Septembek 25, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



431 



into being since Roman times. The recla- 

 mation 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 civilized, 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 na- 

 ture 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 recla- 

 mation was in East Angiia, where the 

 names of the Pens and the Isle of Ely tes- 

 tify to what the surface once was. "For 

 some of our fens," writes Holinshed, "are 

 well known to be either of ten, twelve, six- 

 teen, twenty or thirty miles in length. . . . 

 Wherein also Elie, the famous isle, stand- 

 eth, 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 recla- 

 mation, 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 20 s. 

 to 40 s. an acre . . . without going back to 

 very remote periods, there can not have 

 been less than 150,000 acres drained and 

 improved on an average from 5 s. an acre 

 to 25 s." 150,000 acres is about 234 square 

 miles, but the amount reclaimed by drain- 

 ing in Lincolnshire in the seventeenth, 



eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seems 

 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 Farm- 

 ing, Past and Present," tells us that they 

 were ' ' in the seventeenth century a wilder- 

 ness of bogs, pools and reed shoals — a vast 

 morass from which here and there emerged 

 a few islands of solid earth. ' ' In the sev- 

 enteenth century a Dutch engineer, Ver- 

 muyden, 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 reclama- 

 tions, 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 harbor to a rude and almost bar- 

 barous sort of lazy and beggarly people." 

 In Lincolnshire there was a district called 

 Holland, and in Norfolk one called Marsh- 

 land, said to have been drained by, to 

 quote Dugdale again, "those active and in- 

 dustrious 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. The foreshore 

 of British Guiana, with its canals and sea 

 defences, dating from Dutch times, is now 

 the chief sugar-producing area in the Brit- 

 ish West Indies. If again in Australia 

 man has been a geographical agency, he 



