UNITING THE ISLANDS. 363 



tides, it may have been already comprehended (and 

 shall soon be proved), that the ebb carries back but very 

 little of what has been brought by the flood. So that, 

 but for some extraordinary circumstances, the materials 

 continually impelled towards the shore, which first form 

 islands, would at last unite against the coast in a conti- 

 nuous soil. The rare events, productive of great cata- 

 strophes, do not carry back these materials towards the 

 bottom of the sea ; they only, as it has been said before, 

 ravage the surface, diminishing the heights, and destroy- 

 ing the effect of vegetation. These, then, were the effects 

 against which it was necessary to guard. 



I now come to the plan of uniting the islands, form- 

 ed by these early inhabitants. They availed themselves 

 for that purpose of all such parts of the sand-banks as 

 lay in the intervals between the large islands, and were 

 beginning to produce grass. These, when surrounded 

 with dikes, are what are called Hoogs ; and their effects 

 are to break the waves, thus diminishing their action 

 against the dikes of the large islands, and, at the same 

 time, to determine the accumulation of the mud in the 

 intervals between those islands. In this manner a large 

 marsch island, named Everschop, was already, in 987, 

 united to Eyderstede by the point on which Poppenbull 

 is situated ; and in 995, the union of the same marsches 

 was effected by another point, namely, that of Tetenbull. 

 Lastly, in the year 1000, Eyderstede received a new in- 

 crease by the course of the Hever, prolonged between 

 the sand banks, being fixed by a dike ; but the whole 

 still remained an island. This is an example of the 

 manner in which the marsch islands were united by the 

 hoogs ; and the chronicle of the country says, that, by 



