COAST DIKES. 
333 
many a comparatively unimportant railroad has been con¬ 
structed at twice the cost which would now build that stupen¬ 
dous monument. Indeed, although man, detached from the 
solid earth, is almost powerless to struggle against the sea, he 
is fast becoming invincible by it so long as his foot is planted 
on the shore, or even on the bottom of the rolling ocean ; and 
though on some battle fields between the waters and the land, 
he is obliged slowly to yield his ground, yet he retreats still 
facing the foe, and will finally be able to say to the sea: 
“ Thus far shalt thou come and no farther, and here shall thy 
proud w r aves be stayed ! ” 
The description of works of harbor and coast improvement 
which have only an economical value, not a true geographical 
importance, does not come within the plan of the present 
volume, and in treating this branch of my subject, I shall 
confine myself to such as are designed either to gain new soil 
by excluding the waters from grounds which they had perma¬ 
nently or occasionally covered, or to resist new encroachments 
of the sea upon the land. 
a. Exclusion of the Sea by Diking. 
The draining of the Lincolnshire fens in England, which 
converted about 400,000 acres of marsh, pool, and tide-washed 
flat into plough land and pasturage, is a work, or rather series 
of works, of great magnitude, and it possesses much econom¬ 
ical, and, indeed, no trifling geographical importance. Its 
plans and methods were, at least in part, borrowed from the 
example of like improvements in Holland, and it is, in diffi¬ 
culty and extent, inferior to works executed for the same pur¬ 
pose on the opposite coast of the North Sea, by Dutch, Erisic, 
and Low German engineers. The space I can devote to such 
operations will be better employed in describing the latter, 
and I content myself with the simple statement I have already 
made of the quantity of worthless and even pestilential land 
which has been rendered both productive and salubrious in 
Lincolnshire, by diking out the sea, and the rivers which trav¬ 
erse the fens of that country. 
