We cannot follow all the victories of the sea.  We might examine the inroads made by the waves at Selsea.  There stood the first cathedral of the district before Chichester was founded.  The building is now beneath the sea, and since Saxon times half of the Selsea Bill has vanished.  The village of Selsea rested securely in the centre of the peninsula, but only half a mile now separates it from the sea.  Some land has been gained near this projecting headland by an industrious farmer.  His farm surrounded a large cove with a narrow mouth through which the sea poured.  If he could only dam up that entrance, he thought he could rescue the bed of the cove and add to his acres.  He bought an old ship and sank it by the entrance and proceeded to drain.  But a tiresome storm arose and drove the ship right across the cove, and the sea poured in again.  By no means discouraged, he dammed up the entrance more effectually, got rid of the water, increased his farm by many acres, and the old ship makes an admirable cow-shed.

[Illustration:  Disused Mooring-Post on bank of the Rother, Rye]

The Isle of Wight in remote geological periods was part of the mainland.  The Scilly Isles were once joined with Cornwall, and were not severed until the fourteenth century, when by a mighty storm and flood, 140 churches and villages were destroyed and overwhelmed, and 190 square miles of land carried away.  Much land has been lost in the Wirral district of Cheshire.  Great forests have been overwhelmed, as the skulls and bones of deer and horse and fresh-water shell-fish have been frequently discovered at low tide.  Fifty years ago a distance of half a mile separated Leasowes Castle from the sea; now its walls are washed by the waves.  The Pennystone, off the Lancashire coast by Blackpool, tells of a submerged village and manor, about which cluster romantic legends.

Such is the sad record of the sea’s destruction, for which the industrious reclamation of land, the compensations wrought by the accumulation of shingle and sand dunes and the silting of estuaries can scarcely compensate us.  How does the sea work this?  There are certain rock-boring animals, such as the Pholas, which help to decay the rocks.  Each mollusc cuts a series of augur-holes from two to four inches deep, and so assists in destroying the bulwarks of England.  Atmospheric action, the disintegration of soft rocks by frost and by the attack of the sea below, all tend in the same direction.  But the foolish action of man in removing shingle, the natural protection of our coasts, is also very mischievous.  There is an instance of this in the Hall Sands and Bee Sands, Devon.  A company a few years ago obtained authority to dredge both from the foreshore and sea-bed.  The Commissioners of Woods and Forests and the Board of Trade granted this permission, the latter receiving a royalty of L50 and the former L150.  This occurred in 1896.  Soon afterwards a heavy gale arose and