maker; and in this capacity was employed from by the statement, that both to keep dry and to maintain the dykes around this large area, when brought into the state of a polder, would not exceed in yearly expense the cost of maintaining the existing barrier dykes.

1608 to 1612 in draining the Beemster-a large polder in North Holland, which alone contains 18,000 acres. He worked also at various times as a mill-wright, and as a carver in stone, wood, and ivory; he was a skilful mechanician, and built

The drainage of the lake was, accordingly, clocks and carrioles; he was a professed drainer, resolved upon by the states-general. A navigable a land-measurer, and was cunning in the construc-ring canal was begun, we believe in 1840 and tion of dykes and sluices. He possessed the art this, we understand, is now completed. At three (which he exhibited at different times before persons of rank, but never revealed) of descending and remaining for a length of time below the surface of the water-eating, writing, and playing on musical instruments the while. He visited and was employed in various countries-Denmark, Germany, France, and England—and lived to be nearly eighty years of age, though the year of his death is not recorded.

distant points on the borders of the lake, as many monster engines are to be erected. These, it is calculated will exhaust the waters, and lay the bed of the lake dry, by fourteen months of incessant pumping; at a total cost, for machines and labor, of £140,000. The expense of maintaining the dykes and engines afterwards, will be nearly five thousand pounds a year. The cost of maintain ing the old barrier dykes, amounted, as we have already stated, to about the same sum. The land to be laid dry is variously estimated at from fifty to seventy thousand acres. Taking the lowest of these estimates, the cost of reclaiming amounts to £3 sterling per imperial acre, and that of subsequently maintaining to two shillings per acre.* Independently, therefore, of the other advantages which will attend it, there will be an actual money profit from the undertaking.

The success which had attended the drainage of the North Holland polders, suggested to Leeghwater the bolder idea of applying a similar remedy to the larger sea or lake of Haerlem ;-wall in the limits of the lake, pump out its waters, and the danger of future encroachment will be removed. Accordingly, in 1640, when his experience was fully matured, he published his "Het Haerlemmer Boek;" in which he suggests that the lake might be economically and profitably drained, and details The quantity of water to be lifted is calculated the methods he would recommend for successfully at about a thousand millions of tons. This would accomplishing this gigantic work. Occupied as have required a hundred and fourteen windmills the country then was with Spanish wars, the of the largest size stationed at intervals round the phamphlet of Leeghwater attracted considerable lake, and working for four years, at a total cost of attention. It went through three editions: but upwards of £300,000; while at the same time, the project was one which required time to be after the first exhaustion of the waters was comdigested; and before it had been adequately dis- pleted, the greater number of these mills would cussed, there came the peace of 1648. New have been perfectly useless. How wonderful apadjustments, commercial and political, took place. pears the progress of mechanical art!-three Many previous calculations were now falsified-steam-engines to do the work of one hundred and many projects deferred. Later still, the disas- fourteen huge mills-in one third of the time, and trous wars with Louis XIV. and with England, at less than one half the cost! intervened; and the project of Leeghwater was lost sight of or forgotten.

One of these monster engines-of English manufacture-working, polypus-like, eleven huge suckBut the success of the steam trials on the Zuid ers at the extremity of as many formidable arms, plas, and the discussion to which the works of has been already erected, and tried at the southern Simons and Greve gave rise, lately recalled the extremity of the lake in the neighborhood of Leyden. idea of draining the Haerlem sea, proposed and To this first machine the not ungrateful name of recommended two centuries before. If wealth no THE LEEGHWATER has been given. Vain honors longer poured into the country so fast as when the we pay at last to the memory of men whose minds scheme was first promulgated, the work itself, by were too forward and too capacious for their time the progress of art, had now become infinitely-who were denied by their contemporaries the easier. They were offered the agency of a new few kind words of sympathy which would have instrument, before which the powers of their wind-done so much to comfort, sustain, and strengthen mills quailed; and the most slow and sceptical them! began to confess, that what Leeghwater had so sanguinely pronounced to be possible, might now be comprehended among the reasonable expectations even of cautious and calculating men.

