Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage:

Past, Present and Future Carola Hein

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/adaptive-strategies-for-water-heritage-past-present-a
nd-future-carola-hein/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Constitutionalism : past, present, and future First

Edition Grimm

https://textbookfull.com/product/constitutionalism-past-present-
and-future-first-edition-grimm/

Technical Universities Past present and future Lars

Geschwind

https://textbookfull.com/product/technical-universities-past-
present-and-future-lars-geschwind/

Simulation for Industry 4 0 Past Present and Future

Murat M. Gunal

https://textbookfull.com/product/simulation-for-
industry-4-0-past-present-and-future-murat-m-gunal/

Missions of Universities Past Present Future Lars

Engwall

https://textbookfull.com/product/missions-of-universities-past-
present-future-lars-engwall/
China s Electricity Industry Past Present and Future Ma
Xiaoying

https://textbookfull.com/product/china-s-electricity-industry-
past-present-and-future-ma-xiaoying/

Women and elective office past present and future Third

Edition Thomas

https://textbookfull.com/product/women-and-elective-office-past-
present-and-future-third-edition-thomas/

Chemistry Our Past Present and Future 1st Edition Choon

H. Do

https://textbookfull.com/product/chemistry-our-past-present-and-
future-1st-edition-choon-h-do/

American Prisons: Their Past, Present and Future 1st

Edition David Musick

https://textbookfull.com/product/american-prisons-their-past-
present-and-future-1st-edition-david-musick/

Renewable Energy in the UK: Past, Present and Future

David Elliott

https://textbookfull.com/product/renewable-energy-in-the-uk-past-
present-and-future-david-elliott/
Carola Hein
Editor

Adaptive
Strategies for
Water Heritage
Past, Present and Future
Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage
Carola Hein
Editor

Adaptive Strategies
for Water Heritage
Past, Present and Future
Editor
Carola Hein
Faculty of Architecture and the Built
Environment
Technical University Delft
Delft, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

ISBN 978-3-030-00267-1 ISBN 978-3-030-00268-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00268-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934522

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication.
Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or
format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have
permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this book or parts of it.
The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons
license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s
Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
This work is subject to copyright. All commercial rights are reserved by the author(s), whether the whole
or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission
or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar
methodology now known or hereafter developed. Regarding these commercial rights a non-exclusive
license has been granted to the publisher.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publi-
cation does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the
relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard
to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Andrew Davies Photography, used with permission of Ryhope Engines Trust, all
rights reserved

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Foreword by Giulio Boccaletti

That the world may be facing a water crisis is an idea now firmly entrenched in
global discourse. The World Economic Forum has ranked the risks associated with
water as among the highest to global prosperity. The UN has declared 2018–2028 as
the Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development. Indeed, the symptoms
of the current moment point to a society that has not come to terms with its own
water insecurity: chronic scarcity and over-extraction are the norms in about
one-third of the world’s basins. Some twenty million people per year are displaced
by natural catastrophes caused by water, an amount comparable to that of war.
Billions do not enjoy safe, reliable access to water in their homes. As the human
population tripled over the last forty years, the number of animals in freshwater
systems—such as fish, amphibians, and birds—has dropped by more than
three-quarters. It is predicted that the risks to both people and nature will worsen as
climate change modifies the hydrology of the planet.
What makes any discussion about water complicated is that it carries multiple
economic, legal, political, and cultural values. Water is a public good; at times, it is
a private good; it is often a resource held in common. Access to water and sanitation
is a human right. In some cases, water is subject to public trust, in others to private
ownership. Its most complicated attribute is its delivery, which has very little to do
with the substance itself. And protection from excessive quantities of water is
likewise essential. A society’s water security is a product of its landscape, infras-
tructure, and institutions. Because the impact of choices about these key issues may
last over long periods of time, often outliving generations, cultural values, and even
economic systems, the historical record is not simply instrumental to our under-
standing of how water issues have evolved over time: it is an essential component
of the architecture societies used to manage water, whether they realize it or not.
Framing water as heritage defines it as an object of study and positions it for
preservation.
Adaptive Strategies to Water Heritage is a welcome addition to the growing
literature on the world’s water heritage. The broad scope of the papers in this
volume reflects the pervasiveness of water-related issues across societies, as well as
the universality of solutions. The methodological heterogeneity it embraces, which

v
vi Foreword by Giulio Boccaletti

lies at the boundary of conservation practice, historical analysis, anthropology, and

sociology, accurately reflects the multi-disciplinary nature of the issue.
The relationship between society and its water landscape is dialectical and
deeply contextual. Wrestling with it, examining it to understand our water past, and
recognizing its role in defining our present are essential to preparing for what is to
come.

Giulio Boccaletti
Chief Strategy Officer and Global Managing Director
for Water, The Nature Conservancy
London, United Kingdom

Giulio Boccaletti is the Chief Strategy Officer and Global Managing Director for Water at The
Nature Conservancy. He has been an academic and an executive in the private sector, and has
spent the last fifteen years working on water issues at the intersection of public policy, economic
strategy, and the environment. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures
Council on Environment and Natural Resource Security.
Foreword by Henk Ovink

The future is rapidly changing, the present is in high-speed transition, and com-
plexity is increasing every day. Complexity is in the challenges we face, in their
interdependence across political boundaries, in the systems—environmental, social,
and economic—we use to organize ourselves, and our personal interests.
Challenges are at all levels exacerbated by climate change, increasingly and always
worse every day, every year. If we add up the numbers, the future looks bleak:
every year a new record in rains, droughts, floods, migrants, economic, environ-
mental, and humanitarian destruction and despair. More deaths, conflicts, extreme
events, and dollars lost. These extremes become more and more extreme and impact
on the world’s vulnerable places ever more harshly. The future is here, grounded in
the past. Can we learn from the past to help us tackle our future?
Learning from the past—so easily said, so hard to do. It is tempting to look back
to the past and simplify the world, to imagine that things were once simple and
focused. This is where populism looms, in its nostalgic longing to control, to
surveil, to quash disturbing surprises. But looking back and simplifying do not give
us a clear picture of history, nor an honest perspective on our future. Learning from
the past does not mean we only look back, but that we also look ahead. Using
history and our capacity to understand, we learn to value the past. History is the
broker between us and the past, our aid as we try to explore and exploit that past, to
use it to help us leapfrog into the future. We need an equal, just, and sustainable
society that takes care of the planet, of everything and everyone, and leaves behind
no one. The UN Agenda 2030 sketches out this path forward, littered with chal-
lenges and barriers—none of which is easy to overcome. We will have to reinvent
ourselves a multitude of times. Yet, this change can only come when we, collec-
tively, embrace the past as a perspective on the future.
Learning from the history of water is one of the most amazing journeys one can
take: To see, to know, the course of the river, a drop of water, humankind’s
inventions and interventions for managing water in nature and in our cities.
Amazing deltas dotted the planet, mitigating water extremes long before we had to
learn the words climate change. For centuries before the ecological crisis,
water-wise and water-rich cities proliferated, where water was an equal partner,

vii
viii Foreword by Henk Ovink

where it was celebrated and valued. It is this capacity of water to unite, to bring
together the multiple values of society—environmental, economic, social, and
cultural—that stands out as an inspiration to us to understand the past in order to
learn for the future. Valuing water means bringing together all interests that have to
do with water. It means embracing all partners and their perspectives, protecting all
our sources, building trust and capacity, learning and empowering, innovating,
testing, and investing.
The interdependencies and complexities of climate change demand a compre-
hensive approach, cutting through silos, vested interests, and political positions.
Our planet, our cities, our built systems have all the core values and principles of
complexity we need. But, gradually, we have lost track of these. Our growing
demand led us to abandon our growing capacity to learn, to look back while
stepping ahead. Rethinking the future through the past can help us reinvent our-
selves and our systems, restore our core values, and build a just, equal, and sus-
tainable society. Values drawn from water, from nature, and from culture intertwine
with our capacity to understand this complexity, allow us to strengthen the rela-
tionships between our environmental, societal, and economic systems, and build
upon them. Leaving behind our stubborn convictions, we reach to an adaptive,
flexible, sustainable, and ever-changing way forward. Un-certainty is our certainty,
new extremes are the new normal, and changing interventions for the future, not
failed repetitions of the past, are the road ahead.
We have no time to waste. The future is here. We can change, collectively, if
only we learn to connect the past with the future, embrace and exploit complexity,
live and work together, and act now.

