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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL. No. 1030 



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 re- 

 claiming every year forty square miles of 

 the marshes and fiords." Miss Semple, 

 who, in the ' ' Influences of Geographic En- 

 vironment, ' ' 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 gi- 

 gantic 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 dif- 

 ferent 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- 

 1904, reclaimed from the sea by a barrier 

 over li miles long, designed by the great 

 firm of marine engineers, Coode and 

 Matthews, who built the Colombo break- 

 water. The reclaimed land, owing to the 

 subsidence 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 popu- 

 lation 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. 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 Cats- 

 kill Mountains, a work which the writer in 

 the Times has described as "hardly sec- 

 ond in magnitude and importance to the 

 Panama Canal." In Great Britain cities 

 in search of water supply have ordered 

 houses, churches, fields to be drowned, 

 and small lakes to come into existence. 

 Liverpool created Lake Vyrnwy in Mont- 

 gomeryshire, with a length of nearly five 

 miles and an area of 1,121 acres. Birming- 

 ham is the parent of a similar lake 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 

 Burrinjuek 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 understand right, in 

 this case, by holding up the waters of a 

 river, a long narrow lake has been or is be- 

 ing called into existence. A still larger vol- 

 ume of water is gathered by the great As- 

 souan dam, which holds up the Nile at the 

 head of the First Cataract, washing, and 

 at times submerging, the old temples on 

 the Island of Philae in midstream. First 

 completed in 1902, the dam was enlarged 

 and heightened by 1912 ; and the result of 

 the dam is at the time of high Nile to cre- 

 ate a lake of some 65 square miles in area, 

 as well as to fill up the channel of the river 

 for many miles up stream. Illustrations of 

 artificial lakes might be multiplied from ir- 

 rigation works in India. An official report 

 on the state of Hyderabad, written some 

 years ago, has the following reference to the 

 tanks in the granitic country of that state : 

 "There are no natural lakes, but from the 

 earliest times advantage has been taken of 

 the undulating character of the country to 



