DRAINING OF THE LAKE OF HAARLEM. 347 
struction of the few trees and shrubs which held the loose soil 
together with their roots, the ponds are supposed to have grad¬ 
ually extended themselves, until the action of the wind upon 
their enlarged surface gave their waves sufficient force to over¬ 
come the resistance of the feeble barriers which separated 
them, and to unite them all into a single lake. Popular tradi¬ 
tion, it is true, ascribes the formation of the Lake of Haarlem 
to a single irruption of the sea, at a remote period, and con¬ 
nects it with one or another of the destructive inundations of 
which the Netherland chronicles describe so many; but on a 
map of the year 1531, a chain of four smaller waters occupies 
nearly the ground afterward covered by the Lake of Haarlem, 
and they have more probably been united by gradual en¬ 
croachments resulting from the improvident practices above 
referred to, though no doubt the consummation may have 
been hastened by floods, and by the neglect to maintain dikes, 
or the intentional destruction of them, in the long wars of the 
sixteenth century. 
The Lake of Haarlem was a body of water not far from 
fifteen miles in length, by seven in greatest width, lying be¬ 
tween the cities of Amsterdam and Leyden, running parallel 
with the coast of Holland at the distance of about five miles 
from the sea, and covering an area of about 45,000 acres. By 
means of the Ij, it communicated with the Zuiderzee, the 
Mediterranean of the Netherlands, and its surface was little 
above the mean elevation of that of the sea. Whenever, there¬ 
fore, the waters of the Zuiderzee were acted upon by strong 
northwest winds, those of the Lake of Haarlem were raised pro¬ 
portionally and driven southward, while winds from the south 
tended to create a flow in the opposite direction. The shores 
of the lake were everywhere low, and though in the course of 
the eighty years between 1767 and 1848 more than £350,000 
or $1,700,000 had been expended in checking its encroach¬ 
ments, it often burst its barriers, and produced destructive 
inundations. On the 29th of November, 1836, a south wind 
brought its waters to the very gates of Amsterdam, and on the 
26th of December of the same year, in a northwest gale, they 
