SCIENCE IN ARCADY

 BY

 GRANT ALLEN

 LONDON: LAWRENCE & BULLEN, 16, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W. C. 1892. 

 To GRANT RICHARDS, _IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF MANY KIND OFFICES. _

 Avuncular Greeting. 

 CONTENTS. 

 PAGE

 MY ISLANDS 1

 TROPICAL EDUCATION 21

 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND 40

 A DESERT FRUIT 56

 PRETTY POLL 71

 HIGH LIFE 90

 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS 105

 MUD 123

 THE GREENWOOD TREE 140

 FISH AS FATHERS 157

 AN ENGLISH SHIRE 177

 THE BRONZE AXE 212

 THE ISLE OF RUIM 231

 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD 250

 A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY 266

 CASTERS AND CHESTERS 274

 PREFACE. 

These essays deal for the most part with Science in Arcady. 'Tis mynative country: for I am not of those who 'praise the busy town. ' Onthe contrary, in the words of the great poet who has just departed tojoin Milton and Shelley in a place of high collateral glory, I 'love torail against it still, ' with a naturalist's bitterness. For the town isalways dead and lifeless. There are who admire it, they say--poorpurblind creatures--because, forsooth, 'there is so much life there. 'So much life, indeed! No grass in the streets; no flowers in the lanes;no beetles or butterflies on the dull stone pavements! Brick and mortarhave killed out all life over square miles of Middlesex. For myself, Ilove better the densely-peopled fields than this human desert, thisbeflagged and macadamised man-made solitude. The country teems withlife on every hand; a thousand different plants and flowers in thespangled meadows; a thousand varied denizens of pond, and air, andheath, and copses. Their ways are endless. They attract me far morewith their infinite diversity than the grey and gloomy haunts of thecab-horse and the stock-broker. 

But my Arcady, as you will see, is none the less tolerably broad andeclectic in its limits. These various essays have been suggested to mypen by rambles far and wide between its elastic confines. The littletractate on _Mud_, for example, recalls to mind some pleasant weeksamong the Italian lakes and on the plain of Lombardy. _A Desert Fruit_owes its origin to a morning at Luxor. _High Life_ had its key-notestruck by a fortnight in the Tyrol. _Tropical Education_ is a dimreminiscence of old Jamaican experiences. Our _Eight-Legged Friends_were observed at leisure on the window-panes of our own little nook atDorking. _A Hill-Top Stronghold_ was sketched _in situ_ at Florence bya window that looked across the valley to Fiesole. Excursions intobooks or into the remoter past have given occasion for thearchæological essays relegated here to the end of the volume. 

My thanks are due to Messrs. Longmans for permission to reprint fromtheir magazine _My Islands_, _A Hill-Top Stronghold_, _A Desert Fruit_, _The Isle of Ruim_, _Eight-Legged Friends_, and _Tropical Education_. Ihave also to acknowledge a similar courtesy on the part of Messrs. Smith & Elder with regard to _Mud_, _The Bronze Axe_, _High Life_, _Pretty Poll_, _The Greenwood Tree_, _On the Wings of the Wind_, _Casters and Chesters_, and _Fish as Fathers_, all of which originallyappeared in the _Cornhill_. Messrs. Chatto & Windus have been equallykind as regards the paper on _An English Shire_ contributed to the_Gentleman's_. _A Persistent Nationality_ made its first bow in the_North American Review_, and has still to be introduced to an Englishaudience. 

G. A. 

Hind Head, Surrey, _Oct. _, 1892. 

 SCIENCE IN ARCADY. 

 MY ISLANDS. 

About the middle of the Miocene period, as well as I can now remember(for I made no note of the precise date at the moment), my islandsfirst appeared above the stormy sheet of the North-West Atlantic as alittle rising group of mountain tops, capping a broad boss of submarinevolcanoes. My attention was originally called to the new archipelago bya brother investigator of my own aerial race, who pointed out to me onthe wing that at a spot some 900 miles to the west of the Portuguesecoast, just opposite the place where your mushroom city of Lisbon nowstands, the water of the ocean, as seen in a bird's-eye view from somethree thousand feet above, formed a distinct greenish patch such asalways betokens shoals or rising ground at the bottom. Flying out atonce to the point he indicated, and poising myself above it on my broadpinions at a giddy altitude, I saw at a glance that my friend was quiteright. Land making was in progress. A volcanic upheaval was takingplace on the bed of the sea. A new island group was being forced rightup by lateral pressure or internal energies from a depth of at leasttwo thousand fathoms. 

I had always had a great liking for the study of material plants andanimals, and I was so much interested in the occurrence of this novelphenomenon--the growth and development of an oceanic island before myvery eyes--that I determined to devote the next few thousand centuriesor so of my æonian existence to watching the course of its gradualevolution. 

If I trusted to unaided memory, however, for my dates and facts, Imight perhaps at this distance of time be uncertain whether the momentwas really what I have roughly given, within a geological age or two, the period of the Mid-Miocene. But existing remains on one of theislands constituting my group (now called in your new-fangledterminology Santa Maria) help me to fix with comparative certainty theprecise epoch of their original upheaval. For these remains, still inevidence on the spot, consist of a few small marine deposits of UpperMiocene age; and I recollect distinctly that after the main group hadbeen for some time raised above the surface of the ocean, and aftersand and streams had formed a small sedimentary deposit containingUpper Miocene fossils beneath the shoal water surrounding the maingroup, a slight change of level occurred, during which this minorisland was pushed up with the Miocene deposits on its shoulders, as asort of natural memorandum to assist my random scientificrecollections. With that solitary exception, however, the entire groupremains essentially volcanic in its composition, exactly as it was whenI first saw its youthful craters and its red-hot ash-cones pushedgradually up, century after century, from the deep blue waters of theMid-Miocene ocean. 

All round my islands the Atlantic then, as now, had a depth, as I saidbefore, of two thousand fathoms; indeed, in some parts between thegroup and Portugal the plummet of your human navigators finds nobottom, I have often heard them say, till it reaches 2, 500; and out ofthis profound sea-bed the volcanic energies pushed up my islands as asmall submarine mountain range, whose topmost summits alone stood outbit by bit above the level of the surrounding sea. One of them, themost abrupt and cone-like, by name now Pico, rises to this day, amagnificent sight, sheer seven thousand feet into the sky from theplacid sheet that girds it round on every side. You creatures ofto-day, approaching it in one of your clumsy new-fashioned fire-drivencanoes that you call steamers, must admire immensely its conical peak, as it stands out silhouetted against the glowing horizon in the deepred glare of a sub-tropical Atlantic sunset. 

But when I, from my solitary aerial perch, saw my islands rise bare andmassive first from the water's edge, the earliest idea that occurred tome as an investigator of nature was simply this: how will they ever getclad with soil and herbage and living creatures? So naked and barrenwere their black crags and rocks of volcanic slag, that I could hardlyconceive how they could ever come to resemble the other smiling oceanicislands which I looked down upon in my flight from day to day over somany wide and scattered oceans. I set myself to watch, accordingly, whence they would derive the first seeds of life, and what changeswould take place under dint of time upon their desolate surface. 

For a long epoch, while the mountains were still rising in their activevolcanic state, I saw but little evidence of a marked sort of thegrowth of living creatures upon their loose piles of pumice. Gradually, however, I observed that spores of lichens, blown towards them by thewind, were beginning to sprout upon the more settled rocks, and todiscolour the surface in places with grey and yellow patches. Bit bybit, as rain fell upon the new-born hills, it brought down from theirweathered summits sand and mud, which the torrents ground small anddeposited in little hollows in the valleys; and at last something likeearth was found at certain spots, on which seeds, if there had beenany, might doubtless have rooted and flourished exceedingly. 

My primitive idea, as I watched my islands in this their almostlifeless condition, was that the Gulf Stream and the trade winds fromAmerica would bring the earliest higher plants and animals to ourshores. But in this I soon found I was quite mistaken. The distance tobe traversed was so great, and the current so slow, that the few seedsor germs of American species cast up upon the shore from time to timewere mostly far too old and water-logged to show signs of life in suchungenial conditions. It was from the nearer coasts of Europe, on thecontrary, that our earliest colonists seemed to come. Though theprevalent winds set from the west, more violent storms reached usoccasionally from the eastward direction; and these, blowing fromEurope, which lay so much closer to our group, were far more likely tobring with them by waves or wind some waifs and strays of the Europeanfauna and flora. 

I well remember the first of these great storms that produced anydistinct impression on my islands. The plants that followed in its wakewere a few small ferns, whose light spores were more readily carried onthe breeze than any regular seeds of flowering plants. For a month ortwo nothing very marked occurred in the way of change, but slowly thespores rooted, and soon produced a small crop of ferns, which, findingthe ground unoccupied, spread when once fairly started withextraordinary rapidity, till they covered all the suitable positionsthroughout the islands. 

For the most part, however, additions to the flora, and still more tothe fauna, were very gradually made; so much so that most of thespecies now found in the group did not arrive there till after the endof the Glacial epoch, and belong essentially to the modern Europeanassemblage of plants and animals. This was partly because the islandsthemselves were surrounded by pack-ice during that chilly period, whichinterrupted for a time the course of my experiment. It was interesting, too, after the ice cleared away, to note what kinds could manage bystray accidents to cross the ocean with a fair chance of sprouting orhatching out on the new soil, and which were totally unable by originalconstitution to survive the ordeal of immersion in the sea. Forinstance, I looked anxiously at first for the arrival of some casualacorn or some floating filbert, which might stock my islands withwaving greenery of oaks and hazel bushes. But I gradually discovered, in the course of a few centuries, that these heavy nuts never floatedsecurely so far as the outskirts of my little archipelago; and thatconsequently no chestnuts, apple trees, beeches, alders, larches, orpines ever came to diversify my island valleys. The seeds that didreally reach us from time to time belonged rather to one or other offour special classes. Either they were very small and light, like thespores of ferns, fungi, and club-mosses; or they were winged andfeathery, like dandelion and thistle-down; or they were the stones offruits that are eaten by birds, like rose-hips and hawthorn; or theywere chaffy grains, enclosed in papery scales, like grasses and sedges, of a kind well adapted to be readily borne on the surface of the water. In all these ways new plants did really get wafted by slow degrees tothe islands; and if they were of kinds adapted to the climate they grewand flourished, living down the first growth of ferns and flowerlessherbs in the rich valleys. 

The time which it took to people my archipelago with these variousplants was, of course, when judged by your human standards, immenselylong, as often the group received only a single new addition in thelapse of two or three centuries. But I noticed one very curious resultof this haphazard and lengthy mode of stocking the country: some of theplants which arrived the earliest, having the coast all clear tothemselves, free from the fierce competition to which they had alwaysbeen exposed on the mainland of Europe, began to sport a great deal invarious directions, and being acted upon here by new conditions, soonassumed under stress of natural selection totally distinct specificforms. (You see, I have quite mastered your best modern scientificvocabulary. ) For instance, there were at first no insects of any sorton the islands; and so those plants which in Europe depended for theirfertilisation upon bees or butterflies had here either to adaptthemselves somehow to the wind as a carrier of their pollen or else todie out for want of crossing. Again, the number of enemies beingreduced to a minimum, these early plants tended to lose variousdefences or protections they had acquired on the mainland against slugsor ants, and so to become different in a corresponding degree fromtheir European ancestors. The consequence was that by the time you menfirst discovered the archipelago no fewer than forty kinds of plantshad so far diverged from the parent forms in Europe or elsewhere thatyour savants considered them at once as distinct species, and set themdown at first as indigenous creations. It amused me immensely. 

For out of these forty plants thirty-four were to my certain knowledgeof European origin. I had seen their seeds brought over by the wind orwaves, and I had watched them gradually altering under stress of thenew conditions into fresh varieties, which in process of time becamedistinct species. Two of the oldest were flowers of the dandelion anddaisy group, provided with feathery seeds which enable them to fly farbefore the carrying breeze; and these two underwent such profoundmodifications in their insular home that the systematic botanists whoat last examined them insisted upon putting each into a new genus, allby itself, invented for the special purpose of their reception. Onealmost equally ancient inhabitant, a sort of harebell, also became inprocess of time extremely unlike any other harebell I had ever seen inany part of my airy wanderings. But the remaining thirty new species orso evolved in the islands by the special circumstances of the group hadvaried so comparatively little from their primitive European ancestors, that they hardly deserved to be called anything more than very distinctand divergent varieties. 

Some five or six plants, however, I noted arrive in my archipelago, notfrom Europe, but from the Canaries or Madeira, whose distant blue peakslay dim on the horizon far to the south-west of us, as I poised inmid-air high above the topmost pinnacle of my wild craggy Pico. Thesekinds, belonging to a much warmer region, soon, as I noticed, underwentconsiderable modification in our cooler climate, and were all of themadjudged distinct species by the learned gentlemen who finally reportedupon my island realm to British science. 

As far as I can recollect, then, the total number of flowering plants Inoted in the islands before the arrival of man was about 200; and ofthese, as I said before, only forty had so far altered in type as to beconsidered at present peculiar to the archipelago. The remainder wereeither comparatively recent arrivals or else had found the conditionsof their new home so like those of the old one from which theymigrated, that comparatively little change took place in their forms orhabits. Of course, just in proportion as the islands got stocked Inoticed that the changes were less and less marked; for each new plant, insect, or bird that established itself successfully tended to make thebalance of nature more similar to the one that obtained in the mainlandopposite, and so decreased the chances of novelty of variation. 

Hence, it struck me that the oldest arrivals were the ones whichaltered most in adaptation to the circumstances, while the newest, finding themselves in comparatively familiar surroundings, had lessoccasion to be selected for strange and curious freaks or sports ofform or colour. 

The peopling of the islands with birds and animals, however, was to meeven a more interesting and engrossing study in natural evolution thanits peopling by plants, shrubs, and trees. I may as well begin, therefore, by telling you at once that no furry or hairy quadruped ofany sort--no mammal, as I understand your men of science call them--wasever stranded alive upon the shores of my islands. For twenty or thirtycenturies indeed, I waited patiently, examining every piece ofdriftwood cast up upon our beaches, in the faint hope that perhaps sometiny mouse or shrew or water-vole might lurk half drowned in somecranny or crevice of the bark or trunk. But it was all in vain. I oughtto have known beforehand that terrestrial animals of the higher typesnever by any chance reach an oceanic island in any part of this planet. The only three specimens of mammals I ever saw tossed up on the beachwere two drowned mice and an unhappy squirrel, all as dead asdoornails, and horribly mauled by the sea and the breakers. Nor did weever get a snake, a lizard, a frog, or a fresh-water fish, whose eggs Iat first fondly supposed might occasionally be transported to us onbits of floating trees or matted turf, torn by floods from thoseprehistoric Lusitanian or African forests. No such luck was ours. Not asingle terrestrial vertebrate of any sort appeared upon our shoresbefore the advent of man with his domestic animals, who played havoc atonce with my interesting experiment. 

It was quite otherwise with the unobtrusive small deer of life--thesnails, and beetles, and flies, and earthworms--and especially with thewinged things: birds, bats, and butterflies. In the very earliest daysof my islands' existence, indeed, a few stray feathered fowls of theair were driven ashore here by violent storms, at a time whenvegetation had not yet begun to clothe the naked pumice and volcanicrock; but these, of course, perished for want of food, as did also afew later arrivals, who came under stress of weather at the period whenonly ferns, lichens, and mosses had as yet obtained a foothold on theyoung archipelago. Sea-birds, of course, soon found out our rocks; butas they live off fish only, they contributed little more than rich bedsof guano to the permanent colonising of the islands. As well as I canremember, the land-snails were the earliest truly terrestrial casualsthat managed to pick up a stray livelihood in these first colonial daysof the archipelago. They came oftenest in the egg, sometimes clingingto water-logged leaves cast up by storms, sometimes hidden in the barkof floating driftwood, and sometimes swimming free on the open ocean. In one case, as I recall to myself well, a swallow, driven off from thePortuguese coast, a little before the Glacial period had begun towhiten the distant mountains of central and northern Europe, fellexhausted at last upon the shore of Terceira. There were no insectsthen for the poor bird to feed upon, so it died of starvation andweariness before the day was out; but a little earth that clung in apellet to one of its feet contained the egg of a land-shell, while theprickly seed of a common Spanish plant was entangled among the wingedfeathers by its hooked awns. The egg hatched out, and became the parentof a large brood of minute snails, which, outliving the cold spell ofthe Ice Age, had developed into a very distinct type in the long periodthat intervened before the advent of man in the islands; while the seedsprang up on the natural manure heap afforded by the swallow's decayingbody, and clinging to the valleys during the Glacial Age on thehill-tops, gave birth in due season to one of the most markedlyindigenous of our Terceira plants. 

Occasionally, too, very minute land-snails would arrive alive on theisland after their long sea-voyage on bits of broken forest-trees--acircumstance which I would perhaps hesitate to mention in mere humansociety were it not that I have been credibly informed your own greatnaturalist, Darwin, tried the experiment himself with one of thebiggest European land-molluscs, the great edible Roman snail, and foundthat it still lived on in vigorous style after immersion in sea-waterfor twenty days. Now, I myself observed that several of these bits ofbroken trees, torn down by floods in heavy storm time from the banks ofSpanish or Portuguese rivers, reached my island in eight or ten daysafter leaving the mainland, and sometimes contained eggs of smallland-snails. But as very long periods often passed without a single newspecies being introduced into the group, any kind that once managed toestablish itself on any of the islands usually remained for agesundisturbed by new arrivals, and so had plenty of opportunity to adaptitself perfectly by natural selection to the new conditions. Theconsequence was, that out of some seventy land-snails now known in theislands, thirty-two had assumed distinct specific features before theadvent of man, while thirty-seven (many of which, I think, I nevernoticed till the introduction of cultivated plants) are common to mygroup with Europe or with the other Atlantic islands. Most of these, Ibelieve, came in with man and his disconcerting agriculture. 

As to the pond and river snails, so far as I could observe, they mostlyreached us later, being conveyed in the egg on the feet of stray wadersor water-birds, which gradually peopled the island after the Glacialepoch. 

Birds and all other flying creatures are now very abundant in all theislands; but I could tell you some curious and interesting facts, too, as to the mode of their arrival and the vicissitudes of theirsettlement. For example, during the age of the Forest Beds in Europe, astray bullfinch was driven out to sea by a violent storm, and perchedat last on a bush at Fayal. I wondered at first whether he would effecta settlement. But at that time no seeds or fruits fit for bullfinchesto eat existed on the islands. Still, as it turned out, this particularbullfinch happened to have in his crop several undigested seeds ofEuropean plants exactly suited to the bullfinch taste; so when he diedon the spot, these seeds, germinating abundantly, gave rise to a wholevalleyful of appropriate plants for bullfinches to feed upon. Now, however, there was no bullfinch to eat them. For a long time, indeed, no other bullfinches arrived at my archipelago. Once, to be sure, a fewhundred years later, a single cock bird did reach the island alone, much exhausted with his journey, and managed to pick up a living forhimself off the seeds introduced by his unhappy predecessor. But as hehad no mate, he died at last, as your lawyers would say, without issue. 

It was a couple of hundred years or so more before I saw a thirdbullfinch--which didn't surprise me, for bullfinches are very woodlandbirds, and non-migratory into the bargain--so that they didn't oftenget blown seaward over the broad Atlantic. At the end of that time, however, I observed one morning a pair of finches, after a heavy storm, drying their poor battered wings upon a shrub in one of the islands. From this solitary pair a new race sprang up, which developed after atime, as I imagined they must, into a distinct species. These localbullfinches now form the only birds peculiar to the islands; and thereason is one well divined by one of your own great naturalists (towhom I mean before I end to make the _amende honorable_). In almost allother cases the birds kept getting reinforced from time to time byothers of their kind blown out to sea accidentally--for only suchspecies were likely to arrive there--and this kept up the purity of theoriginal race, by ensuring a cross every now and again with theEuropean community. But the bullfinches, being the merest casuals, never again to my knowledge were reinforced from the mainland, and sothey have produced at last a special island type, exactly adapted tothe peculiarities of their new habitat. 

You see, there was hardly ever a big storm on land that didn't bring atleast one or two new birds of some sort or other to the islands. Naturally, too, the newcomers landed always on the first shore theycould sight; and so at the present day the greatest number of speciesis found on the two easternmost islands nearest the mainland, whichhave forty kinds of land-birds, while the central islands have butthirty-six, and the western only twenty-nine. It would have been quitedifferent, of course, if the birds came mainly from America with thetrade winds and the Gulf Stream, as I at first anticipated. In thatcase, there would have been most kinds in the westernmost islands, andfewest stragglers in the far eastern. But your own naturalists haverightly seen that the existing distribution necessarily implies theopposite explanation. 

Birds, I early noticed, are always great carriers of fruit-seeds, because they eat the berries, but don't digest the hard little stoneswithin. It was in that way, I fancy, that the Portugal laurel firstcame to my islands, because it has an edible fruit with a very hardseed; and the same reason must account for the presence of the myrtle, with its small blue berry; the laurustinus with its currant-like fruit;the elder-tree, the canary laurel, the local sweet-gale, and thepeculiar juniper. Before these shrubs were introduced thusunconsciously by our feathered guests, there were no fruits on whichberry-eating birds could live; but now they are the only native treesor large bushes on the islands--I mean the only ones not directlyplanted by you mischief-making men, who have entirely spoilt my nicelittle experiment. 

It was much the same with the history of some among the birdsthemselves. Not a few birds of prey, for example, were driven to mylittle archipelago by stress of weather in its very early days; butthey all perished for want of sufficient small quarry to make a livingout of. As soon, however, as the islands had got well stocked withrobins, black-caps, wrens, and wagtails, of European types--as soon asthe chaffinches had established themselves on the seaward plains, andthe canary had learnt to nest without fear among the Portugallaurels--then buzzards, long-eared owls, and common barn-owls, drivenwestward by tempests, began to pick up a decent living on all theislands, and have ever since been permanent residents, to the immenseterror and discomfort of our smaller song-birds. Thus the older thearchipelago got the less chance was there of local variation takingplace to any large degree, because the balance of life each day grewmore closely to resemble that which each species had left behind it inits native European or African mainland. 

I said a little while ago we had no mammal in the islands. In that Iwas not quite strictly correct. I ought to have said, no terrestrialmammal. A little Spanish bat got blown to us once by a roughnor'easter, and took up its abode at once among the caves of ourarchipelago, where it hawks to this day after our flies and beetles. This seemed to me to show very conspicuously the advantage which wingedanimals have in the matter of cosmopolitan dispersion; for while it wasquite impossible for rats, mice, or squirrels to cross the interveningbelt of three hundred leagues of sea, their little winged relation, theflitter-mouse, made the journey across quite safely on his own leatheryvans, and with no greater difficulty than a swallow or a wood-pigeon. 

The insects of my archipelago tell very much the same story as thebirds and the plants. Here, too, winged species have stood at a greatadvantage. To be sure, the earliest butterflies and bees that arrivedin the fern-clad period were starved for want of honey; but as soon asthe valleys began to be thickly tangled with composites, harebells, andsweet-scented myrtle bushes, these nectar-eating insects establishedthemselves successfully, and kept their breed true by occasionalcrosses with fresh arrivals blown to sea afterwards. The development ofthe beetles I watched with far greater interest, as they assumed freshforms much more rapidly under their new conditions of restricted foodand limited enemies. Many kinds I observed which came originally fromEurope, sometimes in the larval state, sometimes in the egg, andsometimes flying as full-grown insects before the blast of the angrytempest. Several of these changed their features rapidly after theirarrival in the islands, producing at first divergent varieties, andfinally, by dint of selection, acting in various ways, through climate, food, or enemies, on these nascent forms, evolving into stable andwell-adapted species. But I noticed three cases where bits of driftwoodthrown up from South America on the western coasts contained the eggsor larvae of American beetles, while several others were driven ashorefrom the Canaries or Madeira; and in one instance even a small insect, belonging to a type now confined to Madagascar, found its way safely bysea to this remote spot, where, being a female with eggs, it succeededin establishing a flourishing colony. I believe, however, that at thetime of its arrival it still existed on the African continent, butbecoming extinct there under stress of competition with higher forms, it now survives only in these two widely separated insular areas. 

It was an endless amusement to me during those long centuries, while Idevoted myself entirely to the task of watching my fauna and floradevelop itself, to look out from day to day for any chance arrival bywind or waves, and to follow the course of its subsequent vicissitudesand evolution. In a great many cases, especially at first, thenew-comer found no niche ready for it in the established order ofthings on the islands, and was fain at last, after a hard struggle, toretire for ever from the unequal contest. But often enough, too, hemade a gallant fight for it, and, adapting himself rapidly to his newenvironment, changed his form and habits with surprising facility. Fornatural selection, I found, is a hard schoolmaster. If you happen tofit your place in the world, you live and thrive, but if you don'thappen to fit it, to the wall with you without quarter. Thus sometimesI would see a small canary beetle quickly take to new food and newmodes of life on my islands under my very eyes, so that in a century orso I judged him myself worthy of the distinction of a separate species;while in another case, I remember, a south European weevil evolvedbefore long into something so wholly different from his former selfthat a systematic entomologist would have been forced to enrol him in adistinct genus. I often wish now that I had kept a regular collectionof all the intermediate forms, to present as an illustrative series toone of your human museums; but in those days, of course, we none of usimagined anybody but ourselves would ever take an interest in theseproblems of the development of life, and we let the chance slide tillit was too late to recover it. 

Naturally, during all these ages changes of other sorts were going onin my islands--elevations and subsidences, separations and reunions, which helped to modify the life of the group considerably. Indeed, volcanic action was constantly at work altering the shapes and sizes ofthe different rocky mountain-tops, and bringing now one, now another, into closer relations than before with its neighbours. Why, as recentlyas 1811 (a date which is so fresh in my memory that I could hardlyforget it) a new island was suddenly formed by submarine eruption offthe coast of St. Michael's, to which the name of Sabrina wasmomentarily given by your human geographers. It was about a mile aroundand 300 feet high; but, consisting as it did of loose cinders only, itwas soon washed away by the force of the waves in that stormy region. Imerely mention it here to show how recently volcanic changes have takenplace in my islands, and how continuously the internal energy has beenat work modifying and re-arranging them. 

Up to the moment of the arrival of man in the archipelago the wholepopulation, animal and vegetable, consisted entirely of these waifs andstrays, blown out to sea from Europe or Africa, and modified more orless on the spot in accordance with the varying needs of their newhome. But the advent of the obtrusive human species spoilt the game atonce for an independent observer. Man immediately introduced oranges, bananas, sweet potatoes, grapes, plums, almonds, and many other treesor shrubs, in which, for selfish reasons, he was personally interested. At the same time he quite unconsciously and unintentionally stocked theislands with a fine vigorous crop of European weeds, so that the numberof kinds of flowering plants included in the modern flora of my littlearchipelago exceeds, I think, by fully one-half that which I rememberbefore the date of the Portuguese occupation. In the same way, besideshis domestic animals, this spoil-sport colonist man brought in histrain accidentally rabbits, weasels, mice, and rats, which now aboundin many parts of the group, so that the islands have now in effect awild mammalian fauna. What is more odd, a small lizard has also gotabout in the walls--not as you would imagine, a native-born Portuguesesubject, but of a kind found only in Madeira and Teneriffe, and, as faras I could make out at the time, it seemed to me to come over withcuttings of Madeira vines for planting at St. Michael's. It was aboutthe same time, I imagine, that eels and gold-fish first got loose fromglass globes into the ponds and water-courses. 

I have forgotten to mention, what you will no doubt yourself long sincehave inferred, that my archipelago is known among human beings inmodern times as the Azores; and also that traces of all these curiousfacts of introduction and modification, which I have detailed here intheir historical order, may still be detected by an acute observer andreasoner in the existing condition of the fauna and flora. Indeed, oneof your own countrymen, Mr. Goodman, has collected all the most salientof these facts in his 'Natural History of the Azores, ' and another ofyour distinguished men of science, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, has givenessentially the same explanations beforehand as those which I have hereventured to lay, from another point of view, before a critical humanaudience. But while Mr. Wallace has arrived at them by a process ofarguing backward from existing facts to prior causes and probableantecedents, it occurred to me, who had enjoyed such exceptionalopportunities of watching the whole process unfold itself from the verybeginning, that a strictly historical account of how I had seen it comeabout, step after step, might possess for some of you a greater directinterest than Mr. Wallace's inferential solution of the self-sameproblem. If, through lapse of memory or inattention to detail at soremote a period, I have set down aught amiss, I sincerely trust youwill be kind enough to forgive me. But this little epic of the peoplingof a single oceanic archipelago by casual strays, which I alone havehad the good fortune to follow through all its episodes, seemed to metoo unique and valuable a chapter in the annals of life to be withheldentirely from the scientific world of your eager, ephemeral, nineteenthcentury humanity. 

 TROPICAL EDUCATION. 

If any one were to ask me (which is highly unlikely) 'In whatuniversity would an intelligent young man do best to study?' I think Ishould be very much inclined indeed to answer offhand, 'In theTropics. '

No doubt this advice sounds on first hearing just a trifle paradoxical;and no doubt, too, the proposed university has certain seriousdrawbacks (like many others) on the various grounds of health, expense, faith, and morals. Senior Proctors are unknown at Honolulu; SelectPreachers don't range as far as the West Coast. But it has alwaysseemed to me, nevertheless, that certain elements of a liberaleducation are to be acquired tropically which can never be acquired ina temperate, still less in an arctic or antarctic academy. This is moreespecially true, I allow, in the particular cases of the biologist andthe sociologist; but it is also true in a somewhat less degree of themere common arts course, and the mere average seeker after liberalculture. Vast aspects of nature and human life exist which can neveradequately be understood aright except in tropical countries; vividside-lights are cast upon our own history and the history of our globewhich can never adequately be appreciated except beneath the searchingand all too garish rays of a tropical sun. 

Whenever I meet a cultivated man who knows his Tropics--and moreparticularly one who has known his Tropics during the formative periodof mental development, say from eighteen to thirty--I feelinstinctively that he possesses certain keys of man and nature, certainclues to the problems of the world we live in, not possessed inanything like the same degree by the mere average annual output ofOxford or of Heidelberg. I feel that we talk like Freemasonstogether--we of the Higher Brotherhood who have worshipped the sun, _præsentiorem deum_, in his own nearer temples. 

Let me begin by positing an extreme parallel. How obviously inadequateis the conception of life enjoyed by the ordinary Laplander or the mostintelligent Fuegian! Suppose even he has attended the mission school ofhis native village, and become learned there in all the learning of theEgyptians, up to the extreme level of the sixth standard, yet howfeeble must be his idea of the planet on which he moves! How much musthis horizon be cabined, cribbed, confined by the frost and snow, thegloom and poverty, of the bare land around him! He lives in a dark coldworld of scrubby vegetation and scant animal life: a world where humanexistence is necessarily preserved only by ceaseless labour and atsevere odds; a world out of which all the noblest and most beautifulliving creatures have been ruthlessly pressed; a world where nothinggreat has been or can be; a world doomed by its mere physicalconditions to eternal poverty, discomfort, and squalor. For greenfields he has snow and reindeer moss: for singing birds and flowers, the ptarmigan and the tundra. How can he ever form any fittingconception of the glory of life--of the means by which animal andvegetable organisms first grew and flourished? How can he frame tohimself any reasonable picture of civilised society, or of the originand development of human faculty and human organisation?

Somewhat the same, though of course in a highly mitigated degree, arethe disadvantages under which the pure temperate education labours, when compared with the education unconsciously drunk in at every poreby an intelligent mind in tropical climates. And fully to understandthis pregnant educational importance of the Tropics we must considerwith ourselves how large a part tropical conditions have borne in thedevelopment of life in general, and of human life and society inparticular. 

The Tropics, we must carefully remember, are the norma of nature: theway things mostly are and always have been. They represent to us thecommon condition of the whole world during by far the greater part ofits entire existence. Not only are they still in the strictest sensethe biological head-quarters: they are also the standard or centraltype by which we must explain all the rest of nature, both in man andbeast, in plant and animal. 

The temperate and arctic worlds, on the other hand, are a mere passingaccident in the history of our planet: a hole-and-corner development; aspecial result of the great Glacial epoch, and of that vast slowsecular cooling which preceded and led up to it, from the beginning ofthe Miocene or Mid-Tertiary period. Our European ideas, poor, harsh, and narrow, are mainly formed among a chilled and stunted fauna andflora, under inclement skies, and in gloomy days, all of which can giveus but a very cramped and faint conception of the joyous exuberance, the teeming vitality, the fierce hand-to-hand conflict, and thevictorious exultation of tropical life in its full free development. 

All through the Primary and Secondary epochs of geology, it is nowpretty certain, hothouse conditions practically prevailed almostwithout a break over the whole world from pole to pole. It may be true, indeed, as Dr. Croli believes (and his reasoning on the point I confessis fairly convincing), that from time to time glacial periods in one orother hemisphere broke in for a while upon the genial warmth thatcharacterised the greater part of those vast and immeasurable primævalæons. But even if that were so--if at long intervals the world for somehours in its cosmical year was chilled and frozen in an insignificantcap at either extremity--these casual episodes in a long story do notinterfere with the general truth of the principle that life as a wholeduring the greater portion of its antique existence has been carried onunder essentially tropical conditions. No matter what geologicalformation we examine, we find everywhere the same tale unfolded inplain inscriptions before our eyes. Take, for example, the giantclub-mosses and luxuriant tree-ferns nature-printed on shales of thecoal age in Britain: and we see in the wild undergrowth of thosepalæozoic forests ample evidence of a warm and almost West Indianclimate among the low basking islets of our northern carboniferousseas. Or take once more the oolitic epoch in England, lithographed onits own mud, with its puzzle-monkeys and its sago-palms, its crocodilesand its deinosaurs, its winged pterodactyls and its whale-like lizards. All these huge creatures and these broad-leaved trees plainly indicatethe existence of a temperature over the whole of Northern Europe almostas warm as that of the Malay Archipelago in our own day. The weatherreport for all the earlier ages stands almost uninterruptedly at SetFair. 

Roughly speaking, indeed, one may say that through the long series ofPrimary and Secondary formations hardly a trace can be found of ice orsnow, autumn or winter, leafless boughs or pinched and starveddeciduous vegetation. Everything is powerful, luxuriant, vivid. Life, as Comus feared, was strangled with its waste fertility. Once, indeed, in the Permian Age, all over the temperate regions, north and south, weget passing indications of what seems very like a glacial epoch, partially comparable to that great glaciation on whose last fringe westill abide to-day. But the Ice Age of the Permian, if such there were, passed away entirely, leaving the world once more warm and fruitful upto the very poles under conditions which we would now describe asessentially tropical. 

It was with the Tertiary period--perhaps, indeed, only with the middlesubdivision of that period--that the gradual cooling of the polar andintermediate regions began. We know from the deposits of the chalkepoch in Greenland that late in Secondary times ferns, magnolias, myrtles, and sago-palms--an Indian or Mexican flora--flourishedexceedingly in what is now the dreariest and most ice-clad region ofthe northern hemisphere. Later still, in the Eocene days, though theplants of Greenland had grown slightly more temperate in type, we stillfind among the fossils, not only oaks, planes, vines, and walnuts, butalso wellingtonias like the big trees of California, Spanish chestnuts, quaint southern salisburias, broad-leaved liquidambars, and Americansassafras. Nay, even in glacier-clad Spitzbergen itself, where thecharacter of the flora already begins to show signs of incipientchilling, we nevertheless see among the Eocene types such plants as theswamp-cyprus of the Carolinas and the wellingtonias of the Far West, together with a rich forest vegetation of poplars, birches, oaks, planes, hazels, walnuts, water-lilies, and irises. As a whole, thisvegetation still bespeaks a climate considerably more genial, mild, andequable than that of modern England. 

