[Footnote 14:  M. de Lamblardie, ingenieur des ponts et chaussees, has made a calculation, seemingly upon good grounds, with regard to the wasting of a part of the coast of France, between the Seine and the Somme.  This coast is composed of falaises, (or chalk cliffs, like the opposite coast of England), which are 200 feet high above the level of the sea, composed of strata of marl, separated by beds of flint.  This coast is found to be wasted, at an average, at the rate of one foot per annum.  We may thus perhaps form some idea of the time since the coast of France and that of England had been here united, or one continued mass of those strata which are the same on both those coasts.]

With those hard and rugged coasts of Britain and Ireland, let us contrast the east coasts; What a difference between these and the west side!  Upon the west side, there are no sand banks left upon the coast; the mariner has nothing there to fear but rocks.  It is otherwise on the east; here we find a tamer coast, and, in many places, a sandy bottom.  On the west, nothing appears opposed to the storm of the ocean except the hardest and most solid rock; on the east, we find coasts exposed to the sea which could not have remained in a similar situation on the west.  Let us but compare the two opposite coasts of England, viz. the promontory of Norfolk and Suffolk upon the one side, and Pembrokeshire and Carnarvonshire on the other, both similarly exposed, the one to the north east storm of the German sea, the other to the south west billows of the Atlantic.  What a striking difference!  The coast in the bay of Cardigan is a hard and strong coast compared with that of Norfolk and Suffolk; the one is strong schistus, the other the most tender clay; yet the soft coast stands protuberant to the sea, the harder coast is hollowed out into a bay; the one has no protection but the sands with which it is surrounded, the other had not remained till this day but for the protection of the most solid rocks of Pembrokeshire and Carnarvonshire, which oppose the fury of the waves.

The last general observation which I shall propose, has, for its subject, a more enlarged view than those now taken of the coast, a view indeed which is not so immediately the object of our observation, but which is nevertheless to be made most evident, by means of the others now considered.  We have seen that the land exposed to the sea is destroyed, and the coast wasted more or less, in proportion to the wearing causes, and to the different resisting powers opposed to those causes of decay; we are now to make our observations with regard to the extent and quality of that which has been already destroyed, a subject which can only be conjectured at from the scientific view which may be taken of things, and from the careful examination of that which has been left behind upon the different coasts.