Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/266

252  planted on the spot, in consequence of which the beach was again raised to a sufficient height, and in various places into hills."

At Sea Girt, N. J., there is a strip of beach covered with cedar bushes. These have raised a natural dike. The sand, blown up the beach, is caught by the bushes and arrested, forming a long irregular bank of considerable height. The hollows behind this bank, protected from the surf, from the sea-breeze, and from destructive sand showers, could readily be reclaimed, fertilized, and made productive. For some years clover has been planted just above another part of the beach, and has produced a heavy crop. Those who, not many years ago, first beheld with wonder beautiful rose bushes and honeysuckle vines springing from the sands at Ocean Grove, will think little of the difficulty of covering these sands with vegetation sufficiently strong to withstand the inroads of the encroaching sea.

Thus, as the slight chain forged by the swart elves securely bound the savage wolf Fenrir, so may his brother, Jörmungund, the great ocean monster, be bound by a rope of sand.



ONSIDERABLE interest attaches to the metal nickel at the present time, principally for two reason: In the first place, experiments recently made in France, England, and America have shown that steel alloyed with a small percentage of nickel forms an alloy possessed of great strength and remarkable resisting powers. In the second place, the past few years have witnessed the discovery and initial development on a large scale of what are said to be practically inexhaustible deposits of nickel ore in what is known as the Sudbury District, of Canada.

Nickel may be said to be a modern metal, for its history goes back no further than a century and a half, although the word is much older. The origin of the name is curious and interesting. The men working in the German copper mines often came upon an ore which, though looking like copper ore, did not yield copper when smelted. Such ore they called kupfer-nickel—i. e., goblin copper—because they thought the nickels or spirits of the mine were deluding them with bad ore.

In 1751 the Swedish mineralogist Cronstedt discovered a new metal, which, some three years later, he succeeded in isolating in an impure state. Finding that his new metal was most abundant in kupfer-nickel, he allowed it to retain the name suggested by the old superstition of the German miners.