Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/566

562 towns the greater damage was suffered where the bar was lowest, or where the defenses were weakest. One of the lowest places on the bar was occupied by the Octagon Hotel, which was completely destroyed (Fig. 2). For a great distance along this low region the shore was cut back from 100 to 150 feet, and the damage to buildings was greater than elsewhere. Both north and south of Low Moor station are unusually high portions of the bar, and here the advance of the sea was not so great, even where the defences were battered down and the feet of the shore front was cut away in this region, while the sea gained nothing from the land where the bulkheads remained intact. On the other hand, there are plenty of instances where unusually weak defences failed to prevent fairly extensive erosion of comparatively high areas, and where strong defences saved low areas from attack.

Variations in the character of the material composing a coast necessarily influence the wave erosion. In the Seabright district there is not enough of such variation in the material of the bar to be of any importance. The bar first formed some distance seaward of its present position, and has been pushed landward by the waves. A salt marsh formed back of the bar, and the sands of the latter have been driven in over the surface of the marsh deposits. Hence, the wave-cut cliff on the seaward edge of the bar shows at the base a layer of somewhat indurated black sand, mud and peat, projecting as a little terrace where recently exposed. Above this the yellow-brown beach sands constitute the rest of the cliff, which stands nearly or quite vertical where recently cut into. As these conditions appear to be essentially uniform along the length of the bar under discussion, there is little difference in