Henk Ovink
Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Henk Ovink is Special Envoy for International Water Affairs for the Netherlands and Sherpa to
the UN High-Level Panel on Water. He advocates for water awareness and builds coalitions to
initiate transformative interventions, most recently in his new initiative, Water as Leverage. His
book Too Big. Rebuild by Design: A Transformative Approach to Climate Change reports on his
post-Hurricane Sandy recovery work.
Foreword by Diederik Six and and Henk van
Schaik

The blue marble photograph, taken in 1972 by the Apollo 17 astronauts, shows Earth
—our four-billion-year-old planet—floating in the void of space, its most striking
feature, the omnipresent blue of water. On our planet, water is Life. Water is a friend
and foe of life. From this Life, human beings emerged in Africa about 200,000 years
ago, initiating agriculture and water management activities, thereby increasing the
production of food, providing water services, and reducing the vulnerability of set-
tlements to the perils of drought and flood. Water management innovations spanned
the gamut of activity: structural, tangible measures such as reservoirs and dams;
organizational arrangements for developing and operating structures; and intangible
cultural–spiritual–ethical–ritual meanings and practices. These material, conceptual,
and spiritual connections in water management made it possible for cities to develop
in Mesopotamia and the Indus valley as well as along the banks of the Nile and
China’s rivers. Today, the remnants of ancient water cultures are found on every
continent. Archeological and anthropological research tells us about these ancient
water cultures, these origins of our present cultural identities.
The Industrial Revolution, largely made possible by abundant natural resources,
including water, brought to human life an unprecedented growth of population, life
expectancy, and economies. Despite our resources and our vast experience with water
management, however, since the 1970s, we have come to realize the limits to this
heralded growth. The over-exploitation of natural resources, irreversible pollution, and
climate change all threaten biodiversity, fossil fuels, the water cycle, and the planet itself.
Since 2012, ICOMOS Netherlands has been exploring what can be learned from
water-related heritage rooted in culture and nature. What insights can we derive
from ancient water structures such as the dams of the Middle East or the qanats of
arid regions? governance arrangements such as the water boards of the
Netherlands? or, the ethico-spiritual frameworks of those of the Incas? How can
these varied forms of water-related heritage teach and inspire future planners,
architects, politicians, design engineers, and others as they address present and
future water-related challenges? It is relatively easy to point to water-related

ix
x Foreword by Diederik Six and and Henk van Schaik

heritage as a source of inspiration for innovation and creativity. In practice, how-

ever, this claim needs and must be held to scientific validation and specification
through practical and illustrative cases—as well as to methodological guidance for
policy makers, planners, designers, and training programs.
This publication addresses that need. It presents twenty-one chapters on
water-related heritage that encompass a broad spectrum of theoretical and
methodological approaches and studies of water-related heritage from a range of the
world’s regions. It contributes to the ongoing dialogue on water and heritage
between policy makers, scientists, civil society, and spiritual leaders. The case
studies it presents bridge the divides between the scientific disciplines of engi-
neering, architecture, history, archeology, anthropology, and theology.
It is our hope that this publication will also make decision makers and citizens
more aware of the importance of water-related heritage for the future. We also hope
that it will contribute to the work of the International Scientific Committee at
ICOMOS and to the recognition of Water and Cultural Heritage in both the Water
Agenda and the Water Goals of the Sustainable Development Agenda.
In this spirit, we thank the editor and authors for their commitment to this project
as well as for their perseverance in highlighting the importance of humanity’s water
heritage to the future. We look forward to continuing to work with them to establish
a concerted, global effort for water-related cultural heritage that is locally and
globally acknowledged as a source of inspiration and information for the future.

Jhr. Ir. Diederik Six

President, ICOMOS Netherlands
Doorn, The Netherlands
Ir. Henk van Schaik
Ambassador Water and Heritage
ICOMOS Netherlands
Wageningen, The Netherlands
Acknowledgements

A book of this size would not be possible without the engagement and dedication of
a large number of people. Particular thanks go to the board and the two leaders of
ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) Netherlands, Henk van
Schaik, who has tirelessly pushed the water and heritage agenda for many years,
and Diederik Six, who both initiated the project with Erik Luijendijk and has
consistently supported and inspired the program at every step. They have been
helped in this endeavor, notably by Jan (J. C. A.) Kolen and Mara de Groot from
the Center for Global Heritage and Development (CGHD) of Leiden University,
Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Delft University of Technology. Linde Egberts
of University of Amsterdam and Delft University of Technology helped organize
the workshop on behalf of the Heritage and Environment Group of the CGHD she
then leads with Carola Hein.
The book proposal particularly benefited from the input of Maurits Ertsen,
Steffen Nijuis, and Gerdy Verschuure-Stuip of Delft University of Technology.
Other researchers provided feedback on chapters: Particular thanks go to Tino
Mager of Delft University of Technology and Maaike van Berkel of Radboud
University Nijmegen. Irene Curulli of University of Eindhoven and Rutgerd
Boelens of University of Wageningen and Amsterdam provided additional insights
into the establishment of a research agenda on water and heritage as well on the
creation of the International Scientific Group on Water and Heritage within
ICOMOS.
Several additional people participated in the workshop and scholarly exchange,
providing valuable insights, but for various reasons did not participate in the final
book. I am particularly grateful to Hanna Pennock, Ian Lilley, Eric Luiten, Michiel
Korthals, Reinout Rutte, Heleni Porfyriou, Stefan Uhlenbrook, and Paul van de
Laar.
Such a project needs extensive organizational and financial support. The CGHD
has greatly contributed to the development of the water and heritage theme, by both
building networks and financially supporting a workshop, Water and Heritage for
the Future, held at Delft University of Technology and Fort Vechten in November

xi
xii Acknowledgements

2016. The Chair of History of Architecture and Urban Planning at Delft University
of Technology provided additional administrative and financial support for the
conference and the editing of the book. Thanks go to Kaiyi Zhu from Delft
University of Technology for help with permissions and other works to finalize the
book. Particular thanks go to Laura Helper-Ferris, who did excellent work to help
harmonize, polish, and finalize the various chapters.
Once again, the project would not have been possible without the patience and
support of my family. With love to Patrick, Caya, Aliya, Jolan, Joris, and my
parents Wuppi and Walter.
Contents

1 Introduction: Connecting Water and Heritage for the Future . . . . 1

Carola Hein, Henk van Schaik, Diederik Six, Tino Mager,
Jan (J. C. A.) Kolen, Maurits Ertsen, Steffen Nijhuis
and Gerdy Verschuure-Stuip

Part I Drinking Water

2 Silent and Unseen: Stewardship of Water Infrastructural
Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Meisha Hunter Burkett
3 The Qanat System: A Reflection on the Heritage of the Extraction
of Hidden Waters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Negar Sanaan Bensi
4 Studying Ancient Water Management in Monte Albán, Mexico,
to Solve Water Issues, Improve Urban Living, and Protect
Heritage in the Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Araceli Rojas and Nahuel Beccan Dávila
5 Thirsty Cities: Learning from Dutch Water Supply Heritage . . . . . 79
Suzanne Loen

Part II Agricultural Water

6 Water Meadows as European Agricultural Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Hans Renes, Csaba Centeri, Sebastian Eiter, Bénédicte Gaillard,
Alexandra Kruse, Zdeněk Kučera, Oskar Puschmann, Michael Roth
and Martina Slámová
7 Holler Colonies and the Altes Land: A Vivid Example of the
Importance of European Intangible and Tangible Heritage . . . . . . 133
Alexandra Kruse and Bernd Paulowitz

xiii
xiv Contents

8 Archaic Water: The Role of a Legend in Constructing the Water

Management Heritage of Sanbonkihara, Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Izumi Kuroishi
9 How Citizens Reshaped a Plan for an Aerotropolis and Preserved
the Water Heritage System of the Taoyuan Tableland . . . . . . . . . . 173
Sinite Yu, Chung-Hsi Lin, Hsiaoen Wu, Wenyao Hsu
and Yu-Chuan Chang

Part III Land Reclamation and Defense

10 Reassessing Heritage: Contradiction and Discrepancy
Between Fishery and Agriculture in Planning the Hachirogata
Polder and Its Surrounding Lagoon in Mid-Twentieth
Century Japan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Yasunori Kitao
11 The Noordoostpolder: A Landscape Planning Perspective
on the Preservation and Development of Twentieth-Century
Polder Landscapes in the Netherlands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Steffen Nijhuis
12 Europolders a European Program on Polder Landscape,
Heritage, and Innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Hildebrand P. G. de Boer
13 Hold the Line: The transformation of the New Dutch Waterline
and the Future Possibilities of Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Gerdy Verschuure-Stuip

Part IV River and Coastal Planning

14 ‘Absent–Present’ Heritage: The Cultural Heritage of Dwelling
on the Changjian (Yangtze) River . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Andrew M. Law and Xi Chen
15 Neglected and Undervalued Cultural Heritage: Waterfronts
and Riverbanks of Alblasserwaard, The Netherlands . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Arie den Boer
16 Room for the River: Innovation, or Tradition? The Case
of the Noordwaard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
Sander van Alphen
17 Heritage in European Coastal Landscapes—Four Reasons
for Inter-regional Knowledge Exchange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
Linde Egberts
Contents xv

Part V Port Cities and Waterfronts

18 The Impact of Planning Reform on Water-Related Heritage
Values and on Recalling Collective Maritime Identity
of Port Cities: The Case of Rotterdam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
Azadeh Arjomand Kermani, Wout van der Toorn Vrijthoff
and Arash Salek
19 From HERITAGE to Feritage: How Economic Path
Dependencies in the Caribbean Cruise Destinations Are
Distorting the Uses of Heritage Architecture and Urban Form . . . . 363
Supersudaca, Sofia Saavedra Bruno, Martin Delgado
and Felix Madrazo
20 Using Heritage to Develop Sustainable Port–City Relationships:
Lisbon’s Shift from Object-Based to Landscape Approaches . . . . . 383
José M. Pagés Sánchez and Tom A. Daamen
21 Toward a Cultural Heritage of Adaptation: A Plea
to Embrace the Heritage of a Culture of Risk, Vulnerability
and Adaptation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
Han Meyer

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
Editor and Contributors

About the Editor

Carola Hein is Professor and Head of the History of Architecture and Urban
Planning at Delft University of Technology. Her books include The Capital of
Europe, Rebuilding Urban Japan after 1945, Port Cities, and The Routledge
Handbook of Planning History. She currently works on the transmission of plan-
ning ideas among port cities and within landscapes of oil.

