Excerpt from Holland of the Dutch The Polders. The rich polders, the thickly cultivated fields, Of the western provinces of Holland. When the sea was arrested only the first part of a great task had been accomplished; there remained the reclamation of a land much of which was under water. This process began in the earlier half of the sixteenth century some of the most remarkable achievements of the kind, like the draining Of the Haarlem Lake, occurred in the nineteenth, and it will be very strange if the present century does not witness a strenuous effort to reclaim at least a good part of the Zuyder Zee. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.