PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 431 
to have been well over 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 1,000 square miles. One estimate 
I have seen is as high as 1,200 square miles. Mr. Prothero, in his book on 
‘English Farming, 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 seventeenth cen- 
tury a Dutch engineer, Vermuyden, 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 re- 
clamation, 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 em- 
poldered. 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 reclaiming 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 Netherlands some of North Germany) ‘ more than 2,000 
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 reclaiming 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 over 14 mile 
long, designed by the great firm of marine engineers, Coode and Matthews, 
who built the Colombo breakwater. The reclaimed land, owing to the subsi- 
dence 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 
appreciable, and the indirect effects have been great. God made the country, 
man made the town; and the town is trying to unmake or to remake the 
country. The necessities of town life are responsible for new lakes and rivers. 
Such are the great reservoirs and aqueducts by which water is being brought 
to New York from the Catskill Mountains, one of the reservoirs being twelve 
miles long with a water surface of nearly thirteen square miles. The whole 
work has been described by a writer in the Zimes as ‘hardly second in 
magnitude 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 1,121 acres. 
Birmingham is the parent of similar lakes in a wild Radnorshire 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 under- 