Contributors

Nahuel Beccan Dávila Beccan Davila Urbanismo, Leiden, The Netherlands

Csaba Centeri Institute of Nature Conservation and Landscape Management,
Szent István University, Gödöllö, Hungary
Yu-Chuan Chang HsingWu University, Taiwan, Republic of China
Xi Chen Brunel University, London, England, UK
Tom A. Daamen Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Hildebrand P. G. de Boer Dutch Foundation for Industrial Culture, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
Arie den Boer Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Martin Delgado Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Linde Egberts Vrije Universteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Sebastian Eiter Department of Landscape Monitoring, NIBIO, Aas, Norway
Maurits Ertsen Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

xvii
xviii Editor and Contributors

Bénédicte Gaillard Brandenburg University of Technology, Senftenberg,

Germany
Carola Hein Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Wenyao Hsu Taiwan International Institute for Water Education, Taiwan,
Republic of China
Azadeh Arjomand Kermani Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Yasunori Kitao Kyoto Women’s University, Kyoto, Japan
Jan (J. C. A.) Kolen Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
Alexandra Kruse insitu World Heritage Consulting, Buc, France
Zdeněk Kučera Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Izumi Kuroishi Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan
Andrew M. Law Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK
Chung-Hsi Lin National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan,
Republic of China
Suzanne Loen Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Felix Madrazo Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Tino Mager Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Meisha Hunter Burkett Li/Saltzman Architects, New York, USA
Han Meyer Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Steffen Nijhuis Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
José M. Pagés Sánchez Hamburg Hafencity University, Hamburg, Germany
Bernd Paulowitz Hamburg, Germany
Oskar Puschmann Department of Landscape Monitoring, NIBIO, Aas, Norway
Hans Renes Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Araceli Rojas University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
Michael Roth Nürtingen-Geislingen Polytechnic, Nürtingen, Germany
Sofia Saavedra Bruno Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Arash Salek Rotterdam Municipality, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Negar Sanaan Bensi Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Diederik Six ICOMOS, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Editor and Contributors xix

Martina Slámová Technical University in Zvolen, Zvolen, Slovakia

Sander van Alphen Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Henk van Schaik ICOMOS, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Wout van der Toorn Vrijthoff Delft University of Technology, Delft,
The Netherlands
Gerdy Verschuure-Stuip Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Hsiaoen Wu Taiwan International Institute for Water Education, Taiwan,
Republic of China
Sinite Yu Taiwan International Institute for Water Education, Taiwan, Republic of
China
The flood gate Oostertscheldekering, a Dutch Delta work, Wikimedia, released under a creative
commons attribution 3.0 Unported license
Chapter 1
Introduction: Connecting Water
and Heritage for the Future

Carola Hein, Henk van Schaik, Diederik Six, Tino Mager,

Jan (J. C. A.) Kolen, Maurits Ertsen, Steffen Nijhuis
and Gerdy Verschuure-Stuip

Abstract Water has served and sustained societies throughout the history of
humankind. People have actively shaped its course, form, and function for human
settlement and the development of civilizations. Around water, they have created
socioeconomic structures, policies, and cultures; a rich world of narratives, laws,
and practices; and an extensive tangible network of infrastructure, buildings, and
urban form. Today, the complex and diverse systems of the past are necessarily the
framework for preservation and reuse as well as for new systems. Through twenty-
one chapters in five thematic sections, this book links the practices of the past to a
present in which heritage and water are largely two separate disciplinary and pro-
fessional fields. It describes an alternative emerging present in which policymaking
and design work together to recognize and build on traditional knowledge and skills
while imagining how such efforts will help us develop sustainable futures for cities,
landscapes, and bodies of water.

Keywords Water heritage · Adaptive reuse · Policymaking · ICOMOS · Center

for Global Heritage and Development · Dutch water and heritage practice · Water
and heritage agenda

C. Hein (B) · T. Mager · M. Ertsen · S. Nijhuis · G. Verschuure-Stuip

Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
e-mail: C.M.Hein@tudelft.nl
H. van Schaik · D. Six
ICOMOS, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
J. (J. C. A.) Kolen
Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

© The Author(s) 2020 1

C. Hein (ed.), Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00268-8_1
2 C. Hein et al.

Introduction

Water has always been a central human concern. The earliest prehistoric hunters and
gatherers, although nomadic, also settled down along rivers, lakes, and coastlines
to ensure access to crucial resources–including water. Later, prehistoric farming
societies manipulated water systems and redirected water to meet their essential
needs. Early states managed water resources with large-scale facilities like aqueducts,
irrigation systems, and polders. They used water to cultivate the earth for drinking,
food, and agriculture. No less importantly, water became a key element in their
complex social organizations and political ideologies. People around the world have
both used water as a means of defense and have learned to defend themselves against
water, in the form of floods from river and sea. At the same time, the water in rivers,
lakes, and oceans facilitated trade networks and the exchange of goods, people,
and ideas. This led, among others, to the development of extensive port cities that
connected local communities with the rest of the world.
Over millennia, people have created immensely rich and varied, often intercon-
nected, systems to manage water: in lowlands and mountains, wetlands and deserts,
agricultural landscapes, urban networks, and on urban waterfronts. Today, those sys-
tems are heritage—a term used here broadly to encompass both recognized World
Heritage Sites as well as the historic built environment that people have chosen to
preserve. This heritage is often also still vital and functional. It can range in size
from ingenious small-scale water harvesting systems and aqueducts to larger water
pumping facilities and irrigation and drainage networks, dike systems, and defense
systems (Steenhuis 2015; Labanca Correa de Araujo 2015). It includes maritime
cultural landscapes, canals, harbors, and waterfronts (Daly 2015; Hein 2011; Meyer
1999) as well as local knowledge and skills and regional traditions in water engi-
neering (Sugiura et al. 2015; Scarborough 2003).
Water heritage is found in spaces that are closely linked to traditions, rituals, and
narratives. The hydraulic network at Angkor served both the physical infrastruc-
ture and the ritual network of sacred places and temples (Hang 2015). In the Dutch
delta, the elements of the infrastructure for water management–dikes, river forelands,
polders, locks, and drawbridges–are icons of Dutch historical identity (Steenhuis
2015). Maritime heritage is spiritually important to local coastal communities in
South Africa (Sharfman 2017). Indeed, port cities have a distinctive shared culture
(Hein 2016). This heritage is a crucial source of information both for understanding
how water systems worked in the past and discerning their impact on the present. It is
also a source of knowledge for water managers and environmental engineers; an inte-
gral part of architectural and urban design; as well as a site of cultural identification,
historical experience, public engagement, leisure, and tourism.
A few scholars have examined select aspects of the management of water and
heritage. Maritime archeologist Christer Westerdahl introduced the notion of mar-
itime cultural landscape to name and better explore, study, and preserve the networks
present between communities based on travel and trade over water, be they oceans,
seas, inland lakes, rivers, or artificial waterways. These networks included social
1 Introduction: Connecting Water and Heritage for the Future 3

and political relationships as well as their associated ancient routes, harbors, ship-
yards, settlements, and other physical structures (Westerdahl 1992). The historians
Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen have coined the term seascape to
capture the history of maritime regions around the world (2007). The journal Water
History explores the historical relationship between people and water resource use,
but does not specifically engage heritage or the seas and oceans. Planning historians
have published extensively on waterfront redevelopment and the role of port-related
heritage structures. Architectural and planning historian Carola Hein has proposed
the concept of port cityscapes, arguing that the reach of the port into its neighboring
city and region merits comprehensive investigation (2011, 2016). Planner Han Meyer
and landscape architect Steffen Nijhuis have pointed to the need to study urbanized
deltas and the dual challenges of river and sea water (2014). Other planners and land-
scape architects have explored issues of design, water, and heritage. The work on
hydro-biographies stands as an example (Land-id, Beek and Kooiman 2014; Bosch
and Soree 2016). At the institutional level, the Ramsar Convention is an intergovern-
mental treaty for the preservation and wise use of wetlands; its work encompasses
their natural and cultural heritage (Ramsar 1994). In addition, UNESCO’s World
Heritage Center has published a special issue, Living with Water (2011). And the
International World Water System Heritage Program, launched in 2016 by the World
Water Council in collaboration with the International Commission on Irrigation and
Drainage, has initiated a registrar for the intangible values of water-related heritage.
But these initiatives and studies in historical, urban, and geographical research
have had only tangential influence, if any, on the practice and policy of water heritage
management of diverse typologies—from buildings to landscapes, from engineered
structures to nature conservation. Overall, academics, policymakers, designers, and
the public alike largely perceive heritage and water as separate worlds, represented
by different sectors and organizations; informed by different philosophies, scientific
disciplines, policy frameworks, and design concepts.
Although water and cultural heritage are linked through complex interrelation-
ships, each is approached from siloed perspectives. Water is examined along the
disciplinary lines of science, engineering, governance, and management, whereas
cultural heritage is often looked at as comprising isolated structures rather than as
consisting of elements of a larger system. And researchers often miss water itself alto-
gether. Overall, water’s potential to connect sites of living heritage with each other;
water-related heritage’s capacity to connect past, present, and future; and water’s role
as heritage in spatial developments, landscape design, and urban planning remain
underestimated and underexplored. Moreover, water-related policymaking is highly
segregated within itself, with different specialists dedicated to investigating drinking
water, tourism and recreation, nature and biodiversity, transport and mobility, safety
and security, and so on. Top-down approaches dominate all of these fields. Moreover,
many are primarily land-based, that is, connected to national agendas and focused
upon water that is on or related to land.
Today, global climate change, pollution, and changing political and societal pat-
terns affect both water and heritage on multiple scales; these include systems for
drinking water, irrigation, and drainage as well as the heritage of coastal areas, deltas,
4 C. Hein et al.

