entury, in North
Holland alone, more than six thousand hectares, or fifteen thousand
acres, were thus redeemed from the waters; in South Holland, before
1844, twenty-nine thousand hectares; in the whole of Holland, from
1500 to 1858, three hundred and fifty-five thousand hectares.
Substituting steam-mills for windmills, in thirty-nine months was
completed the great undertaking of the draining of the lake of
Haarlem, which measured forty-four-kilometers in circumference,
and for ever threatened with its tempests the cities of Haarlem,
Amsterdam, and Leyden. And they are now meditating the prodigious work
of drying up the Zuyder-Zee, which embraces an area of more than seven
hundred square kilometers.

But the most tremendous struggle was the battle with the ocean.
Holland is in great part lower than the level of the sea;
consequently, everywhere that the coast is not defended by sand-banks,
it has to be protected by dikes. If these interminable bulkwarks of
earth, granite, and wood were not there to attest the indomitable
courage and perseverance of the Hollanders, it would not be believed
that the hand of man could, even in many centuries have accomplished
such a work. In Zealand alone the dikes extend to a distance of more
than four hundred kilometers. The western coast of the island of
Walcheren is defended by a dike, in which it is computed that the
expense of construction added to that of preservation, if it were put
out at interest, would amount to a sum equal in value to that which
the dike itself would be worth were it made of massive copper.

Around the city of Helder, at the northern extremity of North Holland,
extends a dike ten kilometers long, constructed of masses of Norwegian
granite, which descends more than sixty meters into the sea. The whole
province of Friesland, for the length of eighty-eight kilometers, is
defended by three rows of piles sustained by masses of Norwegian and
German granite. Amsterdam, all the cities of the Zuyder Zee, and all
the islands--fragments of vanished lands--which are strung like beads
between Friesland and North Holland, are protected by dikes. From the
mouths of the Ems to those of the Scheldt Holland is an impenetrable
fortress, of whose immense bastions the mills are the towers, the
cataracts are the gates, the islands the advanced forts; and like a
true fortress, it shows to its enemy, the sea, only the tops of
its bell-towers and the roofs of its houses, as if in def