The arguments at present advanced in favor of the work, comprised one element, which Leeghwater himself had been unable to urge with equal force.

The annual drainage of the lake is calculated at fifty-four millions of tons, of which twenty millions will require in some seasons to be lifted in the course of one or two months. Had our railway undertakings not sprung up to rival or excel it, we should have unhesitatingly claimed for this work the praise of being the boldest effort of civil en

The annual expense of caging and confin-gineering in modern times. ing the waters of the lake, was now known by long experience. The practical minds of the Hollanders, therefore, were naturally much influenced

* If the area of the lake be, as we have stated in a previous page, about 70 square miles, it contains only 45,000 acres, and the cost of reclaiming is still about £3 an acre.

But, now that the national mind has been once canals and tidal sluices would easily discharge its stirred at the picture of these mechanical and social superfluous waters into the Northern Ocean. triumphs, the sober Hollander appears to be passing at once into the extreme of daring; and he has ventured to suggest projects, which cautious men may be excused for looking upon with distrust.

By

We by no means doubt the possibility of this. Though the cost is roughly calculated at five millions sterling, we believe even in the ultimate pecuniary profit of the scheme, if it were successThe Zuyder Zee is a salt sea; bounded towards fully executed. We do fear, however, for the the north by the chain of islands which stretch from power of any dykes to stand, for long, the brunt the Helder to the Dollart, and on the south by the of the northern billows. But what may not adsemi-circular shores of Utrecht and Guelderland. vancing art accomplish? May not the yielding In the time of the Romans, the Yssel, in reality asphalte, or the elastic caoutchouc, yet be seen an arm of the Rhine, which now falls into the mantling the sea-washed walls, and, “yielding to Zuyder Zee below the town of Zwolle, emptied conquer," withstand the persevering tide more itself into Lake Flevo. So far as we can ascertain, gallantly than the stubborn masses of stone and it appears that beyond this latter lake towards the iron? Still the proposed experiment appears to west and south, the Zuyder Zee, then also a fresh-press more closely than we have sufficient warrant water lake, discharged itself by a river, the Vlie, for at present, on the limits within which nature is which occupied nearly the course of the present as yet more than a match for man. We merely channel of that name, and joined the Northern notice the idea of completing by art the natural deOcean, between what now forms the island of Vlie- fences of this sea, further towards the north. land and Ter-schelling. But the natural action of uniting, through the means of intermediate dykes, the elements widened these lakes, and gradually the Texel, Vlieland, Ter-schelling, and Ameland, obliterated the intermediate tract of land. It is with the northern mainland, the German Ocean possible, too, if any faith is to be put in one of might be wholly excluded from the Frisian sea, those conjectures-that of Elie de Beaumont-by and the available surface of the provinces of Holwhich geologists get over difficulties, that the whole land and Frieseland doubled. For this effort, at land of the Netherlands may have sunk, and as- least, we may safely say, that the knowledge and sisted the operation. At all events, it is upon the man have not yet arrived. Can we soberly record, that in 1170, during a great flood, the believe that they will ever come? waters of the southern lake rose to the very gates of the city of Utrecht, so that fish could be caught with nets fron the walls of the town; and the Limits of the lake were greatly extended, especially towards the north, between the two Frieselands. According to some authors, however, West Frieseland still stretched continuously across the present Zuyder Zee from Petten and Medemblik, to the Lauwer Zee. From that time, for upwards of 200 years, it continued to increase, swallowing up "whole forests, and many thousand acres of land, so that large ships might be navigated where carriages used to travel." At last, in 1396, a large part of West Frieseland was swallowed up, lake Flevo entirely disappeared, the existing islands were formed or completely separated from the mainland, and the Zuyder Zee converted into an arm of the Northern Ocean.