and port cities (Lieske et al. 2015; Okamura 2015; Comer 2015; also see Statement
of Amsterdam (1999; Willems and Van Schaik 2015). Rising seas challenge Pacific
archipelagos (Peterson 2015) and the coastal plains and major port cities of the south-
ern and eastern parts of the USA, while flooding rivers threaten cities and towns in
the Low Countries, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. Conversely, severe droughts and
desertification, resulting in land degradation in other parts of the world, challenge
the livelihood of millions of people. Other climate-change-driven challenges, includ-
ing expected food shortages and mass migration, underscore the need to rethink our
longstanding relationship with water, culture, and our built heritage. The future of
water and heritage structures also depends on political, economic, environmental,
cultural, and spatial frameworks, including globalization and the privatization of
water and heritage structures. The growing and changing pollution of canals, rivers,
and seas—notably, the threat of plastic waste to nature, people, and structures—also
warrants new forms of inquiry and design. The energy transition, and the design
steps needed to achieve it, will also create new kinds of heritage in the future. Vast
areas of ports and petroleum installations are just one example of potential future
water-related heritage sites.
History and heritage matter when we design new relationships with water. Water-
related heritage preserves and transmits forgotten best practices and catastrophic
events. It harbors the long histories of water systems and safeguards our cultural
memory for generations to come. New investigations of water history and heritage
can serve as a source of information, inspiration, and identity-building in water
management, wetland recreation, and marine engineering; they are relevant to the
redevelopment, redesign, and reuse of existing and ancient water systems as well as
to the design of new systems. The reuse, adaptation, or redesign of old systems can
contribute to the quality of life of communities and other groups, and to their sense of
place and self-identification. Finally, understanding and analyzing the relationship
between water and heritage can also help us refine our understanding of tangible and
intangible heritage more broadly.
This volume brings new voices to this important and urgent multilateral project at
the interface of water and cultural heritage and shows how we might address its con-
cerns in both scientific research and research-based policymaking. It is one of many
undertakings carried out by ICOMOS Netherlands, the Dutch branch of the Interna-
tional Council of Monuments and Sites, which has sponsored a range of initiatives:
conferences, events, books, and even this volume at all geographical and govern-
mental scales, from the local and regional to the international and global, in order to
stimulate thinking about the interrelationships between cultural heritage and water
management. The rich and agenda-setting contributions of ICOMOS Netherlands to
this challenge are discussed more extensively below. It is, nevertheless, worth noting
that its work, along with that of the Centre for Global Heritage and Development
(CGHD) of Leiden University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Delft University
of Technology, is rooted in the long Dutch history of water-related heritage.
1 Introduction: Connecting Water and Heritage for the Future 5

The Dutch Connection: Water and Heritage

in the Netherlands

The Netherlands is an exemplary delta region in which a dynamic society with a

growing population and an increasingly urbanized landscape—rich in heritage—
has long faced the challenges of large-scale water management. The country has
a centuries-long history of water management which encompasses drinking water
supply systems, irrigation and drainage for agriculture, coastal protection, river man-
agement, canals, ports, and the use of water as a means of military defense. What was
once pioneering infrastructure is now cultural heritage: The Dutch delta illustrates
the peculiar position water and heritage occupy well. On the one hand, water manage-
ment heritage in the Netherlands is extremely rich, historically layered, large-scale,
omnipresent, and strongly tied to national and regional issues of cultural identifica-
tion (Van Gorp and Renes 2003). Dutch contributions to UNESCO’s World Heritage
List primarily consist of monuments and structures from the country’s longstanding
engagement with water and the sea. Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century canal ring,
the Beemster Polder, reclaimed from a lake with the help of windmills by 1612;
Kinderdijk, a concentration of windmills for draining polderland from around 1740;
the Defense Line of Amsterdam, a military defense line built from 1883 to 1920;
the Ir. D. F. Woudagemaal, a steam-driven water pumping station from 1920; and
the former island of Schokland, a strip of peatland that lost its island character with
the construction of the Noordoostpolder in the 1940s animate the list. On the other
hand, this water-related heritage is, at best, only introduced into discussions about
the delta’s future and the quality of life of its inhabitants and visitors in a meager way.
Few consider the area’s water-related cultural heritage as a source of information or
inspiration for the necessary development and innovation of water governance, engi-
neering, or design—a topic which is also explored by the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD 2014).
The Dutch have long debated the very definition of water management heritage.
Since the early 1990s, when the Dutch delta was threatened by floods, two different
perspectives have developed on the history and heritage of water management, as well
as on how to deal with the rapidly changing hydrological situation (Landschap als
Geheugen 1993; Van de Cammen and De Klerk 2003; Ruimte voor de Rivier 2007;
Van Toorn 2011). One group sees heritage within the continuity of cutting-edge engi-
neering and strategies of water management, while the other aims to preserve the
heritage of the physical water structures of the past. Engineers, planners, and nature
conservationists propose that the water-related heritage of the Dutch delta is, in fact,
largely, an intangible tradition of innovative engineering and skillful water manage-
ment, that is, of finding new solutions for changing environmental and hydrological
conditions. From this perspective, it is necessary to reshape the river landscape and
its heritage at a profound level. It is also essential to fundamentally make the delta
“climate-change proof” for the future (Kolen et al. 2014, 178). The typical Dutch
river landscape and management system with its closed dikes, artificial river fore-
lands (the uiterwaarden), and sunken polders, now the pride of Dutch identity and
6 C. Hein et al.

water management, is outdated and could even have catastrophic effects. In keeping
with the emphasis on innovation as against the physicality of water structures, the
Rijkswaterstaat—literally, the agency in charge of the national water level and effec-
tively in charge of water management and infrastructure—set up a program called
Room for the River to provide rivers experiencing high water levels more space free
from development. The IJssel River, for example, is being deepened for navigation,
and a high water channel between two dikes has been constructed to run parallel to
it. Space is created to enable the river to move more freely through the landscape and
to facilitate nature’s own restoration of biodiversity within newly created wetlands.
What continues and what counts as water management heritage to these actors is the
successful tradition of innovation: of finding smart technical solutions for complex
water issues (Nienhuis 2008; Hoeksema 2006; Huisman 2004). In contrast, some
heritage managers have adopted a somewhat different perspective on water-related
heritage. They stress the importance of existing water management structures as
valuable cultural heritage and icons of Dutch national identity. For them, it is the
physical structures of water management, such as the closed dike systems which
Dutch engineers and planners started in the Middle Ages and which gained their
current form in the second half of the nineteenth century, that have to be preserved.
Occasional floods are considered to be part of a system which has never been and
will never be perfectly safe (Kolen et al. 2014, p. 179).
This binary dialogue between water and heritage sectarians is unproductive. In
recent years, a new approach has emerged in the Netherlands that combines both kinds
of heritage work: technological creativity and historic preservation. The Belvedere
Memorandum in heritage management and its incentive program (1999–2009) laid
out a decade of national policy to integrate heritage management with new spa-
tial developments through historically informed design. It has produced promising
experiments in connecting heritage and water issues on a local scale (Belvedere Mem-
orandum 1999; Janssen et al. 2014). With this dynamic approach, new solutions can
be found through reusing old hydraulic systems or creating new ones by applying
historic approaches. The approach even facilitates interventions in line with sus-
tainable practices, as can be seen in recent research on large-scale water systems—
some of which has been published in the Polder Atlas (Steenbergen, et al. 2009).
The Dutch Heritage Department pursues a similar strategy, exploring sustainable
practices for classified heritage structures (Rijksdienst 2018). Heritage groups and
planners around the world can benefit from these experiments and insights.

The Water and Heritage Agenda at ICOMOS

Given the obvious ties between the Netherlands and water-related heritage, ICO-
MOS Netherlands first sought to solidify the few existing relationships between
the worlds of water and heritage management. Between 2013 and 2018, it con-
vened a number of expert meetings and workshops to develop its water and heritage
agenda. The group presented many lectures on the topic at international confer-
1 Introduction: Connecting Water and Heritage for the Future 7

ences outside the Netherlands. Its goals aligned with the UN agenda, as identified
in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (UN 2015). In September 2013, ICO-
MOS Netherlands organized a five-day international conference entitled “Protecting
Deltas, Heritage Helps!” which brought together many experts and representatives of
governmental, nongovernmental, and intergovernmental organizations from all over
the world to share experiences. All invited representatives, partners, and experts
expressed urgency regarding the integration of heritage and water management at
local, regional, and international scales, while recognizing the equally urgent need
for a global exchange of experiences and best practices. To celebrate efforts and
achievements in connecting water and heritage for the future, ICOMOS Netherlands
also developed the “water and heritage monument shield”, an award it first presented
in 2013 to the city of Amsterdam (Six and Luijendijk 2015, p. 12). The conference
resulted in the Statement of Amsterdam, which called on water and heritage stake-
holders, institutions, and specialists to collaborate on active research, education, and
communication in order to advocate for the recognition of water and heritage as one
connected theme rather than as two independent fields (Willems and Van Schaik
2015).
In 2015, ICOMOS Netherlands published an edited and peer-reviewed volume,
Water & Heritage: Material, Conceptual, and Spiritual connections (Willems and
Van Schaik 2015), based partly on papers presented at the 2013 conference. It opens
with this statement by Mrs. Irina Bokova, then, the Director-General of UNESCO:
From the beginning of time, humanity has sought out sources of water to sustain life, health
and the ecosystems on which they depend. This is especially true today, in this turning point
year for the international community, as States shape a new global sustainability agenda.
Limiting the impacts of floods, landslides, and droughts, water security and cooperation
are basic requirements to improving lives and to empowering people to overcome hunger
and disease. The stakes are high. Peace and democracy thrive when people and cultures
cooperate for water. Literacy, gender equality, economic development, respect for human
rights, freedoms, and diversity–all of these depend on water security (Bokova 2015, p. 9).

