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Updated: May 4, 2025
In France, the operations for fixing and reclaiming the dunes which began under the direction of Bremontier about the same time as in Denmark, and which are, in principle and in many of their details, similar to those employed in the latter kingdom have been conducted on a far larger scale, and with greater success, than in any other country.
Andresen quotes Bremontier as stating that the movement of the waves sometimes extends to the depth of five hundred feet, and he adds that others think it may reach to six or even seven hundred feet below the surface. Andresen, Om Klitformationen, p. 20. Many physicists now suppose that the undulations of great bodies of water reach even deeper.
Rescued from the sea by a mere freak of nature, it might, for all practical purposes, have been much more usefully employed if covered a few fathoms deep with salt water. To M. Bremontier came the happy idea of planting the waste land with fir trees. Nothing else would grow, the fir tree might. And it did.
A curious acquired and hereditary instinct, of a different character, may not improperly be noticed here. I refer to that by which horses bred in provinces where quicksands are common avoid their dangers or extricate themsleves from them. See Bremontier, Memoire sur les Dunes, Annales des Ponts et Chaussees, 1833; premier semestre, pp. 155-157.
"The dune sands" of different characters, says Bremontier, "partake of the nature of the different materials which compose them. At certain points on the coast of Normandy they are found to be purely calcareous; they are of mixed composition on the shores of Brittany and Saintonge, and generally quartzose between the mouth of the Gironde and that of the Adour."
Bremontier, speaking of the sand-hills on the western coast of France, says: "The particles of sand composing them are not large enough to resist wind of a certain force, nor small enough to be taken up by it, like dust; they only roll along the surface from which they are detached, and, though moving with great velocity, they rarely rise to a greater height than three or four inches."
The Landes is quite a prosperous province to-day compared with what it was in the time of Louis XVI. During the First Empire there was what we would call a Minister of Woods and Forests named Bremontier. He looked over the Landes and found it to be nothing more than a waste of shifting sand.
For the first adventuress who comes along, a born princess who has strayed into a house of ill fame, or one who frequents such a house, who masquerades as a princess in her coquettish house in Rue Brèmontier, he will forsake father, mother, children, state documents, cabinet, councils, Chamber of Deputies, everything in fact.
Large deposits of sand, therefore, must in general be considered as of ancient, not of recent formation, and many eminent geologists ascribe them to diluvial action. See also the arguments of Bremontier as to the origin of the dune-sands of Gascony, Annales des Ponts et Chaussees, 1833, 1er semestre, pp. 158, 161.
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