It was in this basking world of the chalk and the Eocene that the greatmammalian fauna first took its rise; it was in this easy world offruits and sunshine that the primitive ancestors of man first began towork upwards toward the distinctively human level of the palæolithicperiod. 

But then, in the mid-career of that third day of the geological drama, came a frost--a nipping-frost; and slowly but surely the whole arcticand antarctic worlds were chilled and cramped, degree after degree, bythe gradual on-coming of the Great Ice Age. I am not going to deal herewith either the causes or the extent of that colossal cataclysm; Ishall take all those for granted at present: what we are concerned withnow are the results it left behind--the changes which it wrought onfauna and flora and on human society. Especially is it of importance inthis connection to point out that the Glacial epoch is not yet entirelyfinished--if, indeed, it is ever destined to be finished. We are livingstill on the fringe of the Ice Age, in a cold and cheerless era, thelegacy of the accumulated glaciers of the northern and southernsnow-fields. 

If once that ice were melted off--ah, well, there is much virtue in an_if_. Still, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace seems to suggest somewhere thatthe sun is gradually making inroads even now on those greatglacier-sheets of the northern cap, just as we know he is doing on thesmaller glacier-sheets of Switzerland (most of which are receding), andthat in time perhaps (say in a hundred thousand years or so) warm oceancurrents may once more penetrate to the very poles themselves. That, however, is neither here nor there. The fact remains that we ofNorthern Europe live to-day in a cramped, chilled, contracted world; aworld from which all the larger, fiercer, and grander types have eitherbeen killed off or driven south; a world which stands to the full andvigorous world of the Eocene and Miocene periods in somewhat the samerelation as Lapland stands to-day to Italy or the Riviera. 

This being so, it naturally results that if we want really tounderstand the history of life, its origin and its episodes, we mustturn nowadays to that part of our planet which still most nearlypreserves the original conditions--that is to say, the Tropics. And ithas always seemed to me, both _à priori_ and _à posteriori_, that theTropics on this account do really possess for every one of us a vastand for the most part unrecognised educational importance. 

I say 'for every one of us, ' of deliberate design. I don't mean merelyfor the biologist, though to him, no doubt, their value in this respectis greatest of all. Indeed, I doubt whether the very ideas of thestruggle for life, natural selection, the survival of the fittest, would ever have occurred at all to the stay-at-home naturalists of theLinnæan epoch. It was in the depths of Brazilian forests, or under thebroad shade of East Indian palms, that those fertile conceptions firstflashed independently upon two southern explorers. It is verynoteworthy indeed that all the biologists who have done most torevolutionise the science of life in our own day--Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, Bates, Fritz Müller, and Belt--have without exception formedtheir notions of the plant and animal world during tropical travels inearly life. No one can read the 'Voyage of the _Beagle_, ' the'Naturalist on the Amazons, ' or the 'Malay Archipelago' without feelingat every page how profoundly the facts of tropical nature hadpenetrated and modified their authors' minds. On the other hand, it iswell worth while to notice that the formal opposition to the new andmore expansive evolutionary views came mainly from the museum andlaboratory type of naturalists in London and Paris, the officialexponents of dry bones, who knew nature only through books andpreserved specimens, or through her impoverished and far less plasticdevelopments in northern lands. The battle of organic evolution hasbeen waged by the Darwins, the Huxleys, and the Müllers on the onehand, against the Cuviers, the Owens, and the Virchows on the other. 

Still, it is not only in biology, as I said just now, that a taste ofthe Tropics in early life exerts a marked widening and philosophicinfluence upon a man's whole mental horizon. In ten thousand ways, inthat great tropical university, men feel themselves in closer touchthan elsewhere with the ultimate facts and truths of nature. I don'tknow whether it is all fancy and preconceived opinion, but I oftenimagine when I talk with new-met men that I can detect a certaindifference in tone and feeling at first sight between those who haveand those who have not passed the Tropical Tripos. In the Tropics, inshort, we seem to get down to the very roots of things. Thousands ofquestions, social, political, economical, ethical, present themselvesat once in new and more engagingly simple aspects. Difficulties vanish, distinctions disappear, conventions fade, clothes are reduced to theirleast common measure, man stands forth in his native nakedness. Thingsthat in the North we had come to regard as inevitable--garments, firing, income tax, morality--evaporate or simplify themselves withinstructive ease and phantasmagoric readiness. Malthus and the foodquestion assume fresh forms, as in dissolving views, before our veryeyes. How are slums conceivable or East Ends possible where every mancan plant his own yam and cocoa-nut, and reap their fruitfour-hundred-fold? How can Mrs. Grundy thrive where every woman mayrear her own ten children on her ten-rood plot without aid orassistance from their indeterminate fathers? What need of carpentrywhere a few bamboos, cut down at random, can be fastened together withthongs into a comfortable chair? What use of pottery where calabasheshang on every tree, and cocoa-nuts, with the water fresh and purewithin, supply at once the cup, and the filter, and the Apollinariswithin?

Of course I don't mean to assert, either, that this tropical universitywill in itself suffice for all the needs of educated or rather ofeducable men. It must be taken, _bien entendu_, as a supplementarycourse to the Literæ Humaniores. There are things which can only belearnt in the crowded haunts and cities of men--in London, Paris, NewYork, Vienna. There are things which can only be learnt in the centresof culture or of artistic handicraft--in Oxford, Munich, Florence, Venice, Rome. There is only one Grand Canal and only one Pitti Palace. We must have Shakespeare, Homer, Catullus, Dante; we must have Phidias, Fra Angelico, Rafael, Mendelssohn; we must have Aristotle, Newton, Laplace, Spencer. But after all these, and before all these, there issomething more left to learn. Having first read them, we must readourselves out of them. We must forget all this formal modern life; wemust break away from this cramped, cold, northern world; we must findourselves face to face at last, in Pacific isles or African forests, with the underlying truths of simple naked nature. For that, in itsperfection, we must go to the Tropics; and there, we shall learn andunlearn much, coming back, no doubt, with shattered faiths and brokengods, and strangely disconcerted European prejudices, but looking outupon life with a new outlook, an outlook undimmed by ten thousandpreconceptions which hem in the vision and obstruct the view of themere temperately educated. 

Nor is it only on the _élite_ of the world that this tropical traininghas in its own way a widening influence. It is good, of course, for ourGaltons to have seen South Africa; good for our Tylors to have studiedMexico; good for our Hookers to have numbered the rhododendrons anddeodars of the Himalayas. I sometimes fancy, even, that in the works ofour very greatest stay-at-home thinkers on anthropological orsociological subjects, I detect here and there a certain formalist andschematic note which betrays the want of first-hand acquaintance withthe plastic and expansive nature of tropical society. The beliefs andrelations of the actual savage have not quite that definiteness of formand expression which our University Professors would fain assign tothem. But apart from the widening influence of the Tropics on thesepicked minds, there is a widening influence exerted insensibly on thevery planters or merchants, the rank and file of European settlers, which can hardly fail to impress all those who have lived amongst them. The cramping effect of the winter cold and the artificial life is allremoved. Men live in a freer, wider, warmer air; their doors andwindows stand open day and night; the scent of flowers and the hum ofinsects blow in upon them with every breeze; their brother man andsister woman are more patent in every action to their eyes; the worldshows itself more frankly; it has fewer secrets, and readiersympathies. I don't mean to say the result is all gain. Far from it. There are evils inherent in tropical life which, as a noble lordremarks of nature generally, "no preacher can heal. " But viewed aseducation, like Saint-Simon's thieving, it is all valuable. I shouldthink most men who have once passed through a tropical experience wouldno more wish that full chapter blotted out of their lives than theywould consent to lose their university culture, their Continentaltravel, or their literary, scientific, or artistic education. 

And what are the elements of this tropical curriculum which give itsuch immense educational value? I think they are manifold. A few onlymay be selected as of typical importance. 

In the first place, because first in order of realisation, there is itsvalue as a mental _bouleversement_, a revolution in ideas, a sort ofmoral and intellectual cold shower-bath, a nervous shock to the systemgenerally. The patient or pupil gets so thoroughly upset in all hispreconceived ideas; he finds all round him a life so different from thelife to which he has been accustomed in colder regions, that he wakesup suddenly, rubs his eyes hard, and begins to look about him for somegeneral explanation of the world he lives in. It is good for theordinary man to get thus unceremoniously upset. Take the average youngintelligence of the London streets, with its glib ideas already formedfrom supply and demand in a civilised country, where soil isappropriated, and classes distinct, and commodities drop as it werefrom the clouds upon the middle-class breakfast-table--take such anintelligence, self-satisfied and empty, and place its possessor all atonce in a new environment, where everything material, mental, and moralseems topsy-turvy, where life is real and morals are rudimentary--andunless he is a very particular fool indeed, what a lot you must reallygive that blithe new-comer to turn over and think about! The sun thatshifts now north, now south of him; the seasons that go by foursinstead of twos; the trees that blossom and bear fruit from January toDecember, with no apparent regard for the calendar months as by lawestablished; the black, brown, or yellow people, who know not his creedor his social code; the castes and cross-divisions that puzzle andsurprise him; the pride and the scruples, deeper than those ofcivilised life, but that nevertheless run counter to his own; theeconomic conditions that defy his preconceptions; the virtues and thevices that equally rub him up the wrong way--all these things arehighly conducive to the production of that first substratum ofphilosophic thinking, a Socratic attitude of supreme ignorance, a pureCartesian frame of universal doubt. 

Then again there is the marvellous exuberance and novelty of the faunaand flora. And this once more has something better for us all than merespecialist interest. Sugar and ginger grow for all alike. For we mustremember that not only do the Tropics represent the vastly greaterportion of the world's past: they also represent the vastly greaterportion of the world's present. By far the larger part of the landsurface of the earth is tropical or subtropical; the temperate andarctic regions make up but a minor and unimportant fraction of the soilof our planet. And if we include the sea as well, this truth becomeseven more strikingly evident: the Tropics are even now the rule oflife; the colder regions are but an abnormal and outlying eccentricityof nature. Yet it is from this starved and dwarfed and impoverishednorthern area that most of us have formed our views of life, to thetotal exclusion of the wider, richer, more varied world that calls forour admiration in tropical latitudes. 

Insensibly this richness and vividness of nature all around one, on afirst visit to the Tropics, sinks into one's mind, and producesprofound, though at first unconscious, modifications in one's wholemode of regarding man and his universe. Especially is this the case inearly life, when the character is still plastic and the eye still keen:pictures are formed in that brilliant sunshine and under those dimarches of hot grey sky that photograph themselves for ever on thelasting tablets of the human memory. John Stuart Mill in hisAutobiography dwells lovingly, I remember, on the profound effectproduced on himself by his childish visits to Jeremy Bentham at FordAbbey in Dorsetshire, on the delightful sense of space and freedom andgenerous expansion given to his mind by the mere act of living andmoving in those stately halls and wide airy gardens. Every universityman must look back with pleasure of somewhat the same sort to the freebreezy memories of the quadrangles and common rooms of Christ Church orof Trinity. But in the tropical university everybody passes his time inarcades of Greek or Pompeian airiness: the palm-trees wave and whisperaround his head as he sits for coolness on his wide verandah; thehumming-birds dart from flower to flower on the delicate bouquets thatcrowd his drawing-room. I knew a lady who made a capital collection ofbutterflies and moths at her own dinner-table by simply impounding inpaper boxes the insects that flitted about the lamp at dessert. Why, ifit comes to that, the very bread itself comprises generally a wholeentomological cabinet, and contains in fragments the _disjecta membra_of specimens enough to stock entire glass cases at severe SouthKensington. How's that for an inducement to study life where it isrichest and most abundant in its native starting-place?

But above all in educational importance I rank the advantage of seeinghuman nature in its primitive surroundings, far from the squalid andchilly influences of the tail-end of the Glacial epoch. I admit at oncethat cold has done much, exceeding much, for human development--hasbeen the mother of civilisation in somewhat the same sense thatnecessity has been the mother of invention. To it, no doubt, we owe toa great extent, in varying stages, clothing, the house, fire, thesteam-engine. Yet none the less is it true that the first levels ofsociety must needs have been passed under essentially tropicalconditions, and that nascent civilisation spread but slowly northward, from Egypt and Asia, through Greece and Italy, to the cloudy regionswhere its chief centres are at present domiciled under canopies of coalsmoke. And even to-day the sight of the tropics, green and luxuriant, brings us into touch at once with earlier ideas and habits of therace--makes us more able not only to understand, but also to sympathisewith, our ancient ancestors of the naked-and-not-ashamed era ofculture. Views formed exclusively in the North tend too much to imitatethe reduced gentlewoman's outlook upon life; views formed in theTropics correct this refractive influence by a certain genial andtolerant virile expansion, not to be learned at the Common, Clapham. 

To one whose economic pendulum has hitherto oscillated between selfishluxury in Mayfair and squalid poverty in Seven Dials, there is indeed aworld of novelty in the first view of the tropical poverty that is notsqualid but contentedly luxurious--of the dusky father with his wife orwives (the mere number is a detail) sprawling at full length, halfclad, in the eye of the sun, before the palm-thatched hut, while thefat black babies and the fat black little pigs wallow together almostindistinguishably in the dust at his side, just out of reach of themuscular foot that might otherwise of pure wantonness molest them. Whata flood of light it all casts upon the future possibilities of society, that leisured, cultureless household, on whose garden-plot yam orbread-fruit or bananas or sweet potatoes can be grown in sufficientquantity to support the family without more labour than in Englandwould pay for its kitchen coals; where the hut is but a shelter fromrain, or a bed-curtain for night, and where the untaxed sun suppliesthe place of a drawing-room fire all the year round, and warms thewater for the baby's bath at nothing the gallon! If there is any manwho doesn't sympathise with his dusky brother when he sees him thus athome in his airy palace--any man who doesn't fraternise closely withhis kind when thus brought face to face with our primitive existence, Idon't envy him his stern and wild Caledonian ethics. The beach-comberinstinct should be strong in all sane minds. Or if that blunt way ofputting it perchance offend the weaker brethren, let us say rather, thespirit of the Lotus-eaters. For the man who doesn't want to eat of theLotus just once in his life has become too civilised: the iron of theGradgrind era of universal competition and payment by results hasentered to deeply into his sordid soul. He wants a course of Egypt andTahiti. 

Oh, yes; I know what you are going to object, and I grant it at once:the influence of the Tropics is by no means an ascetic one. They, tendrather to encourage a certain genial and friendly tolerance of allpossible human forms of society--even the lowest. They are essentiallydemocratic, not to say socialistic and revolutionary in tone. Bybringing us all down to the underlying verities of life, apart from itsconventions, they beget perhaps a somewhat hasty impatience of Courtdress and the Lord Chamberlain's regulations. But, _per contra_, theyteach us to feel that every man, whether black, brown, or white, isvery human, and every woman and child, if possible, even a trifle moreso. Wicked as it all is, there is yet in tropical political economymore of the Gospel according to St. John, and less of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus, than in any orthodox political economy prescribedby examiners for the University of London. It is something to see aworld where ceaseless toil is not the necessary and inevitable lot ofall who don't pay income tax on a thousand a year, even if Boardschools are unknown and quadratic equations a vanishing quantity. It issomething to see a stick of sugar-cane protruding from the mouth ofevery child, and oranges retailed at twelve for a ha'penny. It issomething to know how the vast majority of the human race still liveand move and have their being, and to feel that after all their mode oflife, though lacking in Greek iambics, wallpapers, and the _SaturdayReview_, yet appeals in its own beach-comberish way to some of one'sinmost and deepest yearnings. The hibiscus that flames before thewattled hut, the parrot that chatters from the green and goldenmango-tree, the lithe, healthy figures of the children in the stream, are some compensation for the lack of London mud, London fog, andLondon illustrations of practical Christianity in the Isle of Dogs andthe Bermondsey purlieus. I don't know whether I am knocking the lastnail into the completed coffin of my own contention, but I believeevery right-minded man returns from the Tropics a good deal more of aCommunist than when he went there. 

One word of explanation to prevent mistake. I am not myself, likeKingsley or Wallace, an enthusiastic tropicist. On the contrary, viewedas a place of permanent residence, I don't at all like the Tropics tolive in. I am pleading here only for their educational value, in smalldoses. Spending two or three years there in the heyday of life is verymuch like reading Herodotus--a thing one is glad one had once to do, but one would never willingly do again for any money. We northerncreatures are remote products of the Great Ice Age, and by this time, like Polar bears, we have grown adapted to our glacial environment. Allthe more, therefore, is it a useful shaking-up for us to gettransported bodily from our cramped and poverty-stricken northernslums, just once in our life, to the palms and temples of the South, the lands where the human body is a hardy plant, not a frail exotic. Wecome back to our chilly home among the fogs and bogs with widerprojects for the thawing down of the social ice-heap, and theintroduction of the bread-fruit-tree and the currant-bun-bush into theremotest wilds of the borough of Hackney. I am not even quite sure thattropical experience doesn't predispose us somewhat in favour ofplanting the sweet potato instead of grazing battering-rams in theuplands of Connemara. But hush; I hear an editorial frown. No more ofthis heresy. 

 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 

Of course, you know my friend the squirting cucumber. If you don't, that can be only because you've never looked in the right place to findhim. On all waste ground outside most southern cities--Nice, Cannes, Florence: Rome, Algiers, Granada: Athens, Palermo, Tunis, where youwill--the soil is thickly covered by dark trailing vines which bear ontheir branches a queer hairy green fruit, much like a common cucumberat that early stage of its existence when we know it best in thecommercial form of pickled gherkins. As long as you don't interferewith them, these hairy green fruits do nothing out of the common in theway of personal aggressiveness. Like the model young lady of the bookson etiquette, they don't speak unless they're spoken to. But ifperadventure you chance to brush up against the plant accidentally, oryou irritate it of set purpose with your foot or your cane, then, asMr. Rider Haggard would say, 'a strange thing happens': off jumps thelittle green fruit with a startling bounce, and scatters its juice andpulp and seeds explosively through a hole in the end where the stemjoined on to it. The entire central part of the cucumber, in short(answering to the seeds and pulp of a ripe melon), squirts outelastically through the breach in the outer wall, leaving the hollowshell behind as a mere empty windbag. 

Naturally, the squirting cucumber knows its own business best, and isnot without sufficient reasons of its own for this strange and, to someextent, unmannerly behaviour. By its queer trick of squirting, itmanages to kill at least two birds with one stone. For, in the firstplace, the sudden elastic jump of the fruit frightens away browsinganimals, such as goats and cattle. Those meditative ruminants arelittle accustomed to finding shrubs or plants take the aggressiveagainst them; and when they see a fruit that quite literally flies intheir faces of its own accord, they hesitate to attack the uncanny vinewhich bristles with such magical and almost miraculous defences. Moreover, the juice of the squirting cucumber is bitter and nauseous, and if it gets into the eyes or nostrils of man or beast, it impressesitself on the memory by stinging like red pepper. So the trick ofsquirting serves in a double way as a protection to the plant againstthe attacks of herbivorous animals and other enemies. 

But that's not all. Even when no enemy is near, the ripe fruits at lastdrop off of themselves, and scatter their seeds elastically in everydirection. This they do simply in order to disseminate their kind innew and unoccupied spots, where the seedlings will root and find anopening in life for themselves. Observe, indeed, that the very word'disseminate' implies a general vague recognition of this principle ofplant-life on the part of humanity. It means, etymologically, toscatter seed; and it points to the fact that everywhere in nature seedsare scattered broadcast, infinite pains being taken by the mother-plantfor their general diffusion over wide areas of woodland, plain, orprairie. 

Let us take as examples a single little set of instances, familiar toeverybody, but far commoner in the world at large than the inhabitantsof towns are at all aware of: I mean, the winged seeds, that fly aboutfreely in the air by means of feathery hairs or gossamer, likethistle-down and dandelion. Of these winged types we have many hundredvarieties in England alone. All the willow-herbs, for example, havesuch feathery seeds (or rather fruits) to help them on their waythrough life; and one kind, the beautiful pink rose-bay, flies about soreadily, and over such wide spaces of open country, that the plant isknown to farmers in America as fireweed, because it always springs upat once over whole square miles of charred and smoking soil after everydevastating forest fire. It travels fast, for it travels like Ariel. Inmuch the same way, the coltsfoot grows on all new English railwaybanks, because its winged seeds are wafted everywhere in myriads on thewinds of March. All the willows and poplars have also winged seeds: sohave the whole vast tribe of hawkweeds, groundsels, ragworts, thistles, fleabanes, cat's-ears, dandelions, and lettuces. Indeed, one may sayroughly, there are very few plants of any size or importance in theeconomy of nature which don't deliberately provide, in one way oranother, for the dispersal and dissemination of their fruits orseedlings. 

Why is this? Why isn't the plant content just to let its grains orberries drop quietly on to the soil beneath, and there shift forthemselves as best they may on their own resources?

The answer is a more profound one than you would at first imagine. Plants discovered the grand principle of the rotation of crops longbefore man did. The farmer now knows that if he sows wheat or turnipstoo many years running on the same plot, he 'exhausts the soil, ' as wesay--deprives it of certain special mineral or animal constituentsneedful for that particular crop, and makes the growth of the plant, therefore, feeble or even impossible. To avoid this misfortune, he letsthe land lie fallow, or varies his crops from year to year according toa regular and deliberate cycle. Well, natural selection forced the samediscovery upon the plants themselves long before the farmer had dreamedof its existence. For plants, being, in the strictest sense, 'rooted tothe spot, ' absolutely require that all their needs should be suppliedquite locally. Hence, from the very beginning, those plants whichscattered their seeds widest throve the best; while those which merelydropped them on the ground under their own shadow, and on soilexhausted by their own previous demands upon it, fared ill in thestruggle for life against their more discursive competitors. The resulthas been that in the long run few species have survived, except thosewhich in one way or another arranged beforehand for the dispersal oftheir seeds and fruits over fresh and unoccupied areas of plain orhillside. 

I don't, of course, by any means intend to assert that seeds always doit by the simple device of wings or feathery projections. Every varietyof plan or dodge or expedient has been adopted in turn to secure theself-same end; and provided only it succeeds in securing it, anyvariety of them all is equally satisfactory. One might parallel it withthe case of hatching birds' eggs. Most birds sit upon their eggsthemselves, and supply the necessary warmth from their own bodies. Butany alternative plan that attains the same end does just as well. Thefelonious cuckoo drops her foundlings unawares in another bird's nest:the ostrich trusts her unhatched offspring to the heat of the burningdesert sand: and the Australian brush-turkeys, with vicarious maternalinstinct, collect great mounds of decaying and fermenting leaves andrubbish, in which they deposit their eggs to be artificially incubated, as it were, by the slow heat generated in the process of putrefaction. Just in the same way, we shall see in the case of seeds that any methodof dispersion will serve the plant's purpose equally well, providedonly it succeeds in carrying a few of the young seedlings to a properplace in which they may start fair at last in the struggle forexistence. 

As in the case of the fertilization of flowers, so in that of thedispersal of seeds, there are two main ways in which the work iseffected--by animals and by wind-power. I will not insult theintelligence of the reader at the present time of day by telling himthat pollen is usually transferred from blossom to blossom in one orother of these two chief ways--it is carried on the heads or bodies ofbees and other honey-seeking insects, or else it is wafted on the wingsof the wind to the sensitive surface of a sister-flower. So, too, seedsare for the most part either dispersed by animals or blown about by thebreezes of heaven to new situations. These are the two most obviousmeans of locomotion provided by nature; and it is curious to see thatthey have both been utilized almost equally by plants, alike for theirpollen and their seeds, just as they have been utilized by man for hisown purposes on sea or land, in ship, or windmill, or pack-horse, orcarriage. 

There are two ways in which animals may be employed to disperseseeds--voluntarily and involuntarily. They may be compelled to carrythem against their wills: or they may be bribed and cajoled andflattered into doing the plant's work for it in return for somesubstantial advantage or benefit the plant confers upon them. The firstplan is the one adopted by burrs and cleavers. These adhesive fruitsare like the man who buttonholes you and won't be shaken off: they areprovided with little curved hooks or bent and barbed hairs which catchupon the wool of sheep, the coat of cattle, or the nether integumentsof wayfaring humanity, and can't be got rid of without some littledifficulty. Most of them, you will find on examination, belonged toconfirmed hedgerow or woodside plants: they grow among bushes or lowscrub, and thickets of gorse or bramble. Now, to such plants as these, it is obviously useful to have adhesive fruits and seeds: for whensheep or other animals get them caught in their coats, they carry themaway to other bushy spots, and there, to get rid of the annoyancecaused by the foreign body, scratch them off at once against someholly-bush or blackthorn. You may often find seeds of this typesticking on thorns as the nucleus of a little matted mass of wool, soleft by the sheep in the very spots best adapted for the free growth oftheir vigorous seedlings. 

Even among plants which trust to the involuntary services of animals indispersing their seeds, a great many varieties of detail may beobserved on close inspection. For example, in hound's-tongue andgoose-grass, two of the best-known instances among our common Englishweeds, each little nut is covered with many small hooks, which make itcatch on firmly by several points of attachment to passing animals. These are the kinds we human beings of either sex oftenest findclinging to our skirts or trousers after a walk in a rabbit-warren. Butin herb-bennet and avens each nut has a single long awn, crooked nearthe middle with a very peculiar S-shaped joint, which effectuallycatches on to the wool or hair, but drops at the elbow after a shortperiod of withering. Sometimes, too, the whole fruit is provided withprehensile hooks, while sometimes it is rather the individual seedsthemselves that are so accommodated. Oddest of all is the plan followedby the common burdock. Here, an involucre or common cup-shapedreceptacle of hooked bracts surrounds an entire head of purple tubularflowers, and each of these flowers produces in time a distinct fruit;but the hooked involucre contains the whole compound mass, and, beingpulled off bodily by a stray sheep or dog, effects the transference ofthe composite lot at once to some fitting place for their germination. 

Those plants, on the other hand, which depend rather, like Londonhospitals, upon the voluntary system, produce that very familiar formof edible capsule which we commonly call in the restricted sense afruit or berry. In such cases, the seed-vessel is usually swollen andpulpy: it is stored with sweet juices to attract the birds or otheranimal allies, and it is brightly coloured so as to advertise to theireyes the presence of the alluring sugary foodstuff. These instances, however, are now so familiar to everybody that I won't dwell upon themat any length. Even the degenerate schoolboy of the present day, muchas he has declined from the high standard set forth by Macaulay, knowsall about the way the actual seed itself is covered (as in the plum orthe cherry) by a hard stony coat which 'resists the action of thegastric juice' (so physiologists put it, with their usual frankness), and thus passes undigested through the body of its swallower. All Iwill do here, therefore, is to note very briefly that some ediblefruits, like the two just mentioned, as well as the apricot, the peach, the nectarine, and the mango, consist of a single seed with its outercovering; in others, as in the raspberry, the blackberry, thecloudberry, and the dew-berry, many seeds are massed together, eachwith a separate edible pulp; in yet others, as in the gooseberry, thecurrant, the grape, and the whortleberry, several seeds are embeddedwithin the fruit in a common pulpy mass; and in others again, as in theapple, pear, quince, and medlar, they are surrounded by a quantity ofspongy edible flesh. Indeed, the variety that prevails among fruits inthis respect almost defies classification: for sometimes, as in themulberry, the separate little fruits of several distinct flowers growtogether at last into a common berry: sometimes, as in a fig, thegeneral flower-stalk of several tiny one-seeded blossoms forms theedible part: and sometimes, as in the strawberry, the true little nutsor fruits appear as mere specks or dots on the bloated surface of theswollen and overgrown stem, which forms the luscious morsel dear to thehuman palate. 

Yet in every case it is interesting to observe that, while the seedswhich depend for dispersion upon the breeze are easily detached fromthe parent plant and blown about by every wind of doctrine, the seedsor fruits which depend for their dispersion upon birds or animalsalways, on the contrary, hang on to their native boughs to the verylast, till some unconscious friend pecks them off and devours them. Haws, rose-hips, and holly-berries will wither and wilt on the tree inmild winters, because they can't drop off of themselves without the aidof birds, while the birds are too well supplied with other food to carefor them. One of the strangest cases of all, however, is that of themistletoe, which, living parasitically upon the forest-boughs andapple-trees, would of course be utterly lost if its berries droppedtheir seeds on to the ground beneath it. To avoid such a misfortune, the mistletoe berries are filled with an exceedingly viscid and stickypulp, surrounding the hard little nut-like seeds: and this pulp makesthe seeds cling to the bills and feet of various birds which feed uponthe fruit, but most particularly of the missel thrush, who derives hiscommon English name from his devotion to the mistletoe. The birds thencarry them away unwittingly to some neighbouring tree, and rub themoff, when they get uncomfortable, against a forked branch--the exactspots that best suits the young mistletoe for sprouting in. Man, inturn, makes use of the sticky pulp for the manufacture of bird-lime, and so employs against the birds the very qualities which the plantintended as a bribe for their kindly services. 

Among seeds that trust for their disposal to the wind, the commonest, simplest, and least evolved type is that of the ordinary capsule, as inthe poppies and campions. At first sight, to be sure, a casual observermight suppose there existed in these cases no recognisable device atall for the dissemination of the seedlings. But you and I, mostexcellent and discreet reader, are emphatically _not_, of course, merecasual observers. _We_ look close, and go to the very root of things. And when we do so, we see for ourselves at once that almost allcapsules open--where? why, at the top, so that the seeds can only beshaken out when there is a high enough wind blowing to sway the stemsto and fro with some violence, and scatter the small black grainsinside to a considerable distance. Furthermore, in many instances, ofwhich the common poppy-head is an excellent example, the capsule opensby lateral pores at the top of a flat head--a further precaution whichallows the seeds to get out only by a few at a time, after a distinctjerk, and so scatters them pretty evenly, with different winds, over awide circular space around the mother plant. Experiment will show howthis simple dodge works. Try to shake out the poppy-seed from a ripepoppy-head on the plant as it grows, without breaking the stem orbending it unnaturally, and you will easily see how much force of windis required in order to put this unobtrusive but very effectivemechanism into working order. 

The devices of this character employed by various plants for thedispersal of seeds even in ordinary dry capsules are far too numerousfor me to describe in full detail, though they form a delightfulsubject for individual study in any small suburban garden. I will onlygive one more illustrative case, just to show the sort of point anamateur should always be on the look-out for. There is an extremelycommon, though inconspicuous, English weed, the mouse-ear chickweed, found everywhere in flower-beds or grass-plots, however small, andnoticeable for its quaint little horn-shaped capsules. These have avery odd sort of twist or cock-up in the middle, just above the partwhere the seeds lie; and they open at the top by ten small teeth, pointed obliquely outward for no apparent reason. Yet every point has ameaning of its own for all that. The plant is one that lies ratherclose upon the ground; and the effect of this twist in the capsule isthat the seeds, which are relatively heavy, and well stored withnutriment, can never get out at all, unless a very strong wind isblowing, which sweeps over the herbage in long quick waves, and carrieseverything it shakes out for great distances before it. So much designhave even the smallest weeds put into the mechanism for the dispersionof their precious seeds, the hope of their race and the earnest oftheir future!

Artillery marks a higher stage than the sling and the stone. Just so, in many plants, a step higher in the evolutionary scale as regards themethod of dispersion, the capsule itself bursts open explosively, andscatters its contents to the four winds of heaven. Such plants may besaid to discharge their grains on the principle of the bow and arrow. The balsam is a familiar example of this startling mode of moving tofresh fields and pastures new: its capsule consists of five longstraight valves, which break asunder elastically the moment they aretouched, when fully ripe, and shed their seeds on all sides, like somany small bombshells. Our friend the squirting cucumber, which servedas the prime text for this present discourse, falls into somewhat thesame category, though in other ways it rather resembles the truesucculent fruits, and belongs, indeed, to the same family as the melon, the gourd, the pumpkin, and the vegetable-marrow, almost all of whichare edible and in every way fruit-like. Among English weeds, the littlebittercress that grows on dry walls and hedge-banks forms an excellentexample of the same device. Village children love to touch the long, ripe, brown capsules on the top with one timid finger, and then jumpaway, half laughing, half terrified, when the mild-looking little plantgoes off suddenly with a small bang and shoots its grains like acatapult point-blank in their faces. 

It is in the tropics, however, that these elastic fruits reach theirhighest development. There they have to fight, not merely against suchsmall fry as robins, squirrels, and harvest-mice, but against theaggressive parrot, the hard-billed toucan, the persistent lemur, andthe inquisitive monkey. Moreover, the elastic fruits of the tropicsgrow often on spreading forest trees, and must therefore shed theirseeds to immense distances if they are to reach comparatively virginsoil, unexhausted by the deep-set roots of the mother trunk. Under suchexceptional circumstances, the tropical examples of these elasticcapsules are by no means mere toys to be lightly played with by babesand sucklings. The sand-box tree of the West Indies has large roundfruits, containing seeds about as big as an English horsebean; and thecapsule explodes, when ripe, with a detonation like a pistol, scattering its contents with as much violence as a shot from anair-gun. It is dangerous to go too near these natural batteries duringthe shooting season. A blow in the eye from one would blind a maninstantly. I well remember the very first night I spent in my own housein Jamaica, where I went to live shortly after the repression of'Governor Eyre's rebellion, ' as everybody calls it locally. All nightlong I heard somebody, as I thought, practising with a revolver in myown back garden: a sound which somewhat alarmed me under those veryunstable social conditions. An earthquake about midnight, it is true, diverted my attention temporarily from the recurring shots, but didn'tproduce the slightest effect upon the supposed rebel's devotion to theimprovement of his marksmanship. When morning dawned, however, I foundit was only a sand-box tree, and that the shots were nothing more thanthe explosions of the capsules. As to the wonderful tales told aboutthe Brazilian cannon-ball tree, I cannot personally endorse them fromoriginal observation, and will not stain this veracious page with anysecond-hand quotations from the strange stories of modern scientificMunchausens. 

Still higher in the evolutionary scale than the elastic fruits arethose airy species which have taken to themselves wings like the eagle, and soar forth upon the free breeze in search of what the Americansdescribe as 'fresh locations. ' Of this class the simplest type may beseen in those forest-trees, like the maple and the sycamore, whosefruits are flattened out into long expansions or parachutes, technically known as 'keys, ' by whose aid they flutter down obliquelyto the ground at a considerable distance. The keys of the sycamore, totake a single instance, when detached from the tree in autumn, fallspirally through the air owing to the twist of the winged arm, and arecarried so far that, as every gardener knows, young sycamore trees rankamong the commonest weeds among our plots and flower-beds. A curiousvariant upon this type is presented by the lime, or linden, whosefruits are in themselves small wingless nuts; but they are born inclusters upon a common stalk, which is winged on either side by a largemembranous bract. When the nuts are ripe, the whole cluster detachesitself in a body from the branch, and flutters away before the breezeby means of the common parachute, to some spot a hundred yards or more, where the wind chances to land it. 