Following from this theme of crisis, the authors argued that:

Saving the deltas of the world will be one of the most critical challenges for a sustainable
future of humankind. Exposure to water-related hazards, especially due to climate change
resulting in higher frequency and intensity of disasters, together with an increasing population
density and richness in cultural and natural heritage puts communities, particularly in the
world’s deltas, at high risk. Rapid urbanization of delta areas without respecting the historic
water structures accumulated over the centuries make these areas, in which economic, social,
and cultural values are concentrated, even more vulnerable (Six and Luijendijk 2015, 11).

The current volume heeds this call and builds upon these events and publications
to investigate deeply a range of heritage sites and to explore the implications and
opportunities they offer to future design. It is also partly based on a two-day con-
ference entitled, “Water and Heritage for the Future,” held in November, 2016. The
conference was organized through close collaboration by ICOMOS Netherlands and
the Center for Global Heritage and Development.
The first day of the conference, held at Delft University of Technology’s Faculty of
Architecture and the Built Environment, brought together a large and varied group
8 C. Hein et al.

of scientific researchers in spatial planning, urban design, landscape architecture,

civil engineering, water management, history, anthropology, and archeology. The
second day was held at Fort Vechten, located where the New Dutch Waterline—a
water-based defense line—intersects with the Limes, the former Roman frontier near
the city of Utrecht. The conference gathered experts in policymaking, legislation,
and applied research. Following these events, a team of Dutch researchers collabo-
rated to develop a research agenda; a foundation for collaboration and dialogue with
researchers from other disciplines, areas of work, and nationalities; a charter for an
international scientific group; and the initiation of an international scientific board.
Along with our current book, the draft agenda identifies a number of research topics
on water heritage that partly coincide with those identified here and go beyond them.
They include: water for services, that is, for systems of drinking water provision
and sewage; irrigation and drainage infrastructure; and natural and man-made water-
scapes, including reclaimed land areas, defense structures, and the larger matter of
water-related transport systems—concerns which this book addresses. The agenda
adds water power, that is, water as a means of energy generation and as a destructive
force, along with worldviews: encompassing the role of water in the philosophy of
life or conception of the world and its built spaces. The draft agenda is designed so
that future issues may be added including, for example, environmental pollution and
climate change.
In December 2017, at the nineteenth ICOMOS General Assembly in Delhi, ICO-
MOS Netherlands presented an informal proposal to a meeting of the larger body’s
scientific board meeting to initiate the International Scientific Group on Water
and Heritage. The scientific board expressed appreciation for the initiative and
encouraged ICOMOS Netherlands to prepare a formal proposal. During the General
Assembly in Delhi, the Taiwan International Institute for Water Education (TIIWE)
offered to host an international conference on water and heritage as part of the
preparatory process for the International Scientific Group.

This Book and Its Structure

This book is a stepping stone in the process of developing international scientific

interest and an international scientific agenda on water and heritage. It brings into
discussion water and heritage issues through the lens of international cases, while
providing deeper insight into the Dutch case. It explores five thematic areas related
to water heritage: infrastructure designed for drinking water; agricultural sites engi-
neered for irrigation and drainage; areas gained by poldering and other land recla-
mation in agriculture, settlement, and defense systems; river and coastline planning;
and urban and engineered structures in ports and on waterfronts. Each chapter first
addresses larger themes of water heritage, ranging from policymaking to narratives
and from sociocultural meaning to subjectivity, before exploring case studies and
concluding with future-oriented solutions for heritage practice.
1 Introduction: Connecting Water and Heritage for the Future 9

The book opens with an exploration of freshwater services through time and space,
the preservation of infrastructure, its redesign, and potential for inspiring future
design. As Meisha Hunter’s examination shows, intricately engineered systems have
served large populations. Partly due to their service role in traditional water systems,
these systems, distinguished for their utility, have received less attention than World
Heritage Sites listed for their aesthetics, although infrastructural sites can teach us
much that will help us respond to future crises. Areas in which the provisioning
of water suffers from ongoing or accelerated desertification are equally threatened.
Systems such as the qanat of the Middle East and northern Africa are often extremely
vulnerable to relatively small changes in climate, precipitation, political and social
organization, and the exchange and transmission of local specialized knowledge (as
noted in Pangare and Pangare 2015). Negar Sanaan Bensi explains that the qanat
system is not just heritage to be preserved as reminder of a past, but an ongoing
element of the culture and civilization on the Iranian Plateau. Relatedly, what seem
essentially to be water management interventions, such as the drilling of deep wells
after World War II, have larger governmental and cultural implications, which must
be acknowledged so as to benefit future interventions.
Araceli Rojas and Nahuel Beccan Dávila demonstrate the relevance for the future
of design proposals that build on and derive from historic water systems. In Monte
Albán, a site which originates in ancient Oaxaca and has been a UNESCO World
Heritage Site since 1993, the supply system of water—mainly consisting of natural
rivers and tributaries—has defined the infrastructure of settlements while serving as
vessels of ritual meaning. Looking ahead, they suggest that design solutions based
on the historic water system can inspire designers to formulate new strategies for pre-
serving the natural environment and archeological heritage, while improving living
conditions for local people. Suzanne Loen deepens understanding of the Dutch her-
itage in freshwater management, a field whose traditional decentralized practices of
public and private rainwater harvesting largely disappeared at the advent of central-
ized water supply systems. Her goal is to show the potential this heritage contains
for creating an integrated approach to water supply, landscape conservation, and
water-secure livable cities.
Other historic engineered water infrastructure systems include those that improved
agricultural land like meadows and rice paddies, structures that are intimately related
to modes of societal organization and narrative construction. Hans Renes, Csaba Cen-
teri, Sebastian Eiter, Bénédicte Gaillard, Alexandra Kruse, Zdeněk Kučera, Oskar
Puschmann, Michael Roth, and Martina Slamova explore the ways in which the
restoration of derelict water meadows in northwestern and central Europe, Slovakia,
and Norway can help create and advance regional identity on a European scale and,
at the same time, restore biodiversity, improve water retention capacity, and pro-
mote tourism and local understanding of historical cultural values. Alexandra Kruse
and Bernd Paulowitz complement this investigation with insight into the ways in
which Dutch land reclamation technology expanded throughout Europe in the form
of the Holler colonies, tangible evidence of a common European economic and social
history. Izumi Kuroishi rounds out this investigation into agricultural irrigation by
exploring the history of irrigation in Japan’s Sanbonkihara rice paddy region in rela-
10 C. Hein et al.

tion to cultural practices, narratives, and festivals that have shaped the community
around agricultural heritage. Many historical water structures both addressed the
water-related needs of a location and created social communities. Modern techno-
logical interventions often ignored this intricate balance. Recent climate shifts have
emphasized the shortcomings of these systems, as the case of the Taiyuan Tableland
illustrates—where a pond and canal system originally built under the influence of
generations of foreign colonists, immigrants, and experts has deteriorated. Locals,
using what authors Sinite Yu, Chung-His Lin, Hsiaoen Wu, Wenyao Hsu, and Yu-
Chuan Chang call participatory narrative weaving, have successfully challenged
further development plans for the area.
Water management on land can take on various forms: creating land for agri-
culture or urbanization and defending that land against attacks. In coastal and allu-
vial lowlands all over the world (Nijhuis et al. 2019), historic water management
projects blocked water from some areas of land and controlled water levels artifi-
cially so people could live and work on the reclaimed land. This often centuries-old
interaction between human beings and water has produced a rich variety of polder
landscapes. Increasing flood risk due to sea level rise and increased climate turbu-
lence, ongoing subsidence due to intense drainage, and rapid urbanization all call
for protective action. Three chapters explore the spatial and social construction and
meaning of polder landscapes. Yasunori Kitao sets the stage with a careful analysis
of the sociocultural aspects of the construction of the Hachirogata polder in Northern
Honshu, the largest and most highly populated island of Japan. The polder is cele-
brated as an important industrial heritage; however, its narrative rarely acknowledges
the traditional fishing practices destroyed by its very construction. Steffen Nijhuis
complements the Japanese polder heritage exploration, focusing on the preservation
and development of the Dutch Noordoostpolder—built in the twentieth century—
and its consequent development as a cultural heritage landscape. The construction
of polders, which notably involved Dutch expertise, is a Europe-wide phenomenon
and one that may support the creation of a common identity. The Europolder pro-
gram discussed by Hildebrand de Boer showcases the contemporary benefits of these
heritage sites for tourism and regional identity. Other human interventions in water
management were designed to protect land against invasion. A unique example of
such a large-scale historical water-related site that has been preserved and redesigned
is the New Dutch Waterline, an historic defense line. This intervention is examined
by Gerdy Verschuure-Stuip. The preservation of this large monument has provided
an innovative design connection between water, heritage, and tourism at entirely new
scales of intervention.
People around the world have created a broad range of heritage practices along
riverbanks and on river waterfronts. Andrew Law examines the Yangtze River as an
evolving landscape, what he calls a heritage of becoming. His contribution raises
the matter of new digital technologies, including augmented reality tools and their
potential to shape heritage debates. The necessity of conceiving of heritage as part of
a long-lasting creative process in spatial transformation and public and private partic-
ipation is also at the heart of Arie den Boer’s contribution, which argues that cultural
heritage in the Netherlands and elsewhere involves construction and reconstruction,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
with our fellow man, made in the image of God, to inhabit this world
as his palace, and to interpret its mysteries as its priest.
We may probably put these general results into a more popular
form,—for we reserve the details to a seriatim examination of each
formation,—by the following quotation from a modern and
extensively useful writer: “We distinguish four ages of nature,
corresponding to the great geological divisions, namely—
“1. The primary or palæozoic[2] age, comprising the Lower
Silurian, the Upper Silurian, and the Devonian. During this age there
were no air-breathing animals. The fishes were the masters of
creation. We may therefore call it the Reign of Fishes.
“2. The secondary age, comprising the carboniferous formation,
the trias, the oolitic, and the cretaceous formations. This is the epoch
in which air-breathing animals first appear. The reptiles
predominate over the other classes, and we may therefore call it the
Reign of Reptiles.
“3. The tertiary age, comprising the tertiary formations. During
this age, terrestrial mammals of great size abound. This is the Reign
of Mammals.
“4. The modern age, characterized by the appearance of the most
perfect of created beings. This is the Reign of Man.”[3]
From this brief but necessary outline of “the treasures of the deep”
which lie before us we may proceed to make a few preliminary
remarks on the moral and theological aspects of this science. Many
persons have supposed that the statements of Scripture and the
alleged facts of Geology are at variance, and, forgetful that some of
the devoutest minds of this and other countries have been equal
believers in both, have too summarily dismissed geology from their
notice as a study likely to lead to infidelity. To such we would briefly
remark, that it is utterly impossible there can be any contradiction
between the written volume of Inspiration and the outspread volume
of Creation. Both are books written by the same hand, both are works
proceeding from the same ever blessed and beneficent Creator. We
believe in the plenary inspiration of the Bible, and we believe equally
in the plenary inspiration of Nature; both are full of God, for in them
both He is all and in all; and he who is the deepest and the most
reverent student of both will not be long before he comes to the
conclusion that not only is there no disharmony, no discrepancy and
no contradiction between them, but that they are both harmonious
utterances of the one infinite and ever blessed God.
“In reason’s ear they both rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice;
For ever singing as they shine,
‘The hand that made us is divine.’”

