43 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 
The kingdom has a constantly changing area of between 12,000 and 13,000 
-Square miles. Mr. Marsh, in his book, set down the total amount gained to 
agriculture at the time he wrote ‘ by dyking out the sea and by draining shallow 
bays and lakes’ at some 1,370 square miles, which, he says, was one-tenth of the 
kingdom ; at the same time, he estimated that much more had been lost to the sea 
—something like 2,600 square miles. He writes that there were no important sea 
dykes before the thirteenth century, and that draining inland lakes did not 
begin till the fifteenth, when windmills came into use for pumping. In the 
nineteenth century steam pumps took the place of windmills, science strengthen- 
ing an already existing process. Between 1815 and 1855, 172 square miles were 
reclaimed, and this included the Lake of Haarlem, some thirteen miles long 
by six in breadth, with an area of about seventy-three square miles. This was 
reclaimed between 1840 and 1853. At the present time, we are told, about 
forty square miles are being reclaimed annually in Holland; and meanwhile 
the Dutch Government have in contemplation or im hand a great scheme for 
draining the Zuyder Zee, which amounts to recovering from the ocean land 
which was taken by it in historic times at the end of the fourteenth century. 
The scheme is to be carried out in thirty-three years and is to cost nearly sixteen 
million pounds. The reclamation is to be effected by-an embankment across the 
mouth of this inland sea over eighteen miles long. The result will be to add 815 
square miles of land to the kingdom of the Netherlands, 750 square miles of 
which will be fertile land, and in addition to create a much-needed freshwater 
lake with an area of 557 square miles; this lake is to be fed by one of the mouths 
of the Rhine. 
London is partly built on marsh. The part of London where I live, Pimlico, 
was largely built on piles. A little way north, in the centre of fashion, is 
Belgrave Square, and here a lady whom I used to know had heard her grand- 
father say that he had shot snipe. Take the City of London in the strict 
and narrow sense. The names of Moorfields and Fensbury or Finsbury are 
familiar to those who know the City. Stow, in his Survey of London, over 
three hundred years ago, wrote of ‘The Moorfield which lieth without the 
postern called Moorgate. This field of old time was called the Moor. This 
fen or moor field, stretching from the wall of the city betwixt Bishopsgate and 
the postern called Cripplegate to Fensbury and to Holywell continued a waste 
and unprofitable 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 co-operated with man, just as she has co-operated 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 Lincolnshire landowner 
and a keen supporter of reclamation, 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 20s. to 40s. 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 5s. an acre to 258.’ 
150,000 acres is about 234 square miles, but the amount reclaimed by draining 
in Lincolnshire in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seems 
