At the time of De Luc’s visit to Cuxhaven (1797), a dike was constructing to secure the port from the violence of the sea, and the plan of employing blocks for this purpose was suggested by the quantity which were scattered over all the neighbouring country. From the vicinity alone of Hornburg, an inland town between the ports of Stade and Harborg, 600 lasts of blocks, amounting to 240,000 quintals, or 23,679 tons, had at that time been brought and consumed in the dike, which, with the thickness necessary to resist the utmost impetuosity of the waves, and a height of about eight feet, already extended three leagues to the westward of the town. The country in which these accumulations of erratic boulders had taken place, is an expanse of sand covered with heath, except where broken by cultivated patches around the scattered villages, the surface being undulated by hills composed either of sand or of heaps of boulders. De Luc adds, “that he travelled ten miles without perceiving in the whole horizon any house, or even a hovel, or a single tree”--desolate and dreary indeed to the eye of painter or poet, yet rich in all the elements of sublimity to the eye of the geologist. It is quite unnecessary to adduce other and less imposing examples from Great Britain and Ireland of similar facts, the difficulties of explanation being fully embraced by those selected. How have they been brought to their present places? is then the question mentally asked, as well by the learned as the unlearned. Saussure, celebrated for his examination of the Alps, imagined a great debacle and retreat of the sea from the strata that had been formed, as he supposed, by chemical precipitations; and to the violent rush of the vast current he ascribed the excavation of the valleys, and the transport of immense masses of stones from the central chain of the Alps, beyond the precincts of those mountains, to the Jura. Here, then, the excavation of the valleys of the Alps, and the transport of the boulders, are considered results of one great catastrophe, by which the bottom of the sea became hard dry land, its waters descending into huge abysses which had burst open around the Alps. The phenomenon of Boulders is general in a large portion of the northern hemisphere; the explanation however is local and hence insufficient; whilst the philosopher’s machinery, of huge abysses, like the peasant’s giant, is born of necessity, not deduced from experience.