Let us remember that Geology has nothing to do with the history

of man, nor with God’s government of man; to the Bible, and only
there, do we go for information on these points. Geology gives us the
history and the succession of the things and beings that were created
and made, we believe, incalculable ages before man was placed on
the face of the earth. Possibly at times some new discovery in geology
may appear to contradict our long received interpretations of
isolated passages in Scripture, in which case the modesty of science
compels us to reexamine our data, while our reverence for the word
of God teaches us to revise our interpretations. As Dr. Chalmers once
remarked, “the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the
globe; if they fix anything at all, it is only the antiquity of the
species.” We believe that the same God who, in anticipation of the
spiritual wants of the human race, graciously promised from the
beginning of man’s transgression, that “the seed of the woman
should bruise the serpent’s head,” laid up for him “in the bowels of
the earth those vast stores of granite, marble, coal, salt, and the
various metals, the products of its several revolutions; and thus was
an inexhaustible provision made for his necessities, and for the
developments of his genius, ages in anticipation of his
appearance.”[4]
Truth is, and always must be, coincident. There can be no real
contradiction between the truth of Scripture and the truth of Science.
Whatever is true in one department of God’s agency, must be true
when compared with his works in any other department. As an
illustration we may notice one particular in which Geology and
Scripture move towards the same point in proving the recent
introduction of man. We take up a chart of the earth’s crust, and
examine it so far as that crust is open to our investigation: eight
miles depth or height we know pretty accurately, and in all these
accumulations we find one concurrent testimony. If we take the
Azoic period of the earth’s crust, and search through the granitic
rocks of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall; or if we pass on to the
Palæozoic period, and examine the Old Red Sandstone, the
Carboniferous system, or other formations; or, extending our
researches, investigate the secondary formations, the Lias, the
Oolite, and the Chalk, and so on until we arrive at the Tertiary period
of the earth’s history; all the testimony is one; there is no
contradiction; there are no fossil boats or sofas; no fossil beds or
books; no fossil boys and girls; no fossil knives and forks; so far as
the teachings of Geology go throughout all these vast periods it says,
“there was not a man to till the earth;” they declare that man is not so
old as the earth, and that all its fossil remains are pre-Adamite.
Now why should this truth be supposed to lie against the teaching
of Scripture? The object of Moses in the first chapter of Genesis, is to
teach us that all existing matter owes its origin to the God of the
Bible, and not to any of the idols of the heathen. “In the beginning,”
says that oldest historical record with which we are acquainted, “God
created the heaven and the earth;” that is, we apprehend, at some
period of the earth’s history, in all probability an undefined and
incalculable distance from the present time, God created all matter
out of nothing, the universe, these heavens and this earth, began to
be at the word of God.
“But afterwards,” says Dr. Pye Smith, in his translation of these
words, “the earth was without form and void;” undergoing, we
believe, those vast geological changes, those deposits of metal, and
those slow accumulations of mineral wealth, by which it was fitted to
become the temple, the palace, the workshop, and the home of man.
“The first sentence in Genesis is a simple, independent, all-
comprehending axiom to this effect, that matter elementary or
combined, aggregated only or organised, and dependent, sentient,
and intellectual beings, have not existed from eternity either in self-
continuity or succession; but had a beginning; that their beginning
took place by the all-powerful will of one Being, the Self-existent,
Independent and Infinite in all perfection; and that the date of that
beginning is not made known.”[5]
Dr. Redford says, “We ought to understand Moses as saying, that
indefinitely far back and concealed from us in the mystery of eternal
ages prior to the first moment of mundane time, God created the
heavens and the earth;” and Dr. Harris in the same strain writes
thus, “The first verse in Genesis was designed by the Divine Spirit to
announce the absolute origination of the material universe by the
Almighty Creator; and it is so understood in the other parts of holy
writ; passing by an indefinite interval, the second verse describes the
state of our planet immediately prior to the Adamic creation, and the
third verse begins the account of the six days’ work.”
On this subject we will quote but one brief sentence more—and we
have preferred using these quotations to stating the question in our
words, thoroughly accordant as they would have been. In Dr.
Hitchcock’s valuable work, entitled “The Religion of Geology,” he
says, “The time is not far distant when the high antiquity of the globe
will be regarded as no more opposed to the Bible than the earth’s
revolution round the sun and on its axis. Soon shall the horizon
where Geology and Revelation meet be cleared of every cloud, and
present only an unbroken and magnificent circle of truth.”
Let these thoughts be borne in mind while we pursue our
examination of the solid crust of this globe. We do not
“drill and bore
The solid earth, and from its strata thence
Extract a register, by which we learn
That He who made it and revealed its date
To Moses was mistaken in its age.”

Nowhere do we find the age of the globe revealed either to Moses or

any other inspired writer; we believe that as science has nothing to
fear from the Bible, so the Bible has nothing to fear from the widest
intellectual range of study. We ponder in devout amazement over
these unwritten records of the earth’s bygone history: we find
‘sermons in stones’ as we light on some delicate fern, or elegant
vertebrate animal, preserved in the deposits of past ages, and the
hieroglyphics of nature and the distincter utterances of the Bible
prompt the same exclamation,—“How marvellous are thy works, O
God, in wisdom hast thou made them all!” “Waste, and disorder, and
confusion we nowhere find in our study of the crust of the earth;
instead of this we find endless examples of economy, order, and
design; and the result of all our researches carried back through the
unwritten records of past time, has been to fix more steadily our
assurance of the existence of one Supreme Creator of all things; to
exalt more highly our conviction of the immensity of His perfections,
of His might and majesty, His wisdom and His goodness, and all-
sustaining providence; and to penetrate our understandings with a
profound and sensible perception of the high veneration man’s
intellect owes to God. The earth from her deep foundations unites
with the celestial orbs that roll through boundless space, to declare
the glory and show forth the praise of their common Author and
Preserver; and the voice of natural religion accords harmoniously
with the testimonies of revelation, in ascribing the origin of the
universe to the will of one Eternal and Dominant Intelligence, the
Almighty Lord and supreme First Cause of all things that subsist; the
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; before the mountains were
brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, God from
everlasting and world without end.”—Buckland’s Bridgewater
Treatise.
“Come, frankly read the rocks, and see
In them the Earth’s biography;
Let mountain piled on mountain tell
Its antique age; and every shell
In fossil form its tale unfold,
Of life’s bright day through time untold;
And gathering use from great and small,
See good in each, but God in all.”
 CHAPTER II.
PRELIMINARIES.

“Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth.”

David.

As yet we have only been talking about the crust of the earth; we
shall now return and enter upon its actual examination. It will not be
necessary for us personally to descend into the abysmous caverns
that lie beneath our feet, nor, with hammer in hand, to go forth and
explore the district of country in which we may happen to dwell: we
may do all this by and by, when we know both how and what to
observe. Meanwhile, with such teachers as Buckland, Sedgwick,
Murchison, Pye Smith, Hugh Miller, De la Beche, Lyell, Owen and
others, we may for some while to come be only tarry-at-home
travellers; for in a true sense, in this department of knowledge,
“other men have laboured, and we enter into their labours.” Let us
now look at the crust of the earth, as it may be represented in two
imaginary sections. Suppose we could make a vertical section of the
earth’s crust, and cut straight down some eighty miles till we reached
the central mass of incandescence that we believe lies beneath this
crust, or Erdrinde (earth-rind), as the Germans call it, and then
bring out this section to daylight, it would present something very
much like the following appearance.
 DIAGRAM I.