The topmost place of all in the hierarchy of seed life, it seems to me, is taken by the feathery fruits and seeds which float freely hither andthither wherever the wind may bear them. An immense number of the veryhighest plants--the aristocrats of the vegetable kingdom, such as thelordly composites, those ultimate products of plant evolution--possesssuch floating feathery seeds; though here, again, the varieties ofdetail are too infinite for rapid or popular classification. Indeed, among the composites alone--the thistle and dandelion tribe with downyfruits--I can reckon up more than a hundred and fifty distinctvariations of plan among the winged seeds known to me in various partsof Europe. But if I am strong, I am merciful: I will let the public offwith a hundred and forty-eight of them. My two exceptions shall beJohn-go-to-bed-at-noon and the hairy hawkweed, both of them commonEnglish meadow-plants. The first, and more quaintly named, of the twohas little ribbed fruits that end in a long and narrow beak, supportinga radial rib-work of spokes like the frame of an umbrella; and from ribto rib of this framework stretch feathery cross-pieces, continuous allround, so as to make of the whole mechanism a perfect circularparachute, resembling somewhat the web of a geometrical spider. But thehairy hawkweed is still more cunning in its generation; for that cleverand cautious weed produces its seeds or fruits in clustered heads, ofwhich the central ones are winged, while the outer are heavy, squat, and wingless. Thus does the plant make the best of all chances that mayhappen to open before it: if one lot goes far and fares but ill, theother is pretty sure to score a bull's-eye. 

These are only a few selected examples of the infinite dodges employedby enlightened herbs and shrubs to propagate their scions in foreignparts. Many more, equally interesting, must be left undescribed. Onlyfor a single case more can I still find room--that of the subterraneanclover, which has been driven by its numerous enemies to take refuge atlast in a very remarkable and almost unique mode, of protecting itsoffspring. This particular kind of clover affects smooth andclose-cropped hillsides, where the sheep nibble down the grass andother herbage almost as fast as it springs up again. Now, clover seedsresemble their allies of the pea and bean tribe in being exceedinglyrich in starch and other valuable foodstuffs. Hence, they are muchsought after by the inquiring sheep, which eat them off wherever found, as exceptionally nutritious and dainty morsels. Under thesecircumstances, the subterranean clover has learnt to produce smallheads of bloom, pressed close to the ground, in which only the outerflowers are perfect and fertile, while the inner ones are transformedinto tiny wriggling corkscrews. As soon as the fertile flowers havebegun to set their seed, by the kind aid of the bees, the whole stembends downward, automatically, of its own accord; the little corkscrewsthen worm their way into the turf beneath; and the pods ripen andmature in the actual soil itself, where no prying ewe can poke aninquisitive nose to grub them up and devour them. Cases like this pointin certain ways to the absolute high-water-mark of vegetable ingenuity:they go nearest of all in the plant-world to the similitude ofconscious animal intelligence. 

 A DESERT FRUIT. 

Who knows the Mediterranean, knows the prickly pear. Not that thatquaint and uncanny-looking cactus, with its yellow blossoms andbristling fruits that seem to grow paradoxically out of the edge ofthick fleshy leaves, is really a native of Italy, Spain, and NorthAfrica, where it now abounds on every sun-smitten hillside. Like Mr. Henry James and Mr. Marion Crawford, the Barbary fig, as the Frenchcall it, is, in point of fact, an American citizen, domiciled and halfnaturalised on this side of the Atlantic, but redolent still at heartof its Columbian origin. Nothing is more common, indeed, than to seeclassical pictures of the Alma-Tadema school--not, of course, from thebrush of the master himself, who is impeccable in such details, butfair works of decent imitators--in which Caia or Marcia leansgracefully in her white stole on one pensive elbow against a marblelintel, beside a courtyard decorated with a Pompeian basin, andovergrown with prickly pear or "American aloes. " I need hardly saythat, as a matter of plain historical fact, neither cactuses nor agaveswere known in Europe till long after Christopher Columbus had steeredhis wandering bark to the sandy shores of Cat's Island in the Bahamas. (I have seen Cat's Island with these very eyes, and can honestly assureyou that its shores _are_ sandy. ) But this is only one among the manypardonable little inaccuracies of painters, who thrust scarletgeraniums from the Cape of Good Hope into the fingers of Aspasia, orsupply King Solomon in all his glory with Japanese lilies of the mostrecent introduction. 

At the present day, it is true, both the prickly-pear cactus and theAmerican agave (which the world at large insists upon confounding withthe aloe, a member of a totally distinct family) have spread themselvesin an apparently wild condition over all the rocky coasts both ofSouthern Europe and of Northern Africa. The alien desert weeds havefixed their roots firmly in the sunbaked clefts of Ligurian Apennines;the tall candelabrum of the western agave has reared its great spike ofbranching blossoms (which flower, not once in a century, as legendavers, but once in some fifteen years or so) on all the baskinghillsides of the Mauritanian Atlas. But for the origin, and thereforefor the evolutionary history, of either plant, we must look away fromthe shore of the inland sea to the arid expanse of the Mexican desert. It was there, among the sweltering rocks of the Tierras Calientes, thatthese ungainly cactuses first learned to clothe themselves in pricklymail, to store in their loose tissues an abundant supply of stickymoisture, and to set at defiance the persistent attacks of all externalenemies. The prickly pear, in fact, is a typical instance of a desertplant, as the camel is a typical instance of a desert animal. Each laysitself out to endure the long droughts of its almost rainless habitatby drinking as much as it can when opportunity offers, hoarding up thesuperfluous water for future use, and economising evaporation by everymeans in its power. 

If you ask that convenient fiction, the Man in the Street, what sort ofplant a cactus is, he will probably tell you it is all leaf and nostem, and each of the leaves grows out of the last one. Whenever we setup the Man in the Street, however, you must have noticed we do it inorder to knock him down again like a nine-pin next moment: and thisparticular instance is no exception to the rule; for the truth is thata cactus is practically all stem and no leaves, what looks like a leafbeing really a branch sticking out at an angle. The true leaves, ifthere are any, are reduced to mere spines or prickles on the surface, while the branches, in the prickly-pear and many of the ornamentalhot-house cactuses, are flattened out like a leaf to perform foliarfunctions. In most plants, to put it simply, the leaves are the mouthsand stomachs of the organism; their thin and flattened blades arespread out horizontally in a wide expanse, covered with tiny throatsand lips which suck in carbonic acid from the surrounding air, anddisintegrate it in their own cells under the influence of sunlight. Inthe prickly pears, on the contrary, it is the flattened stem andbranches which undertake this essential operation in the life of theplant--the sucking-in of carbon and giving-out of oxygen, which is tothe vegetable exactly what the eating and digesting of food is to theanimal organism. In their old age, however, the stems of the pricklypear display their true character by becoming woody in texture andlosing their articulated leaf-like appearance. 

Everything on this earth can best be understood by investigating thehistory of its origin and development, and in order to understand thiscurious reversal of the ordinary rule in the cactus tribe we must lookat the circumstances under which the race was evolved in the howlingwaste of American deserts. (All deserts have a prescriptive right tohowl, and I wouldn't for worlds deprive them of the privilege. ) Somefamiliar analogies will help us to see the utility of this arrangement. Everybody knows our common English stone-crops--or if he doesn't heought to, for they are pretty and ubiquitous. Now stone-crops grow forthe most part in chinks of the rock or thirsty sandy soil; they areessentially plants of very dry positions. Hence they have thick andsucculent little stems and leaves, which merge into one another byimperceptible gradations. All parts of the plant alike are stumpy, green, and cylindrical. If you squash them with your finger and thumbyou find that though the outer skin or epidermis is thick and firm, theinside is sticky, moist, and jelly-like. The reason for all this isplain; the stone-crops drink greedily by their roots whenever they geta chance, and store up the water so obtained to keep them fromwithering under the hot and pitiless sun that beats down upon them forhours in the baked clefts of their granite matrix. It's the camel trickover again. So leaves and stem grow thick and round and juicy within;but outside they are enclosed in a stout layer of epidermis, whichconsists of empty glassy cells, and which can be peeled off or flayedwith a knife like the skin of an animal. This outer layer preventsevaporation, and is a marked feature of all succulent plants which growexposed to the sun on arid rocks or in sandy deserts. 

The tendency to produce rounded stems and leaves, littledistinguishable from one another, is equally noticeable in many seasideplants which frequent the strip of thirsty sand beyond the reach of thetides. That belt of dry beach that stretches between high-water markand the zone of vegetable mould, is to all intents and purpose aminiature desert. True, it is watered by rain from time to time; butthe drops sink in so fast that in half an hour, as we know, the entirestrip is as dry as Sahara again. Now there are many shore weeds of thisintermediate sand-belt which mimic to a surprising degree the chiefexternal features of the cactuses. One such weed, the commonsalicornia, which grows in sandy bottoms or hollows of the beach, has ajointed stem, branched and succulent, after the true cactus pattern, and entirely without leaves or their equivalents in any way. Still morecactus-like in general effect is another familiar English seaside weed, the kali or glasswort, so called because it was formerly burnt toextract the soda. The glasswort has leaves, it is true, but they arethick and fleshy, continuous with the stem, and each one terminating ina sharp, needle-like spine, which effectually protects the weed againstall browsing aggressors. 

Now, wherever you get very dry and sandy conditions of soil, you getthis same type of cactus-like vegetation--_plantes grasses_, as theFrench well call them. The species which exhibit it are not necessaryrelated to one another in any way; often they belong to most widelydistinct families; it is an adaptive resemblance alone, due tosimilarity of external circumstances only. The plants have to fightagainst the same difficulties, and they adopt for the most part thesame tactics to fight them with. In other words, any plant of whateverfamily, which wishes to thrive in desert conditions, must almost, as amatter of course, become thick and succulent, so as to store up water, and must be protected by a stout epidermis to prevent its evaporationunder the fierce heat of the sunlight. They do not necessarily losetheir leaves in the process; but the jointed stem usually answers thepurpose of leaves under such conditions far better than any thin andexposed blade could do in the arid air of a baking desert. Andtherefore, as a rule, desert plants are leafless. 

In India, for example, there are no cactuses. But I wouldn't advise youto dispute the point with a peppery, fire-eating Anglo-Indian colonel. I did so once, myself, at the risk of my life, at a _table d'hôte_ onthe Continent; and the wonder is that I'm still alive to tell thestory. I had nothing but facts on my side, while the colonel had fists, and probably pistols. And when I say no cactuses, I mean, of course, noindigenous species; for prickly pears and epiphyllums may naturally beplanted by the hand of man anywhere. But what people take for thicketsof cactus in the Indian jungle are really thickets of cactus-likespurges. In the dry soil of India, many spurges grow thick andsucculent, learn to suppress their leaves, and assume the bizarre formsand quaint jointed appearance of the true cactuses. In flower andfruit, however, they are euphorbias to the end; it is only in the thickand fleshy stem that they resemble their nobler and more beautifulWestern rivals. No true cactus grows truly wild anywhere on earthexcept in America. The family was developed there, and, till mantransplanted it, never succeeded in gaining a foothold elsewhere. Essentially tropical in type, it was provided with no means ofdispersing its seeds across the enormous expanse of intervening oceanwhich separated its habitat from the sister continents. 

But why are cactuses so almost universally prickly? From the grotesquelittle melon-cactuses of our English hothouses to the huge and ungainlymonsters which form miles of hedgerows on Jamaican hillsides, themembers of this desert family are mostly distinguished by theirabundant spines and thorns, or by the irritating hairs which break offin your skin if you happen to brush incautiously against them. Cactusesare the hedgehogs of the vegetable world; their motto is _Nemo meimpune lacessit_. Many a time in the West Indies I have pushed my handfor a second into a bit of tangled 'bush, ' as the negroes call it, toseize some rare flower or some beautiful insect, and been punished fortwenty-four hours afterwards by the stings of the almost invisible andglass-like little cactus-needles. When you rub them they only break inpieces, and every piece inflicts a fresh wound on the flesh where itrankles. Some of the species have large, stout prickles; some haveclusters of irritating hairs at measured distances; and some rejoice inboth means of defence at once, scattered impartially over their entiresurface. In the prickly pear, the bundles of prickles are arrangedgeometrically with great regularity in a perfect quincunx. But that isa small consolation indeed to the reflective mind when you've stungyourself badly with them. 

The reason for this bellicose disposition on the part of the cactusesis a tolerably easy one to guess. Fodder is rare in the desert. Thestarving herbivores that find themselves from time to time belated onthe confines of such thirsty regions would seize with avidity upon anysucculent plant which offered them food and drink at once in their lastextremity. Fancy the joy with which a lost caravan, dying of hunger andthirst in the byways of Sahara, would hail a great bed of melons, cucumbers, and lettuces! Needless to say, however, under suchcircumstances melon, cucumber, and lettuce would soon be exterminated:they would be promptly eaten up at discretion without leaving adescendant to represent them in the second generation. In the ceaselesswar between herbivore and plant, which is waged every day and all daylong the whole world over with far greater persistence than the warbetween carnivore and prey, only those species of plant can survive insuch exposed situations which happen to develop spines, thorns, orprickles as a means of defence against the mouths of hungry anddesperate assailants. 

Nor is this so difficult a bit of evolution as it looks at first sight. Almost all plants are more or less covered with hairs, and it needs buta slight thickening at the base, a slight woody deposit at the point, to turn them forthwith into the stout prickles of the rose or thebramble. Most leaves are more or less pointed at the end or at thesummits of the lobes; and it needs but a slight intensification of thispointed tendency to produce forthwith the sharp defensive foliage ofgorse, thistles, and holly. Often one can see all the intermediatestages still surviving under one's very eyes. The thistles, themselves, for example, vary from soft and unarmed species which hauntout-of-the-way spots beyond the reach of browsing herbivores, to suchtrebly-mailed types as that enemy of the agricultural interest, thecreeping thistle, in which the leaves continue themselves as pricklywings down every side of the stem, so that the whole plant is amplyclad from head to foot in a defensive coat of fierce and bristlingspearheads. There is a common little English meadow weed, therest-harrow, which in rich and uncropped fields produces no defensivearmour of any sort; but on the much-browsed-over suburban commons andin similar exposed spots, where only gorse and blackthorn stand achance for their lives against the cows and donkeys, it has developed aprotected variety in which some of the branches grow abortive, and endabruptly in stout spines like a hawthorn's. Only those rest-harrowshave there survived in the sharp struggle for existence which happenedmost to baffle their relentless pursuers. 

Desert plants naturally carry this tendency to its highest point ofdevelopment. Nowhere else is the struggle for life so fierce; nowhereelse is the enemy so goaded by hunger and thirst to desperate measures. It is a place for internecine warfare Hence, all desert plants arequite absurdly prickly. The starving herbivores will attack and devourunder such circumstances even thorny weeds, which tear or sting theirtender tongues and palates, but which supply them at least with alittle food and moisture: so the plants are compelled in turn to takealmost extravagant precautions. Sometimes the leaves end in a stoutdagger-like point, as with the agave, or so-called American aloe;sometimes they are reduced to mere prickles or bundles of needle-likespikes; sometimes they are suppressed altogether, and the work ofdefence is undertaken in their stead by irritating hairs intermixedwith caltrops of spines pointing outward from a common centre in everydirection. When one remembers how delicately sensitive are the tendernoses of most browsing herbivores, one can realize what an excellentmode of defence these irritating hairs must naturally constitute. Ihave seen cows in Jamaica almost maddened by their stings, and evensavage bulls will think twice in their rage before they attempt to maketheir way through the serried spears of a dense cactus hedge. To put itbriefly, plants have survived under very arid or sandy conditionsprecisely in proportion as they displayed this tendency towards theproduction of thorns, spines, bristles, and prickles. 

It is a marked characteristic of the cactus tribe to be very tenaciousof life, and when hacked to pieces, to spring afresh in full vigourfrom every scrap or fragment. True vegetable hydras, when you cut downone, ten spring in its place: every separate morsel of the thick andsucculent stem has the power of growing anew into a separate cactus. Surprising as this peculiarity seems at first sight, it is only aspecial desert modification of a faculty possessed in a less degree byalmost all plants and by many animals. If you cut off the end of a rosebranch and stick it in the ground under suitable conditions, it growsinto a rose tree. If you take cuttings of scarlet geraniums or commonverbenas, and pot them in moist soil, they bud out apace into newplants like their parents. Certain special types can even be propagatedfrom fragments of the leaf; for example, there is a particularlyvivacious begonia off which you may snap a corner of one blade, andhang it up by a string from a peg or the ceiling, when, hi, presto!little begonia plants begin to bud out incontinently on every side fromits edges. A certain German professor went even further than that; hechopped up a liverwort very fine into vegetable mincemeat, which hethen spread thin over a saucerful of moist sand, and lo! in a few daysthe whole surface of the mess was covered with a perfect forest ofsprouting little liverworts. Roughly speaking, one may say that everyfragment of every organism has in it the power to rebuild in itsentirety another organism like the one of which it once formed acomponent element. 

Similarly with animals. Cut off a lizard's tail, and straightway a newtail grows in its place with surprising promptitude. Cut off alobster's claw, and in a very few weeks that lobster is walking aboutairily on his native rocks, with two claws as usual. True, in thesecases the tail and the claw don't bud out in turn into a new lizard ora new lobster. But that is a penalty the higher organisms have to payfor their extreme complexity. They have lost that plasticity, thatfreedom of growth, which characterizes the simpler and more primitiveforms of life; in their case the power of producing fresh organismsentire from a single fragment, once diffused equally over the wholebody, is now confined to certain specialized cells which, in theirdeveloped form, we know as seeds or eggs. Yet, even among animals, at alow stage of development, this original power of reproducing the wholefrom a single part remains inherent in the organism; for you may chopup a fresh-water hydra into a hundred little bits, and every bit willbe capable of growing afresh into a complete hydra. 

Now, desert plants would naturally retain this primitive tendency in avery high degree; for they are specially organized to resistdrought--being the survivors of generations of drought-proofancestors--and, like the camel, they have often to struggle on throughlong periods of time without a drop of water. Exactly the same thinghappens at home to many of our pretty little European stone-crops. Ihave a rockery near my house overgrown with the little white sedum ofour gardens. The birds often peck off a tiny leaf or branch; it dropson the dry soil, and remains there for days without giving a sign oflife. But its thick epidermis effectually saves it from withering; andas soon as rain falls, wee white rootlets sprout out from the underside of the fragment as it lies, and it grows before long into a freshsmall sedum plant. Thus, what seem like destructive agenciesthemselves, are turned in the end by mere tenacity of life into asecondary means of propagation. 

That is why the prickly pear is so common in all countries where theclimate suits it, and where it has once managed to gain a foothold. Themore you cut it down, the thicker it springs; each murdered bit becomesthe parent in due time of a numerous offspring. Man, however, with hisusual ingenuity, has managed to best the plant, on this its own ground, and turn it into a useful fodder for his beasts of burden. The pricklypear is planted abundantly on bare rocks in Algeria, where nothing elsewould grow, and is cut down when adult, divested of its thorns by arough process of hacking, and used as food for camels and cattle. Itthus provides fresh moist fodder in the African summer when the grassis dried up and all other pasture crops have failed entirely. 

The flowers of the prickly pear, as of many other cactuses, growapparently on the edge of the leaves, which alone might give theobservant mind a hint as to the true nature of those thick andflattened expansions. For whenever what look like leaves bear flowersor fruit on their edge or midrib, as in the familiar instance ofbutcher's broom, you may be sure at a glance they are really branchesin disguise masquerading as foliage. The blossoms in the prickly pearare large, handsome, and yellow; at least, they would be handsome ifone could ever see them, but they are generally covered so thick indust that it is difficult properly to appreciate their beauty. Theyhave a great many petals in numerous rows, and a great many stamens ina rosette in the centre; and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, as lawyers put it, they are fertilized for the most part by tropicalbutterflies; but on this point, having observed them but little intheir native habitats, I speak under correction. 

The fruit itself, to which the plant owes its popular name, isbotanically a berry, though a very big one, and it exhibits in a highlyspecialized degree the general tactics of all its family. As far astheir leaf-like stems go, the main object in life of the cactusesis--not to get eaten. But when it comes to the fruit, this object inlife is exactly reversed; the plant desires its fruit to be devoured bysome friendly bird or adapted animal, in order that the hard littleseeds buried in the pulp within may be dispersed for germination undersuitable conditions. At the same time, true to its central idea, itcovers even the pear itself with deterrent and prickly hairs, meant toact as a defence against useless thieves or petty depredators, whowould eat the soft pulp on the plant as it stands (much as wasps dopeaches) without benefiting the species in return by dispersing itsseedlings. This practice is fully in accordance with the general habitof tropical or sub-tropical fruits, which lay themselves out to deservethe kind offices of monkeys, parrots, toucans, hornbills, and othersuch large and powerful fruit-feeders. Fruits which arrange themselvesfor a _clientèle_, of this character have usually thick or nauseousrinds, prickly husks, or other deterrent integuments; but they are fullwithin of juicy pulp, embedding stony or nutlike seeds, which passundigested through the gizzards of their swallowers. 

For a similar reason, the actual prickly pears themselves areattractively coloured. I need hardly point out, I suppose, at thepresent time of day, that such tints in the vegetable world act likethe gaudy posters of our London advertisers. Fruits and flowers whichdesire to attract the attention of beasts, birds, or insects, aretricked out in flaunting hues of crimson, purple, blue, and yellow;fruits and flowers which could only be injured by the notice of animalsare small and green, or dingy and inconspicuous. 

 PRETTY POLL. 

It is an error of youth to despise parrots for their much talking. Loquacity isn't always a sign of empty-headedness, nor is silence asure proof of weight and wisdom. Biologists, for their part, knowbetter than that. By common consent, they rank the parrot group as thevery head and crown of bird creation. Not, of course, because prettyPoll can talk (in a state of nature, parrots only chatter somewhatmeaninglessly to one another), but because the group display on thewhole, all round, a greater amount of intelligence, of cleverness, andof adaptability to circumstances than any other birds, including eventheir cunning and secretive rivals, the ravens, the jackdaws, thecrows, and the magpies. 

What are the efficient causes of this exceptionally high intelligencein parrots? Well, Mr. Herbert Spencer, I believe, was the first topoint out the intimate connection that exists throughout the animalworld between mental development and the power of grasping an objectall round so as to know exactly its shape and its tactile properties. The possession of an effective prehensile organ--a hand or itsequivalent--seems to be the first great requisite for the evolution ofa high order of intellect. Man and the monkeys, for example, have apair of hands; and in their case one can see at a glance how dependentis their intelligence upon these grasping organs. All human arts basethemselves ultimately upon the human hand; and even the apes approachnearest to humanity in virtue of their ever-active and busy littlefingers. The elephant, again, has his flexible trunk, which, as we haveall heard over and over again, _usque ad nauseam_, is equally welladapted to pick up a pin or to break the great boughs of tropicalforest trees. (That pin, in particular, is now a well-worn classic. )The squirrel, once more, celebrated for his unusual intelligence whenjudged by a rodent standard, uses his pretty little paws as veritablehands, by which he can grasp a nut or fruit all round, and so gain inhis small mind a clear conception of its true shape and properties. Throughout the animal kingdom generally, indeed, this correspondence, or rather this chain of causation, makes itself everywhere felt; nohigh intelligence without a highly developed prehensile and graspingorgan. 

Perhaps the opossum is the very best and most crucial instance thatcould possibly be adduced of the intimate connection which existsbetween touch and intellect. For the opossum is a marsupial; it belongsto the same group of lowly-organized, antiquated, and pouch-bearinganimals as the kangaroo, the wombat, and the other belated Australianmammals. Now everybody knows the marsupials as a class are nothingshort of preternaturally stupid. They are just about the very dullestand silliest of all existing quadrupeds. And this is reasonable enough, when one comes to think of it, for they represent a very antique andearly type, the first rough sketch of the mammalian idea, if I may sodescribe them, with wits unsharpened as yet by contact with the worldin the fierce competition of the struggle for life as it displaysitself on the crowded stage of the great continents. They stand, inshort, to the lions and tigers, the elephants and horses, the monkeysand squirrels, of Europe and America, as the Australian blackfellowstands to the Englishman or the Yankee. They are the last relic of theoriginal secondary quadrupeds, stranded for ages in a remote southernisland, and still keeping up among Australian forests the antique typeof life that went out of fashion in Europe, Asia, and America beforethe chalk was laid down or the London Clay deposited on the bed of ournorthern oceans. Hence they have still very narrow brains, and are soextremely stupid that a kangaroo, it is said--though I don't vouch forit myself--when struck a smart blow, will turn and bite the stick thathurts him instead of expending his anger on the hand that holds it. 

Now, every Girton girl is well aware that the opossum, though it is amarsupial too, differs inexpressibly in psychological development fromthe kangaroo and the wombat. Your opossum, in short, is active, sly, and extremely intelligent. He knows his way about the world he livesin. 'A 'possum up a gum-tree' is accepted by the observant Americanmind as the very incarnation of animal cleverness, cunning, andduplicity. In negro folk-lore the resourceful 'possum takes the placeof Reynard the Fox in European stories: he is the Macchiavelli of wildbeasts: there is no ruse on earth of which he isn't amply capable, noartful trick which he can't design and execute, no wily manoeuvre whichhe can't contrive and carry to an end successfully. All guile andintrigue, the 'possum can circumvent even Uncle Remus himself by hiscrafty diplomacy. And what is it that makes all the difference betweenthis 'cute Yankee marsupial and his backward and belated Australiancousins? Why, nothing but the possession of a prehensile hand and tail. Therein lies the whole secret. The opossum's hind foot has a genuineopposable thumb; and he also uses his tail in climbing as asupernumerary hand, almost as much as do any of the monkeys. He oftensuspends himself by it, like an acrobat, swings his body to and fro toget up steam, then lets go suddenly, and flies away to a distantbranch, which he clutches by means of his hand-like hind feet. If thetoes play him false, he can 'recover his tip, ' as circus-folk put it, with his prehensile tail. The consequence is that the opossum, beingable to form for himself clear and accurate conceptions of the realshapes and relations of things by these two distinct grasping organs, has acquired an unusual amount of general intelligence. And further, inthe keen competition of the American continent, he has been forced todevelop an amount of cleverness and low cunning which leaves hisAustralian poor relations far behind in the Middle Ages of evolution. 

At the risk of seeming to run off at a tangent and forsake ourostensible subject, pretty Poll, altogether, I must just pause for onemoment more to answer an objection which I know has been trembling onthe tip of your tongue any time the last five minutes. You've beenwaiting till you could get a word in edgeways to give me a friendlynudge and remark very wisely, 'But look here, I say; how about the dogand the horse in your argument? _They've_ got no prehensile organ thatever I heard of, and yet they're universally allowed to be thecleverest and most intelligent of all earthly quadrupeds. ' True, O mostsapient and courteous objector. I grant it you at once. But observe thedifference. The cleverness of the horse and the dog is acquired, notoriginal. It has probably arisen in the course of their long hereditaryintercourse and companionship with man, the cleverest and mostserviceable individuals being deliberately selected from generation togeneration, as dams and sires to breed from. We can't fairly comparethese artificial human products, therefore, with wild races whoseintelligence is all native and self-evolved. Moreover, the horse atleast _has_ to some slight extent a prehensile organ in his very mobileand sensitive lip, which he uses like an undeveloped or rudimentaryproboscis to feel things all over with. So that the dog alone remainsas a contradictory instance; and even the dog derives his clevernessindirectly from man, whose hand and thumb in the last resort are reallyat the bottom of his vicarious wisdom. 

We may conclude, then, I believe, that touch, as Mr. Herbert Spenceradmirably words it, is 'the mother-tongue of the senses;' and that inproportion as animals have or have not highly developed and serviceabletactile organs will they rank high or low in the intellectual hierarchyof nature. Now, how does this bear upon the family of parrots? Well, inthe first place, everybody who has ever kept a cockatoo or a macaw indomestic slavery is well aware that in no other birds do the claws soclosely resemble a human or simian hand, not indeed in outer form orappearance, but in opposability of the thumbs and in perfection ofgrasping power. The toes on each foot are arranged in oppositepairs--two turning in front and two backward, which gives all parrotstheir peculiar firmness in clinging on a perch or on the branch of atree with one foot only, while they extend the other to grasp a fruitor to clutch at any object they desire to take possession of. True, this peculiarity isn't entirely confined to the parrots alone, as such. They share the division of the foot into two thumbs and two fingerswith a whole large group of allied birds, called, in the charminglyconcise and poetical language of technical ornithology, the ScansorialPicarians, and more generally, known to the unlearned herd (meaning youand me) by their several names of woodpeckers, cuckoos, toucans, andplantain-eaters. All the members of this great group, of which theparrots proper are only the most advanced and developed family, possessthe same arrangement of the digits into front-toes and back-toes. Butin none is the arrangement so perfect as in the parrots, and in none isthe power of grasping an object all round so completely developed andso pregnant in moral and intellectual consequences. 

All the Scansorial Picarians, however (if the reader with hisproverbial courtesy will kindly pardon me the inevitable use of suchvery bad words), are essentially tree-haunters; and the tree-hauntingand climbing habit, as is well beknown, seems particularly favourableto the growth of intelligence. Thus schoolboys climb trees--but Iforgot: this is a scientific article, and such levity is inconsistentwith the dignity of science. Let us be serious! Well, at any rate, monkeys, squirrels, opossums, wild cats, are all of them climbers, andall of them, in the act of clinging, jumping, and balancing themselveson boughs, gain such an accurate idea of geometrical figure, perspective, distance, and the true nature of space-relations, as couldhardly be acquired in any other manner. In one word, they thoroughlyunderstand space of three dimensions, and the tactual realities thatanswer to and underlie each visible appearance. This is the verysubstratum of all intelligence; and the monkeys, possessing it moreprofoundly than any other animals, have accordingly taken the top ofthe form in the competitive examination perpetually conducted bysurvival of the fittest. 

So, too, among birds, the parrots and their allies climb trees androcks with exceptional ease and agility. Even in their own departmentthey are the great feathered acrobats. Anybody who watches awoodpecker, for example, grasping the bark of a tree with its crookedand powerful toes, while it steadies itself behind by digging its stifftail-feathers into the crannies of the outer rind, will readilyunderstand how clear a notion the bird must gain into the practicalaction of the laws of gravity. But the true parrots go a step furtherin the same direction than the woodpeckers or the toucans; for, inaddition to prehensile feet, they have also a highly-developedprehensile bill, and within it a tongue which acts in reality as anorgan of touch. They use their crooked beaks to help them in climbingfrom branch to branch; and being thus provided alike with wings, legs, hands, fingers, bill and tongue, they are in fact the most trulyarboreal of all known animals, and present in the fullest and highestdegree all the peculiar features of the tree-haunting existence. 

Nor is that all. Alone among birds or mammals, the parrots have thecurious peculiarity of being able to move the upper as well as thelower jaw. It is this strange mobility of both the mandibles together, combined with the crafty effect of the sideways glance from thoseartful eyes, that gives the characteristic air of intelligence andwisdom to the parrot's face. We naturally expect so clever a bird tospeak. And when it turns upon us suddenly with a copy-book maxim, weare in no way astonished at its surpassing smartness. 

Parrots are vegetarians; with a single degraded exception to whom Ishall recur hereafter, Sir Henry Thompson himself couldn't find faultwith their regimen. They live chiefly upon a light but nutritious dietof fruit and seeds, or upon the abundant nectar of rich tropicalflowers. And it is mainly for the sake of getting at their chosen foodthat they have developed the large and powerful bills whichcharacterise the family. You may have perhaps noted that most tropicalfruit-eaters, like the hornbills and the toucans, are remarkable forthe size and strength of their beaks: if you haven't, I dare say youwill generously take my word for it. And, _per contra_, it may alsohave struck you that most tropical fruits have thick or hard ornauseous rinds, which need to be torn off before the monkeys or birdsfor whose use they are intended, can get at them and eat them. Ourlittle northern strawberries, and raspberries, and currants, andwhortleberries, developed with a single eye to the petty robins andfinches of temperate climates, can be popped into, the mouth whole andeaten as they stand: they are meant for small birds to devour, and todisperse the tiny undigested nut-like seeds in return for the bribe ofthe soft pulp that surrounds them. But it is quite otherwise withoranges, shaddocks, bananas, plantains, mangoes, and pine-apples: thosegreat tropical fruits can only be eaten properly with a knife and fork, after stripping off the hard and often acrid rind that guards andpreserves them. They lay themselves out for dispersion by monkeys, toucans, and other relatively large and powerful fruit-eaters; and therind is put there as a barrier against small thieves who would rob thesweet pulp, but be absolutely incapable of carrying away and dispersingthe large and richly-stored seeds it covers. 

Parrots and toucans, however, have no knives and forks to cut off therind with; but as monkeys use their fingers, so the birds use for thesame purpose their sharp and powerful bills. No better nut-crackers andfruit-parers could possibly be found. The parrot, in particular, hasdeveloped for the purpose his curved and inflated beak--a wonderfulweapon, keen as a tailor's scissors, and moved by powerful muscles oneither side of the face which bring together the cutting edges withextraordinary energy. The way the bird holds the fruit gingerly in oneclaw, while he strips off the rind dexterously with his under-hunglower mandible, and keeps a sharp look-out meanwhile on either sidewith those sly and stealthy eyes of his for a possible intruder, suggests to the observing mind the whole living drama of his nativeforest. One sees in that vivid world the watchful monkey ever ready toswoop down upon the tempting tail-feathers of his hereditary foe: onesees the canny parrot ever prepared for his rapid attack, and evereager to make him pay with five joints of his tail for his impertinentinterference with an unoffending fellow-citizen of the arborealcommunity. 

Still, there are parrots and parrots, of course. Not all this vastfamily are in all things of like passions one with another. The greatblack cockatoo, for example, the largest of the tribe, lives almostentirely off the central shoot or 'cabbage' of palm-trees: an expensivekind of food, for when once the 'cabbage' is eaten the tree diesforthwith, so that each black cockatoo must have killed in his timewhole groves of cabbage-palms. Others, again, feed off fruits andseeds; and not a few are entirely adapted for flower-haunting andhoney-sucking. 

As a group, the parrots are comparatively modern birds. Indeed, theycould have no place in the world till the big tropical fruits and nutswere beginning to be developed. And it is now pretty certain thatfruits and nuts are for the most part of very recent and specialevolution. To put it briefly, the monkeys and parrots developed thefruits and nuts, while the fruits and nuts returned the compliment bydeveloping conversely the monkeys and parrots. In other words, bothtypes grew up side by side in mutual dependence, and evolved themselves_pari passu_ for one another's benefit. Without the fruits there couldbe no fruit-eaters; and without the fruit-eaters to disperse theirseeds, there could just to the same extent be no fruits to speak of. 

Most of the parrots very much resemble the monkeys and other tropicalfruit-feeders in their habits and manners. They are gregarious, mischievous, noisy, and irresponsible. They have no moral sense, andare fond of practical jokes and other schoolboy horseplay. They moveabout in flocks, screeching aloud as they go, and alight together onsome tree well covered with berries. No doubt, they herd together forthe sake of protection and screech both to keep the flock in a body andto strike alarm and consternation into the breasts of their enemies. When danger threatens, the first bird that perceives it sounds a noteof warning; and in a moment the whole troop is on the wing at once, vociferous and eager, roaring forth a song in their own tongue whichmay be roughly interpreted as stating in English that they don't wantto fight, but by Jingo, if they do, they'll tear their enemy to shredsand drink his blood up too. 

The common grey parrot, the best known in confinement of all his kind, and unrivalled as an orator for his graces of speech, is a native ofWest Africa; so that he shares with other West Africans that perfectcommand of language which has always been a marked characteristic ofthe negro race. He feeds in a general way upon palm-nuts, bananas, mangoes, and guavas, but he is by no means averse, if opportunityoffers, to the Indian corn of the industrious native. His wifeaccompanies him in his solitary rambles, for they are not gregarious. In her native haunts, indeed, Polly is an unsociable bird. It is onlyin confinement that her finer qualities come out, and that she developsinto a speech-maker of distinguished attainments. 