In its mean depth, this wide inland sea does not greatly exceed that of the lake of Haerlem. Full of shallows, its channels are difficult to navigate. At the same time being exposed to the sweep of far-stretching winds, it is dangerous to the sailor. Its frequent ravages on the coast not only necessitate an enormous outlay in the maintenance of dykes, but ever and anon it succeeds in swallowing vast fragments of the land, which it again most reluctantly surrenders.

Such are the works, unquestionably great, which, by means of long, persevering, and costly labor, this people has already executed and such are the still greater, which the progress of mechanical art and the example of their forefathers have led them to enter upon or to project. One reflection, however, was continually present to our minds, as we were surveying the monuments of their skill and courage. How powerful is the will of man over the elements of nature, and yet how feeble and evanescent is all he does! Let his hand cease to labor here for a single season, and the fruits of years upon years of victory are lost. Withhold only for a few months his engineering industry, and the waters will resume their ancient dominion, and Holland in great part disappear. Such a reflection as this ought to humble us as men, without diminishing our zeal as good citizens.

The enlightened and travelled agriculturist who visits Holland, though he candidly confesses that no other country has done so much-so extensively and so well-for the mechanical part of agriculture, will yet not fail to remark that even this branch of rural economy has hitherto only been blocked ont in the rough. Massive and magnificent operations have been executed, but the refined practices of what among us is called thorough If the Haerlem tiger can now be so easily sub- draining, are scarcely known. The improvements dued by the aid of steam, why, it is asked, not in agricultural machinery, which so strikingly dismuzzle also the lion of the Zuyder Zee? A sea- tinguish the present condition of purely English wall, drawn across from Medemblik or Enkhausen progress, have likewise been comparatively little to Stavoren, would inclose the large circular space attended to. The Netherland farmers, in general, which is the proper home of this southern sea; and are entirely unacquainted with our best instruments

of cultivation, our clod-crushers, our drill machines, | dried by wind or steam power, sufficient to lift the our manure-distributers and dibblers, our steaming water only the number of feet now considered apparatus, linseed-crushers, chaff-cutters, and the requisite. To lift it two or three feet higher, so host of new implements, to which the advance of as to reduce by so much the level of the water in the art in Great Britain has given birth. the ditches, might require new adjustments, and further outlay which prudence would by no means recommend. In many localities, however, as we have ascertained by personal inquiry, the existing ditches might be deepened, and the water in them lowered, without any addition to the power employed. Where such is the case, experience seems to say that the next profitable step in the mechanical improvement of the sea-born land, is to lower the water to a sufficient depth, and drain it thoroughly, according to our Deanston system. In other localities, where the capabilities of the power employed are already exhausted, time alone can be expected to bring about a condition of things in which such thorough drainage can be economically adopted. But by degrees the steamengine, as in the flats of our eastern counties, will supersede the windmill in nearly all parts of the Netherlands; and, should the practice we have suggested prove successful elsewhere, the additional power can easily be provided in the new erections.

In regard to thorough drainage, indeed, there are some nice questions to be solved, before it can be pronounced with certainty, that it may or ought to be introduced universally in Holland. In the higher clay lands of the province of Utrecht, and of other districts, where there is a sufficient natural fall to admit of the introduction of tile and stone drains at two to four feet from the surface, the propriety and profit of such drainage are not to be doubted. The accomplishment of this object ought, therefore, to be one of the earliest cares of their local and general agricultural societies. Those who are aware of the millions of money we are now wisely spending for this object, will wonder that a covered drain or draining tile has hardly ever been seen in the rural districts of Holland.

