g about 2,500 acres,
spoken of by Arthur Young as 'a watery desert,' growing sedge and
rushes, and inhabited by frogs and bitterns;--it is now fertile,
well cultivated, and profitable land."

The foregoing extract, from an account of the Drainage of the Fens on the
eastern coast of England, is a text from which might be preached a sermon
worthy of the attention of all who are interested in the vast areas of
salt marsh which form so large a part of our Atlantic coast, from Maine to
Florida.

Hundreds of thousands of acres that might be cheaply reclaimed, and made
our most valuable and most salubrious lands, are abandoned to the inroads
of the sea;--fruitful only in malaria and musquitoes,--always a dreary
waste, and often a grave annoyance.

A single tract, over 20,000 acres in extent, the center of which is not
seven miles from the heart of New York City, skirts the Hackensack River,
in New Jersey, serving as a barrier to intercourse between the town and
the country which lies beyond it, adding miles to the daily travel of the
thousands whose business and pleasure require them to cross it, and
constituting a nuisance and an eyesore to all who see it, or come near it.
How long it will continue in this condition it is impossible to say, but
the experience of other countries has proved that, for an expense of not
more than fifty dollars per acre, this tract might be made better, for all
purposes of cultivation, than the lands adjoining it, (many of which are
worth, for market gardening, over one thousand dollars per acre,) and that
it might afford profitable employment, and give homes, to all of the
industrious poor of the city. The work of reclaiming it would be child's
play, compared with the draining of the Harlaem Lake in Holland, where
over 40,000 acres, submerged to an average depth of thirteen feet, have
been pumped dry, and made to do their part toward the support of a dense
population.

The Hackensack meadows are only a conspicuous example of what exists over
a great extent of our whole seaboard;--virgin lands, replete with every
element of fertility, capable of producing enough food for the support of
millions of human beings, better located, for residence and for
convenience to markets, than the prairies of the Western States,--all
allowed to remain worse than useless; while the poorer uplands near them
are, in many places, teeming with a population whose lives are endangered,
and whose comfort