A LESSON IN RECLAMATION.
We are a little shy in England of the cost and labour of anything that may be called land reclamation ; but how far our most ambitious schemes fall below -the efforts of those who live in some rocky and barren islands! I have been wandering about a Balearic island where it is common to find walls six and even eight feet high, built of enormous stones, which support a terrace only large enough to • grow a handful of trees. For six hundred years or so the population has been steadily terracing the hills, till the whOle his become a smallholder's paradise. Of course, there is no real parallel between a country where the standard crops are oranges and lemons, almonds and olives, and our island deVoted to grain and root growing and to grass. But the Spectacle of the fruits of a continuous policy of reeliniation over the centuries prompts the question whether every country should not have a continuous reclamation policy, slovi but sure, by which the fertility of the land was maintained and extended. The banks that would reclaim the richest -soil in Enrope' on the western end of the Wash would be a bagatelle compared _with the innumerable walls that "hold up the hilliides of Majorca, or the giant banks and ditches that are to nectipy the Dutch for the next thirty years along the Zuider Zee.
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