face against misconduct; but it has already done infinite good, and would do still more if its provisions were strictly enforced. It is often supposed that the shifting of sandbanks is a cause of wreck, but there does not seem sufficient ground for this opinion. We have heard many marvellous stories relative to the shifting of the Goodwin, and of the sudden exposure in full preservation of the hulls of long lost ships. These tales are all poetical, though the edge of the bank may here and there give way and expose the ribs of some vessel long since sucked in. What change there is in the Goodwin, and it is of a very gradual nature, takes place on the western or inshore side: its eastern side is as steep as a wall, and retains the position it had when the first exact survey of it was made. The Brake Sand in the Downs off Ramsgate seems to have moved bodily inshore or to the westward, and there is a slight disposition to change in sands known by the names of the Leigh Middle and Yantlet Ground in Sea Reach, at the entrance of the river Thames. The Yarmouth and Lowestoff sands shift slightly. A channel, or gat as it is called, opens now in one place and now at another; but these variations are soon known and buoyed by the Trinity House. Changes take place at the entrance of the Mersey, but the surveyor of the river quickly marks the deviations and makes them known to the pilots. On the north-east coast of England more extensive alterations have taken place; a large portion of Holderness, in Yorkshire, has been washed away, and the sea has broken through Spurn Point, threatening to make it once more an island. At Landguard Point, at the entrance of Harwich harbour, the injudicious removal of a barrier of cement stone, by which the heavy stroke of the sea has been allowed free action on the shore, has caused the sand to be heaped up within the last half-century, until a shingle beach now rears its head seven feet above the level of high water; where, not many years since, a line-of-battle ship could have sailed into the harbour. Another remarkable increase of land is at Dungeness, where the shingle has extended at the average rate of three yards a year, since the beginning of the Christian era. But although of vast importance to the engineer in dealing with harbours, these changes are not productive of shipwreck.