DIKES OF THE NETHERLANDS. 405 
tions attached by nature to their birthplace, it is inconceivable 
that so dense a population as such wholesale destruction of life 
supposes could find the means of subsistence, or content itself 
to dwell, on a territory liable, a dozen times in a century, to 
such fearful devastation. There can be no doubt, however, 
that the low continental shores of the German Ocean very fre- 
quently suffered immense injury from inundation by the sea, 
and it is natural, therefore, that the various arts of resistance to 
the encroachments of the ocean, and, finally, of aggressive war- 
fare upon its domain, and of permanent conquest of its terri- 
tory, should have been earlier studied and carried to higher per- 
fection in the latter countries, than in England, which had less 
to lose or to gain by the incursions or the retreat of the waters. 
Indeed, although the confinement of swelling rivers by arti- 
ficial embankments is of great antiquity, I do not know that 
the defence or acquisition of land from the sea by diking was 
ever practised on a large scale until systematically undertaken 
by the Netherlanders, a few centuries after the commencement 
of the Christian era. The silence of the Roman historians 
affords a strong presumption that this art was unknown to the 
inhabitants of the Netherlands at the time of the Roman inva- 
sion, and the elder Pliny’s description of the mode of life along 
the coast which has now been long diked in, applies precisely 
to the habits of the people who live on the low islands and 
mainland flats lying outside of the chain of dikes, and wholly 
unprotected by embankments of any sort. 
Origin of Sea-dikes. 
it has been conjectured, and not without probability, that the 
causeways built by the Romans across the marshes of the Low 
Countries, in their campaigns against the Germanic tribes, gave 
the natives the first hint of the utility which might be derived 
from similar constructions applied to a different purpose.* If 
* Tt has often been alleged by eminent writers that a part of the fens in 
Lincolnshire was reclaimed by sea-dikes under the government of the Ro- 
