Dike

“ Instantly the waves took hues of lighter brown, deeper yellow, and cloudy gray, and the sea wore the aspect of a shallow pond with muddy bottom, into which workmen hurl blocks of stone. The purity of the water was sadly dimmed, and the billows dashed foaming toward the sky, threatening in their violent assault to shatter the marble dike erected along the shore. ”

“ I, my friends, am an old man; I have seen dikes built and broken; but the dike that Hauke Haien has proposed according to his God-given insight and has carried through with the government--that dike none of you living men will see broken. And if you don't want to thank him yourselves, your grandchildren some day will not deny him his laurel wreath. ”

“ I have heard so much about the dikes of Holland, that I expected to see a big thing when I came across one of them," added Paul.
"They are a big thing; but really there is very little to see."
"But what is a dike, sir?" asked Paul, curiously. "I never supposed it was anything more than a mud wall."
"It is nothing more than that, only it is on a very large scale, and it must be constructed with the nicest care; for the lives and property of the people depend upon its security. When they are going to build a dike, the first consideration, as in putting up a heavy building, is the foundation. ”

“ The simple houses of the Acadian farmers, with their out-buildings, gave animation to the scene. At their feet lay a broad extent of dike-land, green and glowing with the verdure of Juno, spreading away to that island, which acted as a natural dike against the waters of the sea. Beyond this lay the blue waters of Minas Basin, on whose bosom floated the ship and the schooner, while in the distance rose the cliff which marked the entrance into the Basin, and all the enclosing shores. ”

“ The sides of dikes are often as parallel and straight of those of built walls, the resemblance to human workmanship being heightened by the numerous joints which, intersecting each other along the face of a dike, remind us of well-fitted masonry. ”

“ A country so small that they build dikes to keep the inhabitants from being spilt off the edge, is hardly the place for a scandal—certainly not in stolid Dordrecht or in that fly-speck of a Papendrecht, whose dormer windows peer over the edge of the dike as if in mortal fear of another inundation. ”

“ Hence, when we see a coarse-grained dike outcropping on the surface, we are justified in regarding it as very old, for all the fine-grained upper part has been gradually worn away by the action of the rain, frost, etc. Other things being equal, coarse-grained must be older than fine-grained dikes; and the texture of a dike is at once a measure of its age and of the amount of erosion which the region has suffered since it was formed. ”

“ A dike, stretching from north to south in crescent form, was constructed for a distance of seven or eight miles, separating the waters of the lake into two portions, that on the Mexican side being comparatively independent of the fresh water flowing into the lake in the rainy season. The dike was built by driving a double line of piles, the interior space being filled with stones and earth, the whole over thirty, or, as many authors say, [413] sixty feet wide, and forming a much-frequented promenade. ”

“ Hauke spread the plan of the new dike out on the table. "A few minutes ago," he said, "one of you asked where we should get all the necessary earth. You see here that as far as the foreland extends out into the shallows there is a strip of land left free outside the line of the dike; we can take the earth from there and from the foreland that runs along the dike, north and south from the new koog. If we only have a good thick layer of clay on the water side, we can fill in, on the inside or in the middle, with sand. ”

“ They generally slope up stream pretty sharply. The tide comes in, loaded right up with fine mud, flows over and into and around the long lines of warping dike, then stops and begins to unload. Now, you see, when there are no warping dikes, the current has nothing to delay it, so it soon gets going on the ebb so fast that it washes away pretty near all it has deposited. But these warping dikes bring in a new state of affairs. They so hinder the ebb that there is more silt deposited, and at the same time there is less current on the flats to carry the mud away. ”

“ Eight feet the dike rose above the level of the ground; only to the west towards the water where the sluice was to be laid a gap [Pg 303] had been left; also above, in front of the old dike, the water-course was still untouched. Thus, as for the last thirty years, the tide could flow into the koog without doing much damage there or to the new dike. And so the work of men's hands was consigned to the great God above, and placed under his protection until the spring sun should make its completion possible. ”

“ The dikes traverse the different stratified formations like gigantic walls, which are often encountered by the coal-miners, and on the surface are frequently left in relief by the erosion of the softer enclosing rock, so that in the west of Scotland, especially, they are actually made use of for enclosures. In other cases the dike has decayed faster than the enclosing rock, and its position is marked by a ditch-like depression. ”

“ As a matter of fact, they are dredges, with living-quarters for the crews. Across the channel behind them, shutting them off from the sea, is a solid-looking clay dike.
“Colonel,” we asked, “how did you put those boats into that mud-puddle,—fly them or jump them over?”
“The dipper-dredge cut the way in, and the suction-dredge closed it behind them. That dike keeps them from being disturbed by the rise and fall of the tide. A great part of the canal between here and Limon Bay was excavated in the dry by steam-shovels working behind dikes forty feet below sea-level ”

“ Hauke stood beside his wife at the window; he had just swallowed down his supper; he had been out on the dike. He had gone there on foot early in the afternoon; here and there, where the dike looked weak, he had had pointed stakes and sacks of clay or earth piled up; everywhere he had left men to drive in the stakes and make dams with the sacks in front as soon as the tide should begin to damage the dike. The largest number he had placed at the corner towards the northwest at the intersection of the old and new dikes ”

“ Ground plan of greenstone dike traversing sandstone. Arran.
In the Hebrides and other countries, the same masses of trap which occupy the surface of the country far and wide, concealing the subjacent stratified rocks, are seen also in the sea cliffs, prolonged downwards in veins or dikes, which probably unite with other masses [p.380] of igneous rock at a greater depth. The largest of the dikes represented in the annexed diagram, and which are seen in part of the coast of Skye, is no less than 100 feet in width. ”