Here the granite A will be observed forming the supposed

boundary between the superlying strata and the fire B below to which
we have just referred, and thus will be seen the origin of all plutonic
rocks. Here too will be seen how the granite is not confined to the
lower levels, but rises, as mentioned in the first chapter, far above all
the other strata, and forms some of the highest peaks on the face of
the globe.[6] Here, too, will be seen how the granite is frequently
traversed by veins of trap-dykes, those black-looking branches,
which rise often above the whole mass of metamorphic and stratified
rocks, often occasioning great difficulties in mining operations. Here,
too, the student will see how, supposing the theory of a central globe
of heat to be founded in fact, the volcanoes that are now active, C,
form, as the volcanoes that are extinct, D, once did, the safety valves
of this mighty mass of incandescence, B; and in the same way may be
seen how certain strata may be above the granite, or above any other
formation, though they do not overlie them, and how the lowest
strata, being formed first, is said to be older than any superlying
strata, notwithstanding any accidental arrangement produced by
upheaval or depression. For, in “consequence of the great
commotions which the crust of the globe has undergone, many
points of its surface have been elevated to great heights in the form
of mountains; and hence it is that fossils are sometimes found at the
summit of the highest mountains, though the rocks containing them
were originally formed at the bottom of the sea. But, even when
folded or partly broken, their relative age may still be determined by
an examination of the ends of their upturned strata, where they
appear or crop out in succession, at the surface or on the slopes of
mountains.”[7]
But to make this view of the subject clearer, let us imagine that
some Titanic power was granted us to push down these towering
masses of granite to their original situation, below the metamorphic
and stratified rocks, by which means we should at the same time
restore these curved and broken strata to their originally horizontal
position; and let us suppose that we were now again to descend to
the foundations of the earth for the purpose of making another
vertical section; then the crust of the earth would present to us an
arrangement something like the leaves of a book, or the coats of an
onion, arranged in successive and uninterrupted layers, or in
concentric and unbroken circles. Such a diagram must of course be
imaginary, and unless it is taken into connexion with the previous
remarks, it is more likely to bewilder than to assist the beginner. Let
it again be urged upon the reader, that such a chart as we are about
to lay before him is only intended to give him an idea of the
succession of these formations and systems, and that the details
found in it are anticipatory of many future references to it on the
student’s part. Let it not be supposed that this is a mere barren
research into dry facts that have no connexion with our truest
welfare; for if, as Lord Bacon somewhere finely observes, all study is
to be valued “not so mush as an exercise of the intellect, but as a true
discipline of humanity,” then what study is calculated to be more
useful than Geology, in enlarging and purifying the powers of the
mind, by teaching us how harmonious, and orderly, and economic
are the works of God; in removing all narrow notions of the extent
and age of this solid globe, which from the beginning had its origin in
the almighty will of God; in checking the presumptuous or the
chilling inferences of a sceptical philosophy, by everywhere pointing
out the design, skill, and adaptations of an ever-present and most
beneficent Creator; and in chastening those overweening ideas of
ourselves which both ignorance and knowledge may create and
foster, by saying to us, in the language of God himself, as we stand
amazed in the presence of huge pre-Adamite vestiges of creation,
“Where wast thou,” vain man, “when I laid the foundations of the
earth? Declare if thou hast understanding.” (Job xxxviii. 4.)
 “Among these rocks and stones, methinks I see
More than the heedless impress that belongs
To lonely nature’s casual work; they bear
A semblance strange to Power intelligent,
And of Design not wholly worn away.
And I own
Some shadowy intimations haunt me here,
That in these shows a chronicle survives
Of purposes akin to those of man,
Measuring through all degrees, until the scale
Of time and conscious nature disappear,
Lost in unsearchable eternity.”—Wordsworth.

We will now proceed to the diagram to which we have made

allusion, and which represents an ideal section of the earth’s crust as
the various formations are there found arranged. (Diagram II.)
 DIAGRAM II.

Here, in the words of another writer, we would add for the reader’s
guidance, that “the unstratified or igneous rocks occur in no regular
succession, but appear amidst the stratified without order or
arrangement; heaving them out of their original horizontal positions,
breaking up through them in volcanic masses, and sometimes
overrunning them after the manner of liquid lava. From these
circumstances they are, in general, better known by their mineral
composition than by their order of occurrence. Still it may be
convenient to divide them into three great classes; granite,
trappean, and volcanic—granite being the basis of all known rocks,
and occurring along with the primary and transition strata; the
trappean, of a darker and less crystalline structure than the granite,
and occurring along with the secondary and tertiary rocks; and the
volcanic, still less crystalline and compact, and of comparatively
recent origin, or still in process of formation.” This the student will
observe by another reference to the previous diagram; but, in looking
at the one now before him, we must also add for his further guidance,
—for we are presuming that we address those who need initiation
into the rudiments of this science, and the circumstance that we
never met with a preliminary treatise that quite satisfied us, or
helped such intelligent youth as were prying into the apparently
cabalistic mysteries of the earth’s structural divisions, is one strong
inducement to the present undertaking;—we must add, that “it must
not be supposed, however, that all the stratified rocks always occur in
any one portion of the earth’s crust in full and complete succession
as represented” in Diagram II. “All that is meant is, that such would
be their order if every group and formation were present. But
whatever number of groups may be present, they never happen out
of their regular order of succession; that is, clay-slate never occurs
above coal, nor coal above chalk. Thus in London, tertiary strata
occupy the surface; in Durham, magnesian limestone; in Fife, the
coal measures; and in Perthshire, the old red sandstone and clay-
slate; so that it would be fruitless to dig for chalk in Durham, for
magnesian limestone in Fife, or for coal in Perthshire. It would not
be absurd, however, to dig for coal in Durham, because that mineral
underlies the magnesian limestone; or for old red sandstone in Fife,
because that formation might be naturally expected to occur under
the coal strata of that country, in the regular order of succession.”[8]
Still, after reading all this, we can easily imagine, not so much an
air of incredulity taking possession of the countenance of our
courteous reader as a feeling somewhat like this, with which we have
often come into contact in those geological classes of young persons
which it has been our pleasure to conduct: “Well, all that’s very plain
in the book; I see granite lies at the bottom, and pushes itself up to
the top very often; and I see in the diagrams that coal and chalk are
not found in the same place, and that different localities have their
different formations, and the various formations have their different
fossils, but I confess that I cannot realize it. I know the earth is round
like an orange, a little flattened at the poles—what is called an oblate
spheroid; but all this surpasses my power of comprehension; can’t
you make it plainer?” Well, let us try; on page 27 is a diagram,
representing no ideal, but an actual boring into the earth. London is
situated on the tertiary formation, in what is called geologically the
basin of the London clay, that is almost on the very top of the crust,
or external covering that lies on the vast mass of molten and other
matter beneath. Here is first a drawing and then a section that may
represent this basin:—

DIAGRAM III.

DIAGRAM IV.

The water which falls on the chalk hills flows into them, or into the
porous beds adjoining, and would rise upwards to its level but for the
superincumbent pressure of the bed of clay above it, cccc. Under
these circumstances, in order to procure water, Artesian[9] wells are
sunk through the bed of clay, perhaps also through the chalk, but at
any rate till the depressed stratum of chalk is reached; and this gives
exit to the subterranean water, which at once rises through the iron
tubes inserted in the boring to the surface. By these borings through
the clay, water is obtained where it would be impossible to sink a
well, or where the expense would prohibit the attempt. To explain
this matter, here is a diagram (No. V.) which represents the Artesian
well at the Model Prison at Pentonville, London, the strata upon
which London is built, and which we can apply to the diagram on
page 21, that the theory of the earth’s crust may be the more
thoroughly understood before we proceed.

DIAGRAM V.