A very peculiar and exceptional offshoot of the parrot group is thebrush-tongued lory, several species of which are common in Australia, India, and the Molucca Islands. These pretty and interesting creaturesare in point of fact parrots which have practically made themselvesinto humming-birds by long continuance in the poetical habit ofvisiting flowers for food. Like Mr. Oscar Wilde in his æsthetic days, they breakfast off a lily. Flitting about from tree to tree with greatrapidity, they thrust their long extensible tongues, pencilled withhoney-gathering hairs, into the tubes of many big tropical blossoms. The lories, indeed, live entirely on nectar, and they are so common inthe region they have made their own that all the larger flowers therehave been developed with a special view to their tastes and habits, aswell as to the structure of their peculiar brush-like honey-collector. In most parrots the mouth is dry and the tongue horny; but in thelories it is moist and much more like the same organ in thehumming-birds and sun-birds. The prevalence of very large andbrilliantly coloured flowers in the Malayan region must be set down forthe most part to the selective action of these æsthetic andcolour-loving little brush-tongued parrots. 

Australia and New Zealand, as everybody knows, are the countries whereeverything goes by contraries. And it is here that the parrot group hasdeveloped some of its strangest and most abnormal offshoots. One wouldimagine beforehand that no two birds could be more unlike in everyrespect than the gaudy, noisy, gregarious cockatoos and the sombre, nocturnal, solitary owls. Yet the New Zealand owl-parrot is, to put itplainly, a lory which has assumed all the outer appearance and habitsof an owl. A lurker in the twilight or under the shades of night, burrowing for its nest in holes in the ground, it has dingy brownplumage like the owls, with an undertone of green to bespeak its parrotorigin: while its face is entirely made up of two great disks, surrounding the eyes, which succeed in giving it a most marked andunmistakable owl-like appearance. 

Now, why should a parrot so strangely disguise itself and belie itsancestry? The reason is plain. It found a place for it ready made innature. New Zealand is a remote and sparsely-stocked island, peopled bymere casual waifs and strays of life from adjacent but still verydistant continents. There are no dangerous enemies there. Here, then, was a clear chance for a nightly prowler. The owl-parrot with truebusiness instinct saw the opening thus clearly laid before it, and tookto a nocturnal and burrowing life, with the natural consequence that itacquired in time the dingy plumage, crepuscular eyes, and broaddisk-like reflectors of other prowling night-fliers. Unlike the owls, however, the owl-parrot, true to the vegetarian instincts of the wholelory race, lives almost entirely upon sprigs of mosses and othercreeping plants. It is thus essentially a ground bird; and as it feedsat night in a country possessing no native beasts of prey, it hasalmost lost the power of flight, and uses its wings only as a sort ofparachute to break its fall in descending from a rock or tree to itsaccustomed feeding-ground. To get up again, it climbs, parrot-like, with its hooked claws, up the surface of the trunk or the face of aprecipice. 

Even more aberrant in its ways, however, than the burrowing owl-parrot, is that other strange and hated New Zealand lory, the kea, which, aloneamong its kind, has abjured the gentle ancestral vegetarianism of thecockatoos and macaws, in favour of a carnivorous diet of singularferocity. And what is odder still, this evil habit has been developedin the kea since the colonization of New Zealand by the English, thosemost demoralizing of new-comers. The settlers have taught the Maori towear tall hats and to drink strong liquors: and they have throwntemptation in the way of even the once innocent native parrot. Beforethe white man came, in fact, the kea was a mild-mannered fruit-eatingor honey-sucking bird. But as soon as sheep-stations were establishedin the island these degenerate parrots began to acquire a distincttaste for raw mutton. At first, to be sure, they ate only the sheep'sheads and offal that were thrown out from the slaughter-houses pickingthe bones as clean of meat as a dog or a jackal. But in process oftime, as the taste for blood grew upon them, a still viler idea enteredinto their wicked heads. The first step on the downward path suggestedthe second. If dead sheep are good to eat, why not also living ones?The kea, pondering deeply on this abstruse problem, solved it at oncewith an emphatic affirmative. And he straightway proceeded to act uponhis convictions, and invent a really hideous mode of procedure. Perching on the backs of the living sheep he has now learnt the exactspot where the kidneys are to be found; and he tears open the flesh toget at these dainty morsels, which he pulls out and devours, leavingthe unhappy animal to die in miserable agony. As many as two hundredewes have thus been killed in a night at a single station. I needhardly add that the sheep-farmer naturally resents this irregularproceeding, so opposed to all ideals of good grazing, and that the daysof the kea are now numbered in New Zealand. But from the purelypsychological point of view the case is an interesting one, as beingthe best recorded instance of the growth of a new and complex instinctactually under the eyes of human observers. 

One word as to the general colouring of the parrot group as a whole. Tropical forestine birds have usually a ground tone of green becausethat colour enables them best to escape notice among the monotonousverdure of equatorial woodland scenery. In the north, to be sure, greenis a very conspicuous colour; but that is only because for half theyear our trees are bare, and even during the other half they lack that'breadth of tropic shade' which characterises the forests of all hotcountries. Therefore, in temperate climates, the common ground-tone ofbirds is brown, to harmonise with the bare boughs and leafless twigs, the clods of earth and dead turf or stubble. But in the evergreentropics green is the right hue for concealment or defence. Thereforethe parrots, the most purely tropical family of birds on earth, aremostly greenish; and among the smaller and more defenceless sorts, likethe familiar little love-birds, where the need for protection isgreatest, the green of the plumage is almost unbroken. Of the tinyPigmy Parrots of New Guinea, for instance, Mr. Bowdler Sharpe says:'Owing to their small size and the resemblance of their green colouringto the forests they inhabit, they are not easily seen, and until recentyears were very hard to procure. ' And of the green parrot of Jamaica, Mr. Gosse remarks: 'Often we hear their voices proceeding from acertain tree, or else have marked the descent of a flock on it; but onproceeding to the spot, though the eye has not wandered from it, wecannot discover an individual. We go close to the tree, but all issilent and still as death. We institute a careful survey of every partwith the eye, to detect the slightest motion, or the form of a birdamong the leaves, but all in vain. We begin to think they have stolenoff unperceived; but on throwing a stone into the tree, a dozen throatsburst forth into a cry, and as many green birds rush forth upon thewing. Green may thus be regarded as the normal or basal parrot tint, from which all other colours are special decorative variations. 

But fruit-eating and flower-feeding creatures, like butterflies andhumming-birds--seeking their food ever among the bright berries andbrilliant flowers, almost invariably acquire in the long run anæsthetic taste for pure and varied colouring, and by the aid of sexualselection this taste stereotypes itself at last in their own wings andplumage. They choose their mates for colour as they choose theirfoodstuffs. Hence all the larger and more gregarious parrots, in whichthe need for concealment is less, tend to diversify the fundamentalgreen of their coats with crimson, yellow, or blue, which in some casestake possession of the entire body. The largest kinds of all, like thegreat blue and yellow or crimson macaws, are as gorgeous as Solomon inall his glory: and they are also the species least afraid of enemies;for in Brazil you may often see them wending their way homeward openlyin pairs every evening, with as little attempt at concealment as rooksin England. In the Moluccas and New Guinea, says Mr. Wallace, whitecockatoos and gorgeous lories in crimson and blue are the verycommonest objects in the local fauna. Even the New Zealand owl-parrot, however, still retains many traces of his original greenness, mixedwith the dirty brown and dingy yellow of his acquired nocturnal andburrowing nature. 

If fruit-eaters are fine, flower-haunters are magnificent. And thebrush-tongued lories, that search for nectar among the bells of Malayanblossoms, are the brightest-coloured of all the parrot tribes. Indeed, no group of birds, according to Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace (who ought toknow, if anybody does), exhibits within the same limited number oftypes so extraordinary a diversity and richness of colouring as theparrots. 'As a rule, ' he says, 'parrots may be termed green birds, themajority of the species having this colour as the basis of theirplumage, relieved by caps, gorgets, bands and wing-spots of other andbrighter hues. Yet this general green tint sometimes changes into lightor deep blue, as in some macaws; into pure yellow or rich orange, as insome of the American macaw-parrots; into purple, grey or dove-colour, as in some American, African, and Indian species; into the purestcrimson, as in some of the lories; into rosy-white and pure white, asin the cockatoos; and into a deep purple, ashy or black, as in severalPapuan, Australian, and Mascarene species. There is in fact hardly asingle distinct and definable colour that cannot be fairly matchedamong the 390 species of known parrots. Their habits, too, are such asto bring them prominently before the eye. They usually feed in flocks;they are noisy, and so attract attention; they love gardens, orchards, and open sunny places; they wander about far in search of food, andtowards sunset return homeward in noisy flocks, or in constant pairs. Their forms and motions are often beautiful and attractive. Theimmensely long tails of the macaws and the more slender tails of theIndian parroquets, the fine crest of the cockatoos, the swift flight ofmany of the smaller species, and the graceful motions of the littlelove-birds and allied forms, together with their affectionate natures, aptitude for domestication, and power of mimicry, combine to renderthem at once the most conspicuous and the most attractive of all thespecially tropical forms of bird life. '

I have purposely left to the last the one point about parrots whichmost often attracts the attention of the young, the gay, the giddy, andthe thoughtless: I mean their power of mimicry in human language. And Ibelieve I am justified in passing it over lightly. For in fact thispower is but a very incidental result of the general intelligence ofparrots, combined with the other peculiarities of their social life andforestine character. Dominant woodland animals, indeed, like monkeys, parrots, toucans, and hornbills, at least if vegetarian in theirhabits, are almost always gregarious, noisy, mischievous, andimitative. And the imitation results directly from the unusualintelligence; for, after all, what is the power of learning itself--atleast, in all save its very highest phases--but the faculty ofaccurately imitating another? Monkeys for the most part imitate actiononly, because they haven't very varied or flexible voices. Parrots andmany other birds, on the contrary--like the starling and still moremarkedly the American mocking-bird--being endowed with considerableflexibility of voice, imitate either songs or spoken words with greatdistinctness. In the parrot the power of attention is also veryconsiderable, for the bird will often try over with itself repeatedlythe lesson it has set itself to learn. But people too generally forgetthat at best the parrot knows only the general application of asentence, not the separate meanings of its component words. It knows, for example, that 'Polly wants a lump of sugar' is a phrase oftenfollowed by a present of food. But to believe it can understand anabstract expression, like the famous 'By Jove! what a beastly lot ofparrots!' is to confound learning by rote with genuine comprehension. Acareful review of all the evidence makes almost every scientificobserver conclude that at most a parrot knows a word of command as ahorse knows 'Whoa!' or a dog knows the order to hunt for rats in thewainscot. 

 HIGH LIFE. 

Everybody knows mountain flowers are beautiful. As one rises up anyminor height in the Alps or the Pyrenees below snow-level, one noticesat once the extraordinary brilliancy and richness of the blossoms onemeets there. All nature is dressed in its brightest robes. Great beltsof blue gentian hang like a zone on the mountain slopes; masses ofyellow globe-flower star the upland pastures; nodding heads ofsoldanella lurk low among the rugged boulders by the glacier's side. Nolowland blossoms have such vividness of colouring, or grow in suchconspicuous patches. To strike the eye from afar, to attract and allureat a distance, is the great aim and end in life of the Alpine flora. 

Now, why are Alpine plants so anxious to be seen of men and angels? Whydo they flaunt their golden glories so openly before the world, insteadof shrinking in modest reserve beneath their own green leaves, like thePuritan primrose and the retiring violet? The answer is, Because of theextreme rarity of the mountain air. It's the barometer that does it. Atfirst sight, I will readily admit, this explanation seems as fancifulas the traditional connection between Goodwin Sands and TenterdenSteeple. But, like the amateur stories in country papers, it is'founded on fact, ' for all that. (Imagine, by the way, a tale foundedentirely on fiction! How charmingly aerial!) By a roundabout road, through varying chains of cause and effect, the rarity of the air doesreally account in the long run for the beauty and conspicuousness ofthe mountain flowers. 

For bees, the common go-betweens of the loves of the plants, cease torange about a thousand or fifteen hundred feet below snow-level. Andwhy? Because it's too cold for them? Oh, dear, no: on sunny days inearly English spring, when the thermometer doesn't rise above freezingin the shade, you will see both the honey-bees and the great blackbumble as busy as their conventional character demands of them amongthe golden cups of the first timid crocuses. Give the bee sunshine, indeed, with a temperature just about freezing-point, and he'll flitabout joyously on his communistic errand. But bees, one must remember, have heavy bodies and relatively small wings: in the rarefied air ofmountain heights they can't manage to support themselves in the mostliteral sense. Hence their place in these high stations of the world istaken by the gay and airy butterflies, which have lighter bodies and amuch bigger expanse of wing-area to buoy them up. In the valleys andplains the bee competes at an advantage with the butterflies for allthe sweets of life: but in this broad sub-glacial belt on themountain-sides the butterflies in turn have things all their own way. They flit about like monarchs of all they survey, without a rival inthe world to dispute their supremacy. 

And how does the preponderance of butterflies in the upper regions ofthe air affect the colour and brilliancy of the flowers? Simply thus. Bees, as we are all aware on the authority of the great Dr. Watts, areindustrious creatures which employ each shining hour (well-chosenepithet, 'shining') for the good of the community, and to the bestpurpose. The bee, in fact, is the _bon bourgeois_ of the insect world:he attends strictly to business, loses no time in wild or recklessexcursions, and flies by the straightest path from flower to flower ofthe same species with mathematical precision. Moreover, he is careful, cautious, observant, and steady-going--a model business man, in fact, of sound middle-class morals and sober middle-class intelligence. Noflitting for him, no coquetting, no fickleness. Therefore, the flowersthat have adapted themselves to his needs, and that depend upon himmainly or solely for fertilisation, waste no unnecessary material onthose big flaunting coloured posters which we human observers know aspetals. They have, for the most part, simple blue or purple flowers, tubular in shape and, individually, inconspicuous in hue; and they areoftenest arranged in long spikes of blossom to avoid wasting the timeof their winged Mr. Bultitudes. So long as they are just bright enoughto catch the bee's eye a few yards away, they are certain to receive avisit in due season from that industrious and persistent commercialtraveller. Having a circle of good customers upon whom they can dependwith certainty for fertilisation, they have no need to waste any largeproportion of their substance upon expensive advertisements or gaudypetals. 

It is just the opposite with butterflies. Those gay and irrepressiblecreatures, the fashionable and frivolous element in the insect world, gad about from flower to flower over great distances at once, and thinkmuch more of sunning themselves and of attracting their fellows than ofattention to business. And the reason is obvious, if one considers fora moment the difference in the political and domestic economy of thetwo opposed groups. For the honey-bees are neuters, sexless purveyorsof the hive, with no interest on earth save the storing of honey forthe common benefit of the phalanstery to which they belong. But thebutterflies are full-fledged males and females, on the hunt through theworld for suitable partners: they think far less of feeding than ofdisplaying their charms: a little honey to support them during theirflight is all they need:--'For the bee, a long round of ceaseless toil;for me, ' says the gay butterfly, 'a short life and a merry one. ' Mr. Harold Skimpole needed only 'music, sunshine, a few grapes. ' Thebutterflies are of his kind. The high mountain zone is for them a trueball-room: the flowers are light refreshments laid out in thevestibule. Their real business in life is not to gorge and lay by, butto coquette and display themselves and find fitting partners. 

So while the bees with their honey-bags, like the financier with hismoney-bags, are storing up profit for the composite community, thebutterfly, on the contrary, lays himself out for an agreeable flutter, and sips nectar where he will, over large areas of country. He fliesrather high, flaunting his wings in the sun, because he wants to showhimself off in all his airy beauty: and when he spies a bed of brightflowers afar off on the sun-smitten slopes, he sails off towards themlazily, like a grand signior who amuses himself. No regular ploddingthrough a monotonous spike of plain little bells for him: what he wantsis brilliant colour, bold advertisement, good honey, and plenty of it. He doesn't care to search. Who wants his favours must make himselfconspicuous. 

Now, plants are good shopkeepers; they lay themselves out strictly toattract their customers. Hence the character of the flowers on thisbeeless belt of mountain side is entirely determined by the characterof the butterfly fertilisers. Only those plants which laid themselvesout from time immemorial to suit the butterflies, in other words, havesucceeded in the long run in the struggle for existence. So thebutterfly-plants of the butterfly-zone are all strictly adapted tobutterfly tastes and butterfly fancies. They are, for the most part, individually large and brilliantly coloured: they have lots of honey, often stored at the base of a deep and open bell which the longproboscis of the insect can easily penetrate: and they habitually growclose together in broad belts or patches, so that the colour of eachreinforces and aids the colour of the others. It is this cumulativehabit that accounts for the marked flowerbed or jam-tart characterwhich everybody must have noticed in the high Alpine flora. 

Aristocracies usually pride themselves on their antiquity: and the highlife of the mountains is undeniably ancient. The plants and animals ofthe butterfly-zone belong to a special group which appears everywherein Europe and America about the limit of snow, whether northward orupward. For example, I was pleased to note near the summit of MountWashington (the highest peak in New Hampshire) that a large number ofthe flowers belonged to species well known on the open plains ofLapland and Finland. The plants of the High Alps are found also, as arule, not only on the High Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the ScotchGrampians, and the Norwegian fjelds, but also round the Arctic Circlein Europe and America. They reappear at long distances where suitableconditions recur: they follow the snow-line as the snow-line recedesever in summer higher north toward the pole or higher vertically towardthe mountain summits. And this bespeaks in one way to the reasoningmind a very ancient ancestry. It shows they date back to a very old andcold epoch. 

Let me give a single instance which strikingly illustrates the generalprinciple. Near the top of Mount Washington, as aforesaid, lives tothis day a little colony of very cold-loving and mountainousbutterflies, which never descend below a couple of thousand feet fromthe wind-swept summit. Except just there, there are no more of theresort anywhere about: and as far as the butterflies themselves areaware, no others of their species exist on earth: they never have seena single one of their kind, save of their own little colony. One mightcompare them with the Pitcairn Islanders in the South Seas--an isolatedgroup of English origin, cut off by a vast distance from all theircongeners in Europe or America. But if you go north some eight or ninehundred miles from New Hampshire to Labrador, at a certain point thesame butterfly reappears, and spreads northward toward the pole ingreat abundance. Now, how did this little colony of chilly insects getseparated from the main body, and islanded, as it were, on a remotemountain-top in far warmer New Hampshire?

The answer is, they were stranded there at the end of the Glacialepoch. 

A couple of hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts--don't let ushaggle, I beg of you, over a few casual centuries--the whole ofnorthern Europe and America was covered from end to end, as everybodyknows, by a sheet of solid ice, like the one which Frithiof Nansencrossed from sea to sea on his own account in Greenland. For manythousand years, with occasional warmer spells, that vast ice-sheetbrooded, silent and grim, over the face of the two continents. Life wasextinct as far south as the latitude of New York and London. No plantor animal survived the general freezing. Not a creature broke themonotony of that endless glacial desert. At last, as the celestialcycle came round in due season, fresh conditions supervened. Warmerweather set in, and the ice began to melt. Then the plants and animalsof the sub-glacial district were pushed slowly northward by the warmthafter the retreating ice-cap. As time went on, the climate of theplains got too hot to hold them. The summer was too much for theglacial types to endure. They remained only on the highest mountainpeaks or close to the southern limit of eternal snow. In this way, every isolated range in either continent has its own little colony ofarctic or glacial plants and animals, which still survive bythemselves, unaffected by intercourse with their unknown andunsuspected fellow-creatures elsewhere. 

Not only has the Glacial epoch left these organic traces of itsexistence, however; in some parts of New Hampshire, where the glacierswere unusually thick and deep, fragments of the primæval ice itselfstill remain on the spots where they were originally stranded. Amongthe shady glens of the white mountains there occur here and there greatmasses of ancient ice, the unmelted remnant of primæval glaciers; andone of these is so large that an artificial cave has been cleverlyexcavated in it, as an attraction for tourists, by the canny Yankeeproprietor. Elsewhere the old ice-blocks are buried under the _débris_of moraine-stuff and alluvium, and are only accidentally discovered bythe sinking of what are locally known as ice-wells. No existingconditions can account for the formation of such solid rocks of ice atsuch a depth in the soil. They are essentially glacier-like in originand character: they result from the pressure of snow into a crystallinemass in a mountain valley: and they must have remained there unmeltedever since the close of the Glacial epoch, which, by Dr. Croll'scalculations, must most probably have ceased to plague our earth someeighty thousand years ago. Modern America, however, has no respect forantiquity: and it is at present engaged in using up this palæocrysticdeposit--this belated storehouse of prehistoric ice--in the manufactureof gin slings and brandy cocktails. 

As one scales a mountain of moderate height--say seven or eightthousand feet--in a temperate climate, one is sure to be struck by thegradual diminution as one goes in the size of the trees, till at lastthey tail off into mere shrubs and bushes. This diminution--an oldcommonplace of tourists--is a marked characteristic of mountain plants, and it depends, of course, in the main upon the effect of cold, and ofthe wind in winter. Cold, however, is by far the more potent factor ofthe two, though it is the least often insisted upon: and this can beseen in a moment by anyone who remembers that trees shade off in justthe self-same manner near the southern limit of permanent snow in theArctic regions. And the way the cold acts is simply this: it nips offthe young buds in spring in exposed situations, as the chillysea-breeze does with coast plants, which, as we commonly butincorrectly say, are "blown sideways" from seaward. 

Of course, the lower down one gets, and the nearer to the soil, thewarmer the layer of air becomes, both because there is greaterradiation, and because one can secure a little more shelter. So, veryfar north, and very near the snow-line on mountains, you always findthe vegetation runs low and stunted. It takes advantage of every crack, every cranny in the rocks, every sunny little nook, every jutting pointor wee promontory of shelter. And as the mountain plants have beenaccustomed for ages to the strenuous conditions of such cold andwind-swept situations, they have ended, of course, by adaptingthemselves to that station in life to which it has pleased the powersthat be to call them. They grow quite naturally low and stumpy androsette-shaped: they are compact of form and very hard of fibre: theypresent no surface of resistance to the wind in any way; rounded andboss-like, they seldom rise above the level of the rooks and stones, whose interstices they occupy. It is this combination of charactersthat makes mountain plants such favourites with florists: for theypossess of themselves that close-grown habit and that rich profusion ofclustered flowers which it is the grand object of the gardener byartificial selection to produce and encourage. 

When one talks of the 'the limit of trees' on a mountain side, however, it must be remembered that the phrase is used in a strictly human orPickwickian sense, and that it is only the size, not the type, of thevegetation that is really in question. For trees exist even on thehighest hill-tops: only they have accommodated themselves to theexigencies of the situation. Smaller and ever smaller species have beendeveloped by natural selection to suit the peculiarities of theseinclement spots. Take, for example, the willow and poplar group. Nobodywould deny that a weeping willow by an English river, or a Lombardypoplar in an Italian avenue, was as much of a true tree as an oak or achestnut. But as one mounts towards the bare and wind-swept mountainheights one finds that the willows begin to grow downward gradually. The 'netted willow' of the Alps and Pyrenees, which shelters itselfunder the lee of little jutting rocks, attains the height of only a fewinches; while the 'herbaceous willow, ' common on all very highmountains in Western Europe, is a tiny creeping weed, which nobodywould ever take for a forest tree by origin at all, unless he happenedto see it in the catkin-bearing stage, when its true nature and historywould become at once apparent to him. 

Yet this little herb-like willow, one of the most northerly and hardyof European plants, is a true tree at heart none the less for all that. Soft and succulent as it looks in branch and leaf, you may yet count onit sometimes as many rings of annual growth as on a lordly Scotchfir-tree. But where? Why, underground. For see how cunning it is, thislittle stunted descendant of proud forest lords: hard-pressed bynature, it has learnt to make the best of its difficult and precariousposition. It has a woody trunk at core, like all other trees; but thistrunk never appears above the level of the soil: it creeps and rootsunderground in tortuous zigzags between the crags and boulders that liestrewn through its thin sheet of upland leaf-mould. By this simple planthe willow manages to get protection in winter, on the same principleas when we human gardeners lay down the stems of vines: only the willowremains laid down all the year and always. But in summer it sends upits short-lived herbaceous branches, covered with tiny green leaves, and ending at last in a single silky catkin. Yet between the greatweeping willow and this last degraded mountain representative of thesame primitive type, you can trace in Europe alone at least a dozendistinct intermediate forms, all well marked in their differences, andall progressively dwarfed by long stress of unfavourable conditions. 

From the combination of such unfavourable conditions in Arcticcountries and under the snow-line of mountains there results a curiousfact, already hinted at above, that the coldest floras are also, fromthe purely human point of view, the most beautiful. Not, of course, themost luxuriant: for lush richness of foliage and 'breadth of tropicshade' (to quote a noble lord) one must go, as everyone knows, to theequatorial regions. But, contrary to the common opinion, the tropics, hoary shams, are not remarkable for the abundance or beauty of theirflowers. Quite otherwise, indeed: an unrelieved green strikes thekeynote of equatorial forests. This is my own experience, and it isborne out (which is far more important) by Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, who has seen a wider range of the untouched tropics, in all fourhemispheres--northern, southern, eastern, western--than any other man, I suppose, that ever lived on this planet. And Mr. Wallace is firm inhis conviction that the tropics in this respect are a complete fraud. Bright flowers are there quite conspicuously absent. It is rather inthe cold and less favoured regions of the world that one must look forfine floral displays and bright masses of colour. Close up to thesnow-line the wealth of flowers is always the greatest. 

In order to understand this apparent paradox one must remember that thehighest type of flowers, from the point of view of organisation, is notat the same time by any means the most beautiful. On the contrary, plants with very little special adaptation to any particular insect, like the water-lilies and the poppies, are obliged to flaunt forth invery brilliant hues, and to run to very large sizes in order to attractthe attention of a great number of visitors, one or other of whom maycasually fertilise them; while plants with very special adaptations, like the sage and mint group, or the little English orchids, are socunningly arranged that they can't fail of fertilisation at the veryfirst visit, which of course enables them to a great extent to dispensewith the aid of big or brilliant petals. So that, where the strugglefor life is fiercest, and adaptation most perfect, the flora will onthe whole be not most, but least, conspicuous in the matter of veryhandsome flowers. 

Now, the struggle for life is fiercest, and the wealth of nature isgreatest, one need hardly say, in tropical climates. There alone do wefind every inch of soil 'encumbered by its waste fertility, ' as Comusputs it; weighed down by luxuriant growth of tree, shrub, herb, creeper. There alone do lizards lurk in every hole; beetles dwellmanifold in every cranny; butterflies flock thick in every grove; bees, ants, and flies swarm by myriads on every sun-smitten hillside. Accordingly, in the tropics, adaptation reaches its highest point; andtangled richness, not beauty of colour, becomes the dominant note ofthe equatorial forests. Now and then, to be sure, as you wander throughBrazilian or Malayan woods, you may light upon some bright tree clad inscarlet bloom, or some glorious orchid drooping pendant from a boughwith long sprays of beauty: but such sights are infrequent. Green, andgreen, and ever green again--that is the general feeling of theequatorial forest: as different as possible from the rich mosaic of ahigh alp in early June, or a Scotch hillside deep in golden gorse andpurple heather in broad August sunshine. 

In very cold countries, on the other hand, though the conditions aresevere, the struggle for existence is not really so hard, because, inone word, there are fewer competitors. The field is less occupied; lifeis less rich, less varied, less self-strangling. And thereforespecialisation hasn't gone nearly so far in cold latitudes oraltitudes. Lower and simpler types everywhere occupy the soil; mosses, matted flowers, small beetles, dwarf butterflies. Nature is lessluxuriant, yet in some ways more beautiful. As we rise on the mountainsthe forest trees disappear, and with them the forest beasts, from bearsto squirrels; a low, wind-swept vegetation succeeds, very poor inspecies, and stunted in growth, but making a floor of rich flowersalmost unknown elsewhere. The humble butterflies and beetles of thechillier elevation produce in the result more beautiful bloom than thehighly developed honey-seekers of the richer and warmer lowlands. Luxuriance is atoned for by a Turkey carpet of floral magnificence. 

How, then, has the world at large fallen into the pardonable error ofbelieving tropical nature to be so rich in colouring, and circumpolarnature to be so dingy and unlovable? Simply thus, I believe. Thetropics embrace the largest land areas in the world, and are richer bya thousand times in species of plants and animals than all the rest ofthe earth in a lump put together. That richness necessarily resultsfrom the fierceness of the competition. Now among this enormous mass oftropical plants it naturally happens that some have finer flowers thanany temperate species; while as to the animals and birds, they areundoubtedly, on the whole, both larger and handsomer than the fauna ofcolder climates. But in the general aspect of tropical nature anoccasional bright flower or brilliant parrot counts for very littleamong the mass of lush green which surrounds and conceals it. On theother hand, in our museums and conservatories we sedulously pick outthe rarest and most beautiful of these rare and beautiful species, andwe isolate them completely from their natural surroundings. Theconsequence is that the untravelled mind regards the tropics mentallyas a sort of perpetual replica of the hot-houses at Kew, superimposedon the best of Mr. Bull's orchid shows. As a matter of fact, people whoknow the hot world well can tell you that the average tropical woodlandis much more like the dark shade of Box Hill or the deepest glades ofthe Black Forest. For really fine floral display in the mass, all atonce, you must go, not to Ceylon, Sumatra, Jamaica, but to the farnorth of Canada, the Bernese Oberland, the moors of Inverness-shire, the North Cape of Norway. Flowers are loveliest where the climate iscoldest; forests are greenest, most luxuriant, least blossoming, wherethe conditions of life are richest, warmest, fiercest. In one word, High Life is always poor but beautiful. 

 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. 

A singular opportunity was afforded me last summer for making myselfthoroughly at home with the habits and manners of the common Englishgeometrical spider. By the pure chance of circumstance, two ladies ofthat intelligent and interesting species were kind enough to select fortheir temporary residence a large pane of glass just outside mydrawing-room window. Now, it so happened that this particular pane wasconstructed not to open, being, in fact, part of a big bow-window, thealternate sashes of which were alone intended for ventilation. Hence itcame to pass that by diligent care I was enabled to preserve my twoeight-legged acquaintances from the devouring broom of the Britishhousemaid, and to keep them constantly under observation at all timesand seasons during a whole summer. Of course this result was onlyobtained by a distinct exercise of despotic authority, for I know thosepoor spiders were a constant eyesore in Ellen's sight--the housemaid ofthe moment bore the name of Ellen--but I persisted in my prohibition ofany forcible ejectment, and I carried my point in the end in the veryteeth of that constituted domestic authority. So successful was I, indeed, that when at last we flitted southwards ourselves with theswallows on our annual migration to the Mediterranean shores, we leftLucy and Eliza--those were the names we had given them--in undisturbedpossession of their prescriptive rights in the drawing-room windows. This year they are gone, and our home is left spiderless. 

They were curious and uninviting pets, I'm bound to admit, those greatjuicy-looking creatures. Nobody could say that any form of spider isprecisely what our Italian friends prettily describe in their liquidway as _simpatico_. At times, indeed, the conduct of Lucy and Eliza wasso peculiarly horrible and blood-curdling in its atrocity, that even I, their best friend, who had so often interceded for their lives andsaved them from the devastating duster of the aggressivehousemaid--even I myself, I say, more than once debated in my own mindwhether I was justified in letting them go on any longer in theircareer of crime unchecked, or whether I ought not rather to rush out atonce, avenging rag in hand, and sweep them away at one fell swoop fromthe surface of a world they disgraced with their unbridled wickedness. Eliza, in particular, I'm constrained to allow, was a perfect monsterof vice--a sort of undeveloped arachnid Borgia, quick to slay andrelentless in pursuit; a mass of eight-legged sins, stained with thecolourless gore of ten thousand struggling victims, and absolutelywithout a single redeeming point in her hateful character. And yet, whenever any more than usually horrible massacre of some pretty andinnocent fly almost moved me in my righteous wrath to rush out into thegarden in hot haste and put an end at once to the cruel wretch'sexistence with a judicial antimacassar, a number of moral scruples, such as could only be adequately resolved by the editor of the_Spectator_, always occurred spontaneously to my mind and consciencejust in time to ensure that wicked Eliza a fresh spell of life in whichto continue unabashed her atrocious behaviour. 

Has man, I asked myself at such moments, mere human man, any right toset himself up in the place of earthly providence, as so much betterand more moral than insentient nature? If the spider cruelly devoursliving flies and intelligent or highly sensitive bees, we must at leastremember that she has no choice in the matter, and that, as the poetjustly remarks, ''tis her nature to. ' But then, on the other hand, itmight be plausibly argued that 'tis our nature equally to kill thecreature that we see so hatefully fulfilling the law of its own cruelbeing. And yet again it might be pleaded by any able counsel whoundertook the defence of Lucy or Eliza on her trial for her lifeagainst her human accusers, that she was impelled to all these evildeeds by maternal affection, one of the noblest and most unselfish ofanimal instincts. Moreover, if the spider didn't prey, it wouldobviously die; and it seems rather hard on any creature to condemn itto death for no better reason than because it happens to have been borna member of its own kind, and not of any other and less morallyobjectionable species. Jedburgh justice o£ that sort rather savours ofthe method pursued by the famous countryman who was found cutting aharmless amphibian into a hundred pieces with his murderous spade, andsaying spitefully as he did so, at every particularly savage cut: 'I'lllarn ye to be a twoad, I will; I'll larn ye to be a twoad!'

Nevertheless, in spite of all this my vaunted philosophy, I willfrankly confess that more than once Eliza and Lucy sorely tried mypatience, and that I was often a good deal better than half-minded inmy soul to rush out in a feverish fit of moral indignation and put anend to their ghastly career of crime without waiting to hear what theyhad to say in their own favour, showing cause why sentence of deathshould not be executed upon them. And I would have done it, I believe, had it not been for that peculiar arrangement of the drawing-roomwindows, which made it impossible to get at the culprits direct, without going out into the garden and round the house; which, ofcourse, is a severe strain in wet or windy weather to put uponanybody's moral enthusiasm. In the end, therefore, I always gave theevil-doers the benefit of the doubt; and I only mention my ethicalscruples in the matter here lest scoffers should say, when they come toread what manner of things Lucy and Eliza did: 'Oh yes, that's justlike those scientific folks; they're always so cold-blooded. He couldstand by and see these poor helpless flies tortured slowly to death, without a chance for their lives, and never put out a helping hand tosave them!' Well, I would only ask you one question, my sapient friend, who talk like that: Has it ever occurred to you that, if you kill onespider, you merely make room in the overflowing economy of nature foranother to pick up a dishonest livelihood? Have you ever reflected thatthe prime blame of spiderhood rests with Nature herself (if we mayventure to personify that impersonal entity); and that she has providedsuch a constant supply or relay of spiders as will amply suffice tofill up all the possible vacancies that can ever occur in insect-eatingcircles? Unless you have considered all these points carefully, andhave an answer to give about them, you are not in a position topronounce upon the subject, and you had better be referred for sixmonths longer, as the medical examiners gracefully put it, to yourethical, psychological, and biological studies. The great point aboutthe position in which Eliza and Lucy had placed themselves was simplythis. They stood full against the light, so that we could see rightthrough their translucent bodies, which were almost liquid to lookupon, and beautifully dappled with dark spots on a grey ground in avery pretty and effective pattern. So favourable was the opportunityfor observation, indeed, that we could clearly make out with the nakedeye even the joints of their legs, the hairs on their tarsi--excuse thephrase--and the very shape of their cruel tigerlike claws, as theyrushed forth upon their prey in a sort of carnivorous frenzy. At allhours of the day we could notice exactly what they were doing orsuffering; and so familiar did we become with them individually andpersonally, that before the end of the season we recognized in detailall the differences of their characters almost as one might do withcats or dogs, and spoke of them by their Christian names like old andwell-known acquaintances. 

