mysterious North Sea. Imagination can picture the Roman soldiers from
the heights of the utmost wave-washed citadels of the empire,
contemplating with sadness and wonder the wandering tribes of that
desolate country, and regarding them as a race accursed of Heaven.

Now, when we reflect that such a region has become one of the richest,
most fertile, and best-governed countries in the world, we understand
how justly Holland is called the conquest of man.

But it should be added that it is a continuous conquest.

To explain this fact,--to show how the existence of Holland,
notwithstanding the great works of defence built by its inhabitants,
still requires an incessant struggle fraught with perils,--it is
sufficient to glance rapidly at the greatest changes of its physical
history, beginning at the time when its people had reduced it to a
habitable country.

Tradition tells of a great inundation of Friesland in the sixth
century. From that period catastrophes are recorded in every gulf, in
every island, one may say, in almost every town, of Holland. It is
reckoned that through thirteen centuries one great inundation, besides
smaller ones, has taken place every seven years, and, since the
country is an extended plain, these inundations were very deluges.
Toward the end of the thirteenth century the sea destroyed part of a
very fertile peninsula near the mouth of the Ems and laid waste more
than thirty villages. In the same century a series of marine
inundations opened an immense gap in Northern Holland and formed the
Gulf of the Zuyder Zee, killing about eighty thousand people. In 1421
a storm caused the Meuse to overflow, and in one night buried in its
waters seventy-two villages and one hundred thousand inhabitants. In
1532 the sea broke the embankments of Zealand, destroyed a hundred
villages, and buried for ever a vast tract of the country. In 1570 a
tempest produced another inundation in Zealand and in the province of
Utrecht; Amsterdam was inundated, and in Friesland twenty thousand
people were drowned. Other great floods occurred in the seventeenth
century; two terrible ones at the beginning and at the end of the
eighteenth; one in 1825, which laid waste Northern Holland, Friesland,
Over-Yssel, and Gelderland; another in 1855, when the Rhine,
overflowing, flooded Gelderland and the province of Utrecht and
submerged a large part of North Brabant. Besides these great
catastrophes, there occurred in the different