or windmills, in thirty-nine months
was completed the great undertaking of the draining of the lake of
Haarlem, which measured forty-four kilometres in circumference, and
forever 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
kilometres.

The rivers, another eternal enemy, cost no less of labor and sacrifice.
Some, like the Rhine, which lost itself in the sands before reaching the
sea, had to be channeled and defended at their mouths, against the
tides, by formidable cataracts; others, like the Meuse, bordered by
dikes as powerful as those that were raised against the ocean; others,
turned from their course; the wandering waters gathered together; the
course of the affluents regulated; the waters divided with rigorous
measure in order to retain that enormous mass of liquid in equilibrium,
where the slightest inequality might cost a province; and in this way
all the rivers that formerly spread their devastating floods about the
country were disciplined into channels and constrained to do service.

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 bulwarks 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
kilometres. 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 kilometres long,
constructed of masses of Norwegian granite, which descends more than
sixty metres into the sea. The whole province of Friesland, for the
length of eighty-eight kilometres, 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