As the webs which Lucy and Eliza spun were several times broken ormutilated during the year, either by accident or the gardener, we hadplenty of chances for seeing how they proceeded in making them. Thelines were in both cases stretched between a white rose-bush thatclimbed up one side of the window, and a purple clematis that occupiedand draped the opposite mullion. But Lucy and Eliza didn't live in thewebs--those were only their snares or traps for prey; each of them hadin addition a private home or apartment of her own under shelter of arose-leaf at some distance from the treacherous geometrical structure. The house itself consisted merely of a silken cell, built out from therose-leaf, and connected with the snare by a single stout cord of verysolid construction. On this cord the spider kept one foot--I had almostsaid one hand--constantly fixed. She poised it lightly by her claws, and whenever an insect got entangled in the web, a subtle electricmessage, so to speak, seemed to run along the line to the ever-watchfulcarnivore. In one short second Lucy or Eliza, as the case might be, haddarted out upon her quarry, and was tackling it might main, accordingto the particular way its size and strength rendered then and thereadvisable. The method of procedure, which I shall describe more fullyby-and-by, differed considerably from case to case, as these very largeand strong spiders have sometimes to deal with mere tiny midges, andsometimes with extremely big and dangerous creatures, like bumble-bees, wasps, and even hornets. 

In building their webs, as in many other small points, Lucy and Elizashowed from the first no inconsiderable personal differences. Lucybegan hers by spinning a long line from her spinnerets, and letting thewind carry it wherever it would; while Eliza, more architectural incharacter, preferred to take her lines personally from point to point, and see herself to their proper fastening. In either case, however, thefirst thing done was to stretch some eight or ten stout threads fromplace to place on the outside of the future web, to act as _pointsd'appuy_ for the remainder of the structure. To these outer threads, which the spiders strengthened so as to bear a considerable strain bydoubling and trebling them, other thinner single threads were thencarried radially at irregular distances, like the spokes of a wheel, from a point in the centre, where they were all made fast and connectedtogether. As soon as this radiating framework or scaffolding wasfinished, like the woof on a loom, the industrious craftswoman startedat the middle, and began the task of putting in the cross-pieces orweft which were to complete and bind together the circular pattern. These she wove round and round in a continuous spiral, setting out atthe centre, and keeping on in ever-widening circlets, till she arrivedat last at the exterior or foundation threads. How she fastened thesecross-pieces to the ray-lines I could never quite make out, though Ioften followed the work closely from inside through the pane of glasswith a platyscopic lens; for, strange to say, the spiders were not inthe least disturbed by being watched at their work, and never took theslightest notice of anything that went on at the other side of thewindow. My impression is, however, that she gummed them together, letting them harden into one as they dried; for the thread itself isalways semi-liquid when first exuded. 

The cross-pieces, we observed from the very beginning, were invariablycovered by little sparkling drops of something wet and beadlike, whichat first in our ignorance we took for dew; for until I begansystematically observing Lucy and Eliza, I will frankly confess I hadnever paid any particular attention to the spider-kind with thesolitary exception of my old winter friends, the trap-door spiders ofthe Mediterranean shores. But, after a little experience, we soon foundout that these pearly drops on the web were not dew at all, but asticky substance, akin, to that of the web, secreted by the animalsthemselves from their own bodies. We also quickly discovered, coming tothe observation as we did with minds unbiased by previous knowledge, that the viscid liquid in question was of the utmost importance to thespiders in securing their prey, and that unfortunate insects were notmerely entangled but likewise gummed down or glued by it, like birds inbird-lime or flies in treacle. So necessary is the sticky stuff, indeed, to the success of the trap, that Lucy and Eliza used to renewthe entire set of cross-pieces in the web every morning, and thusensure from day to day a perfectly fresh supply of viscid fluid; but, so far as I could see, they only renewed the rays and thefoundation-threads under stress of necessity, when the snare had beenso greatly injured by large insects struggling in it, or by the wind orthe gardener, as to render repairs absolutely unavoidable. The wholestructure, when complete, is so beautiful and wonderful a sight, withits geometrical regularity and its beaded drops, that if it wereproduced by a rare creature from Madagascar or the Cape, in theinsect-house at the Zoo, all the world, I'm convinced, would rush tolook at it as a nine-days' wonder. But since it's only the trap of thecommon English garden spider, why, we all pass it by without deigningeven to glance at it. 

At night my eight-legged friends slept always in their own homes ornests under shelter of the rose-leaves. But during the day theyalternated between the nest and the centre of the web, which lastseemed to serve them as a convenient station where they waited fortheir prey, standing head downward with legs wide spread on the rays, on the look-out for incidents. Whether at the centre or in the nest, however, they kept their feet constantly on the watch for anydisturbance on the webs; and the instant any unhappy little fly gotentangled in their meshes, the ever-watchful spider was out like aflash of lightning, and down at once in full force upon that incautiousintruder. I was convinced after many observations that it is by touchalone the spider recognizes the presence of prey in its web, and thatit hardly derives any indications worth speaking of from its numerouslittle eyes, at least as regards the arrival of booty. If a very biginsect has got into the web, then a relatively large volume ofdisturbance is propagated along the telegraphic wire that runs from thesnare to the house, or from the circumference to the centre; if a smallone, then a slight disturbance; and the spider rushes out accordingly, either with an air of caution or of ferocious triumph. 

Supposing the booty in hand was a tiny fly, then Lucy or Eliza wouldjump upon it at once with that strange access of apparently personalanimosity with seems in some mysterious way a characteristic of allhunting carnivorous animals. She would then carelessly wind a thread ortwo about it, in a perfunctory way, bury her jaws in its body, and inless than half a minute suck out its juices to the last drop, leavingthe empty shell unhurt, like a dry skeleton or the slough of adragon-fly larva. But when wasps or other large and dangerous insectsgot entangled in the webs, the hunters proceeded with far greatercaution. Lucy, indeed, who was a decided coward, would stand and lookanxiously at the doubtful intruder for several seconds, feeling the webwith her claws, and running up and down in the most undecided manner, as if in doubt whether or not to tackle the uncertain customer. ButEliza, whose spirits always rose like Nelson's before the face ofdanger, and whose motto seemed to be '_De l'audace, de l'audace, ettoujours de l'audace_, ' would rush at the huge foe in a perfecttransport of wild fury, and go to work at once to enclose him in hertoils of triple silken cables. I always fancied, indeed, that Eliza wasin a thoroughly housewifely tantrum at seeing her nice new web soruthlessly torn and tattered by the unwelcome visitor, and that shesaid to herself in her own language: 'Oh well, then, if you _will_ haveit, you _shall_ have it; so here goes for you. ' And go for him she did, with most unladylike ferocity. Indeed, Eliza's best friend, I must fainadmit, could never have said of her that she was a perfect lady. 

The chawing-up of that wasp was a sight to behold. I have no greatsympathy with wasps--they have done me so many bad turns in my timethat I don't pretend to regard them as deserving of exceptionalpity--but I must say Eliza's way of going at them was unduly barbaric. She treated them for all the world as if they were entirely devoid of anervous system. I wouldn't treat a _Saturday Reviewer_ myself as thatspider treated the wasps when once she was sure of them. She went atthem with a sort of angry, half-contemptuous dash, kept cautiously outof the way of the protruded sting, began in most business-like fashionat the head, and rolling the wasp round and round with her legs andfeelers, swathed him rapidly and effectually, with incredible speed, ina dense network of web poured forth from her spinnerets. In less thanhalf a minute the astonished wasp, accustomed rather to act on theoffensive than the defensive, found himself helplessly enclosed in aperfect coil of tangled silk, which confined him from head to stingwithout the possibility of movement in any direction. The whole timethis had been going on the victim, struggling and writhing, had beenpushing out its sting and doing the very best it knew to deal the wilyEliza a poisoned death-blow. But Eliza, taught by ancestral experience, kept carefully out of the way; and the wasp felt itself finally twirledround and round in those powerful hands, and tied about as to its wingsby a thousand-fold cable. Sometimes, after the wasp was secured, Elizaeven took the trouble to saw off the wings so as to prevent furtherstruggling and consequent damage to the precious web; but more oftenshe merely proceeded to eat it alive without further formality, stillavoiding its sting as long as the creature had a kick left in it, butotherwise entirely ignoring its character as a sentient being in themost inhuman fashion. And all the time, till the last drop of his bloodwas sucked out, the wasp would continue viciously to stick out hisdeadly sting, which the spider would still avoid with hereditarycunning. It was a horrid sight--a duel _à outrance_ between two equallyhateful and poisonous opponents; a living commentary on the appallingbut o'er-true words of the poet, that 'Nature is one with rapine, aharm no preacher can heal. ' Though these were the occasions when onesometimes felt as if the cup of Eliza's iniquities was really full, andone must pass sentence at last, without respite or reprieve, upon thatlife-long murderess. 

One insect there was, however, before which even Eliza herself, hardened wretch as she seemed, used to cower and shiver; and that wasthe great black bumble-bee, the largest and most powerful of theBritish bee-kind. When one of these dangerous monsters, a burly, buzzing bourgeois, got entangled in her web, Eliza, shaking in hershoes (I allow her those shoes by poetical licence) would retire inhigh dudgeon to her inmost bower, and there would sit and sulk, invisible bad temper, till the clumsy big thing, after many futileefforts, had torn its way by main force out of the coils thatsurrounded it. Then, the moment the telegraphic communication told herthe lines in the web were once more free, Eliza would sally forth againwith a smiling face--oh yes, I assure you, we could tell by her lookwhen she was smiling--and would repair afresh with cheerful alacritythe damage done to her snare by the unwelcome visitor. Hummingbirdhawk-moths, on the other hand, though so big and quick, she would killimmediately. As for Lucy, craven soul, she had so little sense ofproper pride and arachnid honour, that she shrank even from the waspswhich Eliza so bravely and unhesitatingly tackled; and more than oncewe caught her in the very act of cutting them out entire, with thewhole piece of web in which they were immeshed, and letting them dropon to the ground beneath, merely as a short way of getting rid of themfrom her premises. I always rather despised Lucy. She hadn't even theone redeeming virtue of most carnivorous or predatory races--aninsensate and almost automatic courage. 

I need hardly say, however, that the spider does not kill her prey by amere fair-and-square bite alone. She has recourse to the art of thePalmers and Brinvilliers. All spiders, as far as known, are providedwith poison-fangs in the jaws, which sometimes, as in the tarantula andmany other large tropical kinds, well known to me in Jamaica andelsewhere, are sufficiently powerful to produce serious effects uponman himself; while even much smaller spiders, like Eliza and Lucy, havepoison enough in their falces, as the jawlike organs are called, tokill a good big insect, such as a wasp or a bumble-bee. Thesechannelled poison-glands, combined with their savage tigerlike claws, make the spiders as a group extremely formidable and dominantcreatures, the analogues in their own smaller invertebrate world of theserpents and wolves in the vertebrate creation. 

Lucy and Eliza's family relations, I am sorry to say, were not, wefound, of a kind to endear them to a critical public alreadysufficiently scandalized by their general mode of behaviour to theirinoffensive neighbours. As mothers, indeed, gossip itself had not aword of blame to whisper against them; but as wives, their conduct wasdistinctly open to the severest animadversion. The males of the gardenspider, as in many other instances, are decidedly smaller than theirbig round mates; so much so is this the case, indeed, in certainspecies that they seem almost like parasites of the immensely largersack-bodied females. Now, just as the worker bees kill off the dronesas soon as the queen-bee has been duly fertilized, regarding them as ofno further importance or value to the hive, so do the lady-spiders notonly kill but eat their husbands as soon as they find they have nofurther use for them. Nay, if a female spider doesn't care for thelooks of a suitor who is pressing himself too much upon her fondattention, her way of expressing her disapprobation of his appearanceand manners is to make a murderous spring at him, and, if possible, devour him. Under these painful circumstances the process of courtshipis necessarily to some extent a difficult and delicate one, fraughtwith no small danger to the adventurous swain who has the boldness tocommend himself by personal approach to these very fickle and irasciblefair ones. It was most curious and exciting, accordingly, to watch thedetails of the strange courtship, which we could only observe in thecase of the cruel Eliza, the rather gentler Lucy having been alreadymated, apparently, before she took up her quarters in our climbingwhite rose-bush. One day, however, a timid-looking male spider, withinquiry and doubt in every movement of his tarsi, strolled tentativelyup on the neat round web where Eliza was hanging, head downward asusual, all her feet on the thread, on the look-out for house-flies. Weknew he was a male at once by his longer and thinner body, and by hisnatural modesty. He walked gingerly on all eights, like an arachnidAgag, in the direction of the object of his ardent affections, with amost comic uncertainty in every step he took towards her. His clawsfelt the threads as he moved with anxious care; and it was clear he wasready at a moment's notice to jump away and flee for his life withheadlong speed to his native obscurity if Eliza showed the slightestdisposition, by gesture or movement, to turn and rend him. Now andagain, as he approached, Eliza, half coquettish, moved her feet a shortstep, and seemed to debate within her own mind in which spirit sheshould meet his flattering advances--whether to accept him or to eathim. At each such hesitation, the unhappy male, fearing the worst, andsore afraid, would turn on his heel and fly for dear life as fast aseight trembling legs would carry him. Then, after a minute or two, hewould evidently come to the conclusion that he had wronged hislady-love, and that her movement was one of true, true love rather thanof carnivorous and cannibalistic appetite. At last, as I judged, hisconstancy was rewarded, though his ominous disappearance very shortlyafterwards made me fear for the worst as to his final adventures. 

In the end, Eliza laid a large number of eggs in a silken cocoon, inshape a balloon, and secreted, like the web, by her invaluablespinnerets. Indeed, the real reason--I won't say excuse--for therapacity and Gargantuan appetite of the spider lies, no doubt, in theimmense amount of material she has to supply for her daily-renewedwebs, her home, and her cocoon, all which have actually to be spun outof the assimilated food-stuffs in her own body; to say nothing of theadditional necessity imposed upon her by nature for laying a trifle ofsix or seven hundred eggs in a single summer. And, to tell the truth, Lucy and Eliza seemed to us to be always eating. No matter at what hourone looked in upon them, they were pretty constantly engaged indevouring some inoffensive fly, or weaving hateful labyrinths of hastycord round some fiercely-struggling wasp or some unhappy beetle. 

We weren't fortunate enough, I regret to say, to see Eliza's eggs hatchout from the cocoon; but in other instances, especially in SouthernEurope, I have noticed the little heap of well-covered ova, gluedtogether into a mass, and attached to a branch or twig by stout silkencables. If you open the cocoon when the young spiders are just hatched, they begin to run about in the most lively fashion, and look like aliving and moving congeries of little balls or seedlets. The commongarden spider lays some seven hundred or more such eggs at a sitting, and out of those seven hundred only two on an average reach maturityand once more propagate their kind. For if only four lived and throve, then clearly, in the next generation, there would be twice as manyspiders as in this; and in the generation after that again, four timesas many; and then eight times; and so on _ad infinitum_, until thewhole world was just one living and seething mass of common gardenspiders. 

What keeps them down, then, in the end to their average number? Whatprevents the development of the whole seven hundred? The simple answeris, continuous starvation. As usual, nature works with cruellavishness. There are just as many spiders at any given minute as thereare insects enough in the world or in their area to feed upon. Everyspider lays hundreds of eggs, so as to make up for the average infantmortality by starvation, or by the attacks of ichneumon flies, or bybeing eaten themselves in the young stage, or by other casualties. Andso with all other species. Each produces as many young on the averageas will allow for the ordinary infant mortality of their kind, andleave enough over just to replace the parents in the next generation. And that's one of the reasons why it's no use punishing Lucy and Elizafor their misdeeds in this world. Kill them off if you will, and beforenext week a dozen more like them will dispute with one another thevacant place you have thus created in the balanced economy of thatmicrocosm the garden. 

Our observations upon Lucy and Eliza, however, had the effect of makingus take an increased interest thenceforth in spiders in general, whichtill that time we had treated with scant courtesy, and set us aboutlearning something as to the extraordinary variety of life and habit tobe found within the range of this single group of arthropods, at firstsight so extremely alike in their shapes, their appearance, theirmorals, and their manners. It's perfectly astonishing, though, when onecomes to look into it in detail, how exceedingly diverse spiders are intheir mode of life, their structure, and the variety of uses to whichthey put their one extremely distinctive structural organ, thespinnerets. I will only say here that some spiders use these peculiarglands to form light webs by whose aid, though wingless, they floatballoon-wise through the air; that others employ them to line the sidesof their underground tunnels, and to make the basis of theirmarvellously ingenious earthen trap-doors; that yet others have learnthow to adapt these same organs to a subaquatic existence, and to fillcocoons with air, like miniature diving bells; while others, again, have taught themselves to construct webs thick enough to catch and holdeven creatures so superior to themselves in the scale of being ashumming-birds and sunbirds. This extraordinary variety in theutilization of a single organ teaches once more the same lesson whichis impressed upon us elsewhere by so many other forms of organicevolution: whatever enables an animal or plant to gain an advantageover others in the struggle for life, no matter in what way, is sure tosurvive, and to be turned in time to every conceivable use of which itsstructure is capable, in the infinite whirligig of ever-varying nature. 

 MUD. 

Even a prejudiced observer will readily admit that the most valuablemineral on earth is mud. Diamonds and rubies are just nowhere bycomparison. I don't mean weight for weight, of course--mud is 'cheap asdirt, ' to buy in small quantities--but aggregate for aggregate. Quiteliterally, and without hocus-pocus of any sort, the money valuation ofthe mud in the world must outnumber many thousand times the moneyvaluation of all the other minerals put together. Only we reckon itusually not by the ton, but by the acre, though the acre is worth mostwhere the mud lies deepest. Nay, more, the world's wealth is whollybased on mud. Corn, not gold, is the true standard of value. Withoutmud there would be no human life, no productions of any kind: for foodstuffs of every description are raised on mud; and where no mud exists, or can be made to exist, there, we say, there is desert or sand-waste. Land, without mud, has no economic value. To put it briefly, the onlyparts of the world that count much for human habitation are the muddeposits of the great rivers, and notably of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Indus, the Irrawaddy, the Hoang Ho, the Yang-tse-Kiang;of the Po, the Rhone, the Danube, the Rhine, the Volga, the Dnieper; ofthe St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Orinoco, theAmazons, the La Plata. A corn-field is just a big mass of mud; and thedeeper and purer and freer from stones or other impurities it is thebetter. 

But England, you say, is not a great river-mud field; yet it supportsthe densest population in the world. True; but England is anexceptional product of modern civilization. She can't feed herself: sheis fed from Odessa, Alexandria, Bombay, New York, Montreal, BuenosAyres--in other words, from the mud fields of the Russian, theEgyptian, the Indian, the American, the Canadian, the Argentine rivers. Orontes, said Juvenal, has flowed into Tiber; Nile, we may saynowadays, with equal truth, has flowed into Thames. 

There is nothing to make one realize the importance of mud, indeed, like a journey up Nile when the inundation is just over. You lounge onthe deck of your dahabieh, and drink in geography almost withoutknowing it. The voyage forms a perfect introduction to the study ofmudology, and suggests to the observant mind (meaning you and me) thereal nature of mud as nothing else on earth that I know of can suggestit. For in Egypt you get your phenomenon isolated, as it were, from alldisturbing elements. You have no rainfall to bother you, no localstreams, no complex denudation: the Nile does all, and the Nile doeseverything. On either hand stretches away the bare desert, rising up ingrey rocky hills. Down the midst runs the one long line of alluvialsoil--in other words, Nile mud--which alone allows cultivation and lifein that rainless district. The country bases itself absolutely on mud. The crops are raised on it; the houses and villages are built of it;the land is manured with it; the very air is full of it. The crudebrick buildings that dissolve in dust are Nile mud solidified; the redpottery of Assiout is Nile mud baked hard; the village mosques andminarets are Nile mud whitewashed. I have even seen a ship's bulwarksneatly repaired with mud. It pervades the whole land, when wet, as mudundisguised; when dry, as dust-storm. 

Egypt, says Herodotus, is a gift of the Nile. A truer or more pregnantword was never spoken. Of course it is just equally true, in a way, that Bengal is a gift of the Ganges, and that Louisiana and Arkansasare gifts of the Mississippi; but with this difference, that in thecase of the Nile the dependence is far more obvious, far freer fromdisturbing or distracting details. For that reason, and also becausethe Nile is so much more familiar to most English-speaking folk thanthe American rivers, I choose Egypt first as my type of a regularmud-land. But in order to understand it fully you mustn't stop all yourtime in Cairo and the Delta; you mustn't view it only from the terraceof Shepheard's Hotel or the rocky platform of the Great Pyramid atGhizeh: you must push up country early, under Mr. Cook's care, to Luxorand the First Cataract. It is up country that Egypt unrolls itselfvisibly before your eyes in the very process of making: it is therethat the full importance of good, rich black mud first forces itselfupon you by undeniable evidence. 

For remember that, from a point above Berber to the sea, the dwindlingNile never receives a single tributary, a single drop of fresh water. For more than fifteen hundred miles the ever-lessening river rolls onbetween bare desert hills and spreads fertility over the deep valley intheir midst--just as far as its own mud sheet can cover the barrenrocky bottom, and no farther. For the most part the line of demarcationbetween the grey bare desert and the cultivable plain is as clear andas well-defined as the margin of sea and land: you can stand with onefoot on the barren rock and one on the green soil of the tilled andirrigated mud-land. For the water rises up to a certain level, and tothat level accordingly it distributes both mud and moisture: above itcomes the arid rock, as destitute of life, as dead and bare and lonelyas the centre of Sahara. In and out, in waving line, up to the base ofthe hills, cultivation and greenery follow, with absolute accuracy, theline of highest flood-level; beyond it the hot rock stretches drearyand desolate. Here and there islands of sandstone stand out above thegreen sea of doura or cotton; here and there a bay of fertility runsaway up some lateral valley, following the course of the mud; but oneinch above the inundation-mark vegetation and life stop short all atonce with absolute abruptness. In Egypt, then, more than anywhere else, one sees with one's own eyes that mud and moisture are the veryconditions of mundane fertility. 

Beyond Cairo, as one descends seaward, the mud begins to open outfan-wise and form a delta. The narrow mountain ranges no longer hem itin. It has room to expand and spread itself freely over the surroundingcountry, won by degrees from the Mediterranean. At the mouths the mudpours out into the sea and forms fresh deposits constantly on thebottom, which are gradually silting up still newer lands to seaward. Slow as is the progress of this land-forming action, there can be nodoubt that the Nile has the intention of filling up by degrees thewhole eastern Mediterranean, and that in process of time--say in nomore than a few million years or so, a mere bagatelle to thegeologist--with the aid of the Po and some other lesser streams, itwill transform the entire basin of the inland sea into a level andcultivable plain, like Bengal or Mesopotamia, themselves (as we shallsee) the final result of just such silting action. 

It is so very important, for those who wish to see things "as clear asmud, " to understand this prime principle of the formation of mud-lands, that I shall make no apology for insisting on it further in some littledetail; for when one comes to look the matter plainly in the face, onecan see in a minute that almost all the big things in human historyhave been entirely dependent upon the mud of the great rivers. Thebesand Memphis, Rameses and Amenhotep, based their civilisation absolutelyupon the mud of Nile. The bricks of Babylon were moulded of Euphratesmud; the greatness of Nineveh reposed on the silt of the Tigris. UpperIndia is the Indus; Agra and Delhi are Ganges and Jumna mud; China isthe Hoang Ho and the Yang-tse-Kiang; Burmah is the paddy field of theIrrawaddy delta. And so many great plains in either hemisphere consistreally of nothing else but mud-banks of almost incredible extent, filling up prehistoric Baltics and Mediterraneans, that a glance at theprobable course of future evolution in this respect may help us tounderstand and to realize more fully the gigantic scale of some pastaccumulations. 

As a preliminary canter I shall trot out first the valley of the Po, the existing mud flat best known by personal experience to the feet andeyes of the tweed-clad English tourist. Everybody who has looked downupon the wide Lombard plain from the pinnacled roof of Milan Cathedral, or who has passed by rail through that monotonous level of poplars andvines between Verona and Venice, knows well what a mud flat due toinundation and gradual silting up of a valley looks like. What I wantto do now is to inquire into its origin, and to follow up in fancy thesame process, still in action, till it has filled the Adriatic from endto end with one great cultivable lowland. 

Once upon a time (I like to be at least as precise as a fairy tale inthe matter of dates) there was no Lombardy. And that time was not, geologically speaking, so very remote; for the whole valley of the Po, from Turin to the sea, consists entirely of alluvial deposits--or, inother words, of Alpine mud--which has all accumulated where it now liesat a fairly recent period. We know it is recent, because no part ofItaly has ever been submerged since it began to gather there. To put itmore definitely, the entire mass has almost certainly been laid downsince the first appearance of man on our earth: the earliest humanbeings who reached the Alps or the Apennines--black savages clad inskins of extinct wild beasts--must have looked down from their slopes, with shaded eyes, not on a level plain such as we see to-day, but on agreat arm of the sea which stretched like a gulf far up towards thebase of the hills about Turin and Rivoli. Of this ancient sea theAdriatic forms the still unsilted portion. In other words, the greatgulf which now stops short at Trieste and Venice once washed the footof the Alps and the Apennines to the Superga at Turin, covering thesites of Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, Ravenna, Mantua, Cremona, Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Pavia, Milan, and Novara. The industrious reader whogets out his Baedeker and looks up the shaded map of North Italy whichforms its frontispiece will be rewarded for his pains by a bettercomprehension of the district thus demarcated. The idle must be contentto take my word for what follows. I pledge them my honour that I'll domy best not to deceive their trustful innocence. 

It may sound at first hearing a strange thing to say so, but the wholeof that vast gulf, from Turin to Venice, has been entirely filled upwithin the human period by the mud sheet brought down by mountaintorrents from the Alps and the Apennines. 

A parallel elsewhere will make this easier of belief. You have lookeddown, no doubt, from the garden of the hotel at Glion upon the lake ofGeneva and the valley of the Rhone about Villeneuve and Aigle. If so, you can understand from personal knowledge the first great stage in themud-filling process; for you must have observed for yourself from thatcommanding height that the lake once extended a great deal farther upcountry towards Bex and St. Maurice than it does at present. You canstill trace at once on either side the old mountainous banks, descending into the plain as abruptly and unmistakably as they stilldescend to the water's edge at Montreux and Vevey. But the silt of theRhone, brought down in great sheets of glacier mud (about which moreanon) from the Furca and the Jungfrau and the Monte Rosa chain, hascompletely filled in the upper nine miles of the old lake basin with alevel mass of fertile alluvium. There is no doubt about the fact: youcan see it for yourself with half an eye from that specular mount (togive the Devil his due, I quote Milton's Satan): the mud lies even frombank to bank, raised only a few inches above the level of the lake, andas lacustrine in effect as the veriest geologist on earth could wishit. Indeed, the process of filling up still continues unabated at thepresent day where the mud-laden Rhone enters the lake at Bouveret, toleave it again, clear and blue and beautiful, under the bridge atGeneva. The little delta which the river forms at its mouth shows thefresh mud in sheets gathering thick upon the bottom. Every day this newmud-bank pushes out farther and farther into the water, so that inprocess of time the whole basin will be filled in, and a level plain, like that which now spreads from Bex and Aigle to Villeneuve, willoccupy the entire bed from Montreux to Geneva. 

Turn mentally to the upper feeders of the Po itself, and you find thesame causes equally in action. You have stopped at Pallanza--Garoni'sis so comfortable. Well, then, you know how every Alpine stream, as itflows, full-gorged, into the Italian lakes, is busily engaged infilling them up as fast as ever it can with turbid mud from theuplands. The basins of Maggiore, Como, Lugano, and Garda are by origindeep hollows scooped out long since during the Great Ice Age by thepressure of huge glaciers that then spread far down into what is nowthe poplar-clad plain of Lombardy. But ever since the ice cleared away, and the torrents began to rush headlong down the deep gorges of the ValLeventina and the Val Maggia, the mud has been hard at work, doing itslevel best to fill those great ice-worn bowls up again. Near the mouthof each main stream it has already succeeded in spreading a fan-shapeddelta. I will not insult you by asking you at the present time of daywhether you have been over the St. Gothard. In this age of _trains deluxe_ I know to my cost everybody has been everywhere. No chance ofpretending to superior knowledge about Japan or Honolulu; the touristknows them. Very well, then; you must remember as you go pastBellinzona--revolutionary little Bellinzona with its three castledcrags--you look down upon a vast mud flat by the mouth of the Ticino. Part of this mud flat is already solid land, but part is mere marsh orshifting quicksand. That is the first stage in the abolition of thelakes: the mud is annihilating them. 

Maggiore, indeed, least fortunate of the three main sheets, is beingattacked by the insidious foe at three points simultaneously. At theupper end, the Ticino, that furious radical river, has filled in alarge arm, which once spread far away up the valley towards Bellinzona. A little lower down, the Maggia near Locarno carries in a freshcontribution of mud, which forms another fan-shaped delta, andstretches its ugly mass half across the lake, compelling the steamersto make a considerable detour eastward. This delta is rapidly extendinginto the open water, and will in time fill in the whole remaining spacefrom bank to bank, cutting off the upper end of the lake about Locarnofrom the main basin by a partition of lowland. This upper end will thenform a separate minor lake, and the Ticino will flow out of it acrossthe intervening mud flat into the new and smaller Maggiore of ourgreat-great-grandchildren. If you doubt it, look what the torrent ofthe Toce, the third assailing battalion of the persistent mud force, has already done in the neighbourhood of Pallanza. It has entirely cutoff the upper end of the bay, that turns westward towards the Simplon, by a partition of mud; and this isolated upper bit forms now in our ownday a separate lake, the Lago di Mergozzo, divided from the main sheetby an uninteresting mud bank. In process of time, no doubt, the wholeof Maggiore will be similarly filled in by the advancing mud sheet, andwill become a level alluvial plain, surrounded by mountains, andgreatly admired by the astute Piedmontese cultivator. 

What is going on in Maggiore is going on equally in all the othersub-Alpine lakes of the Po valley. They are being gradually filled in, every one of them, by the aggressive mud sheet. The upper end ofLugano, for example, has already been cut off, as the Lago del Piano, from the main body; and the _piano_ itself, from which the littleisolated tarn takes its name, is the alluvial mud fiat of a lateraltorrent--the mud flat, in fact, which the railway from Porlezzatraverses for twenty minutes before it begins its steep and picturesqueclimb by successive zigzags over the mountains to Menaggio. Similarlythe influx of the Adda at the upper end of Como has cut off the Lago diMezzola from the main lake, and has formed the alluvial level thatstretches so drearily all around Colico. Slowly the mud fiendencroaches everywhere on the lakes; and if you look for him when yougo, there you can see him actually at work every spring under your veryeyes, piling up fresh banks and deltas with alarming industry, andpreparing (in a few hundred thousand years) to ruin the tourist tradeof Cadenabbia and Bellagio. 

If we turn from the lakes themselves to the Lombard plain at large, which is an immensely older and larger basin, we see traces of the sameaction on a vastly greater scale. A glance at the map will show theintelligent and ever courteous reader that the 'wandering Po'--I dropinto poetry after Goldsmith--flows much nearer the foot of theApennines than of the Alps in the course of its divagations, and seemspurposely to bend away from the greater range of mountains. Why isthis, since everything in nature must needs have a reason? Well, it isbecause, when the mud first began to accumulate in the old Lombard bayof the Adriatic, there was no Po at all, whether wandering orotherwise: the big river has slowly grown up in time by the union ofthe lateral torrents that pour down from either side, as the growth ofthe mud flat brought them gradually together. Careful study of a goodmap will show how this has happened, especially if it has the plainsand mountains distinctively tinted after the excellent German fashion. The Ticino, the Adda, the Mincio, if you look at them close, revealthemselves as tributaries of the Po, which once flowed separately intothe Lombard bay; the Adige, the Piave, the Tagliamento farther alongthe coast, reveal themselves equally as tributaries of the future Po, when once the great river shall have filled up with its mud the spacebetween Trieste and Venice, though for the moment they empty themselvesand their store of detritus into the open Adriatic. 

Fix your eyes for a moment on Venetia proper, and you will see how thishas all happened and is still happening. Each mountain torrent thatleaps from the Tyrolese Alps bring down in its lap a rich mass of mud, which has gradually spread over a strip of sea some forty or fiftymiles wide, from the base of the mountains to the modern coast-line ofthe province. Near the sea--or, in other words, at the temporaryoutlet--it forms banks and lagoons, of which those about Venice are thebest known to tourists, though the least characteristic. For miles andmiles between Venice and Trieste the shifting north shore of theAdriatic consists of nothing but such accumulating mud banks. Yearafter year they push farther seaward, and year after year fresh isletsand shoals grow out into the waves beyond the temporary deltas. Intime, therefore, the gathering mud banks of these Alpine torrents mustjoin the greater mud bank that runs rapidly seaward at the delta of thePo. As soon as they do so the rivers must rush together, and what wasonce an independent stream, emptying itself into the Adriatic, mustbecome a tributary of the Po, helping to swell the waters of that greatunited river. The Adige has now just reached this state: its delta iscontinuous with the delta of the Po, and their branches interosculate. The Mincio and the Adda reached it ages since: the Piave and theLivenia will not reach it for ages. In Roman days Hatria was still onthe sea: it is now some fifteen miles inland. 

From all this you can gather why the existing Po flows far from theAlps and nearer the base of the Apennines. The Alpine streams in fardistant days brought down relatively large floods of glacial mud;formed relatively large deltas in the old Lombard bay; filled up withrelative rapidity their larger half of the basin. The Apennines, lesslofty, and free from glaciers, sent down shorter and smaller torrents, laden with far less mud, and capable therefore of doing but littlealluvial work for the filling in of the future Lombardy. So the riverwas pushed southward by the Alpine deposits of the northern streams, leaving the great plains of Cisalpine Gaul spread away to the north ofit. 

And this land-making action is ceaseless and continuous. About Venice, Chioggia, Maestra, Comacchio, the delta of the Po is still spreadingseaward. In the course of ages--if nothing unforeseen occurs meanwhileto prevent it--the Alpine mud will have filled in the entire Adriatic;and the Ionian Isles will spring like isolated mountain ridges from theAdriatic plain, as the Euganean hills--those 'mountains Euganean' whereShelley 'stood listening to the pæan with which the legioned rocks didhail the sun's uprise majestical'--spring in our own time from the deadlevel of Lombardy. Once they in turn were the Euganean islands, andeven now to the trained eye of the historical observer they stand upisland-like from the vast green plain that spreads flat around them. 

Perhaps it seems to you a rather large order to be asked to believethat Lombardy and Venetia are nothing more than an outspread sheet ofdeep Alpine mud. Well, there is nothing so good for incredulity, don'tyou know, as capping the climax. If a man will not swallow an inch offact, the best remedy is to make him gulp down an ell of it. And, indeed, the Lombard plain is but an insignificant mud flat comparedwith the vast alluvial plains of Asiatic and American rivers. Thealluvium of the Euphrates, of the Mississippi, of the Hoang Ho, of theAmazons would take in many Lombardies and half-a-dozen Venetias withoutnoticing the addition. But I will insist upon only one example--therivers of India, which have formed the gigantic deep mud flat of theGanges and the Jumna, one of the very biggest on earth, and thatbecause the Himalayas are the highest and newest mountain chain exposedto denudation. For, as we saw foreshadowed in the case of the Alps andApennines, the bigger the mountains on which we can draw the greaterthe resulting mass of alluvium. The Rocky Mountains give rise to theMissouri (which is the real Mississippi); the Andes give rise toAmazons and the La Plata; the Himalayas give rise to the Ganges and theIndus. Great mountain, great river, great resulting mud sheet. 