“ When a mass of the unstratified or igneous rocks, such as granite, trap, and lava, appears as if injected into a rent in the stratified rocks, cutting across the strata, it forms a dike. They are sometimes seen running along the ground, and projecting, like a wall, from the softer strata on both sides of them having wasted away; whence they were first called in the north of England and in Scotland dikes, a provincial name for wall. It is not easy to draw the line between dikes and veins. The former are generally of larger dimensions, and have their sides parallel for considerable distances ”

“ This familiar observation has taught the inhabitants of the coast that an artificial wall or dike will, in many situations, give rise to a broad belt of dunes. Thus a sand dike or wall, of three or four miles in length, thrown in 1610 across the Koegras, a tide-washed flat between the Zuiderzee and the North Sea, has occasioned the formation of rows of dunes a mile in breadth, and thus excluded the sea altogether from the Koegras. ”

“ If a man has neglected to strengthen his dike and has not kept his dike strong, and a breach has broken out in his dike, and the waters have flooded the meadow, the man in whose dike the breach has broken out shall restore the corn he has caused to be lost. ”

“ If the edge of the ice meets an obstacle, it is apt to break at a foot or more from the shore, and the pieces, still carrying their load of gravel, are shoved up the bank to its top, until, as years roll by, the dike is made too high to receive further additions. ”

“ On the dike, however, the glacier-marks extend for its whole length in great perfection, while they have entirely disappeared from the surrounding surfaces, so as to leave the dike thus standing out in full relief. This is an instructive case, showing how little disintegration has gone on since the drift-period. All the currents that have swept over it, all the rains that have beaten upon it, have not worn away one inch from the original surface of the hill. I have observed many other roches moutonnées in Scotland, especially about the neighborhood of Loch Awe, Loch Fyne, and Loch Etive. ”

“ The moon stood high in the heavens and shone upon the wide sea that was just beginning, as the tide rose, to wash with its waters over the glistening flats of clay. Only the low murmur of the water, not the sound of a single animal was heard here in the vast open; on the marshes behind the dike, too, all was deserted, and cows and oxen were still in their stalls. ”

“ Men dig trenches through it to let the water drain away. Along the banks of the river they pile the black peaty sods in long rows. This makes a dike or dam to keep the river from spreading over the grass in floods. Now the land begins to dry very fast. Wild cranberries, "cat-o'-nine-tails," and young bushes spring up. Perhaps a road is laid out over the meadows, and then houses are built, and boys and girls come to live on the smooth plain that grew out of the sea.
If you should visit the meadows at Chelsea, in Massachusetts, you would see just such a lagoon shut in by a travelling beach. ”

“ They were seldom caused by great deposits of rock, but appeared to be formed by a dike or ledge of hard rock rising from the softer rock—the same intrusion being sometimes found on both sides of the stream—forming a dam the full width of the channel, over which the water made a swift descent, with a long line of interference waves below. ”

“ The lake was lower by a foot than I had ever before seen it in the autumn. In August it had washed the bushes on its dikes; now a yard or more of sand tempted a stroller to follow its fair rim past wood and meadow. Along my shore of the lake the natural dike is in places fully seven feet high. It has been made during the centuries by the “thrust” of the ice which results from the expansion of the ice-field by day following its contraction by night. On a sandy shore the expanding ice pushes up a little ridge of silt, and works it higher and higher as the ice mass rises during the winter. ”

“ This road, on either hand, was bordered by a high rail fence, along which rose, here and there, the bleak spire of a ghostly and perishing Lombardy poplar. This is the tree of all least suited to those wind-beaten regions, but none other will the country people plant. Close up to the road, at one point, curved a massive sweep of red dike, and further to the right stretched the miles on miles of naked marsh, till they lost themselves in the lonely, shifting waters of the Basin. ”

“ Where a dike ends above in older rocks, and particularly in horizontally stratified sedimentary beds, in a pipe-like form, similar to the conduit of a volcano, but without reaching the surface, the unexpanded or but slightly enlarged summit portion lifts a comparatively small cover into a dome, and what has been termed a plutonic plug results. ”

“ Secondary dikes or cross levees run from the main structure to certain subsidiary works, so that if the outer main dike is broken or water flows through, this will be ponded, for a while at least, against the inner line of defense, thus affording time to assemble the necessary equipment to fight another intrusion. ”

“ Nearly all rocks are traversed by planes of division or cracks called joints, which usually run in several directions, dividing the rock into blocks. And it is probable that dike-fissures are most commonly produced, not by breaking the rocks anew, but by widening or opening the pre-existing joint-cracks. Hence the straight and regular jointing of slate, limestone and most sedimentary rocks is accompanied by wall-like dikes—the typical dikes (Fig. 10) ; while the more irregular jointing of granite and other massive rocks gives rise to sinuous, branching, variable dikes. ”

“ In order to deflect the current and cause it to deepen the channel at the mouth of the river the United States built submerged dikes and sills, composed of willow mattresses weighted down with stone; also several spurs. Spur dike No. 5, located near the 'Head of the Passes,' consists of a cribwork of round piles, hewn walings, and sawn cross-braces, all securely bolted together, with a curtain of round piles bolted against the upstream face. ”

“ But, since they are formed wholly below the surface, and usually at great depths in the earth, it is evident that they can appear on the surface only as the result of enormous erosion; and erosion is a slow process, demanding, in these cases, many thousands or millions of years. Therefore, the more ancient dike rocks alone are within our reach; those of recent formation being still deeply buried in the earth’s crust. ”