CHAP. VIII. HUMAN BONES NOT FOUND IN LAKE OF HAARLEM. 147 



of several hundred miles in extent, where they often ap- 

 proached within less than half a mile of a land peopled by 

 millions of human beings. 



Lake of Haarlem. 



It is not many years since the Government of Holland re- 

 solved to lay dry that great sheet of water formerly called the 

 Lake of Haai'lem, extending over 45,000 square acres. Thej^ 

 succeeded, in 1853, in turning it into dry land, by means 

 of -powerful pumps constantly worked by steam, which raised 

 the water and discharged it into a canal running for twenty 

 or thirty miles round the newly-gained land. This land was 

 depressed thirteen feet beneath the mean level of the ocean. 

 I travelled, in 1859, over part of the bed of this old lake, 

 and found it already converted into ai'able land, and peopled 

 by an agricultural population of 5000 souls. Mr. Staring, 

 who had been for some years employed by the Dutch Govern- 

 ment in constructing a geological map of Holland, was my 

 companion and guide. He informed me that he and his 

 associates had searched in vain for human bones in the de- 

 posits which had constituted for three centuries the bed of 

 the great lake. 



There had been many a shipwreck and many a naval fight 

 in those waters, and hundreds of Dutch and Spanish soldiers 

 and sailors had met there with a watery grave. The popula- 

 tion which lived on the borders of this ancient sheet of water 

 numbered between thirty and forty thousand souls. In dig- 

 ging the great canal, a fine section had been laid open, about 

 thirt}" miles long, of the deposits which formed the ancient 

 bottom of the lake. Trenches, also, innumerable, several feet 

 deep, had been freshly dug on all the farms, and their united 

 length must have amounted to thousands of miles. In some 

 of the sandy soil recently thrown out of the trenches, I observed 