At a very remote period, so long ago that we cannot reduce it to anycommon measure with our modern chronology, the southern table-land ofIndia--the Deccan, as we call it--formed a great island like Australia, separated from the continent of Asia by a broad arm of the sea whichoccupied what is now the great plain of Bengal, the North-West, and thePunjaub. This ancient sea washed the foot of the Himalayas, and spreadsouth thence for 600 miles to the base of the Vindhyas. But theHimalayas are high and clad with gigantic glaciers. Much ice grindsmuch mud on those snow-capped summits. The rivers that flowed from theRoof of the World carried down vast sheets of alluvium, which formedfans at their mouths, like the cones still deposited on a far smallerscale in the Lake of Geneva by little lateral torrents. Gradually thesilt thus brought down accumulated on either side, till the rivers rantogether into two great systems--one westward--the Indus, with its fourgreat tributaries, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravee, Sutlej; one eastward, theGanges, reinforced lower down by the sister streams of the Jumna andthe Brahmapootra. The colossal accumulation of silt thus producedfilled up at last all the great arm of the sea between the two mountainchains, and joined the Deccan by slow degrees to the continent of Asia. It is still engaged in filling up the Bay of Bengal on one side by thedetritus of the Ganges, and the Arabian Sea on the other by thesand-banks of the Indus. 

In the same way, no doubt, the silt of the Thames, the Humber, theRhine, and the Meuse tend slowly (bar accidents) to fill up the NorthSea, and anticipate Sir Edward Watkin by throwing a land bridge acrossthe English Channel. If ever that should happen, then history will haverepeated itself, for it is just so that the Deccan was joined to themainland of Asia. 

One question more. Whence comes the mud? The answer is, Mainly from thedetritus of the mountains. There it has two origins. Part of it isglacial, part of it is leaf-mould. In order to feel we have really gotto the very bottom of the mud problem--and we are nothing if notthorough--we must examine in brief these two separate origins. 

The glacier mud is of a very simple nature. It is disintegrated rock, worn small by the enormous millstone of ice that rolls slowly over thebed, and deposited in part as 'terminal moraine' near the summermelting-point. It is the quantity of mud thus produced, and borne downby mountain torrents, that makes the alluvial plains collect so quicklyat their base. The mud flats of the world are in large part the wearand tear of the eternal hills under the planing action of the eternalglaciers. 

But let us be just to our friends. A large part is also due to theindustrious earth-worm, whose place in nature Darwin first taught us toestimate at its proper worth. For there is much detritus and muchfirst-rate soil even on hills not covered by glaciers. Some of thistakes its origin, it is true, from disintegration by wind or rain, butmuch more is caused by the earth-worm in person. That friend ofhumanity, so little recognized in his true light, has a habit ofdrawing down leaves into his subterranean nest, and there eating themup, so as to convert their remains into vegetable mould in the form ofworm-casts. This mould, the most precious of soils, gets dissolvedagain by the rain, and carried off in solution by the streams to thesea or the lowlands, where it helps to form the future cultivable area. At the same time the earthworms secrete an acid, which acts upon thebare surface of rock beneath, and helps to disintegrate it inpreparation for plant life in unfavourable places. It is probable thatwe owe almost more on the whole to these unknown but conscientious andindustrious annelids than even to those 'mills of God' the glaciers, ofwhich the American poet justly observes that though they grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small. 

In the last resort, then, it is mainly on mud that the life of humanityin all countries bases itself. Every great plain is the alluvialdeposit of a great river, ultimately derived from a great mountainchain. The substance consists as a rule of the débris of torrents, which is often infertile, owing to its stoniness and its purely mineralcharacter; but wherever it has lain long enough to be covered byearth-worms with a deep black layer of vegetable mould, there theresulting soil shows the surprising fruitfulness one gets (for example)in Lombardy, where twelve crops a year are sometimes taken from themeadows. Everywhere and always the amount and depth of the mud is themeasure of possible fertility; and even where, as in the Great AmericanDesert, want of water converts alluvial plains into arid stretches ofsand-waste, the wilderness can be made to blossom like the rose in avery few years by artificial irrigation. The diversion of the ArkansasRiver has spread plenty over a vast sage scrub; the finest crops in theworld are now raised over a tract of country which was once the terrorof the traveller across the wild west of America. 

 THE GREENWOOD TREE. 

It is a common, not to say a vulgar error, to believe that trees andplants grow out of the ground. And of course, having thus begun bycalling it bad names, I will not for a moment insult the intelligenceof my readers by supposing them to share so foolish a delusion. I begto state from the outset that I write this article entirely for thebenefit of Other People. You and I, O proverbially Candid andIntelligent One, it need hardly be said, are better informed. But OtherPeople fall into such ridiculous blunders that it is just as well toput them on their guard beforehand against the insidious advance offalse opinions. I have known otherwise good and estimable men, indeed, who for lack of sound early teaching on this point went to their graveswith a confirmed belief in the terrestrial origin of all earthlyvegetation. They were probably victims of what the Church in itssuccinct way describes and denounces as Invincible Ignorance. 

Now, the reason why these deluded creatures supposed trees to grow outof the ground, instead of out of the air, is probably only because theysaw their roots there. 

Of course, when people see a wallflower rooted in the clefts of someold church tower, they don't jump at once to the inane conclusion thatit is made of rock--that it derives its nourishment direct from thesolid limestone; nor when they observe a barnacle hanging by its suckerto a ship's hull, do they imagine it to draw up its food incontinentlyfrom the copper bottom. But when they see that familiar pride of ourcountry, a British oak, with its great underground buttresses spreadingabroad through the soil in every direction, they infer at once that thebuttresses are there, not--as is really the case--to support it anduphold it, but to drink in nutriment from the earth beneath, which isjust about as capable of producing oak-wood as the copper plate on theship's hull is capable of producing the flesh of a barnacle. Sundryfamiliar facts about manuring and watering, to which I will returnlater on, give a certain colour of reasonableness, it is true, to thismistaken inference. But how mistaken it really is for all that, asingle and very familiar little experiment will easily show one. 

Cut down that British oak with your Gladstonian axe; lop him of hisbranches; divide him into logs; pile him up into a pyramid; put a matchto his base; in short, make a bonfire of him; and what becomes ofrobust majesty? He is reduced to ashes, you say. Ah, yes, but whatproportion of him? Conduct your experiment carefully on a small scale;dry your wood well, and weigh it before burning; weigh your ashafterwards, and what will you find? Why, that the solid matter whichremains after the burning is a mere infinitesimal fraction of the totalweight: the greater part has gone off into the air, from whence itcame, as carbonic acid. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes; but air to air, too, is the rule of nature. 

It may sound startling--to Other People, I mean--but the simple truthremains, that trees and plants grow out of the atmosphere, not out ofthe ground. They are, in fact, solidified air; or to be more strictlycorrect, solidified gas--carbonic acid. 

Take an ordinary soda-water syphon, with or without a wine-glassful ofbrandy, and empty it till only a few drops remain in the bottom. Thenthe bottle is full of gas; and that gas, which will rush out with aspurt when you press the knob, is the stuff that plants eat--the rawmaterial of life, both animal and vegetable. The tree grows and livesby taking in the carbonic acid from the air, and solidifying itscarbon; the animal grows and lives by taking the solidified carbon fromthe plant, and converting it once more into carbonic acid. That, in itsideally simple form, is the Iliad in a nutshell, the core and kernel ofbiology. The whole cycle of life is one eternal see-saw. First theplant collects its carbon compounds from the air in the oxidized state;it deoxidizes and rebuilds them: and then the animal proceeds to burnthem up by slow combustion within his own body, and to turn them looseupon the air, once more oxidized. After which the plant starts again onthe same round as before, and the animal also recommences _da capo_. And so on _ad infinitum_. 

But the point which I want particularly to emphasize here is just this:that trees and plants don't grow out of the ground at all, as mostpeople do vainly talk, but directly out of the air; and that when theydie or get consumed, they return once more to the atmosphere from whichthey were taken. Trees undeniably eat carbon. 

Of course, therefore, all the ordinary unscientific conceptions of howplants feed are absolutely erroneous. Vegetable physiology, indeed, gotbeyond these conceptions a good hundred years ago. But it usually takesa hundred years for the world at large to make up its leeway. Treesdon't suck up their nutriment by the roots, they don't derive theirfood from the soil, they don't need to be fed, like babies through atube, with terrestrial solids. The solitary instance of an orchid hungup by a string in a conservatory on a piece of bark, ought to besufficient at once to dispel for ever this strange illusion--if peopleever thought; but of course they don't think--I mean Other People. Thetrue mouths and stomachs of plants are not to be found in the roots, but in the green leaves; their true food is not sucked up from thesoil, but is inhaled through tiny channels from the air; the mass oftheir material is carbon, as we can all see visibly to the naked eyewhen a log of wood is reduced to charcoal: and that carbon the leavesthemselves drink in, by a thousand small green mouths, from theatmosphere around them. 

But how about the juice, the sap, the qualities of the soil, the manurerequired? is the incredulous cry of Other People. What is the use ofthe roots, and especially of the rootlets, if they are not the mouthsand supply-tubes of the plants? Well, I plainly perceive I can get 'noforrarder, ' like the farmer with his claret, till I've answered thatquestion, provisionally at least; so I will say here at once, withoutfurther ado--the plant requires drink as well as food, and the rootsare the mouths that supply it with water. They also suck up a few otherthings as well, which are necessary indeed, but far from forming thebulk of the nutriment. Many plants, however, don't need any roots atall, while none can get on without leaves as mouths and stomachs. Thatis to say, no true plantlike plants, for some parasitic plants arepractically, to all intents and purposes, animals. To put it briefly, every plant has one set of aerial mouths to suck in carbon, and manyplants have another set of subterranean mouths as well, to suck upwater and mineral constituents. 

Have you ever grown mustard and cress in the window on a piece offlannel? If so, that's a capital practical example of the comparativeunimportance of soil, except as a means of supplying moisture. You putyour flannel in a soup-plate by the dining-room window; you keep itwell wet, and you lay the seeds of the cress on top of it. The youngplants, being supplied with water by their roots, and with carbon bythe air around, have all the little they need below, and grow andthrive in these conditions wonderfully. But if you were to cover themup with an air-tight glass case, so as to exclude fresh air, they'dshrivel up at once for want of carbon, which is their solid food, aswater is their liquid. 

The way the plant really eats is little known to gardeners, but veryinteresting. All over the lower surface of the green leaf lie scattereddozens of tiny mouths or apertures, each of them guarded by two smallpursed-up lips which have a ridiculously human appearance when seenthrough a simple microscope. When the conditions of air and moistureare favourable, these lips open visible to admit gases; and then thetiny mouths suck in carbonic acid in abundance from the air aroundthen. A series of pipes conveys the gaseous food thus supplied to theupper surface of the leaf, where the sunlight falls full upon it. Now, the cells of the leaf contain a peculiar green digestive material, which I regret to say has no simpler or more cheerful name thanchlorophyll; and where the sunlight plays upon this mysteriouschlorophyll, it severs the oxygen from the carbon in the carbonic acid, turns the free gas loose upon the atmosphere once more through the tinymouths, and retains the severed carbon intact in its own tissues. Thatis the whole process of feeding in plants: they eat carbonic acid, digest it in their leaves, get rid of the oxygen with which it wasformerly combined, and keep the carbon stored up for their ownpurposes. 

Life as a whole depends entirely upon this property of chlorophyll; forevery atom of organic matter in your body or mine was originally somanufactured by sunlight in the leaves of some plant from which, directly or indirectly, we derive it. 

To be sure, in order to make up the various substances which composetheir tissues--to build up their wood, their leaves, their fruits, their blossoms--plants require hydrogen, nitrogen, and even smallquantities of oxygen as well; but these various materials aresufficiently supplied in the water which is taken up by the roots, andthey really contribute very little indeed to the bulk of the tree, which consists for the most part of almost pure carbon. If you were totake a thoroughly dry piece of wood, and then drive off from it by heatthese extraneous matters, you would find that the remainder, the purecharcoal, formed the bulk of the weight, the rest being for the mostpart very light and gaseous. Briefly put, plants are mostly carbon andwater, and the carbon which forms their solid part is extracted directfrom the air around them. 

How does it come about then that a careless world in general, and moreespecially the happy-go-lucky race of gardeners and farmers inparticular, who have to deal so much with plants in their practicalaspect, always attach so great importance to root, soil, manure, minerals, and so little to the real gaseous food stuff of which theircrops are, in fact, composed? Why does Hodge, who is so strong on grainand guano, know absolutely nothing about carbonic acid? That seems atfirst sight a difficult question to meet. But I think we can meet itwith a simple analogy. 

Oxygen is an absolute necessary of human life. Even food itself ishardly so important an element in our daily existence; for Succi, Dr. Tanner, the prophet Elijah, and other adventurous souls too numerous tomention, have abundantly shown us that a man can do without foodaltogether for forty days at a stretch, while he can't do withoutoxygen for a single minute. Cut off his supply of that life-supportinggas, choke him, or suffocate him, or place him in an atmosphere of purecarbonic acid, or hold his head in a bucket of water, and he dies atonce. Yet, except in mines or submarine tunnels, nobody ever takes intoaccount practically this most important factor in human and animallife. We toil for bread, but we ignore the supply of oxygen. And why?Simply because oxygen is universally diffused everywhere. It costsnothing. Only in the Black Hole of Calcutta or in a broken tunnel shaftdo men ever begin to find themselves practically short of thatlife-sustaining gas, and then they know the want of it far sooner andfar more sharply than they know the want of food on a shipwreck raft, or the want of water in the thirsty desert. Yet antiquity never evenheard of oxygen. A prime necessary of life passed unnoticed for ages inhuman history, only because there was abundance of it to be hadeverywhere. 

Now it isn't quite the same, I admit, with the carbonaceous food ofplants. Carbonic acid isn't quite so universally distributed as oxygen, nor can every plant always get as much as it wants of it. I shall showby-and-by that a real struggle for food takes place between plants, exactly as it takes place between animals; and that certain plants, like Oliver Twist in the workhouse, never practically get enough toeat. Still, carbonic acid is present in very large quantities in theair in most situations, and is freely brought by the wind to all theopen spaces which alone man uses for his crops and his gardening. Themost important element in the food of plants is thus in effect almosteverywhere available, especially from the point of view of the merepractical everyday human agriculturist. The wind that bloweth where itlisteth brings fresh supplies of carbon on its wings with every breezeto the mouths and throats of the greedy and eager plants that long toabsorb it. 

It is quite otherwise, however, with the soil and its constituents. Land, we all know--or if we don't, it isn't the fault of Mr. George andMr. A. R. Wallace--land is 'naturally limited in quantity. ' Every planttherefore struggles for a foothold in the soil far more fiercely andfar more tenaciously than it struggles for its share in the free air ofheaven. Your plant is a land-grabber of Rob Roy proclivities; itbelieves in a fair fight and no favour. A sufficient supply of food italmost takes for granted, if only it can once gain a sufficientground-space. But other plants are competing with it, tooth and nail(if plants may be permitted by courtesy those metaphorical adjuncts), for their share of the soil, like crofters or socialists; every spareinch of earth is permeated and pervaded with matted fibres; and each isstriving to withdraw from each the small modicum of moisture, mineralmatter, and manure for which all alike are eagerly battling. 

Now, what the plant wants from the soil is three things. First andforemost it wants support; like all the rest of us it must have its_pou sto_, its _pied-à-terre_, its _locus standi_. It can't hang aloft, like Mahomet's coffin, miraculously suspended on an aerial perchbetween earth and heaven. Secondly, it wants water, and this it cantake in, as a rule, only or mainly by means of the rootlets, thoughthere are some peculiar plants which grow (not parasitically) on thebranches of trees, and absorb all the moisture they need by pores ontheir surface. And thirdly, it wants small quantities of nitrogenousmatter--in the simpler language of everyday life called manure--as wellas of mineral matter--in the simpler language of everyday life calledashes. It is mainly the first of these three, support, that the farmerthinks of when he calculates crops and acreage; for the second, hedepends upon rainfall or irrigation; but the third, manure, he cansupply artificially; and as manure makes a great deal of incidentaldifference to some of his crops, especially corn--which requiresabundant phosphates--he is apt to over-estimate vastly its importancefrom a theoretical point of view. 

Besides, look at it in another light. Over large areas together, theconditions of air, climate, and rainfall are practically identical. Butsoil differs greatly from place to place. Here it's black; there it'syellow; here it's rich loam; there it's boggy mould or sandy gravel. And some soils are better adapted to growing certain plants thanothers. Rich lowlands and oolites suit the cereals; red marl produceswonderful grazing grass; bare uplands are best for gorse and heather. Hence everything favours for the practical man the mistaken idea thatplants and trees grow mainly out of the soil. His own eyes tell him so;he sees them growing, he sees the visible result undeniable before hisface; while the real act of feeding off the carbon in the air is whollyunknown to him, being realizable only by the aid of the microscope, aided by the most delicate and difficult chemical analysis. 

Nevertheless French chemists have amply proved by actual experimentthat plants can grow and produce excellent results without any aid fromthe soil at all. You have only to suspend the seeds freely in the airby a string, and supply the rootlets of the sprouting seedlings with alittle water, containing in solution small quantities of manure-stuffs, and the plants will grow as well as on their native heath, or evenbetter. Indeed, nature has tried the same experiment on a larger scalein many cases, as with the cliff-side plants that root themselves inthe naked clefts of granite rocks; the tropical orchids that fastenlightly on the bark of huge forest trees; and the mosses that spreadeven over the bare face of hard brick walls, with scarcely a chink orcranny in which to fasten their minute rootlets. The insect-eatingplants are also interesting examples in their way of the curious meanswhich nature takes for keeping up the manure supply under tryingcircumstances. These uncanny things are all denizens of loose, peatysoil, where they can root themselves sufficiently for purposes offoothold and drink, but where the water rapidly washes away all animalmatter. Under such conditions the cunning sundews and the ruthlesspitcher-plants set deceptive honey traps for unsuspecting insects, which they catch and kill, absorbing and using up the protoplasmiccontents of their bodies, by way of manure, to supply their quota ofnitrogenous material. 

It is the literal fact, then, that plants really eat and live offcarbon, just as truly as sheep eat grass or lions eat antelopes; andthat the green leaves are the mouths and stomachs with which they eatand digest it. From this it naturally results that the growth andspread of the leaves must largely depend upon the supply of carbon, asthe growth and fatness of sheep depends upon the supply of pasturage. Under most circumstances, to be sure, there is carbon enough and tospare lying about loose for every one of them; but conditions do nowand again occur where we can clearly see the importance of the carbonsupply. Water, for example, contains practically much less carbonicacid than atmospheric air, especially when the water is stagnant, andtherefore not supplied fresh to the plant from moment to moment. As aconsequence, almost all water-plants have submerged leaves very narrowand waving, while floating plants, like the water-lilies, have themlarge and round, owing to the absence of competition from other kindsabout, which enables them to spread freely in every direction from thecentral stalk. Moreover, these leaves, lolling on the water as they do, have their mouths on the upper instead of the under surface. But themost remarkable fact of all is that many water plants have two entirelydifferent types of leaves, one submerged and hair-like, the otherfloating and broad or circular. Our own English water-crowfoot, forexample, has the leaves that spring from its stem, below the surface, divided into endless long waving filaments, which look about in thewater for the stray particles of carbon; but the moment it reaches thetop of its native pond the foliage expands at once into broad lily-likelobes, that recline on the water like oriental beauties, and absorbcarbon from the air to their heart's content, The one type may belikened to gills, that similarly catch the dissolved oxygen diffused inwater; the other type may be likened to lungs, that drink in the freeand open air of heaven. 

Equally important to the plant, however, with the supply of carbonicacid, is the supply of sunshine by whose aid to digest it. The carbonalone is no good to the tree if it can't get something which willseparate it from the oxygen, locked in close embrace with it. Thatthing is sunshine. There is nothing, therefore, for which herbs, trees, and shrubs compete more eagerly than for their fair share of solarenergy. In their anxiety for this they jostle one another down mostmercilessly, in the native condition, grasses struggling up with theirhollow stems above the prone low herbs, shrubs overtopping the grassesin turn, and trees once more killing out the overshadowed undershrubs. One must remember that wherever nature has free play, instead of beingcontrolled by the hand of man, dense forest covers every acre of groundwhere the soil is deep enough; gorse, whins, and heather, or theirequivalents grow wherever the forest fails; and herbs can only holdtheir own in the rare intervals where these domineering lords of thevegetable creation can find no foothold. Meadows or prairies occurnowhere in nature, except in places where the liability to destructivefires over wide areas together crushes out forest trees, or else wheregoats, bison, deer, and other large herbivores browse them ceaselesslydown in the stage of seedlings. Competition for sunlight is thus evenkeener perhaps than competition for foodstuffs. Alike on trees, shrubs, and herbs, accordingly the arrangement of the leaves is always exactlycalculated so as to allow the largest possible horizontal surface, andthe greatest exposure of the blade to the open sunshine. In trees thisarrangement can often be very well observed, all the leaves beingplaced at the extremities of the branches, and forming a greatdome-shaped or umbrella-shaped mass, every part of which stands an evenchance of catching its fair share of carbonic acid and solar energy. 

The shapes of the leaves themselves are also largely due to the samecause, every leaf being so designed in form and outline as to interfereas little as possible with the other leaves on the same stem, asregards supply both of light and of carbonaceous foodstuffs. It is onlyin rare cases, like that of the water-lily, that perfectly round leavesoccur, because the conditions are seldom equal all round, and theincidence of light and the supply of carbon are seldom unlimited. Butwherever leaves rise free and solitary into the air, without mutualinterference, they are always circular, as may be well seen in thecommon nasturtium and the English pennywort. On the other hand, amongdense hedgerows and thickets, where the silent, invisible struggle forlife is fierce indeed, and where sunlight and carbonic acid areintercepted by a thousand competing mouths and arms, the prevailingtypes of leaf are extremely cut up and minutely subdivided into smalllace-like fragments. The plant in such cases can't afford material tofill up the interstices between the veins and ribs which determine itsunderlying architectural structure. Often indeed species which growunder these hard conditions produce leaves which are, as it were, butskeleton representatives of their large and well filled-out compeers inthe open meadows. 

It is only by bearing vividly in mind this ceaseless and noiselessstruggle between plants for their gaseous food and the sunshine whichenables them to digest it that we can ever fully understand the varyingforms and habits of the vegetable kingdom. To most people, no doubt, itsounds like pure metaphor to talk of an internecine struggle betweenrooted beings which cannot budge one inch from their places, nor fightwith horns, hoofs, or teeth, nor devour one another bodily, nor treadone another down with ruthless footsteps. But that is only because wehabitually forget that competition is just as really a struggle forlife as open warfare. The men who try against one another for aclerkship in the City, or a post in a gang of builder's workmen, arejust as surely taking away bread and butter out of their fellows'mouths for their own advantage, as if they fought for it openly withfists or six-shooters. The white man who encloses the hunting groundsof the Indian, and plants them with corn, is just as surely doomingthat Indian to death as if he scalped or tomahawked him. And so toowith the unconscious warfare of plants. The daisy or the plantain thatspreads its rosette of leaves flat against the ground is just as trulymonopolizing a definite space of land as the noble owner of a Highlanddeer forest. No blade of grass can spring beneath the shadow of thosetightly pressed little mats of foliage; no fragment of carbon, no rayof sunshine can ever penetrate below that close fence of livinggreenstuff. 

Plants, in fact, compete with one another all round for everything theystand in need of. They compete for their food--carbonic acid. Theycompete for their energy--their fair share of sunlight. They competefor water, and their foothold in the soil. They compete for the favoursof the insects that fertilize their flowers. They compete for the goodservices of the birds or mammals that disseminate their seeds in properspots for germination. And how real this competition is we can see in amoment, if we think of the difficulties of human cultivation. There, weeds are always battling manfully with our crops or our flowers formastery over the field or garden. We are obliged to root up withceaseless toil these intrusive competitors, if we wish to enjoy thekindly fruits of the earth in due season. When we leave a garden toitself for a few short years, we realize at once what effect thecompetition of hardy natives has upon our carefully tended and unstableexotics. In a very brief time the dahlias and phloxes and lilies haveall disappeared, and in their place the coarse-growing docks andnettles and thistles have raised their heads aloft to monopolize airand space and sunshine. 

Exactly the same struggle is always taking place in the fields andwoods and moors around us, and especially in the spots made over topure nature. There, the greenwood tree raises its huge umbrella offoliage to the skies, and allows hardly a ray of sunlight to strugglethrough to the low woodland vegetation of orchid or wintergreenunderneath. Where the soil is not deep enough for trees to rootsecurely, bushes and heathers overgrow the ground, and compete withtheir bell-shaped blossoms for the coveted favour of bees andbutterflies. And in open glades, where for some reason or other theforest fails, tall grasses and other aspiring herbs run up apacetowards the free air of heaven. Elsewhere, creepers struggle up to thesun over the stems and branches of stronger bushes or trees, which theyoften choke and starve by monopolizing at last all the available carbonand sunlight. And so throughout; the struggle for life goes on just asceaselessly and truly among these unconscious combatants as among thelions and tigers of the tropical jungle, or among the human serfs ofthe overstocked market. 

An ounce of example, they say, is worth a pound of precept. So a singleconcrete case of a fierce vegetable campaign now actually in progressover all Northern Europe may help to make my meaning a trifle clearer. Till very lately the forests of the north were largely composed inplaces of the light and airy silver birches. But with the gradualamelioration of the climate of our continent, which has been going onfor several centuries, the beech, a more southern type of tree, hasbegun to spread slowly though surely northward. Now, beeches are greedytrees, of very dense and compact foliage; nothing else can grow beneaththeir thick shade, where once they have gained a foothold; and theseedlings of the silver birch stand no chance at all in the strugglefor life against the serried leaves of their formidable rivals. Thebeech literally eats them out of house and home; and the consequence isthat the thick and ruthless southern tree is at this very momentgradually superseding over vast tracts of country its more graceful andbeautiful, but far less voracious competitor. 

 FISH AS FATHERS. 

Comparatively little is known as yet, even in this age of publicity, about the domestic arrangements and private life of fishes. Not thatthe creatures themselves shun the wiles of the interviewer, or are atall shy and retiring, as a matter of delicacy, about their familyaffairs; on the contrary, they display a striking lack of reticence intheir native element, and are so far from pushing parental affection toa quixotic extreme that many of them, like the common rabbitimmortalised by Mr. Squeers, 'frequently devour their own offspring. 'But nature herself opposes certain obvious obstacles to the pursuit ofknowledge in the great deep, which render it difficult for the ardentnaturalist, however much he may be so disposed, to carry on hisobservations with the same facility as in the case of birds andquadrupeds. You can't drop in upon most fish, casually, in their ownhomes; and when you confine them in aquariums, where your opportunitiesof watching them through a sheet of plate-glass are considerablygreater, most of the captives get huffy under the narrow restrictionsof their prison life, and obstinately refuse to rear a brood ofhereditary helots for the mere gratification of your scientificcuriosity. 

Still, by hook and by crook (especially the former), by observationhere and experiment there, naturalists in the end have managed to piecetogether a considerable mass of curious and interesting information ofan out-of-the-way sort about the domestic habits and manners of sundrypiscine races. And, indeed, the morals of fish are far more varied anddivergent than the uniform nature of the world they inhabit might leadan _à priori_ philosopher to imagine. To the eye of the mere casualobserver every fish would seem at first sight to be a mere fish, and todiffer but little in sentiments and ethical culture from all the restof his remote cousins. But when one comes to look closer at theircharacter and antecedents, it becomes evident at once that there is adeal of unsuspected originality and caprice about sharks and flat-fish. Instead of conforming throughout to a single plan, as the young, thegay, the giddy, and the thoughtless are too prone to conclude, fish arein reality as various and variable in their mode of life as any othergreat group in the animal kingdom. Monogamy and polygamy, socialism andindividualism, the patriarchal and matriarchal types of government, theoviparous and viviparous methods of reproduction, perhaps even thedissidence of dissent and esoteric Buddhism, all alike are wellrepresented in one family or another of this extremely eclectic andphilosophically unprejudiced class of animals. 

If you want a perfect model of domestic virtue, for example, where canyou find it in higher perfection than in that exemplary and devotedfather, the common great pipe-fish of the North Atlantic and theBritish Seas? This high-principled lophobranch is so careful of itscallow and helpless young that it carries about the unhatched eggs withhim under his own tail, in what scientific ichthyologists pleasantlydescribe as a subcaudal pouch or cutaneous receptacle. There they hatchout in perfect security, free from the dangers that beset the spawn andfry of so many other less tender-hearted kinds; and as soon as thelittle pipe-fish are big enough to look after themselves the sacdivides spontaneously down the middle, and allows them to escape, toshift for themselves in the broad Atlantic. Even so, however, thejuniors take care always to keep tolerably near that friendly shelter, and creep back into it again on any threat of danger, exactly asbaby-kangaroos do into their mother's marsupium. The father-fish, infact, has gone to the trouble and expense of developing out of his owntissues a membranous bag, on purpose to hold the eggs and young duringthe first stages of their embryonic evolution. This bag is formed bytwo folds of the skin, one of which grows out from each side of thebody, the free margins being firmly glued together in the middle by anatural exudation, while the eggs are undergoing incubation, butopening once more in the middle to let the little fish out as soon asthe process of hatching is fairly finished. 

So curious a provision for the safety of the young in the pipe-fish maybe compared to some extent, as I hinted above, with the pouch in whichkangaroos and other marsupial animals carry their cubs after birth, till they have attained an age of complete independence. But thestrangest part of it all is the fact that while in the kangaroo it isthe mother who owns the pouch and takes care of the young, in thepipe-fish it is the father, on the contrary, who thus speciallyprovides for the safety of his defenceless offspring. And what is odderstill, this topsy-turvy arrangement (as it seems to us) is the commonrule throughout the class of fishes. For the most part it must becandidly admitted by their warmest admirer, fish make very bad parentsindeed. They lay their eggs anywhere on a suitable spot, and as soon asthey have once deposited them, like the ostrich in Job, they go ontheir way rejoicing, and never bestow another passing thought upontheir deserted progeny. But if ever a fish _does_ take any pains in theeducation and social upbringing of its young, you're pretty sure tofind on enquiry it's the father--not as one would naturally expect, themother--who devotes his time and attention to the congenial task ofhatching or feeding them. It is he who builds the nest, and sits uponthe eggs, and nurses the young, and imparts moral instruction (with asnap of his jaw or a swish of his tail) to the bold, the truant, thecheeky, or the imprudent; while his unnatural spouse, well satisfiedwith her own part in having merely brought the helpless eggs into thisworld of sorrow, goes off on her own account in the giddy whirl ofsociety, forgetful of the sacred claims of her wriggling offspring upona mother's heart. 

In the pipe-fish family, too, the ardent evolutionist can trace a wholeseries of instructive and illustrative gradations in the development ofthis instinct and the corresponding pouch-like structure among the malefish. With the least highly-evolved types, like the long-nosedpipe-fish of the English Channel, and many allied forms from Europeanseas, there is no pouch at all, but the father of the family carriesthe eggs about with him, glued firmly on to the service of his abdomenby a natural mucus. In a somewhat more advanced tropical kind, theridges of the abdomen are slightly dilated, so as to form an opengroove, which loosely holds the eggs, though its edges do not meet inthe middle as in the great pipe-fish. Then come yet other moreprogressive forms, like the great pipe-fish himself, where the foldsmeet so as to produce a complete sac, which opens at maturity, to letout its little inmates. And finally, in the common Mediterraneansea-horses, which you can pick up by dozens on the Lido at Venice, anda specimen of which exists in the dried form in every domestic museum, the pouch is permanently closed by coalescence of the edges, leaving anarrow opening in front, through which the small hippocampi creep outone by one as soon as they consider themselves capable of buffeting thewaves of the Adriatic. 

Fish that take much care of their offspring naturally don't need toproduce eggs in the same reckless abundance as those dissipated kindsthat leave their spawn exposed on the bare sandy bottom, at the mercyof every comer who chooses to take a bite at it. They can afford to laya smaller number, and to make each individual egg much larger andricher in proportion than their rivals. This plan, of course, enablesthe young to begin life far better provided with muscles and fins thanthe tiny little fry which come out of the eggs of the improvidentspecies. For example, the cod-fish lays nine million odd eggs; butanybody who has ever eaten fried cod's-roe must needs have noticed thateach individual ovum was so very small as to be almost indistinguishableto the naked eye. Thousands of these infinitesimal specks are devouredbefore they hatch out by predaceous fish; thousands more of the youngfry are swallowed alive during their helpless infancy by the enemies oftheir species. Imagine the very fractional amount of parental affectionwhich each of the nine million must needs put up with! On the otherhand, there is a paternally-minded group of cat-fish known as the genus_Arius_, of Ceylon, Australia, and other tropical parts, the males ofwhich carry about the ova loose in their mouths, or rather in anenlargement of the pharynx, somewhat resembling the pelican's pouch;and the spouses of these very devoted sires lay accordingly only veryfew ova, all told, but each almost as big as a hedge-sparrow's egg--awonderful contrast to the tiny mites of the cod-fish. To put itbriefly, the greater the amount of protection afforded the eggs, thesmaller the number and the larger the size. And conversely, the largerthe size of the egg to start with, the better fitted to begin thebattle of life is the young fish when first turned out on a cold worldupon his own resources. 

This is a general law, indeed, that runs through all nature, fromLondon slums to the deep sea. Wasteful species produce many young, andtake but little care of them when once produced. Economical speciesproduce very few young, but start each individual well-equipped for itsplace in life and look after them closely till they can take care ofthemselves in the struggle for existence. And on the average, howevermany or however few the offspring to start with, just enough attainmaturity in the long run to replace their parents in the nextgeneration. Were it otherwise, the sea would soon become one solid massof herring, cod, and mackerel. 

These cat-fish, however, are not the only good fathers that carry theiryoung (like woodcock) in their own mouths. A freshwater species of theSea of Galilee, _Chromis Andreæ_ by name (dedicated by science to thememory of that fisherman apostle, St. Andrew, who must often havenetted them), has the same habit of hatching out its young in its owngullet: and here again it is the male fish upon whom this apparentlymaternal duty devolves, just as it is the male cassowary that sits uponthe eggs of his unnatural mate, and the male emu that tends the nest, while the hen bird looks on superciliously and contents herself withexercising a general friendly supervision of the nursery department. Imay add parenthetically that in most fish families the eggs arefertilised after they have been laid, instead of before, which no doubtaccounts for the seeming anomaly. 

