The Dawson news. (Dawson, Ga.) 1889-current, 1911-05-10
NERCILESSNESS or THE SEA
Is UTTERLY INDIFFERENT TO
MANS HOPES AND FEARS,
Claims Islands, Coast Lines and Viii
lagos With Little Warming. Half
OF Holland Below Level.

OF Holland Below Level.
The lands upon which the great
bulk of the worlds population lives
are seemingly in little danger of hav-
ing the hungry ocean gain advant-
age on the kingdom of the shore,
but with these great natural muta-
tons man has little to do. Islands,
coast lines, villages and nations rise
and fall slowly or rapidly, with little
warning, as nature sees fit, and there
is almost as little hope OF preventing
or undoing the DETACHMENT of the sea
as there is of restoring what times
fell hand defaced," as the sonnet has
it.
On the outskirts of civilization
men still live in imminent danger of
these unheralded mutations. They
have not acquired the Indifferent Sc
curity which we know, but in the
pursuit of living they defy and
learn to forget their dangers. The
fisherfolk of Finland build their viii
lagos upon the ice that fringes the
coast. and the natives of the coral
and volcanic islands of the Pacific
which rise above the water in a
night and disappear almost as quick
ly build their bamboo shacks and
rear families in the face of possible
destruction.
At Helsingfors, on the Gulf of Fin
land, a great block of ice upon which
the native fishermen had built viii
lage where they housed their wives
oh,
tells, broke away from the mainland
and fioated out to sea. The whole
village was carried away during
night gale and its loss was not dis
covered until the next morning, when
it had drifted out of sight. Boats
were sent to the rescue, but no trace
of the missing community was found.
Last December the Island of lilo
pango Lagoon, Salvador, in the
midst of a series of earthquake
shocks, suddenly disappeared and
slid away into the depths of the la
COON, carrying with it lie men, wo-
men and children and all the houses
they had erected, the fields that they
and their fathers titled, and the YES
tiges of their occupation.
Nature Utterly Indifferent.
The Athenians and the Egyptians
in Solon's time had glowing accounts
to give of the Island of Atlantis,
which lay off the Pillars of Hercules,
and finally disappeared under the
sea, For some years the keels OF
Greek ships grated on the mud shoals
that rose near the surface, and then
they, too, disappeared, and Atlantis
was forgotten and her glory over
Swallowed by the rising brilliancy OF
Greece and her neighbors.
There is little glory or splendor
lost with the fishing village of Hell
singfors. 1t was not an Atlantis, but
it serves as an omen that nature is
still Indifferent to mans plans, and
wrecks cities or villages, builds up
mountains or runs water over their
SUBMITS without regard to human
plans or ambitions.
Archaeologists who have studied
the prehistoric barrows and mounds
on the islands in the British cnannel
are convinced that men built stone
villages on the land that is now the
channel bottom before the British
Isles and the continent were sepa-
rated. If this is true there are DOUBT
less whole prehistoric cities, stone
circles, tombs and towers on the
channel bottom.
In 1872 the former city of Kings