In the same manner Artesian wells have been sunk in other places,
as at Hampstead Water Works, 450 feet deep; Combe & Delafield’s,
500 feet deep; and the Trafalgar-square Water Works, 510 feet deep.
[10]
Now, the reader has only to take this last diagram, and in
imagination to apply it to the one on page 21, in order to see that so
far as actual boring and investigation go, the geological theory of the
earth’s crust is correct; only again let it be observed that this order is
never inverted, although it frequently happens that some one or
more of the strata may be absent.
Hitherto we have spoken of the earth’s crust without reference to
that wondrous succession and development of living beings which
once had their joy of life, and whose fossil remains, found in the
different strata, waken such kindling emotions of the power of Deity,
and enlarge indefinitely our conceptions of the boundless resources
of His Mind. This will open before us a new chapter in the history of
our planet, already the theatre of such vast revolutions, and which,
under the influence of Divine truth, is yet to undergo one greater and
nobler than any of these. We have as yet only glanced at the surface
page of the wondrous book, now happily opened for us by geologists,
to whose names we have already made reference; and as the mind
rests with intense pleasure on the discoveries of Champollion,
Belzoni, Lane, Layard, Botta, and others who have deciphered the
hieroglyphics, in which were written the wars and the chronicles of
ancient nations, whose names and deeds are becoming, by books and
lectures, and above all by our noble national Museum, familiar even
to our children, and a source of help and solace to the hard-toiling
artisan; so with profounder interest, as carried back into remoter
ages of antiquity, so remote that they seem to lie beyond the power of
a human arithmetic to calculate, do we humbly endeavour to
decipher the hieroglyphics,[11] not of Egypt or of Nineveh, but of the
vast creation of God, written in characters that require, not only
learning and science to understand, but modesty, patience, and
triumphant perseverance. He who with these pre-requisites
combines reverence for God and His revelation, will always find in
Geology material both for manly exercise of thought, and also for
reverent adoration of Him who is Himself unsearchable, and whose
ways are past finding out.
“We not to explore the secrets, ask
Of His eternal empire, but the more
To magnify His works, the more we know.”—Milton.
 Most happily for Christendom, our noblest men of science are not
ashamed of the “reproach of Christ;” and we know not how to
conclude this chapter in a strain more accordant with our own
thoughts than by quoting the words of an eminent living naturalist:
—“I can echo with fullest truth the experience of Bishop Heber; ‘In
every ride I have taken, and in every wilderness in which my tent has
been pitched, I have found enough to keep my mind from sinking
into the languor and the apathy which have been regarded as natural
to a tropical climate.’ Nay, I may truly say, I found no tendency to
apathy or ennui. Every excursion presented something to admire;
every day had its novelty; the morning was always pregnant with
eager expectation; the evening invariably brought subjects of interest
fresh and new; and the days were only too short for enjoyment. They
were not days of stirring adventure, of dangerous conflicts with man
or with beast, or of hair-breadth escapes in flood and field; their
delights were calm and peaceful, I trust not unholy, nor unbecoming
the character of a Christian, who has his heart in heaven, and who
traces, even in earth’s loveliest scenes, the mark of the spoiler. The
sentiments expressed by my friend[12] and fellow-labourer are those
which I would ever associate with the study of science. ‘If the sight of
nature,’ observes Mr. Hill, ‘were merely the looking at a painted
pageantry, or at a spectacle filling the carnal mind with wonder and
delight, the spirit would be overpowered and worked into weariness;
but it is admiration at the wisdom, and reverence for the beneficence
of Almighty power. He who dwelleth in the light which no man can
approach unto, whom no man hath seen, nor can see,’ is yet visible in
His perfections through the works of His hand, and His designs are
made manifest in the purpose of His creatures. Wherever our lot is
cast, into whatever scenes our wayward impulses lead us, the mind-
illumined eye gazes on divine things, and the spirit-stirred heart feels
its pulses bounding with emotions from the touch of an ever-present
Deity. The habit that sees in every object the wisdom and the
goodness as well as the power of God, I may speak of, as Coleridge
speaks of the poetical spirit, ‘it has been to me an exceeding great
reward; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined
my enjoyments; it has endeared my solitude; and it has given me the
habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that
meets and surrounds me.’
“‘Great are thy works, Jehovah, infinite
Thy power! what thought can measure thee, or tongue
Relate thee?’”[13]
 CHAPTER III.
THE ANCIENT EPOCH.

“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”—Job xxxviii. 4.

And now in right earnest let us begin our examination of the

earth’s crust. Some of the terms we may use will, perhaps, at first
sight appear repulsive from their novelty and difficulty; such words
we will explain as we proceed, and will only stay the student’s course
to remark, that there is a necessity for the use of the dead languages
in the formation of compound terms that are to become descriptive
names, and in their application to newly discovered objects. This
necessity arises from the fact that it is only in this way that scientific
men of different nations can understand the character of each other’s
researches, and compare notes with one another. A fossil is found, let
us suppose, in the lias formation; it proves to be the organic remains
of some very strange and anomalous creature. People go down to
Lyme Regis to examine it, and, in doing so, discover others.
Comparative anatomists arrange the dislocated parts and give them a
name; this must be intelligible to geologists on the Continent as well
as in England; and therefore some term descriptive of the animal,
once the living possessor of these “dry bones,” must be given, and
finally it is called ichthyosaurus. Any one in Russia, or Austria, or
Italy, who happened to be acquainted with the rudiments of Greek,
would know at once the kind of animal referred to by its very name,
derived from ichthus, a fish, and sauros, a lizard. This would indicate
to all scientific men the nature of this remarkable animal, of which
we shall have to tell some stories by and by as full of wonder as any
modern or ancient book of marvels; while, if we had called it fish-
lizard, only those who understood English would know what we
meant. Our object is to simplify as much as possible every difficult
term that may be used; but while we solicit our readers to master
each difficulty as it rises, we hope they will not think that, when they
have read this little book, they are masters of Geology, our highest
ambition being only to impart a taste for the science.
To return: our examination commences with the Plutonic rocks, so
called in memory of the well-known mythological god of the fiery or
infernal regions; and we take granite[14] as a type of these rocks,
because it is so familiar to all our readers. There are besides granite,
syenite,[15] greenstone, porphyry, basalt, and others, to dilate upon
which would defeat our purpose. Our object is to lay but a little at a
time upon the memory, and to let that little be well digested before
we pass from the thoroughly known to the unknown. Nothing but
actual examination can make the student familiar with the varieties
of the rocks of this very ancient epoch in the world’s history. Well,
everybody knows what granite is; they see it on the kerb-stones of
the wayside, in the hard paving of the London streets, in the massive
slabs of London and Waterloo Bridges, and elsewhere. “Granite!”
exclaims the reader, “everybody knows what granite is, and there is
an end of it; you make as much fuss about granite as Wordsworth did
about his well-known primrose, and the man who could see nothing
but a primrose in a primrose.”
But there is a poetry and a history about granite upon which we
are going to dwell. This piece of granite which I hold in my hand is
composed of quartz, mica, and feldspar.[16] The quartz is white and
hard—I can’t scratch it with my knife; the mica is in glistening plates
or scales; and the feldspar is soft and greyish, and can easily be
scratched. Oh, if this granite could speak, what a story could it tell!
“To give it, then, a tongue were wise in man.” Let us try. “Once upon
a time, long, long ages ago, incalculable periods before Adam was
placed in possession of Eden, I, the granite, and my contemporaries,
came into being. Before us, this planet ‘was without form and void.’ A
dark chaotic period, of which I know nothing, preceded me. When I
first emerged into being, at the command of Him who laid the
foundations of the earth, this world was a barren, lifeless,
uncultivated, uninhabited, untrodden, seasonless waste. Here and
there were undulations of land and water, but all was bare, desolate,
and silent: not a moss nor a lichen covered the ancient skeleton of
the globe; not a sea-weed floated in the broad ocean; not a trace
existed even of the least highly organized animal or vegetable;
everything was still, and with the stillness of universal death. The
earth was prepared, and the fiat of creation had gone forth; but there
was no inhabitant, and no beings endowed with life had been
introduced to perform their part in the great mystery of creation.”[17]
And the granite might go on to say—“Man! of three-score years and
ten, where wast thou when He, my Maker and yours, laid the
foundations of the earth? Let me tell you what an important part I
have played in the history of your world’s formation. I rise to the
highest elevations, and form the sublimest pinnacles on the surface
of the globe, and without me your scenery would lose its grandeur
and its glory. But for me Albert Smith had never climbed Mont
Blanc, nor Humboldt Cotopaxi and Chimborazo; nor would the head
of the famed Egyptian Memnon[18] have been sculptured. You may
see me giving to Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland their most valuable
minerals and metals. In Europe
‘I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute.’

The Scandinavians, the Hartz mountains, the Alps, and the Pyrenees
are mine; nor is my territory less in Asia, Africa, the great Americas,
and in the becoming great Australia; and thus, by my deeply rooted
foundations and my vast extension, I constitute the framework, solid
and immoveable, of this ‘great globe and all that it inherits.’”
Thus, at any rate, the granite might speak, nor would there be one
word of vain boasting in it. Having beard it, or fancied we heard it,
which amounts to the same thing, let us soberize ourselves, and put
granite into the third person. There are no fossils in granite and the
other Plutonic and volcanic rocks; even supposing any forms of life
to have been in existence at the period to which we are referring, the
action of fire has annihilated all their remains. We should not
therefore expect in Cumberland and Cornwall, nor in those parts of
Devonshire where granite prevails, to find the fossils peculiar to
other formations with which in time we hope to make familiar
acquaintance. But though destitute of interest in this respect, how
great is its importance and interest in those economic uses which
have the geologist for their guide, and the whole family of man for
their beneficent operations! “Many varieties of granite are excellent
as building stones, though expensive in working to definite forms.
Some of the most important public works of Great Britain and
Ireland, France and Russia, are of this material. In selecting granite,
those varieties in which the constituent minerals and the scales of
mica are superabundant, should be avoided; and, as a practical test,
it is wise to notice the country immediately around the quarry, as the
sandy varieties rapidly disintegrate,[19] and form accumulations of
micaceous sand. The Hayter or Dartmoor granite, the Aberdeen
granite, the Kingstown (Dublin) granite, some beds of the Mourne or
county of Down granite, and the Guernsey or Channel Island granite,
are well known for their excellence. In some of the quarries the
bedding of the granite is more defined than in others; and wherever
this is the case, or where marked cleavages or joints prevail, the work
is much facilitated. Many old Egyptian works and statues were
formed of granite, and it is still used for colossal works, as it takes a
fine polish. For example, the great fountain shell, or vase, before the
Museum at Berlin, and the pedestal of Peter the Great at St.
Petersburg, are of the northern granite, being sculptured from erratic
blocks. The splendid Scotch granite columns, in the vestibule of the
Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, are beautiful examples of a
modern application of this rock to the arts.”[20]
It is also in the Plutonic or igneous rocks that almost all the metals
are found; and here we have our first illustration of that order to
which we shall frequently call attention; an order as exquisite as can
be found in the drawers of a lady’s cabinet, forbidding the thought
that anything observable at the present time, in the bowels or on the
surface of the crust of the earth, can be attributed to the violent
diluvial action of the Noachian deluge. The diagram below represents
an ideal section of a mining district.