Still, good mothers too may be found among fish, though far fromfrequently. One of the Guiana catfishes, known as Aspredo, very muchresembles her countrywoman the Surinam toad in her nurseryarrangements. Of course you know the Surinam toad--whom not to knowargues yourself unknown--that curious creature that carries her eggs inlittle pits on her back, where the young hatch out and pass throughtheir tadpole stage in a slimy fluid, emerging at last from the cellsof this living honeycomb only when they have attained the fullamphibian honours of four-legged maturity. Well, Aspredo among cat-fishmanages her brood in much the same fashion; only she carries her eggsbeneath her body instead of on her back like her amphibious rival. Whenspawning time approaches, and Aspredo's fancy lightly turns to thoughtsof love, the lower side of her trunk begins to assume, by anticipation, a soft and spongy texture, honeycombed with pits, between which arearranged little spiky protuberances. After laying her eggs, the motherlies flat upon them on the river bottom, and presses them into thespongy skin, where they remain safely attached until they hatch out andbegin to manage for themselves in life. It is curious that the only twocreatures on earth which have hit out independently this original modeof providing for their offspring should both be citizens of Guiana, where the rivers and marshes must probably harbour some special dangerto be thus avoided, not found in equal intensity in other fresh waters. 

A prettily marked fish of the Indian Ocean, allied, though not veryclosely, to the pipe fishes, has also the distinction of handing overthe young to the care of the mother instead of the father. Its name isSolenostoma (I regret that no more popular title exists), and it has apouch, formed in this case by a pair of long broad fins, within whichthe eggs are attached by interlacing threads that push out from thebody. Probably in this instance nutriment is actually provided throughthese threads for the use of the embryo, in which case we must regardthe mechanism as very closely analogous indeed to that which obtainsamong mammals. 

Some few fish, indeed, are truly viviparous; among them certainblennies and carps, in which the eggs hatch out entirely within thebody of the mother. One of the most interesting of these divergenttypes is the common Californian and Mexican silver-fish, an inhabitantof the bays and inlets of sub-tropical America. Its chief peculiarityand title to fame lies in the extreme bigness of its young at birth. The full-grown fish runs to about ten inches in length, fisherman'sscale, while the fry measure as much as three inches apiece; so thatthey lie, as Professor Seeley somewhat forcibly expresses it, 'packedin the body of the parent as close as herrings in a barrel. ' Thisstrange habit of retaining the eggs till after they have hatched out isnot peculiar to fish among egg-laying animals, for the common littlebrown English lizard is similarly viviparous, though most of itsrelatives elsewhere deposit their eggs to be hatched by the heat of thesun in earth or sandbanks. 

Mr. Hannibal Chollop, if I recollect aright, once shot an imprudentstranger for remarking in print that the ancient Athenians, thatinferior race, had got ahead in their time of the modern Loco-focoticket. But several kinds of fish have undoubtedly got ahead in thisrespect of the common reptilian ticket; for instead of leaving abouttheir eggs anywhere on the loose to take care of themselves, they builda regular nest, like birds, and sit upon their eggs till the fry emergefrom them. All the sticklebacks, for instance, are confirmednest-builders: but here once more it is the male, not the female, whoweaves the materials together and takes care of the eggs during theirperiod of incubation. The receptacle itself is made of fibres ofwater-weeds or stalks of grass, and is open at both ends to let acurrent pass through. As soon as the lordly little polygamist has builtit, he coaxes and allures his chosen mates into the entrance, one byone, to lay their eggs; and then when the nest is full, he mounts guardover them bravely, fanning them with his fins, and so keeping up acontinual supply of oxygen which is necessary for the properdevelopment of the embryo within. It takes a month's sitting before theyoung hatch out, and even after they appear, this excellent father(little Turk though he be, and savage warrior for the stocking of hisharem) goes out attended by all his brood whenever he sallies forth fora morning constitutional in search of caddis-worms, which shows thatthere may be more good than we imagine, after all, in the domesticinstitutions even of people who don't agree with us. 

The bullheads or miller's thumbs, those quaint big-headed beasts whichdivide with the sticklebacks the polite attentions of ingenious Britishyouth, are also nest-builders, and the male fish are said to anxiouslywatch and protect their offspring during their undisciplined nonage. Equally domestic are the habits of those queer shapeless creatures, themarine lump-suckers, which fasten themselves on to rocks, like limpets, by their strange sucking disks, and defy all the efforts of enemy orfishermen to dislodge them by main force from their well-chosenposition. The pretty little tropical walking-fish of the filuroidtribe--those fish out of water--carry the nest-making instinct a pointfurther, for they go ashore boldly at the beginning of the rainy seasonin their native woods, and scoop out a hole in the beach as a place ofsafety, in which they make regular nests of leaves and otherterrestrial materials to hold their eggs. Then father and mother taketurns-about at looking after the hatching, and defend the spawn withgreat zeal and courage against all intruders. 

I regret to say, however, there are other unprincipled fish whichdisplay their affection and care for their young in far morequestionable and unpleasant manners. For instance, there is thatuncanny creature that inserts its parasitic fry as a tiny egg insidethe unsuspecting shells of mussels and cockles. Our fishermen are onlytoo well acquainted, again, with one unpleasant marine lamprey, the hagor borer, so called because it lives parasitically upon other fishes, whose bodies it enters, and then slowly eats them up from withinoutward, till nothing at all is left of them but skin, scales, andskeleton. They are repulsive eel-shaped creatures, blind, soft, andslimy; their mouth consists of a hideous rasping sucker; and they pourout from the glands on their sides a copious mucus, which makes them asdisagreeable to handle as they are unsightly to look at. Mackerel andcod are the hag's principal victims; but often the fisherman draws up ahag-eaten haddock on the end of his line, of which not a wrack remainsbut the hollow shell or bare outer simulacrum. As many as twenty ofthese disgusting parasites have sometimes been found within the body ofa single cod-fish. 

Yet see how carefully nature provides nevertheless for the duereproduction of even her most loathsome and revolting creations. Thehag not only lays a small number of comparatively large and well-storedeggs, but also arranges for their success in life by supplying eachwith a bundle of threads at either end, every such thread terminatingat last in a triple hook, like those with which we are so familiar inthe case of adhesive fruits and seeds, like burrs or cleavers. By meansof these barbed processes, the eggs attach themselves to living fishes;and the young borer, as soon as he emerges from his horny covering, makes his way at once into the body of his unconscious host, whom heproceeds by slow degrees to devour alive with relentless industry, fromthe intestines outward. This beautiful provision of nature enables theinfant hag to start in life at once in very snug quarters upon aready-made fish preserve. I understand, however, that cod-fishphilosophers, actuated by purely personal and selfish conceptions ofutility, refuse to admit the beauty or beneficence of this mostsatisfactory arrangement for the borer species. 

Probably the best known of all fishes' eggs, however (with the solitaryexception of the sturgeon's, commonly observed between brown bread andbutter, under the name of caviare), are the queer leathery purse-shapedova of the sharks, rays, skates, and dog-fishes. Everybody has pickedthem up on the seashore, where children know them as devil's purses anddevil's wheelbarrows. Most of these queer eggs are oblong andquadrangular, with the four corners produced into a sort of handles orstreamers, often ending in long tendrils, and useful for attaching themto corallines or seaweeds on the bed of the ocean. But it is worthnoticing that in colour the egg-cases closely resemble the common wrackto which they are oftenest fastened; and as they wave up and down inthe water with the dark mass around them, they must be almostindistinguishable from the wrack itself by the keenest-sighted of theirenemies. This protective resemblance, coupled with the toughness andslipperiness of their leathery envelope or egg-shell, renders themalmost perfectly secure from all evil-minded intruders. As aconsequence, the dog-fish lay but very few eggs each season, and thosefew, large and well provided with nutriment for their spottedoffspring. It is these purses, and those of the thornback and theedible skate, that we oftenest pick up on the English coast. The largeroceanic sharks are mostly viviparous. 

In some few cases, indeed, among the shark and ray family, themechanism for protection goes a step or two further than in thesesimple kinds. That well-known frequenter of Australian harbours, thePort Jackson shark, lays a pear-shaped egg, with a sort of spiralstaircase of leathery ridges winding round it outside, Chinese pagodawise, so that even if you bite it (I speak in the person of apredaceous fish) it eludes your teeth, and goes dodging offscrew-fashion into the water beyond. There's no getting at this evasivebody anywhere; when you think you have it, it wriggles away sideways, and refuses to give any hold for jaws or palate. In fact, a moreslippery or guileful egg was never yet devised by nature's unconsciousingenuity. Then, again, the Antarctic chimæra (so called from its veryunprepossessing personal appearance) relies rather upon pure deceptionthan upon mechanical means for the security of its eggs. The shell orcase in this instance is prolonged at the edge into a kind of broadwing on either side, so that it exactly resembles one of the large flatleaves of the Antarctic fucus in whose midst it lurks. It forms thehigh-water mark, I fancy, of protective resemblance amongst eggs, fornot only is the margin leaf-like in shape, but it is even gracefullywaved and fringed with floating hairs, as is the fashion with theexpanded fronds of so many among the gigantic far-southern sea-weeds. 

A most curious and interesting set of phenomena are those which oftenoccur when a group of fishes, once marine, take by practice toinhabiting freshwater rivers; or, _vice-versâ, _ when a freshwater kind, moved by an aspiration for more expansive surroundings, takes up itsresidence in the sea as a naturalised marine. Whenever such a change ofaddress happens, it usually follows that the young fry cannot stand theconditions of the new home to which their ancestors wereunaccustomed--we all know the ingrained conservatism of children--andso the parents are obliged once a year to undertake a pilgrimage totheir original dwelling-place for the breeding season. 

Extreme cases of terrestrial animals, once aquatic in habits, throw aflood of lurid light (as the newspapers say) upon the reason why thisshould be so. For example, frogs and toads develop from tadpoles, whichin all essentials are true gill-breathing fish. It is, therefore, obvious that they cannot lay their eggs on dry land, where the tadpoleswould be unable to find anything to breathe; so that even the driestand most tree-haunting toads must needs repair to the water once a yearto deposit their spawn in its native surroundings. Once more, crabspass their earlier larval stages as free-swimming crustaceans, somewhatshrimp-like in appearance, and as agile as fleas: it is only by gradualmetamorphosis that they acquire their legs and claws and heavypedestrian habits. Now there are certain kinds of crab, like the WestIndian land-crabs (those dainty morsels whose image every epicure whohas visited the Antilles still enshrines with regret in a warm cornerof his heart), which have taken in adult life to walking bodily onshore, and visiting the summits of the highest mountains, like the fishof Deucalion's deluge in Horace. But once a year, as the land-crabsbask in the sun on St. Catherine's Peak or the Fern Walk, a strangeinstinctive longing comes over them automatically to return for a whileto their native element; and, obedient to that inner monitor of theirrace, down they march in thousands, _velut agmine facto_, to lay theireggs at their leisure in Port Royal harbour. On the way, the negroescatch them, all full of rich coral, waiting to be spawned; and Chloe orDinah, serves them up hot, with breadcrumbs, in their own red shells, neatly nestling between the folds of a nice white napkin. The rest runaway, and deposit their eggs in the sea, where the young hatch out, andpass their larval stage once more as free and active little swimmingcrustaceans. 

Well, crabs, I need hardly explain in this age of enlightenment, arenot fish; but their actions help to throw a side-light on the migratoryinstinct in salmon, eels, and so many other true fish which havechanged with time their aboriginal habits. The salmon himself, forinstance, is by descent a trout, and in the parr stage he is even nowalmost indistinguishable from many kinds of river-trout that nevermigrate seaward at all. But at some remote period, the ancestors of thetrue salmon took to going down to the great deep in search of food, andbeing large and active fish, found much more to eat in the salt waterthan ever they had discovered in their native streams. So they settledpermanently in their new home, as far as their own lives went at least;though they found the tender young could not stand the brine that didno harm to the tougher constitutions of the elders. No doubt the changewas made gradually, a bit at a time, through the brackish water, thespecies getting further and further seaward down bays and estuarieswith successive generations, but always returning to spawn in itsnative river, as all well-behaved salmon do to the present moment. Atlast, the habit hardened into an organic instinct, and nowadays theyoung salmon hatch out like their fathers as parr in fresh water, thengo to the sea in the grilse stage and grow enormously, and finallyreturn as full-grown salmon to spawn and breed in their particularbirthplace. 

Exactly the opposite fate has happened to the eels. The salmonoids as afamily are freshwater fish, and by far the greater number ofkinds--trout, char, whitefish, grayling, pollan, vendace, gwyniad, andso forth--are inhabitants of lakes, steams, ponds, and rivers, only avery small number having taken permanently or temporarily to a marineresidence. But the eels, as a family, are a saltwater group, most oftheir allies, like the congers and murænas, being exclusively confinedto the sea, and only a very small number of aberrant types having evertaken to invading inland waters. If the life-history of the salmon, however, has given rise to as much controversy as the Mar peerage, thelife-history of the eel is a complete mystery. To begin with, nobodyhas ever so much as distinguished between male and female eels; exceptmicroscopically, eels have never been seen in the act of spawning, norobserved anywhere with mature eggs. The ova themselves are whollyunknown: the mode of their production is a dead secret. All we know isthis: that eels never reproduce in fresh water; that a certain numberof adults descend the rivers to the sea, irregularly, during the wintermonths; and that some of these must presumably spawn with the utmostcircumspection in brackish water or in the deep sea, for in the courseof the summer myriads of young eels, commonly called grigs, andproverbial for their merriment, ascend the rivers in enormous bodies, and enter every smaller or larger tributary. 

If we know little about the paternity and maternity of eels, we know agreat deal about their childhood and youth, or, to speak more eelishly, their grigginess and elverhood. The young grigs, when they do maketheir appearance, leave us in no doubt at all about their presence ortheir reality. They wriggle up weirs, walls, and floodgates; they forcethere way bodily through chinks and apertures; they find out everydrain, pipe, or conduit in a given plane rectilinear figure; and whenall other spots have been fully occupied, they take to dry land, likeveritable snakes, and cut straight across country for the nearest lake, pond, or ornamental waters. 

These swarms or migrations are known to farmers as eel-fairs; but theword ought more properly to be written eel-fares, as the eels then fareor travel up the streams to their permanent quarters. A great manyeels, however, never migrate seaward at all, and never seem to attainto years of sexual maturity. They merely bury themselves under stonesin winter, and live and die as celibates in their inland retreats. Sovery terrestrial do they become, indeed, that eels have been taken withrats or field-mice undigested in their stomachs. 

The sturgeon is another more or less migratory fish, originally (likethe salmon) of freshwater habits, but now partially marine, whichascends its parent stream for spawning during the summer season. Incredible quantities are caught for caviare in the great Russianrivers. At one point on the Volga, a hundred thousand people collect inspring for the fishery, and work by relays, day and night continuously, as long as the sturgeons are going up stream. On some of thetributaries, when fishing is intermitted for a single day, thesturgeons have been known to completely fill a river 360 feet wide, sothat the backs of the uppermost fish were pushed out of the water. (Itake this statement, not from the 'Arabian Nights, ' as the scoffermight imagine, but from that most respectable authority, ProfessorSeeley. ) Still, in spite of the enormous quantity killed, there is nodanger of any falling off in the supply for the future, for every fishlays from two to three million eggs, each of which, as caviare eaterswell know, is quite big enough to be distinctly seen with the naked eyein the finished product. The best caviare is simply bottled exactly asfound, with the addition merely of a little salt. No man of taste canpretend to like the nasty sun-dried sort, in which the individual eggsare reduced to a kind of black pulp, and pressed hard with the feetinto doubtful barrels. 

In conclusion, let me add one word of warning as to certain popularerrors about the young fry of sundry well-known species. Nothing ismore common than to hear it asserted that sprats are only immatureherring. This is a complete mistake. Believe it not. Sprats are a verydistinct species of the herring genus, and they never grow much biggerthan when they appear, _brochés_, at table. The largest adult spratmeasures only six inches, while full-grown herring may attain as muchas fifteen. Moreover, herring have teeth on the palate, always wantingin sprats, by which means the species may be readily distinguished atall ages. When in doubt, therefore, do not play trumps, but examine thepalate. On the other hand, whitebait, long supposed to be a distinctspecies, has now been proved by Dr. Günther, the greatest ofichthyologists, to consist chiefly of the fry or young of herring. Tocomplete our discomfiture, the same eminent authority has also shownthat the pilchard and the sardine, which we thought so unlike, are oneand the same fish, called by different names according as he is caughtoff the Cornish coast or in Breton, Portuguese, or Mediterraneanwaters. Such aliases are by no means uncommon among his class. To saythe plain truth, fish are the most variable and ill-defined of animals;they differ so much in different habitats, so many hybrids occurbetween them, and varieties merge so readily by imperceptible stagesinto one another, that only an expert can decide in doubtful cases--andevery expert carefully reverses the last man's opinion. Let us at leastbe thankful that whitebait by any other name would eat as nice; thatscience has not a single whisper to breathe against their connectionwith lemon; and that whether they are really the young of _Clupeaharengus_ or not, the supply at Billingsgate shows no symptom offalling short of the demand. 

 AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 

For the reasons which have determined the existence of Sussex as acounty of England, and which have given it the exact boundaries that itnow possesses, we must go back to the remote geological history of thesecondary ages. Its limits and its very existence as a separate shirewere predetermined for it by the shape and consistence of the mud orsand which gathered at the bottom of the great Wealden lake, or filledup the hollows of the old inland cretaceous sea. Paradoxical as itsounds to say so, the Celtic kingdom of the Regni, the South Saxonprincipality of Ælle the Bretwalda, the modern English county ofSussex, have all had their destinies moulded by the geologicalconformation of the rock upon which they repose. Where human annals seeonly the handicraft and interaction of human beings--Euskarian andAryan, Celt and Roman, Englishman and Norman--a closer scrutiny ofhistory may perhaps see the working of still deeper elements--chalk andclay, volcanic upheaval and glacial denudation, barren upland andforest-clad plain. The value and importance of these underlying factsin the comprehension of history has, I believe, been very generallyoverlooked; and I propose accordingly here to take the single county ofSussex in detail, in order to show that when the geological andgeographical factors of the problem are given, all the rest follows asa matter of course. By such detailed treatment alone can one hope toestablish the truth of the general principle that human history is atbottom a result of geographical conditions, acting upon thefundamentally identical constitution of man. 

In a certain sense, it is quite clear that human life depends mainlyupon soil and conformation, to an extent that nobody denies. You cannothave a dense population in Sahara; and you can hardly fail to have onein the fruitful valley of the Nile. The growth of towns in one districtrather than another must be governed largely by the existence of riversor harbours, of coal or metals, of agricultural lowlands or defensibleheights. Glasgow could not spring up in inland Leicestershire, norManchester in coalless Norfolk. Insular England must naturally be thegreatest shipping country in Europe; while no large foreign trade ispossible in any Bohemia except Shakespeare's. So much everybody admits. But it seems to me that these underlying causes have coloured theentire local history of every district to an extent which few peopleadequately recognise, and that until such recognition becomes moregeneral, our views of history must necessarily be very narrow. We mustsee not only that something depends upon geographical configuration, not even merely that a great deal depends upon it, but that everythingdepends upon it. We must unlearn our purely human history, and learn ahistory of interaction between nature and man instead. 

From the great central boss of the chalk system in Salisbury Plain, twolong cretaceous horns or projections run out to eastward towards theChannel and the German Sea. These two horns, separated by the deepvalley of the Weald, are known as the North and South Downsrespectively. The first great spur or ridge passes through the heart ofSurrey, and then forms the backbone of Kent, expanding into a fan atits eastward extremity, where it topples over abruptly into the sea inthe sheer bluffs which sweep round in a huge arc from the NorthForeland in the Isle of Thanet, to Shakespeare's Cliff at Dover. Thesecond or southernmost range, that of the South Downs, parts companyfrom the main boss in Hampshire, and runs eastward in a narrower butbolder line, till the Channel cuts short its progress in the water-wornprecipice of Beachy Head. Between these two ranges of Downs lies thelow forest region of the Weald, and between the South Downs and the seastretches a long but very narrow strip of lowland, beginning atChichester, and ending where the chalk cliffs first meet the shorebeside the new Aquarium and Chain Pier at Brighton. Thus the whole ofSussex consists of three well-marked parallel belts: the low coast-lineon the south-west, the high chalk Downs in the centre, and the Wealddistrict on the north and north-west. As these three belts determinethe whole history and very existence of Sussex as an English shire, Ishall make no apology for treating their origin here in some rapiddetail. 

The oldest geological formation with which we have to deal in Sussex(to any considerable extent) is the Wealden: so that our inquiry neednot go any farther back in the history of the world than the latersecondary ages. Before that time, and for long æons afterward, theportion of the earth's crust which now forms Sussex had probably neveremerged from the ocean. Britain was then wholly represented by theprimary regions of Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall, forming a smallarchipelago or group of rocky islands separated at some distance by awide passage from the nucleus of the young European continent. But bythe Wealden period, the English Channel and the Eastern half of Englandhad been considerably elevated above the level of the sea. Great riversand lakes existed in this new continental region, much like those whichnow exist in Sweden, Northern Russia, and Canada; and the deposits ofsand or mud formed at their bottoms or in their estuaries compose thechief part of the Wealden formation in England. Without going fullyinto this question (somewhat complicated by frequent changes of level), it will suffice for our present purpose to say that the Wealdenconsists, in the main, of two great divisions, which form, so to speak, the floor, or lowest story, of the Sussex formations. The first orbottom division is chiefly composed of a rather soft and friablesandstone, which runs through the whole Forest Ridges, and crops out inthe grey cliffs of Hastings and Fairlight. The second or upper divisionis chiefly composed of a thick greasy clay, which forms the soil in thegreater part of the Weald, and glides unobtrusively under the sea inthe flat shore on either side of Hastings, giving rise to the lowlandsof Pevensey Bay and the Romney Marshes. Why the sandstone, which isreally the bottom layer, should appear higher than the clay in theseplaces, we shall see a little later. 

After the deposition of the gritty or muddy Wealden beds in the lakeand _embouchure_ of the old continental river, there came a secondperiod of considerable depression, during which the whole ofsouth-eastern England was once more covered by a shallow sea. This searan, like an early northern Mediterranean, right across the face ofCentral Europe; and on its bottom was deposited the soft ooze ofglobigerina shells and siliceous sponge skeletons which has nowhardened into chalk and flint. A great cretaceous sheet thus overlaythe Wealden beds and the whole face of Sussex to a depth of at least600 feet; and if it had not been afterwards worn off in places, as thenursery rhyme says of old Pillicock, it would be there still. I needhardly say that the chalk is yet _en évidence_ along the whole range ofSouth Downs, and forms the tall white cliffs between Brighton andBeachy Head. 

Finally, during the Tertiary period, another layer of London clay andother soft deposits was spread over the top of the chalk, certainly onthe strip between the South Downs and the sea, and probably over thewhole district between the Channel and the Thames valley: though inthis case, later denudation has proceeded so far that very few tracesof the Tertiary formations are preserved anywhere except in the greaterhollows. 

Such being the original disposition of the strata which compose Sussex, we have next to ask, What are the causes which have produced itsexisting configuration? If the whole mass had merely been upliftedstraight out of the sea, we ought now to find the whole country a flatand level table-land, covered over its entire surface with a uniformcoat of Tertiary deposits. On digging or boring below these, we oughtto come upon the chalk, and below the chalk again, with its cretaceouscongeners the greensand or the gault, we ought to meet the Weald clayand the Hastings sand. Wherever a seaward cliff exhibited a section forour observation, we ought to find these same strata all exposed inregular order--the sandstone at the bottom, the clay above it, thebroad belt of chalk halfway up, and the Tertiary muds and rubbles atthe top. But in the county as we actually find it, we get a verydifferent state of things. Here, the surface at sea-level is composedof London clay; there, a great mound of chalk rises into a swellingdown; and yonder, once more, a steep escarpment leads us down into abroad lowland of the Weald. The causes which have led to thisarrangement of surface and conformation must now be considered withnecessary brevity. 

The North and South Downs, with all the country between them, form partof a great fold or outward bulge of the strata above enumerated, havingits centre about the middle line of the Forest Ridge. Imagine thesestrata bent or pushed upward by an internal upheaving force actingalong that line, and you will get a rough picture of the originalcircumstances which have led to the existing arrangement of the county. You would then have, instead of a flat table-land, as supposed above, agreat curved mountain slope, with its centre on top of the ForestRidge. This gentle slope would rise from the sea between Chichester anda point south of Beachy, would swell slowly upward till it reached aheight of two or three thousand feet at the Surrey border, and wouldfall again gradually towards the Thames valley at London. On thesouthern side of the Downs this is pretty much what we now get, theTertiary strata being preserved in the district near Chichester; thoughfarther east, around Newhaven and Beachy Head, the sea has encroachedupon the chalk so as to cut out the great white cliffs which bound theview everywhere along the shore from Brighton to Eastbourne. In thecentral portion of the boss, however, almost all the highest elevatedpart has been denuded by ice or water action. Between the North andSouth Downs, where we ought to find the mountain ridge, we find insteadthe valley of the Weald. Here the chalk has been quite worn away, giving rise to the steep escarpment on the northern side of the SouthDowns, seen from the Devil's Dyke, so that at the foot of the suddendescent we get the Weald clay exposed; while in the very centre of theupheaved tract the clay itself has been cut through, and the Hastingssand appears upon the surface. Moreover, the sand, being upraised bythe central force, stands higher than the clay on either side, whichforms the trough of the Weald; and thus the forest ridge, which abutsupon the sea in the cliffs of Hastings Castle, seems to lie above theclay, under which, however, it really glides on either side. I needhardly add that this rough diagrammatic description is only meant as ageneral indication of the facts, and that it considerably simplifiesthe real geological changes probably involved in the sculpture ofSussex. Nevertheless, I believe it pretty accurately represents themain formative points in the ante-human history of the county. 

So much by way of preface or introduction. These facts of structureform the data for the reconstruction of the Sussex annals during thehuman period. Upon them as framework all the subsequent development ofthe county hangs. And first let us observe how, before the advent ofman upon the scene, the shire was already strictly demarcated by itsnatural boundaries. Along the coast, between Chichester Harbour andBrighton, stretched a long, narrow, level strip of clay and alluvium, suitable for the dwelling-place of an agricultural people. Back of thiscoastwise belt lay the bare rounded range of the South Downs--goodgrazing land for sheep, but naturally incapable of cultivation. Tworivers, however, flowed in deep valleys through the Downs, and theirbasins, with the outlying combes and glens, were also the predestinedseats of agricultural communities. The one was the Ouse, passingthrough the fertile country around Lewes, and falling at last into theEnglish Channel at Seaford, not as now at Newhaven; the other was theCuckmere river, which has cut itself a deep glen in the chalk hillsjust beneath the high cliffs of Beachy Head. Beyond the Downs again, tothe north, the country descended abruptly to the deep trough of theWeald, whose cold and sticky clays or porous sandstones are never ofany use for purposes of tillage. Hence, as its very name tells us, theWeald has always been a wild and wood-clad region. The Romans knew itas the Silva Anderida, or forest of Pevensey; the early English as theAndredesweald. Both names are derived from a Celtic root signifying'The Uninhabited. ' Even in our own day, a large part of this tract iscovered by the woodlands of Tolgate Forest, St. Leonard's Forest, andAshdown Forest; while the remainder is only very scantily laid down inpasture-land or hop-fields, with a considerable sprinkling of copses, woods, commons, and parks. From its very nature, indeed, the Weald cannever be anything else, in its greater portion, than a wild, uncultivated, and wooded region. 

Let us note, too, how the really habitable strip of Sussex, from thepoint of view of an early people, was quite naturally cut off from allother parts of England by obvious limits. This habitable stripconsists, of course, of the coastwise belt from Brighton to theHampshire border (which belt I shall henceforward take the liberty ofdesignating as Sussex Proper), together with the seaward valleys andcombes of the South Downs. To the west, the great tidal flats andswamps about Hayling Island cut off Sussex from Hampshire; and beforedrainage and reclamation had done their work, these marshy districtsmust have formed a most impassable frontier. From this point, the greatwoodland region of the Weald, thickly covered with primæval forest, andtenanted by wolves, bears, wild boars, and red deer, swept round in along curve from the swamps at Bosham and Havant to the correspondingswamps of the opposite end at Pevensey and Hurstmonceux. The belt ofsavage wooded country, thick with the lairs of wild beasts, which thusringed round the greater part of the county, shut off the coastwisestrip at once from all possibility of communication with the rest ofEngland. So Sussex Proper and the combes of the Downs were naturallypredestined to form a single Celtic kingdom, a single Saxonprincipality, and a single English shire. 

It will be observed that this description leaves wholly out ofconsideration the strip of country about Hastings, Rye, and Winchelsea. It does so intentionally. That strip of country does not belong toSussex in the same intimate and strictly necessary manner as the restof the county. It probably once formed the seat of a small independentcommunity by itself; and though there were good and obvious reasons whyit should become finally united to Sussex rather than to Kent, it maybe regarded as to some extent a debateable island between them. For anisland it practically was in early times. At Pevensey Bay the Weald randown into the sea by a series of swamps and bogs still artificiallydrained by dykes and sluices. On the other side, the Romney marshesformed a similar though wider stretch of tidal flats, reclaimed anddrained at a far later period, partly through the agency of the longshingle bank thrown up round the low modern spit of Dungeness. Betweenthem, the Hastings cliffs rose high above marsh and sea. In their rear, the Weald forest covered the ridge; so that the Hastings district(still a separate rape or division of the county) formed a sort ofsmaller Sussex, divided, like the larger one, from all the rest ofEngland by a semicircular belt of marsh, forest, and marsh once more. These are the main elements out of which the history of the county ismade up. 

How far such conditions may have acted upon the very earliest humaninhabitants of Sussex--the palæolithic savages of the drift--before thelast Glacial epoch, it is impossible to say, because we know that manyof them did not then exist, and that the present configuration of thecounty is largely due to subsequent agencies. Britain was then unitedto the continent by a broad belt of land, filling up the bed of theEnglish Channel, and it possessed a climate wholly different from thatof the present day; while the position of the drift and the rivergravels shows that the sculpture of the surface was then in manyrespects unlike the existing distribution of hill and valley. We mustconfine ourselves, therefore, to the later or recent period (subsequentto the last glaciation of Britain), during which man has employedimplements of polished stone, of bronze, and of iron. 

The Euskarian neolithic population of Britain--a dark white race, likethe modern Basques--had settlements in Sussex, at least in the coastdistrict between the Downs and the sea. Here they could obtain inabundance the flints for the manufacture of their polished stonehatchets; while on the alluvial lowlands of Selsea and Shoreham theycould grow those cereals upon which they largely depended for theirdaily bread. Neolithic monuments, indeed, are common along the range ofthe South Downs, as they are also on the main mass of the chalk inSalisbury Plain; and at Cissbury Hill, near Worthing, we have remainsof one of the largest neolithic camp refuges in Britain. The evidenceof tumuli and weapons goes to show that the Euskarian people of Sussexoccupied the coast belt and the combes of the Downs from the Chichestermarshland to Pevensey, but that they did not spread at all into theWeald. In fact, it is most probable that at this early period Sussexwas divided into several little tribes or chieftainships, each of whichhad its own clearing in the lowland cut laboriously out of the forestby the aid of its stone axes; while in the centre stood the compactvillage of wooden huts, surrounded by a stockade, and girt without bythe small cultivated plots of the villagers. On the Downs above rosethe camp or refuge of the tribe--an earthwork rudely constructed inaccordance with the natural lines of the hills--to which the whole bodyof people, with their women, children, and cattle, retreated in case ofhostile invasion from the villagers on either side. It is not likelythat any foreigners from beyond the great forest belt of the Wealdwould ever come on the war-trail across that dangerous and tracklesswilderness; and it is probable, therefore, that the camps or refugeswere constructed as places of retreat for the tribes against theirimmediate neighbours, rather than against alien intruders from without. Hence we may reasonably conclude--as indeed is natural at such an earlystage of civilisation--that the whole district was not yet consolidatedunder a single rule, but that each village still remained independent, and liable to be engaged in hostilities with all others. Even ifextended chieftainships over several villages had already been set up, as is perhaps implied by the great tumuli of chiefs and the size of thecamps in some parts of Britain, we must suppose them to have beenconfined for the most part to a single river valley. If so, there mayhave been petty Euskarian principalities, rude supremacies orchieftainships like those of South Africa, in the Chichester lowlands, in the dale of Arun, in the valleys of the Adur, the Ouse, and theCuckmere River, and perhaps, too, in the insulated Hastings region, between the Pevensey levels and the Romney marsh. These principalitieswould then roughly coincide with the modern rapes of Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings. Each would possess itsown group of villages, and tilled lowland, its own boundary of forest, and its own camp of refuge on the hill-tops. Cissbury almostundoubtedly formed such a camp for the fertile valley of the Adur andthe coast strip from Worthing to Brighton. On its summit has beendiscovered an actual manufactory of stone implements from the copiousmaterial supplied by the flint veins in the chalk of which it iscomposed. 

Such a society, left to itself in Sussex, could never have got muchfurther than this. It could not discover or use metals, when it had nometal in its soil except the small quantity of iron to be found in thethen inaccessible Weald. It had no copper and no tin, and therefore itcould not manufacture bronze. But the geographical position of Englandgenerally, within sight of the European continent, made it certain thatif ever anywhere else bronze should come to be used, thebronze-weaponed people must ultimately cross over and subjugate thestone-weaponed aborigines of the island. Moreover, bronze was certainto be first hit upon in those countries where tin and copper were mosteasily workable--that is to say, in Asia. From Asia, the secret of itsmanufacture spread to the outlying peninsula of Europe, where it wasquickly adopted by the Aryan Celts, who had already invaded theoutlying continent, armed only with weapons of stone. As soon as theyhad learnt the use of bronze, certain great changes and improvementsfollowed naturally--amongst others, an immense advance in the art ofboat-building. The Celts of the bronze age soon constructed vesselswhich enabled them to cross the narrow seas and invade Britain. Theirsuperior weapons gave them at once an enormous advantage over theEuskarian natives, armed only with their polished flint hatchets, andbefore long they overran the whole island, save only the recesses ofWales and the north of Scotland. From that moment, the bronze age ofBritain set in--say some 1, 000 or 1, 500 years before the Christian era. 

The Celts, however, did not exterminate the whole Euskarian people;they were too few in number and too far advanced in civilisation forsuch a course. They knew it was better to make them slaves than todestroy them: for the Celts had just reached, but had not yet gotbeyond, the slave-making stage of culture. To this day, people of mixedEuskarian parentage, and marked by the long skull, dark complexion, andblack eyes of the Euskarian type, form a large proportion of theEnglish peasantry; and they are found even in Sussex, whichsubsequently suffered more than most other parts of Britain from thedestructive deluge of Teutonic barbarism in the fifth century. Butthough the Celts did not exterminate the Euskarians, they completelyCelticised them, just as the Teuton is now Teutonising the oldpopulation of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In South Wales andelsewhere, indeed, the aborigines retained their own language andinstitutions, as Silures and so forth; but in the conquered districtsof southern and eastern Britain they learned the tongue of theirmasters, and came to be counted as Celtic serfs. Thus, at the time whenBritain comes forth into the full historic glare of Roman civilisation, we find the country inhabited by a Celtic aristocracy of Aryantype--round-headed, fair-haired, and blue-eyed; together-with a _plebs_of Celticised Euskarian or half-caste serfs, retaining, as they stillretain, the long skulls and dark complexions of their aboriginalancestors. This was the ethnical composition of the Sussex populationat the date of the first Roman invasions. 

