PREFACE
   The title of this handbook may be regarded as enshrining a solecism. The Standing Orders of Parliament, however, employ the same phrase, and in so doing perpetrate a paradox. They lay down rules regulating the deposit of plans, such plans being for “work which is to be situate on tidal lands within the ordinary spring tides”. They then go on to direct that the documents so defined shall be duly lodged at the Office of the Harbour Department, Board of Trade, and marked “Tidal Waters”. Ancient Roman writers betray a similar confusion of phrase. Describing the phenomenon of diurnal tides, a wonder migrants from the almost tideless waters of the Mediterranean could not fathom, they state that they were puzzled to say whether such territory was to be appropriately called land or water. Shakespeare’s index of man’s inconstancy was summed in the phrase, “one foot in sea, and one on shore”.
   This work is primarily concerned with those problems which underlie the maintenance of coastal and riparian lands, and, as a factor in such control, the extent to which horticulture may be enlisted in the cause of conservation. The original charter of the Institution of Civil Engineers defines the profession of the civil engineer as “the art of directing the great sources of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man ”, British engineers have perhaps been somewhat apt to disregard those transformations which are capable of being
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