Again, the high moorlands and heaths are not beyond the reach of improvement from this mode of drainage. Saturated with ochrey matter to within a few inches of the surface, no plants can entrust their roots to the unwholesome under-soil. There is, however, a counter experience to Hence they are barely verdant with a scanty herb-combat, before this recommendation will be lis age. But permit the rains to descend, and escape at regular intervals through systematic channels underneath, and the poisonous ochre will be gradually washed away, and the soil prepared for those further steps by which its permanent improvement is to be brought about.

tened to among the practical men by whom the Dutch polders and the English fens are now farmed. The command of the water which they now possess, enables them to throw it off when it is excessive, and to let it on to the land—that is, into the ditches-when in their opinion it is deBut the poldered or low-lying lands are in a ficient. To high-land farmers this latter practice different and more difficult position. The water seems extraordinary; and yet a fair show of reain the open ditches, by which they are drained, son is advanced in its defence. When land of rarely stands more than twelve inches below the any kind is fully saturated with water, it shrinks general level of the fields, while in winter it not and cracks in the drying. The wettest land, unfrequently covers them altogether. In these therefore, cracks and yawns the most, when the circumstances, it appears at first sight impossible drought of summer comes. Clay soils especially to introduce anything like a system of thorough-the Oxford clay, for example, in England, and drainage. If the water is to stand so high, there the carse clays in Scotland-gape in an excessive can be no outfall for covered drains inserted at a depth likely to be useful in materially increasing the produce of the land.

Our British experience has established, that the removal of the water to a depth of three feet from the surface in all land from which an outfall can be obtained, is profitable; pays the expense of the operation, and leaves a fair profit on the undertaking. Assuming, then, that this result of our home experience may guide our opinion concerning what would follow in untried circumstances, we shall be justified in concluding that the fertility of the poldered lands of every kind in Holland would be increased, by going deeper, and exhausting the water to a depth of three feet below the level of the cultivated or pasture land. In regard to the latter, perhaps a flooding in the winter, if not permitted to injure the under drains, might not only be allowable, but might even be attended with good effects. The apparent difficulty is to effect this new operation. The polders are at present

degree, when a length of warm and dry weather occurs. The roots of plants are, in consequence, compressed and parched, vegetation withers or is burned up, and the evil is naturally attributed to the want of water.* In fenny districts, therefore, and in the Dutch polders, the farmer rejoices that

* A singular effect of frost upon some of the fenny soils in the Bedford level, is described by Mr. Clarke in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society. "Throughout the whole of the fens, the land which is not real peat soil, having a portion of salt mixed with it, is liable to honeycomb during frost; that is, the frost separates about a two-inch stratum of the surface soil into a net-like assemblage of small lumps, the soil beneath this perforated crust remaining exceedingly soft and light. This hard crust pinching the blades of wheat whilst the roots are in the loose earth below, appears to rise, and the young plants are thus drawn out from their roots, and laid on this process, but freezes into a solid piece; on the lowest the top of the land. The pure black soil is not subject to and wettest portions of silty peat it does immense mischief." The evil effects of this honeycombing are in a great measure prevented by merely scarifying the rapestubbles, and sowing wheat without the previous use of the plough.

it is in his power, from the high level canals, to | does in rural economy, in retarding the introduclet the water occasionally flow into his ditches; tion of better and more profitable methods. and thus, by maintaining it at its usual, and, as he considers, proper, height, to quench the thirst of his parching corn and pastures.

In Lincolnshire and our other fenny districts, this practice of introducing fresh water, borrowed by them from the Dutch, is justified on three But though the practice is a good one under grounds-that it serves as a fence by filling the the circumstances, it will become not only un- ditches, that it gives drink to the cattle, and that necessary, but absolutely hurtful, whenever the it refreshes the growing herbage. Quick-hedges progress of improvement shall have changed the would do away with the first of these reasons, and circumstances for the better. In the present con- convenient watering places with the second; dition of the land, over-saturated with water, the while, as we have shown, the third is in reality air penetrates only a short distance below its sur-only an obstacle to improvement. We ought to face; and the roots, either of natural herbage or mention, to the credit of the Stretham and Waterof sown crops, confine themselves to the few inches of upper soil which are freest from water, and in some degree mellowed by the air. They draw neither moisture nor solid nutriment from the soil below. When the summer's heat comes, therefore, and dries up this shallow overlying soil, the roots are compressed and dried up. Deprived of their usual food and moisture, they naturally wither and die. Or suppose water to rise in small quantity from below, by so-called capillary attraction, it brings up unwholesome substances along with it, which the roots cannot drink in with impunity, and thus the plant is not only parched, but also poisoned. Let in the water, however, to its usual level, and you both dilute the poison, and refresh your crops with wholesome fluid.

