DRAINING OF THE LAKE OF HAARLEM. 491 
seventy-seven dollars an acre, amounting altogether to £661,000 
sterling or $3,200,000. The unsold lands were valued at more 
than £6,000 or nearly $30,000, and as the total cost was £764,- 
500 or about $3,700,000, the direct loss to the state, exclusive of 
interest on the capital expended, may be stated at £100,000 or 
something less than $500,000. 
The success of this operation has encouraged others of like 
plants, Alnus, Salix, Myrica, etc., appear, and these contribute to hasten the 
attachment of the turf to the bottom, both by their weight and by sending 
their roots quite through into the ground.” 
This is the regular method employed by nature for the gradual filling up of 
shallow lakes and pools, and converting them first into morass and then into 
dry land. Whenever, therefore, man removes the peat or turf, he exerts an 
injurious geographical agency, and, asI have already said, there is no doubt 
that the immense extension of the inland seas of Holland in modern times is 
owing to this and other human imprudences. ‘‘ Hundreds of hectares of 
floating pastures,’’ says our author, ‘‘ which have nothing in their appearance 
to distinguish them from grass-lands resting on solid bog, are found in 
Overijssel, in North Holland, and near Utrecht. In short, they occur in all 
deep bogs, and wherever deep water is left long undisturbed.” 
In one case a floating island, which had attached itself to the shore, con- 
tinued to float about for a long time after it was torn off by a flood, and was 
solid enough to keep a pond of fresh water upon it sweet, though the water 
in which it was swimming had become brackish from the irruption of the sea. 
After the hay is cut, cattle are pastured, and occasionally root-crops grown 
upon these islands, and they sometimes have large trees growing upon them. 
When the turf or peat has been cut, leaving water less than a yard deep, 
Equisetum limosum grows at once, and is followed by the second class of 
marsh plants mentioned above. Their roots do not become detached from the 
bottom in such shallow water, but form ordinary turf or peat. These pro- 
cesses are so rapid that a thickness of from three to six feet of turf is 
formed in half a century, and many men have lived to mow grass where they 
had fished in their boyhood, and to cut turf twice in the same spot. In 
Ireland the growth of peat is said to be much more rapid. ELIskkE RE- 
cLus, La Terre, i., 591, 592. But see AsBJGRNSEN, Torv og Torvdrift, ii., 
29, 30. 
Captain Gilliss says that before Lake Taguataga in Chili was drained, there 
were in it islands composed of dead plants matted together to a thickness of 
from four to six feet, and with trees of medium size growing upon them. 
These islands floated before the wind ‘‘ with their trees and browsing cattle.” 
— United States Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere, i., 
pp. 16, 17. 
