BARRIER BEACHES OF THE ATLANTIC COAST. BY FREDERICK J. H. MERRILL, PH. D. _REPRINTED FROM THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY FOR OCTOBER, 1890._ NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 1890. BARRIER BEACHES OF THE ATLANTIC COAST BY FREDERICK J. H. MERRILL, PH. D. From Cape Cod to Cape Florida our coast is fringed with barrier beaches. They are the reefs of sand which protect the mainland shore from the storm-waves of the ocean. Isolated and uninhabited were most of these sea-born barriers for a long period in the history of our country, but the need of a breathing-place on the part of the thousands who inhabit our crowded cities has caused, within a few years, a great transformation. Railroad and turnpike bridges have been built, connecting many of them with the shore. Hotels and cottages, club-houses and bathing-houses, in short, buildings for every purpose which contributes to the pleasure and comfort of man have sprung up, as it were by magic, on the south shore of Long Island, on the coast 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.