beach fens in Cambridge, that, contrary to the general opinion, the farmers there consider that the waters should be kept as low as possible. After the first slight evils which the change might occasion were once over, all, are satisfied, would soon come to the same conclusion. In the Deeping, and, we believe, most other fens, the adventurers have a right to admit the water at their pleasure. The general trusts, or courts of sewers, cannot prevent them; and thus it not unfrequently happens, that, while the steam-engine is at work to drain the fen at one end, the adventurers are admitting the water by means of their sluices at the other! We have ourselves examined this question on the spot, with a desire to arrive at the truth; and our present persuasion is, that, even on those more peaty portions of the fen country, where the clay for gaulting or top-dressing the surface is dug from a depth of three or four feet, the necessity for fresh water, were the land properly drained and managed, is in a great degree imaginary.

But amend the conditions; permanently abstract the water by means of a thorough drainage, and the necessity for such supplies of under-water will cease. When thus drained, the land would naturally open in all directions, and allow the air to penetrate deeper. The roots, no longer deterred by the presence of superfluous and stagnant water, In Holland, this thorough drainage is a question would gladly descend further in quest of more as important, perhaps, in a sanitary, as in an agriabundant food; and the increased luxuriance of the cultural point of view. The province of Zealand herbage would show that they were successful in|—including all the islands at the mouths of the obtaining it. The summer drought may return and parch it again to the same depth as before; but the soil, whether it be a stiff clay or a porous peat, will now no longer open into wide fissures as before, so as to compress the roots; while these again, stretched in all directions to a greater depth, are drawing from a wholesome and unparched subsoil the materials which are necessary to their continued growth. In reality, the same state of things will prevail there as in all our drained clay and boggy lands at higher levels, where no facilities have ever existed for letting on water during summer droughts. It is clear, therefore, we think, that though there may be good reason for introducing water artificially, where, by the uniform presence of too much wet, the roots of plants are confined to that thin layer of surface soil over which the sun may be supposed to be predominant; yet there is no good ground for supposing that such a practice would be necessary, if deep draining could be once introduced into these poldered districts. The practice appears, in fact, only an evidence of a backward state of knowledge, operating, as defective knowledge always

Maese and Scheldt, formed of sea slime in the way we have described-is of almost inexhaustible richness, fertile in corn and madder; but prurient also in fevers, and inhabited by a people of sickly looks, feeble frame, and unhealthy constitution, who are intolerant of fatigue. The young recruits for the army scarcely endure the weight of the musket, till a year's training in the higher country has given a sounder tone to their lungs, and strength to their unsteady limbs. Dyked in, and, where necessary, scooped dry by water-wheels, the soil is still rife in pestilential miasmata. Cattle fatten, but sheep rot upon it; and, though in favorable years it yields excellent crops, yet the produce is greatly at the mercy of the seasons. Deepen the main ditches, however, in these rich polders, pump out the water to a lower depth by at least a couple of feet, insert covered drains so as thoroughly to dry them, and we are certain, that not only would the land be more cheaply worked, the harvests more secure, and the crops of every kind greater on the average of years, but they would be reaped also and consumed by a healthier and happier, a more long-lived and more

numerous, race of men. In this aspect, the kind | especially by chemical research. They are all of drainage we are recommending is no longer a included, therefore, under what we call the chemmere question of rural economy: it must take its ical division of agriculture. place among the gravest considerations of philanthropy and national well-being.

We have said that the progress of agriculture in every country is marked by two periods-the mechanical and the chemical. In Holland, the rough portion of the mechanical period has been passed through magnifiently, while its more refined after-operations have not yet been sufficiently studied. The force of the country has hitherto been expended in adding to the available surface of the kingdom. It has not been so generally recollected, that, when we make a given breadth of land yield a double produce, we contribute as much to a country's strength and greatness, as by adding another equal breadth to its actual area.

