392 COAST DIKES. 



Dravning of Lincolnshire Fens. 



The draining of the Lincolnshire fens in England, which haa 

 converted about 400,000 acres of marsh, pool, and tide-washed 

 flat into ploughland and pasturage, is a work, or rather series of 

 works, of great magnitude, and it possesses much economical, 

 and indeed no trifling geographical, importance. Its plans and 

 methods were, at least in part, borrowed from the example of like 

 improvements in Holland, and it is, in difficulty and extent, in- 

 ferior to works executed for the same purpose on the opposite 

 coast of the Korth Sea, by Dutch, Frisic and Low German en- 

 gineers. The space I can devote to such operations will be better 



Quarterly Review for January, 1858, it is stated that in a single rock-cutting 

 on tlie Liverpool and Manchester railway, 480,000 cubic yards of stone were 

 removed ; that the earth excavated in the construction of English railways up 

 to that date amounted to a hundred and fifty million cubic yards, and that at 

 the Round Down Cliff, near Dover, a single blast of nineteen thousand pounds 

 of powder blew down a thousand million tons of chalk, and covered fifteen 

 acres of land with the fragments. 



In 1869, a mass of marble equal to one and a half times the cubical contents 

 of the Duomo at Florence, or about 450,000 cubic yards, was thrown down at 

 Carrara by one blast, and two hours after, another equal mass, which had 

 been loosened by the explosion, fell of itself. — Zolfanelli, La Lunigiana, 

 p. 43. 



The coal yearly extracted from the mines of England averages not less than 

 100,000,000 tons. The specific gravity of British coal ranges from 1.20 to 1.35, 

 and consequently we may allow a cubic yard to the ton. If we add the earth 

 and rock removed in order to reach the coal, we shall have a yearly amount of 

 excavation for this one object equal to more than thirty times the volume of 

 the pyramid of Cheops. See p. 631, post. 



The amount of coal yearly raised from British mines has rapidly increased 

 since the above paragraph was written. The quantity extracted in 1881 is re- 

 ported to exceed 150,000,000 tons. 



These are wonderful achievements of human industry : but the rebuilding 

 of Chicago within a single year after the great fire — not to speak of the extra- 

 ordinary material improvements previously executed at that city — in some 

 respects surpasses them all, and it probably involved the expenditure of a sum 

 of muscular and of moral energy which has never before been exerted, within 

 a like period, in the accomplishment of a single material object. 



In this connection it may not be amiss to mention an extraordinary labor of 

 a single individual which was made the subject of a public commemoration, 

 in 1880, at Susa, in Northern Italy. Early in the sixteenth century, a humble 

 stone-cutter, named Colombano Romeau, spent eicjlit years, entirely unaided, 

 in the excavation of a long tunnel, through solid rock, to supply water to two 

 small parcels of ground. 



