From Monmouth to the head of Barnegat Bay there is no beach similar to that of Sandy Hook. Instead of a sand-reef separated from the mainland by a navigable channel, there is only the sloping strand adjoining, as at Long Branch, the foot of an upland bluff, or as at Spring Lake, Seagirt, and Point Pleasant, with its crest on a level with the surface of the upland. Between Bay Head and Cape May, however, there are twelve beaches, mostly well developed and preserved, and named respectively Squan, Island, Long, Island or Little, Brigantine, Absecon, Peck’s, Ludlam’s, Seven-Mile, Five-Mile or Holly, Two-Mile, and Poverty. The majority of these, however, do not show the high degree of development exhibited by Seven-Mile and Five-Mile Beaches. Some appear to be only in the earlier stages of growth, while others have passed their prime and are now yielding to the attacks of wind and wave. These agents have been hitherto considered only with reference to their constructive effect on the beaches, and it now remains to consider their destructive action. When the wind blows from the west it carries back to the sea much of the sand which the east wind had piled up in dunes, and, but for the fact that the latter wind prevails, the sand-hills would not long exist. By a surplus of constructive action, however, the beaches are all moving to the west. Year after year sand is removed from their eastern margin by the winter storms, and carried north or south according to the direction of the prevailing current. The winds from the ocean drive the dunes westward, and, with the possible exception of Sandy Hook, all the beaches are now underlaid by an old salt meadow, originally formed in sheltered waters on their west side. In this turf, when exposed during an unusually low tide, the footprints of cattle are seen in many places, made, it is claimed, when the salt meadow was a pasture and lay on the shoreward side of the beach. This westward recession has, in many cases, amounted to more than a mile within two centuries. On many of the beaches south of Point Pleasant the westward progress of the dunes has been made over and through the native forest. As a result of this, gnarled cedars, dying and dead, are found among the dunes; and in many cases stumps may be seen in the sand within reach of the tide. Near the northern end of Seven-Mile Beach, at the time of the writer’s visit in 1885, an immense dune forty feet in height and half a mile in length had been for many years encroaching steadily upon the dense forest. The tree-tops here projected above the summit of the ridge like the heads of drowning men above the waves; while on the outer flank of the overwhelming mass of sand the gnarled, skeleton trunks of those which had perished in it stood bare and grim, showing with dreary grayness the fate of the earlier victims of which the ragged and wave-worn stumps alone remained. A more desolate scene the writer has never witnessed.