408 DEAINING OF THE LAKE OF HAAELEM. 



the recovered lands were offered for sale for its benefit. Up to 

 1858, forty-two thousand acres had been sold at not far from 

 sixteen ponnds sterling or seventy-seven dollars an acre, amount- 

 ing altogether to £661,000 sterhng or $3,200,000. The unsold 



shallow lakes and pools, and converting thena first into morass and then into 

 dry land. Whenever, therefore, man removes the peat or turf, he exerts an 

 injurious geographical agency, and, as I 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. Elisee Re- 

 ciiUS, La Terre, i., 591, 592, But see Asbjornsen, Torv og Torvdrift, ii., 29, 30. 

 See Nature, Sept. 26, 1878, where it is stated, in an article on the Superficial 

 Geology of S. W. Lancashire, that the turf-moss, in a certain peat-tract in 

 Somersetshire, is growing at the rate of from four to six feet in fifteen years, 

 so that the places where the peat is cut are filled up in that time. 



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 tJie Southern Hemisphere, i. , 

 pp. 16, 17. 



Col. Yule, in his Mission to the Court of Ava, speaking of a lake in Burmah, 

 says : " The surface of this lake presents the singular spectacle of a multitude 

 of floating islands. They are composed of the interlaced roots of a coarse 

 grass or reed, loaded with a little soil. The roots of the grass shoot down to 

 the bottom of the lake in dry weather, but in the rains many of these entangled 

 masses are buoyed up and separated from the ground, so as to be quite afloat. 

 The inhabitants often occupy them as fishing stations, or even erect their cot- 

 tages on them, anchoring the islands to the bottom by long bamboos. They 