The chemical period occupies itself exclusively with the means of inducing this increased productiveness. Mechanics having done its part, says to Chemistry, "Here is dry land—clay, or gravel, or sandy down, or naked heath, or elevated peat. How are we to grow remunerating crops on each of these soils? How are those already remunerating to be rendered still more profitable ?"

As respects this branch of agriculture, Holland has at least as much lee-way to make up, as in regard to her thorough drainage. We do not say this by way of disparagement, but as a matter of fact, which has fallen under our personal observation. She has therefore another great step to take, by which not only the produce of her fields may be increased, but the intelligence also of her rural population enlarged, and their intellectual position elevated. Rescue the practice of agriculture from the trammels of a dull routine, the timehonored custom of the country; convert it into an experimental art, by making the proceedings upon the farm consist of a series of well-devised and thoughtful trials, of which the results are carefully observed and accurately recorded: do this, and the farmer is unconsciously raised into the intelligent cultivator of a most interesting branch of natural science.

A large portion of the surface of Holland is covered with peat, naturally dry and somewhat elevated, (the hooge veenen ;) while another consists of sandy downs and unproductive heath. Yet, even in Sir William Temple's time, there must have been great exaggeration in his stateinent, that "they employed more men to repair the dykes than all the corn in the provinces would maintain." The ignorance of Davies is far more inexcusable, since it regards a point so easily ascer

"the soil snatched from the ocean is too poor and ungrateful to be worth the labor of cultivation;" the truth being, that it yields easy and rich returns of wheat, flax, tobacco, madder, and other valuable crops.

In early times, chemistry returned no scientific answer to questions such as these, and undertook to prescribe neither rules nor systems, by which the objects specified in them might be attained. As a science, it was then unknown, and its resources and appliances unsuspected. But, at pres-tained. He asserts, in his History of Holland, that ent, every successful practice struck out by the tentative or trial method, and from time to time included in the approved code of rural operations, finds its explanation in the discoveries of modern chemistry. Errors of practice are corrected, and causes of failure made clear. The rocks and reefs which lie in the way of agricultural improvement are mapped out; deeper and more direct channels brought to light; and new methods suggested, by which not only are known ends to be attained more completely and more economically than before, but objects also realized, which have hitherto been considered unattainable.

It is nevertheless true, that many parts of Holland yield little agricultural produce. The reader will readily understand how one or more branches of improvement may be neglected in a country, when its whole mind and energies are turned into another. How have the cold uplands in Scotland and the intractable clays in England been neglected during the last half century, in favor of the more easily managed turnip and barley soils! And so the high veens of Frieseland and Groningen,

and the Zuyder Zee, and the heaths of North Brabant, have suffered from the want of skilful chemical cultivation. Upon these tracts, the prudent applications of this branch of science are, we believe, likely to succeed beyond the most sanguine expectations.

The doctrine, economy, composition, preparation, and skilful use of manures-how wonderfully have all these points been illustrated and developed the sandy tract of the Veluwe between Arnheim in late years! What the plant consists of-how, and with what substances it is fed-what the soil naturally contains-how it is to be improved, so that what is present in it may be made readily available to the plant, and what it lacks be in the best way supplied-where the kinds of food necessary to the plant are to be obtained most abun- The high veens of Frieseland are chiefly valuadantly, and how applied most profitably to the soil ble as mines of peat, which, by the construction of -what effects climate, situation, and tillage exer- canals through them, is shipped on the spot, and cise upon the fertility of the land, and upon the thence conveyed to the southern and western marfertilizing virtues of whatever is laid upon, or kets. The surface, however, is extensively cultimixed with it;-these, and hundreds of similar vated for the growth of buckwheat. It is pared questions, all involving or suggesting peculiar modes and burned, the ashes spread, and the seed sown of practice, are arising daily, where culture is pros- and harrowed in, and in due course the harvest ecuted as an advancing art—and they are solved reaped. But no manure is added; and after the