he sea burst the dikes of
Zealand, destroying hundreds of villages, and covering forever a large
tract of country. In 1570 a storm caused another inundation in Zealand
and in the province of Utrecht; Amsterdam was invaded by the waters, and
in Friesland twenty thousand people were drowned. Other great
inundations took place in the seventeenth century; two terrible ones at
the beginning and the end of the eighteenth; one in 1825 that desolated
North Holland, Friesland, Over-Yssel, and Gueldres; and another great
one of the Rhine, in 1855, which invaded Gueldres and the province of
Utrecht, and covered a great part of North Brabant. Beside these great
catastrophes, there happened in different centuries innumerable smaller
ones, which would have been famous in any other country, but which in
Holland are scarcely remembered: like the rising of the lake of
Haarlem, itself the result of an inundation of the sea; flourishing
cities of the gulf of Zuyder Zee vanished under the waters; the islands
of Zealand covered again and again by the sea, and again emerging;
villages of the coast, from Helder to the mouths of the Meuse, from time
to time inundated and destroyed; and in all these inundations immense
loss of life of men and animals. It is plain that miracles of courage,
constancy, and industry must have been accomplished by the Hollanders,
first in creating and afterwards in preserving such a country. The enemy
from which they had to wrest it was triple: the sea, the lakes, the
rivers. They drained the lakes, drove back the sea, and imprisoned
the rivers.

To drain the lakes the Hollanders pressed the air into their service.
The lakes, the marshes, were surrounded by dikes, the dikes by canals;
and an army of windmills, putting in motion force-pumps, turned the
water into the canals, which carried it off to the rivers and the sea.
Thus vast tracts of land buried under the water saw the sun, and were
transformed, as if by magic, into fertile fields, covered with villages,
and intersected by canals and roads. In the seventeenth century, in less
than forty years, twenty-six lakes were drained. At the beginning of the
present century, 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 f