September io, 1914] 



NATURE 



43 



field, stretching from the wall of the city betwixt 

 Bishopsg'ate and the postern called Cripplegate to 

 Fensbury and to Holywell continued a waste and un- 

 profitable ground a long time." By 1527, he tells us, 

 it was drained " into the course of Walbrook, and so 

 into the Thames, and by these degrees was this fen or 

 moor at length made main and hard ground, which 

 before, being overgrown with flags, sedges and rushes, 

 served to no use." It is said that this fen or marsh had 

 come into being since Roman times. The reclamation 

 which has been carried out in the case of London is 

 typical of what has been done in numerous other cases. 

 As man has become more civilised, he has come down 

 from his earlier home in the uplands, has drained the 

 valley swamps, and on the firm land thus created has 

 planted the streets and houses of great cities. 



The Romans had a hand in the draining of Romney 

 Marsh in Sussex, and here nature cooperated with 

 man, just as she has cooperated in the deltas of the 

 great rivers, for the present state of the old Cinque 

 Ports, Rye and Winchelsea, shows how much on this 

 section of the English coast the sea has receded. But 

 the largest reclamation was in East Anglia, where the 

 names of the Fens and the Isle of Ely testify to what 

 the surface once was. " For some of our fens," writes 

 Holinshed, '"are well known to be either of ten, twelve, 

 sixteen, twenty or thirty miles in length. . . . Wherein 

 also Elie, the famous isle, standeth, which is seven 

 miles every way, and whereunto there is no access 

 but by three causies." Arthur Young, in 1799, in his 

 " General View of the Agriculture of the County of 

 Lincoln," a copy of which he dedicated to that great 

 friend of Australia, Sir Joseph Banks, who was a Lin- 

 colnshire landowner and a keen supporter of reclama- 

 tion, wrote of the draining which had been carried out 

 in Lincolnshire. "The quantity of land thus added to 

 the kingdom has been great ; fens of water, mud, wild 

 fowl, frogs and agues have been converted to rich 

 pasture and arable worth from 205. to 405. an acre 

 . . . without going back to very remote periods, there 

 cannot have been less than 150,000 acres drained and 

 improved on an average from 55. an acre to 255." 

 150,000 acres is about 234 square miles, but the amount 

 reclaimed by draining in Lincolnshire in the seven- 

 teenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seems to 

 have been more than 500 square miles. The Fenlands 

 as a whole extended into six counties. They were 

 seventy miles in length, from ten to thirty miles broad, 

 and covered an area of from 800 to 1000 square miles. 

 One estimate I have seen is as high as 1200 square 

 miles. Mr. Prothero, in his book on "English Farm- 

 ing. Past and Present," tells us that they were "in the 

 seventeenth century a wilderness of bogs, pools and 

 reed shoals — a vast morass from which here and there 

 emerged a few islands of solid earth." In the seven- 

 teenth century a Dutch engineer, \'ermuyden, was 

 called in to advise, and the result of draining what 

 was called after the peer who contracted for it the 

 Bedford Level, together with subsequent reclamations, 

 was to convert into ploughland and pasture large tracts 

 which, in the words of an old writer, Dugdale, had 

 been "a vast and deep fen, affording little benefit to 

 the realm other than fish or fowl, with overmuch 

 harbour to a rude and almost barbarous sort of lazy 

 and beggarly people." In Lincolnshire there was a 

 district called Holland, and in Norfolk one called 

 Marshland, said to have been drained by, to quote 

 Dugdale again, "those active and industrious people, 

 the Romans." 



The Dutch and the English, who thus added to their 

 home lands by reclamation, went far and wide through 

 the world, changing its face as they went. The 

 Dutch, where they planted themselves, planted trees 

 also ; and when they came to land like their own 

 Netherlands, again they reclaimed and empoldered. 



NO. 2341, VOL. 94] 



The foreshore of British Guiana, with its canals and 

 sea defences, dating from Dutch times, is now the 

 chief sugar-producing area in the British West Indies. 

 If again in Australia man has been a geographical 

 agency, he learnt his trade when he was changing the 

 face of his old home in the British Isles. 



Instances of reclaiming land from water might be 

 indefinitely multiplied. We might compare the work 

 done by different nations. In Norway, for instance, 

 Reclus wrote that "the agriculturists are now reclaim- 

 ing every year forty square miles of the marshes and 

 fiords." Miss Semple, who, in the " Influences of 

 Geographic Environment," writes that "between the 

 Elbe and Scheldt " (that is, including with the Nether- 

 lands some of North Germany) " more than 2000 

 square miles have been reclaimed from river and sea 

 in the past 300 years," tells us also that " the most 

 gigantic dyke system in the world is that of the 

 Hoangho, by which a territory of the size of England 

 is won from the water for cultivation." Or we might 

 take the different objects which have impelled men 

 here and there to dry up water and bank out sea. 

 Agriculture has not been the only object, nor yet re- 

 claiming for town sites. Thus, in order to work the 

 hematite iron mines at Hodbarrow, in Cumberland, an 

 area of 170 acres was, in the years 1900-04, reclaimed 

 from the sea by a barrier more than \\ miles long, 

 designed by the great firm of marine engineers, Coode 

 and Matthews, which built the Colombo breakwater. 

 The reclaimed land, owing to the subsidence caused 

 by the workings, is now much below the level of the 

 sea. Here is an instance of reclamation not adding 

 to agricultural or pastoral area, but giving mineral 

 wealth, thereby attracting population and enriching a 

 district. 



How far has land been drowned by the agency of 

 man ? Again the total area is a negligible quantity-, 

 but again, relatively to small areas, it has been appre- 

 ciable, and the indirect effects have been great. The 

 necessities of town life are responsible for new lakes 

 and rivers. Such are the great reservoirs and aque- 

 ducts by which water is being brought to New York 

 from the Catskill Mountains, a work which a writer 

 in the Times has described as "hardly second in mag- 

 nitude and importance to the Panama Canal." In 

 Great Britain cities in search of a water supply have 

 ordered houses, churches, fields to be drowned, and 

 small lakes to come into existence. Liverpool created 

 Lake Vyrnwy in Montgomeryshire, with a length of 

 nearly five miles and an area of 1121 acres. Birming- 

 ham is the parent of a sirriilar lake in a wild Radnor- 

 shire valley near my old home. The water is not 

 carried for anything like the distance from Mundaring 

 to Kalgoorlie, and on a much greater scale than these 

 little lakes in Wales is the reservoir now being formed 

 in New South Wales by the Burrinjuck dam, on the 

 Murrumbidgee River, which, as I read, is, or will be, 

 forty-one miles long, ' and cover an area of twenty 

 square miles. If I understand right, in this case, by 

 holding up the waters of a river, a long narrow lake 

 has been or is being called into existence. A still 

 larger volume of water is gathered by the great 

 Assouan dam, which holds up the Nile at the head of 

 the First Cataract, washing, and at times submerging, 

 the old temples on the Island of Philae in mid-stream. 

 First completed in 1902, the dam was enlarged and 

 heightened by 1912; and tlTe result of the dam is at 

 the time of high Nile to create a lake of some 65 

 square miles in area, as well as to fill up the channel 

 of the river for many miles up stream. Illustrations 

 of artificial lakes might be multiplied from irrigation 

 works in India. An official report on the State of 

 Hyderabad, written some years ago, has the following 

 reference to the tanks in the granitic country of that 

 State: "There are no natural lakes, but from the 



