396 LAND GAINED BY DIKING. 



and lakes, is estimated by Staring at three hundred and fifty-five 

 thousand hunder or hectares, equal to eight hundred and seventy- 

 seven thousand two liundred and forty acres, which is one-tenth 

 of the area of the kingdom.* In very many instances the dikee 

 have been partially, in some particularly exposed locahties totally, 

 destroyed by the violence of the sea, and the drained lands again 

 fiooded. In some cases the soil thus painfully won from the ocean 

 has been entirely lost ; in others it has been recovered by repair- 

 ing or rebuilding the dikes and pumping out the water. Besides 

 this, the weight of the dikes gradually sinks them into the soft 

 soil beneath, and this loss of elevation must be compensated by 

 raising the surface, while the increased burden thus added tends 

 to sink them still lower. " Tetens declares," says Kohl, " that in 

 somes places the dikes have gradually sunk to the depth of sixty 

 or even a hundred feet." f For these reasons, the processes of 

 dike-building have been almost everywhere again and again re- 

 peated, and thus the total expenditure of money and of labor, 

 upon the works in question, is much greater than would appear 

 from an estimate of the actual cost of diking-in a given extent of 

 coastland and draining a given area of water-surface.:}: 



* Staring, Voormaals en Thans, p. 163. Much the largest proportion of 

 the lands so reclaimed, though for the most part lying above low-water tide- 

 mark, is at a lower level than the Lincolnshire fens, and more subject to in- 

 undation from the irruptions of the sea. 



^ Die Inseln und Marachen der Eerzogthumer Schleswig und Holstein, iii., 

 p. 151. 



X The purely agricultural island of Pelworm, ofE the coast of Schleswig, 

 containing about 10,000 acres, annually expends for the maintenance of its 

 dikes not less than £6,000 sterling, or nearly |30,000. — J. G. Kohl, Inseln 

 und Marschen Schleswig' s und Holstein' s, ii., p. 394. 



The original cost of the dikes of Pelworm is not stated. 



" The greatest part of the province of Zeeland is protected by dikes meas- 

 uring 250 miles in length, the maintenance of which costs, in ordinary years, 



more than a million guilders [above $400,000] The annual expenditure 



for dikes and hydraulic works in Holland is from five to seven million guild- 

 ers" [$2,000,000 to $2,800,000]. --WrLD, Die Niederlande, i., p. 62. 



One is not sorry to learn that the Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands had 

 some compensations. The great chain of ring-dikes which surrounds a large 

 part of Zeeland is due to the energy of Caspar de Robles, the Spanish govern- 

 or of that province, who in 1570 ordered the construction of these works at 

 the public expense, as a substitute for the private embankments which had 



