ected with the
mainland as to appear a peninsula, and was called North Friesland, a
highly cultivated and populous district. It measured from nine to eleven
geographical miles from north to south, and six to eight from east to
west. In the above-mentioned year it was torn asunder from the
continent, and in part overwhelmed. The Isle of Northstrand, thus
formed, was, towards the end of the sixteenth century, only four
geographical miles in circumference, and was still celebrated for its
cultivation and numerous population. After many losses, it still
contained nine thousand inhabitants. At last, in the year 1634, on the
evening of the 11th of October, a flood passed over the whole island,
whereby 1300 houses, with many churches, were lost; fifty thousand head
of cattle perished, and above six thousand men. Three small islets, one
of them still called Northstrand, alone remained, which are now
continually wasting.

The redundancy of river water in the Baltic, especially during the
melting of ice and snow in spring, causes in general an outward current
through the channel called the Cattegat. But after a continuance of
northwesterly gales, especially during the height of the spring-tides,
the Atlantic rises, and pouring a flood of water into the Baltic,
commits dreadful devastations on the isles of the Danish Archipelago.
This current even acts, though with diminished force, as far eastward as
the vicinity of Dantzic.[447] Accounts written during the last ten
centuries attest the wearing down of promontories on the Danish coast,
the deepening of gulfs, the severing of peninsulas from the mainland,
and the waste of islands, while in several cases marsh land, defended
for centuries by dikes, has at last been overflowed, and thousands of
the inhabitants whelmed in the waves. Thus the island Barsoe, on the
coast of Sleswick, has lost, year after year, an acre at a time, and the
island Alsen suffers in like manner.

_Cimbrian deluge._--As we have already seen that during the flood before
mentioned, 6000 men and 50,000 head of cattle perished on Northstrand on
the western coast of Jutland, we are all well prepared to find that this
peninsula, the Cimbrica Chersonesus of the ancients, has from a remote
period been the theatre of like catastrophes. Accordingly, Strabo
records a story, although he treats it as an incredible fiction, that,
during a high tide, the ocean rose upon this coast so rapidly, that men
on horseback were sc