judge--at least you could have judged this time last year--by the
masses of masonry torn from their iron clampings during the gale of
three winters since. Look steadily at those rolled blocks, those
twisted stanchions, if they are there still; and then ask yourselves-
-it will be fair reasoning from the known to the unknown--What effect
must such wave-power as that have had beating and breaking for
thousands of years along the western coasts of England, Scotland,
Ireland? It must have eaten up thousands of acres--whole shires, may
be, ere now. Its teeth are strong enough, and it knows neither rest
nor pity, the cruel hungry sea. Give it but time enough, and what
would it not eat up? It would eat up, in the course of ages, all the
dry land of this planet, were it not baffled by another counteracting
force, of which I shall speak hereafter.

As you go on beyond the sea-wall, you find what it is eating up. The
whole low cliff is going visibly. But whither is it going? To form
new soil in the aestuary. Now you will not wonder how old harbours
so often become silted up. The sea has washed the land into them.
But more, the sea-currents do not allow the sands of the aestuary to
escape freely out to sea. They pile it up in shifting sand-banks
about the mouth of the aestuary. The prevailing sea-winds, from
whatever quarter, catch up the sand, and roll it up into sand-hills.
Those sand-hills are again eaten down by the sea, and mixed with the
mud of the tide-flats, and so is formed a mingled soil, partly of
clayey mud, partly of sand; such a soil as stretches over the greater
part of all our lowlands.

Now, why should not that soil, whether in England or in Scotland,
have been made by the same means as that of every aestuary.