Another point of interest to be derived from this summary is the place that landscape takes among the motives of the Holland School. We see, in fact, that it figures at the beginning of the new era and continues to the end. Seghers and Van Goyen precede the century, which immediately opens with Salomon Ruisdael and Aert van der Neer, followed in the earlier division by Both, Wouwerman, Koninck, Cuyp, Berchem, and Van Everdingen. Then the second period opens with the birth of Jacob Ruisdael, and, including Potter, Adriaen van de Velde, and Vermeer (the last named with one known example), ends with Hobbema. Similarly, in the allied department of marine-painting, the century opens with Simon de Vlieger; Willem van de Velde the Elder follows, and in the later period the art is represented by Bakhuysen and Willem van de Velde the Younger. As a matter of fact, in each field of motive the seed was laid in the beginning of the period under examination. What followed was a rotation of crops and an enriched development of each variety. CHAPTER III BEGINNING OF THE NEW The breathing-time given by the truce allowed play for dissensions among parties and for the ambitions that had crept into the house of Orange. Meanwhile it favored the development that during the next hundred years made Holland the richest and most advanced country in Europe. To commemorate the raising of the siege of Leyden, the patriots in 1574 had founded a university in that city; to inaugurate the truce, they pumped dry the Beemster Lake and added eighteen thousand acres to their territory. The two acts, and even the order in which they came, were characteristic of this extraordinary people. They were the most enlightened of their day and brought their intelligence to bear upon all the practical concerns of life. The renown of their university excelled that of Paris, Oxford, or Cambridge; their scholars laid the foundations of international law and modern medicine, and their printing-presses produced more books than those of the rest of Europe combined. Their development in painting is our present subject, but they also carried their love of the beautiful into the design and craftsmanship of the ornaments and utensils of the home, and into the laying out of gardens and the cultivation of flowers. Meanwhile their looms, manned by weavers who had fled from Flanders to avoid religious persecution, produced the finest fabrics in Europe; their workshops exported the best mathematical, astronomical, and nautical instruments; and their discovery of the art of cutting and polishing diamonds gave them a monopoly of this business. The Bank of Amsterdam was founded in the first year of the truce and soon became famous for the amount of its deposits and the volume of its transactions, while the city itself became the chief distributing center for the commerce of the Old and the New World.