a warmer climate, while on the southern extremity of the zone of barrier beaches the cocoanut palm, planted by accident or design, rears its leafy crown in luxuriant verdure.

It is not the design of the writer to describe in detail the beaches of the Atlantic coast, but rather to consider their history and mode of growth. As it has been his fortune to spend much time on the sea-shore of New Jersey, he proposes to discuss the barrier beaches of that State as types of their genus.

They are sandy islands and peninsulas, from two to twenty miles in length and from half a mile to a mile in width, separated by inlets and usually divided from the mainland by an interval of several miles, in which are broad expanses of salt meadow, fringing and separating a series of channels, bays, and sounds.

The beaches which are now in their highest state of development are Sandy Hook, Seven-Mile Beach, and Holly Beach near Cape May. These typical examples of the sea-born barriers are much alike in structure, and consist of four principal divisions. The first division, or interior, is an undulating area covered with heavy timber, of which the size suggests its age. Immense hollies, oaks, pines, and red cedars abound, many of the first measuring two feet in diameter, and some of the latter attaining a circumference of four or five yards. The sassafras grows in remarkable luxuriance and immense grape-vines are everywhere to be seen, overhanging a dense undergrowth. In spring and summer the ground is covered with fragrant blossoms; columbines, violets, pinks, orchids, and a host of other flowers lend their bright colors to enhance the varied greens of the foliage. This is the beach primeval. Skirting it seaward is the second division, which bears smaller timber. Low cedars, hollies, and pines are here the chief forms of arboreal vegetation, and fewer flowering plants are seen. This zone is of later formation, and its trees are younger than those of the first. Adjoining it is the third division, which consists of a belt of undulating dunes a few hundred feet or yards