Under the bronze-weaponed Celts, a very different type of civilisationbecame possible. In the first place a more extended chieftainshipresulted from the improved weapons and consequent military power; andall Britain (at least, towards the close of the Celtic domination)became amalgamated into considerable kingdoms, some of which seem tohave spread over several modern shires. Sussex, however, enclosed byits barrier of forest, would naturally remain a single littleprincipality of itself, held, at least in later times, by a tribe knownto the Romans as Regni. Traces of Celtic occupation are mainly confinedto the Downs and the seaward slope of Sussex Proper; in the broadexpanse of the Weald, they are few and far between. The Celts occupiedthe fertile valleys and alluvial slopes, cut down the woods by theriver sides and on the plains, and built their larger and more regularcamps of refuge upon the Downs, for protection against the kindredCantii beyond the Weald, or the more distantly-related Belgæ across theHayling tidal flats. Of these hill-forts, Hollingbury Castle, nearBrighton, may be taken as a typical example. Bronze weapons and otherimplements of the bronze age are found in great numbers about Lewes inparticular (where the isolated height, now crowned by the NormanCastle, must always have commanded the fertile river vale of the Ouse), as well as at Chichester, Bognor, and elsewhere. But the great forest, inhabited by savage beasts and still more terrible fiends, proved abarrier to their northward extension. Even if they had cleared theland, they could not have cultivated it with their existing methods;and so it is only in a few spots near the upper river valleys that wefind any traces of outlying Celtic hamlets in the wilderness of theWeald. Some kind of trade, however, must have existed between the Regniand the other tribes of Britain, in order to supply them with thebronze, whose component elements Sussex does not possess. Woolsonbury, Westburton Hill, Clayton Hill, Wilmington, Hangleton Down, PlumptonPlain, and many other places along the coast have yielded large numbersof bronze implements; while the occurrence of the raw metal in lumps, together with the finished weapons, at Worthing and Beachy Head, aswell the discovery of a mould for a socketed celt at Wilmington, showsthat the actual foundry work was performed in Sussex itself. Abeautiful torque from Hollingbury Castle attests the workmanship of theSussex founders. No doubt the tin was imported from Cornwall, while thecopper was probably brought over from the continent. Glass beads, doubtless of Southern (perhaps Egyptian) manufacture, have also beenfound in Sussex, with implements of the bronze age. 

In the polished stone age, the county had been self-supporting, becauseof its possession of flint. In the bronze age it was dependent uponother places, through its non-possession of copper or tin. During theformer period it may have exported weapons from Cissbury; during thelatter, it must have imported the material of weapons from Cornwall andGaul. 

Before the Romans came, the Celts of Britain had learned the use ofiron. Whether they ever worked the iron of the Weald, however, isuncertain. But as the ores lie near the surface, as wood (to be madeinto charcoal) for the smelting was abundant, and as these two factscaused the Weald iron to be extensively employed in later times, it isprobable that small clearings would be made in the most accessiblespots, and that rude ironworks would be established. 

The same geographical causes which made Britain part of the Roman worldnaturally affected Sussex, as one of its component portions. Even underthe Empire, however, the county remained singularly separate. TheRomans built two strong fortresses at Anderida and Regnum, Pevensey andChichester, to guard the two Gwents or lowland plains, where the shoreshelves slowly to seaward; and they ran one of their great roads acrossthe coastwise tract, from Dover to the Portus Magnus (now Porchester), near Portsmouth; but they left Sussex otherwise very much to its owndevices. We know that the Regni were still permitted to keep theirnative chief, who probably exercised over his tribesmen somewhat thesame subordinate authority which a Rájput raja now exercises under theBritish government. Here, again, we see the natural result of theisolation of Sussex. The Romans ruled directly in the open plains ofthe Yorkshire Ouse and the Thames, as we ourselves rule in the BengalDelta, the Doáb, and the Punjáb; but they left a measure ofindependence to the native princes of south Wales, of Sussex, and ofCornwall, as we ourselves do to the native rulers in the deserts ofRájputana, the inaccessible mountains of Nipal, and the aboriginal hilldistricts of Central India. 

When the Roman power began to decay, the outlying possessions were thefirst to be given up. The Romans had enslaved and demoralised theprovincial population; and when they were gone, the great farms tilledby slave labour under the direction of Roman mortgagee-proprietors layopen to the attacks of fresh and warlike barbarians from beyond thesea. How early the fertile east coasts of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, andEast Anglia may have fallen a prey to the Teutonic pirates we cannotsay. The wretched legends, indeed, retailed to us by Gildas, Bæda, andthe English Chronicle, would have us believe that they were colonisedat a later period; but as they lay directly in the path of themarauders from Sleswick, as they were certainly Teutonised verythoroughly, and as no real records survive, we may well take it forgranted that the long-boats of the English, sailing down with theprevalent north-east winds from the wicks of Denmark, came first toshore on these fertile coasts. After they had been conquered andcolonised, the Saxon and Jutish freebooters began to look forsettlements, on their part, farther south. One horde, led, as thelegend veraciously assures us, by Hengest and Horsa, landed in Thanet;another, composed entirely of Saxons, and under the command of acertain dubious Ælle, came to shore on the spit of Selsea. It was fromthis last body that the county took its newer name of Suth-Seaxe, SuthSexe, or Sussex. Let us first frankly narrate the legend, and then seehow far it may fairly be rationalised. 

In 477, says the English Chronicle--written down, it must beremembered, from traditional sources, four centuries later, at thecourt of Alfred the West Saxon--in 477, Ælle and his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing, and Cissa, came to Britain in three ships, and landed at thestow that is cleped Cymenes-ora. There that ilk day they slew manyWelshmen, and the rest they drave into the wood hight Andredes-leah. In485, Ælle, fighting the Welsh near Mearcredes Burn, slew many, and therest he put to flight. In 491, Ælle, with his son Cissa, besetAndredes-ceaster, and slew all that therein were, nor was there afterone Welshman left. Such is the whole story, as told in the bald andsimple entries of the West Saxon annalist, A more dubious traditionfurther states that Ælle was also Bretwalda, or overlord, of all theTeutonic tribes in Britain. 

And now let us see what we can make of this wholly unhistorical andlegendary tale. Whether there ever was a South Saxon king named Ælle wecannot say; but that the earliest English pirate fleet on this coastshould have landed near Selsea is likely enough. The marauders wouldnot land near the Romney marshes or the Pevensey flats, where the greatfortresses of Lymne and Anderida would block their passage; and theycould not beach their keels easily anywhere along the cliff-girt coastbetween Beachy Head and Brighton; so they would naturally sail alongpast the marshland and the chalk cliffs till they reached the openchampaign shore near Chichester. Cymenes-ora, where they are said tohave landed, is now Keynor on the Bill of Selsea; and Selsea itself, asits name (correctly Selsey) clearly shows us, was then an island in thetidal flats. This was just the sort of place which the English piratesloved, for all tradition represents their first settlements as effectedon isolated spots like Thanet, Hurst Castle, Holderness, andBamborough. Thence they would march upon Regnum, the square Roman townat the harbour head, and reduce it by storm, garrisoned as it doubtlesswas by a handful of semi-Romanised Welshmen or Britons. The town tookthe English name of Cissanceaster, or Chichester. Moreover, all aroundthe Chichester district, we still find a group of English clanvillages, with the characteristic patronymic termination _ing_. Suchare East and West Wittering, Donnington, Funtington, Didling, andothers. It is _vraisemblable_ enough that the little strip of very lowcoast between Hayling Island and the Arun may have been the firstoriginal South Saxon colony. Nor is it by any means impossible that thenames of Keynor and Chichester Cymenes-ora and Cissanceaster--may stillenshrine the memory of two among the old South Saxon freebooters. 

The tradition of a battle at Mearcredes Burn, when the Welsh were againdefeated, may refer to an advance by which, a few years later, theSouth Saxon pirates pushed eastward along the coast, and occupied thestrip of shore as far as Brighton, together with the fertile valley ofthe Lewes Ouse. In the first-named district we find a large group ofEnglish Clan villages, including Patching, Poling, Angmering, Goring, Worthing, Tarring, Washington, Lullington, Blatchingden, Ovingdean, Rottingdean, and many others. Amongst them is one which has clearlygiven rise to the name of Ælle's third son, and that is Lancing. Unfortunately for the legend, we must decide that this was really thesettlement of an English clan of Lancingas, as Washington was the _tun_or enclosure of the Weasingas, and Beddingham was the _ham_ or home ofthe Beddingas. Around Lewes, in like manner, we find Tarring, Malling, Piddinghoe, Bletchington, and others; while in the valley just to theeast we have ten or eleven such names as Lullington, Wilmington, Folkington, and Littlington. These districts, I imagine, represent thesecond advance of the English conquerors. 

Finally, fourteen years after the first landing, the South Saxonscrossed the Downs and attacked Anderida. The Roman walls of the greatfortress were thick and strong, as their remains, built over by theNorman Castle, still show; but they were defended by half-trainedWelsh, who could not withstand the English onset. With the fall ofAnderida, the native power was broken for ever, 'nor was there afterone Welshman left. ' The English tribe of the Hastingas settled atHastings; and the South Saxons were now supreme from marsh to marsh. 

But did they really exterminate the native Celt-Euskarian population? Iventure to say, no. Some no doubt, especially the men, they slew; butthe women and children, as even Mr. Freeman admits, were probablyspared in large numbers. Even of the men, many doubtless became slavesto the Saxon lords; while others maintained themselves in isolatedbands in the Weald. To this day the Euskarian type of humanity is notuncommon among the Sussex peasantry, and all the rivers still bear theCeltic names of Arun, Adur, Ouse, and Calder. That there was 'noWelshmen left' is only another way of saying that the armed Welshresistance ceased. The Romanised Britons became English churls andserfs--nay, the very name for a serf in ordinary conversation was Wealaor Welshman. The population received a new element--the EnglishSaxons--but it was not completely changed. The Weorthingas and Goringassimply became masters of the lands formerly held by Roman owners; andthe cabins of their British serfs still clustered around the woodenhall of the English lords. 

Nevertheless, Sussex is one of the most thoroughly Teutonised countiesin England. The proportion of Saxon blood is very marked: light hairand blue eyes, together with the broad and short English skull, arecommon even among the peasantry. The number of English Clan namesnoticed by Mr. Kemble in the towns and villages of Sussex is 68 asagainst 60 in almost equally Teutonic Kent, 48 in Essex, 21 in largelyCeltic Dorset, 6 in Cumberland, 2 in Cornwall, and none in Monmouth. The size and number of the hundreds into which the county is dividedtells us much the same tale. Each hundred was originally a group of onehundred free English families, settled on the soil, and holding incheck the native subject population of Anglicised Celt-Euskarianchurls. Now, in Sussex we get 61 hundreds, and in Kent 61, as against13 in Surrey beyond the Weald (where the clan names also sink to 18), and 8 in Hertfordshire. Or, to put it another way, which I borrow fromMr. Isaac Taylor, in Sussex there is one hundred to every 23 squaremiles; in Kent to every 24; in Dorset to every 30; in Surrey to every58; in Herts to every 79; in Gloucester to every 97; in Derby to every162; in Warwick to every 179; and in Lancashire to every 302. In otherwords, while in Kent, Sussex, and the east the free English inhabitantsclustered thickly on the soil, with a relatively small servilepopulation, in Mercia and the west the English population was much moresparsely scattered, with a relatively great servile population. So, aslate as the time of Domesday, in Kent and Sussex the slaves mentionedin the great survey (only a small part, probably, of the total)numbered only 10 per cent. Of the population, while in Devon andCornwall they numbered 20 per cent. , and in Gloucestershire 33 percent. 

These results are all inevitable. It is obvious that the first attacksmust necessarily be made upon the east and south coasts, and that theinland districts and the west must only slowly be conquered afterward. Especially was it easy to found Teutonic kingdoms in the four isolatedregions of Lincolnshire, East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex, each of whichwas cut off from the rest of England in early times by impassable fens, marshes, forests, or rivers. It was easy here to kill off the Welshfighting population, to drive the remnants into the Fen Country or theWeald, to enslave the captives, the women, and the children, and tosecure the Teutonic colony by a mark or border of woodland, swamp, orhill. On the other hand, Wessex, Northumbria, and Mercia, with a vagueand ill-defined internal border, had harder work to fight their way inagainst a united Welsh resistance; and it was only very slowly thatthey pushed across the central watershed, to dismember the unconqueredremnant of the Britons at last into the three isolated bodies ofDamnonia (Cornwall and Devon), Wales Proper, and Strathclyde. This isprobably why the earliest settlements were made in these isolated coastregions, and why the inward progress of the other colonies was sorelatively slow. 

The South Saxons, then, at first occupied the three fertile bits of thecounty--the coast belt of Sussex Proper, the Valley of the Ouse, andthe isolated Hastings district--because these were the best adapted fortheir strictly agricultural life. In spite of the legend of Ælle, I donot suppose that they were all united from the first under a singleprincipality. It seems far more probable that each little clansettlement was at first wholly independent; that afterwards threelittle chieftainships grew up in the three fertile strips--typified, perhaps, by the story of Ælle's three sons--and that the whole finallycoalesced into a single kingdom of the South Saxons, which is the statein which we find the county in Bæda's time. As ever, its boundarieswere marked out for it by nature, for the Weald remained as yet analmost unbroken forest; and the names of Selsea, Pevensey, Winchelsea, Romney, and many others, show by their common insular termination(found in all isles round the British coast, as in Sheppey, Walney, Bardsea, Anglesea, Fursey, Wallasey, and so forth) that the marshlandwas still wholly undrained, and that a few islands alone stood here andthere as masses of dry land out of their desolate and watery expanse. The Hastings district, too, fell more naturally to Sussex than to Kent, because the marshes dividing it from the former were far lessformidable than those which severed it from the latter. Most probablythe South Saxons intentionally aided nature in cutting off theirterritory from all other parts of Britain; for every English kingdomloved to surround itself with a distinct mark or border of waste, as adefence against invasion from outside. The Romans had brought Sussexwithin the great network of their road system; but the South Saxons nodoubt took special pains to cut off those parts of the roads which ledacross their own frontier. At any rate, it is quite clear that Sussexdid not largely participate in the general life of the new England, andthat intercourse with the rest of the world was extremely limited. 

The South Saxon kings probably lived for the most part at Chichester, though no doubt they had _hams_, after the royal Teutonic fashiongenerally, in many other parts of their territory; and they moved aboutfrom one to the other, with their suite of thegns, eating up in eachwhat food was provided by their serfs for their use, and then moving onto the next. The isolation of Sussex is strikingly shown by its longadherence to the primitive paganism. Missionaries from Rome, under theguidance of Augustine, converted Kent as early as 597. For Kent was thenearest kingdom to the continent; it contained the chief port of entryfor continental travellers, Richborough--the Dover of those days--andits king, accustomed to continental connections, had married aChristian Frankish princess from Paris. Hence Kent was naturally thefirst Teutonic principality to receive the faith. Next cameNorthumbria, Lindsey, East Anglia, Wessex, and even inland Mercia. ButSussex still held out for Thor and Woden as late as 679, three-quartersof a century after the conversion of Kent, and twenty years afterMercia itself had given way to the new faith. Even when Sussex wasfinally converted, the manner in which the change took place wascharacteristic. It was not by missionaries from beyond the Weald inKent or Surrey, nor from beyond the marsh in Wessex. An Irish monk, Bæda tells us, coming ashore on the open coast near Chichester, established a small monastery at Bosham--even then, no doubt, a royal_ham_, as we know it was under Harold--'a place, ' says the oldhistorian significantly, 'girt round by sea and forest. ' (It lies juston the mark between Wessex and the South Saxons. ) Æthelwealh, theking--a curious name, for it means 'noble Welshman' (perhaps he was ofmixed blood)--had already been baptized in Mercia, and his wife was thedaughter of a Christian ealdorman of the Worcester-men; but the rest ofthe principality was heathen. The Irish monk effected nothing; butshortly after Wilfrith, the fiery Bishop of York, on one of his usualflying visits to Rome, got shipwrecked off Selsea. With his accustomedvigour, he went ashore, and began a crusade in the heathen land. He wasable at once to baptize the 'leaders and soldiers'--that is to say, thefree military English population; while his attendant priests--Eappa, Padda, Burghelm, and Oiddi (it is pleasant to preserve these littlepersonal touches)--proceeded to baptize the 'plebs'--that is to say, the servile Anglicised Celt-Euskarian substratum--up and down thecountry villages. 

It was to Wilfrith, too, that Sussex owed her first cathedral. Æthelwealh made him a present of Selsea, 'a place surrounded by the seaon every side save one, where an isthmus about as broad as astone's-throw connects it with the mainland, ' and there the ardentbishop founded a regular monastery, in which he himself remained forfive years. On the soil were 250 serfs, whom Wilfrith at once set free. After the death of Aldhelm, the West Saxon bishop, in 709, Sussex wasmade a separate bishopric, with its seat at Selsea; and it was not tillafter the Norman Conquest that the cathedral was removed to Chichester. It may be noted that all these arrangements were in strict accordancewith early English custom. The kings generally gave their bishops aseat near their own chief town, as Cuthbert had his see at Lindisfarne, close to the royal Northumbrian capital of Bamborough; so that theproximity of Selsea to Chichester made it the most natural place for abishopstool; and, again, it was usual to make over spots in the fens ormarshes to the monks, who, by draining and cultivating them, performeda useful secular work. No traces now remain of old Selsea Cathedral, its site having long been swallowed up by incursions of the sea. Bædahas the ordinary number of miracles to record in connection with themonastery. 

As time went on, however, the isolation of Sussex became less complete. Æthelwealh had got himself into complications with Wessex by acceptingthe sovereignty of the Isle of Wight and the Meonwaras aboutSouthhampton from the hands of a Mercian conqueror. Perhaps Æthelwealhthen repaired the old Roman roads which led from his own _ham_ atChichester to Portsmouth in Wessex, and broke down the mark, so as toconnect his old and his new dominions with one another. At any rate, shortly after, Cædwalla, the West Saxon, an ætheling at large on thelook-out for a kingdom, attacked him suddenly with his host of thegnsfrom this unexpected quarter, killed the King himself, and harried theSouth Saxons from marsh to marsh. Two South Saxons thegns expelled himfor a time, and made themselves masters of the country. But afterwards, Cædwalla, becoming King of the West Saxons, recovered Sussex once more, and handed it on to his successor, Ini. Hence the South Saxons had nobishopric of their own during this period, but were included in the seeof the West Saxons at Winchester. 

During the hundred years of the Mercian Supremacy, coincident, roughlyspeaking, with the eighth century, we hear little of Sussex; but itseems to have shaken off the yoke of Wessex, and to have been insubjection to the great Mercian over-lords alone. It had its ownunder-kings and its own bishops. Early in the ninth century, however, when Ecgberht the West Saxon succeeding in throwing off the Mercianyoke, the other Saxon States of South Britain willingly joined himagainst the Anglian oppressors. 'The men of Kent and Surrey, Sussex andEssex, gladly submitted to King Ecgberht. ' When the royal house of theSouth Saxons died out, Sussex still retained a sort of separateexistence within the West Saxon State, as Wales does in the England ofour own day. Æthelwulf made his son under-king of Kent, Essex, Surrey, and Sussex; and so, during the troublous times of the Danish invasion, when all southern England became one in its resistance to the heathen, those old principalities gradually sank into the position of provincesor shires. 

From the period of union with the general West Saxon Kingdom (whichgrew slowly into the Kingdom of England under Eadgar and Cnut), themarkland of the Weald seems to have been gradually encroached upon fromthe south. Most of the names in that district are distinctly'Anglo-Saxon' in type; by which I mean that they were imposed beforethe Norman Conquest, and belong to the stage of the language then inuse. Even during the Roman period, settlements for iron-mining existedin the Weald, and these clearings would of course be occupied by theEnglish colonists at a comparatively early time. Just at the foot ofthe Downs, too, on the north side, we find a few clan settlements onthe edge of the Weald, which must date from the first period of Englishcolonisation. Such are Poynings, Didling, Ditchling, Chillington, andChiltington. Farther in, however, the clan names grow rarer; and wherewe find them they are not _hams_ or _tuns_, regular communities ofSaxon settlers, but they show, by their forestine terminations of_hurst_, _ley_, _den_, and _field_, that they were mere outlyingshelters of hunters or swineherds in the trackless forest. Such areBillinghurst, Warminghurst, Itchingfield, and Ardingley. On theCuckmere river, the villages in the combes bear names like Jevingtonand Lullington; but in the upper valley of the little stream, where itflows through the Weald, we find instead Chiddingley and Hellingley. Most of the Weald villages, however, bear still more woodlandtitles--Midhurst, Farnhurst, Nuthurst, Maplehurst, and Lamberhurst;Cuckfield, Mayfield, Rotherfield, Hartfield, Heathfield, andWivelsfield; Crawley, Cowfold, Loxwood, Linchmere, and Marden. _Hams_and _tuns_, the sure signs of early English colonisation, are almostwholly lacking; in their place we get abundance of such names asConeyhurst Common, Water Down Forest, Hayward's Heath, Milland Marsh, and Bell's Oak Green. To this day even, the greater part of the Wealdis down in park, copse, heath, forest, common, or marshland. Throughoutthe whole expanse of the woodland region in Sussex, with the outlyingportions in Kent, Surrey, and Hants, Mr. Isaac Taylor has collected nofewer than 299 local names with the significant forest terminations in_hurst_, _den_, _ley_, _holt_, and _field_. These facts show that, during the later 'Anglo-Saxon' period, the Weald was being slowlycolonised in a few favourable spots. Its use as a mark was now gone, and it might be safely employed for the peaceful purposes of the archerand the swineherd. Names referring to pasture and the wild beasts aretherefore common. 

To the same time must doubtless be assigned the exact delimitation ofthe Sussex frontiers. During the early periods, the Kentings, theSuthrige, and the West Saxons would all extend on their side as far asthe Weald, which would be treated as a sort of neutral zone. But whenthe Woodland itself began to be occupied, a demarcation would naturallybe made between the neighbouring provinces. The boundary follows themost obvious course. It starts on the east from the old mouth of theRother (now diverted to Rye New Harbour), known as the Kent Ditch, inwhat was then the central and most impassable part of the marshland. Itruns along the Rother to its bifurcation, and then makes for theheaven-water-parting or dividing back of the Forest Ridge, beside twoor three lesser streams. Then it passes along the crest of the ridgefrom Tunbridge Wells, past East Grinstead and Crawley, till it strikesthe Hampshire border. There it follows the line between the twowatersheds to the sea, which it reaches at Emsworth. There is, however, one long insulated spur of Hampshire running down from Haslemere toGraffham (in apparent defiance of geographical features), whose originand meaning I do not understand. 

With the Norman Conquest, the history of Sussex, and of Englandgenerally, for the most part ceases abruptly; all the rest is merepersonal gossip about Prince Edward and the battle of Lewes, or aboutGeorge IV. And the Brighton Pavilion. Not, of course, that there is notreal national history here as elsewhere; but it is hard to disentanglefrom the puerile personalities of historians generally. Nevertheless, some brief attempt to reconstruct the main facts in the subsequenthistory of Sussex must still be undertaken. The part which Sussex borepassively in the actual Conquest is itself typical of the newrelations. England was getting drawn into the general run of Europeancivilisation, and the old isolation of Sussex was beginning to bebroken down. Lying so near the Continent, Sussex was naturally thelanding-place for an army coming from Normandy or Ponthieu. William'sfleet came ashore on the low coast at Pevensey. Naturally he turnedtowards Hastings, whence a road now led through the Weald to London. Onthe tall cliffs he threw up an earthwork, and then marched towards thegreat town. Harold's army met him on the heights of Senlac, part of thesolitary ridge between the marshes, by which alone London could bereached. Harold fell on the spot now marked by the ruined high altar ofBattle Abbey--a national monument at present in the keeping of anEnglish duke. Once the native army was routed, William marched onresistlessly to London, and Sussex and England were at his feet. 

The new feudal organisation of the county is doubtless shadowed forthin the existing rapes. Of these there are six, called respectivelyafter Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings. Itwill be noticed at once that these were the seats of the new bishopricand of the five great early castles. In one form or another, more orless modernised, Arundel Castle, Bramber Castle, Lewes Castle, PevenseyCastle, and Hastings Castle all survive to our own day. In accordancewith their ordinary policy of removing cathedrals from villages tochief towns, and so concentrating the civil and ecclesiasticalgovernment, the Normans brought the bishopstool from Selsea toChichester. The six rapes are fairly coincident--Chichester with themarsh district; Arundel with the dale of Arun; Bramber with the dale ofAdur; Lewes with the western dale of Ouse; Pevensey with the easterndale of Ouse; and Hastings with the insulated region between themarshes. In other words, Sussex seems to have been cut up into sixnatural divisions along the sea-shore; while to each division wasassigned all the Weald back of its own shore strip as far as theborder. Thus the rapes consist of six long longitudinal belts, eachwith a short sea front and a long stretch back into the Weald. 

Increased intercourse with the Continent brought the Cinque Ports intoimportance; and, as premier Cinque Port, Hastings grew to be one of thechief towns in Sussex. The constant French wars made them prominent inmediæval history. As trade grew up, other commercial harbours gave riseto considerable mercantile towns. Rye and Winchelsea, at the mouth ofthe Rother, were great ports of entry from France as late as the daysof Elizabeth. Seaford, at the mouth of the Ouse, was also an importantharbour till 1570, when a terrible storm changed the course of thestream to the town called from that fact Newhaven. Lewes was likewise aport, as the estuary of the Ouse was navigable from the mouth up to thetown. Brighthelmstone was still a village; but old Shoreham on the Adurwas a considerable place. Arundel Haven and Chichester Harbour recallsthe old mercantile importance of their respective neighbourhoods. Theonly other places of any note in mediæval Sussex were Steyning, underthe walls of Bramber Castle; Hurstmonceux, which the Conqueror bestowedupon the lord of Eu; Battle, where he planted his great expiatoryabbey; and Hurst Pierpont, which also dates from William's own time. The sole important part of the county was still the strip along thecoast between the Weald and the sea. 

During the Plantagenet period, England became a wool-exporting country, like Australia at the present day; and therefore the wool-growing partsof the island rose quickly into great importance. Sussex, with itslarge expanse of chalk downs, naturally formed one of the bestwool-producing tracts; and in the reign of Edward III. , Chichester wasmade one of the 'staples' to which the wool trade was confined bystatute. Sussex Proper and the Lewes valley were now among the mostthickly populated regions of England. 

The Weald, too, was beginning to have its turn. English iron wasgetting to be in request for the cannon, armour, and arms required inthe French wars; and nowhere was iron more easily procured, side byside with the fuel for smelting it, than in the Sussex Weald. From thedays of the Edwards to the early part of the eighteenth century, thewoods of the Weald were cut down in quantities for the iron works. During this time, several small towns began to spring up in the oldforest region, of which the chief are Midhurst, Petworth, Billinghurst, Horsham, Cuckfield, and East Grinstead. Many of the desertedsmelting-places may still be seen, with their invariable accompanimentof a pond or dam. The wood supply began to fail as early as Elizabeth'sreign, but iron was still smelted in 1760. From that time onward, thecompetition of Sheffield and Birmingham--where iron was prepared by the'new method' with coal--blew out the Sussex furnaces, and the Wealdrelapsed once more into a wild heather-clad and wood-covered region, now thickly interspersed with parks and country seats, of whichPetworth, Cowdry, and Ashburnham are the best known. 

Modern times, of course, have brought their changes. With the northwardrevolution caused by steam and coal, Sussex, like the rest of southernEngland, has fallen back to a purely agricultural life. The sea hasblocked up the harbours of Rye, Winchelsea, Seaford, and Lewes. Man'shand has drained the marshes of the Rother, of Pevensey, and of SelseaBill; and railways have broken down the isolation of Sussex from theremainder of the country. Still, as of old, the natural configurationcontinues to produce its necessary effects. Even now there are no townsof any size in the Weald: few, save Lewes, Arundel, and Chichester, anywhere but on the coast. The Downs are given up to sheep-farming; theWeald to game and pleasure-grounds; the shore to holiday-making. Theproximity to London is now the chief cause of Sussex prosperity. In theold coaching days, Brighton was a foregone conclusion. Sixty miles byroad from town, it was the nearest accessible spot by the seaside. Assoon as people began to think of annual holidays, Brighton mustnecessarily attract them. Hence George IV. And the Pavilion. Therailroad has done more. It has made Brighton into a suburb, and raisedits population to over 100, 000. At the same time, the South Coast linehas begotten watering-places at Worthing, Bognor, and Littlehampton. Inthe other direction, it has created Eastbourne. Those who do not lovechalk (as the Georges did), choose rather the more broken and woodedcountry round Hastings and St. Leonards, where the Weald sandstone runsdown to the sea. The difference between the rounded Downs andsaucer-shaped combes of the chalk, and the deep glens traversing thesoft friable strata of the Wealden, is well seen in passing from BeachyHead to Ecclesbourne and Fairlight. Shoreham is kept half alive by theBrighton coal trade: Newhaven struggles on as a port for Dieppe. But asa whole, the county is now one vast seaside resort from end to end, sothat to-day the flat coasts at Selsea, Pevensey, and Rye, are aloneleft out in the cold. The iron trade and the wool trade have long sincegone north to the coal districts. Brighton and Hastings sum up inthemselves all that is vital in the Sussex of 1881. 

 THE BRONZE AXE. 

There is always a certain fascination in beginning a subject at thewrong end and working backward: it has the charm which inevitablyattaches to all evil practices; you know you oughtn't, and so you can'tresist the temptation to outrage the proprieties and do it. I can'tmyself resist the temptation of beginning this article where it oughtto break off--with Chinese money, which is not the origin, but thefinal outcome and sole remaining modern representative of that antiqueand almost prehistoric implement, the Bronze Age hatchet. 

Improbable and grotesque as this affiliation sounds at first hearing, it is, nevertheless, about as certain as any other fact inanthropological science--which isn't, perhaps, saying a great deal. Thefamiliar little brass cash, with the square hole for stringing themtogether on a thread in the centre, well known to the frequenter ofminor provincial museums, are, strange to say, the lineal descendants, in unbroken order, of the bronze axe of remote Celestial ancestors. From the regular hatchet to the modern coin one can trace a distinct, if somewhat broken, succession, so that it is impossible to say wherethe one leaves off and the other begins--where the implement mergesinto the medium of exchange, and settles down finally into the root ofall evil. 

Here is how this curious pedigree first worked itself out. In earlytimes, before coin was invented, barter was usually conducted betweenproducer and consumer with metal implements, as it still is in CentralAfrica at the present day with Venetian glass beads and rolls of redcalico. Payments were all made in kind, and bronze was the commonestform of specie. A gentleman desirous of effecting purchases in foreignparts went about the world with a number of bronze axes in his pocket(or its substitute), which he exchanged for other goods with the nativetraffickers in the country where he did his primitive business. Atfirst, the early Chinese in that unsophisticated age were content touse real hatchets for this commercial purpose; but, after a time, withthe profound mercantile instinct of their race, it occurred to some ofthem that when a man wanted half a hatchet's worth of goods he might aswell pay for them with half a hatchet. Still, as it would be a pity tospoil a good working implement by cutting it in two, the worthy Ah Siningeniously compromised the matter by making thin hatchets, of theusual size and shape, but far too slender for practical usage. By sodoing he invented coin: and, what is more, he invented it far earlierthan the rival claimants to that proud distinction, the Lydians, whoseelectrum staters were first struck in the seventh century, B. C. But, according to Professor Terrien de la Couperie, some of the fancyChinese hatchets which we still retain date back as far as the year1000 (a good round number), and are so thin that they could only havebeen intended to possess exchange value. And when a distinguishedSinologist gives us a date for anything Chinese, it behoves the rest ofthe unlearned world to open its mouth and shut its eyes, and thankfullyreceive whatever the distinguished Sinologist may send it. 

In the seventh century, then, these mercantile axes, made in thestrictest sense to sell and not to use, were stamped with an officialstamp to mark their amount, and became thereby converted into truecoins--that was the root of the 'root of all evil. ' Thence thedeclension to the 'cash' is easy; the form grew gradually more and moreregular, while the square hole in the centre, once used for the handle, was retained by conservatism and practical sense as a convenient meansof stringing them together. 

So this was the end of the old bronze hatchet, perhaps the mostwonderful civilizing agent ever invented by human ingenuity. Let ushark back now, and from the opposite side see what was its firstbeginning. 

'But why, ' you ask, 'the most wonderful civilizing agency? What did thebronze axe ever do for humanity?' Well, nearly everything. I believe Ihave really not said too much. We are apt to talk big nowadays aboutthe steam-engine, and that marvellous electricity which is always goingto do wonders for us all--to-morrow; but I don't know whether eitherever produced so great a revolution in human life, or so completelymetamorphosed human existence, as that simple and commonplace bronzehatchet. 

For, consider that before the days of bronze man knew no weapon orimplement of any sort save the stone axe, or tomahawk, and theflint-tipped arrow. Consider, that the highest stage of human culturehe had then reached was hardly higher than that of the scalp-huntingRed Indian or the seal-spearing Esquimaux. Consider, that in his StoneAge agriculture and grains were almost unknown--the forest uncleared, the soil untilled, and hunting and fishing the sole or principal humanactivities. It was the bronze axe that first enabled man to makeclearings in the woodland on the large scale, and to sow on thoseclearings in good big fields the wheat and barley which determined thefirst great upward step in the drama of civilization. All these thingsdepend in ultimate analysis upon that pioneer of culture, the bronzehatchet. 

And how did the first Watt or Edison of metallurgy come to make thatearliest bronze implement? Well, it seems probable that between theStone Age and the Bronze Age there intervened everywhere, or nearlyeverywhere, a very short and transient age of copper. And the reasonfor thus thinking is threefold. In the first place, bronze is an alloyof tin and copper: and it seems natural to suppose that men would usethe simple metals in isolation to begin with, before they discoveredthat they could harden and temper them by mixing the two together. Inthe second place, copper occurs in the pure or native state (withoutthe trouble of smelting) in several countries, and was therefore a verynatural metal for early man to cast his inquiring glance upon. And inthe third place, weapons of unmixed copper, apparently of very antiquetypes, have been found in various parts of the world, both in Asia andAmerica. According to Mr. John Evans, the most learned historian of theBronze Age, the greatest copper 'find' of the eastern hemisphere wasthat at Gungeria, in Central India; and the copper implements therefound consisted entirely of flat celts of a very early and almostprimitive pattern. 

The copper weapons of America, however, have greater illustrative andethnological interest, because the noble red man, at the period whenColumbus first discovered him, and when he first discovered Columbus, was still in the Stone Age of his very imperfect culture, or, to speakmore correctly, of extreme barbarism. The fact is, the Indians of LakeSuperior were only just beginning to employ copper, and were on the eveof independently inaugurating a Bronze Age of their own, when theintrusive white man came and spoiled the fun by the incontinentintroduction of iron, firearms, missionaries, whisky, and all the otherresources of civilization. On the shores of Lake Superior native copperexists in abundance; and the intelligent Red Indian, finding thishandsome red stone in the cliffs by his side, was pretty sure to tryhis hand at chipping a tomahawk out of the rare material. But, as soonas he did so, Mr. Evans suggests, he would find to his surprise that ityielded to his blows; in short, that he had got that singularphenomenon, a malleable stone, to deal with. Hammering away at his newinvention, he must shortly have hammered it into a shapely axe. The newprocess took his practical fancy at once: vistas of an untold wealth ofscalps floated gaily before his fevered brain; and he proceeded tohammer himself various weapons and implements without delay. Amongstothers, he produced for himself very neat spear-heads, with socketsadapted for the reception of a shaft, made by hammering out the baseflat, and then turning over the edges so as to enclose the wood betweenthem, like a modern hoe-handle. In Wisconsin alone more than a hundredof such copper axes, spear-heads, and knives have been unearthed byantiquaries and duly recorded. 

All these weapons, however, are simply hammered, not cast or melted. The Red Indian hadn't yet reached the stage of making a mould when DeChamplain and his _voyageurs_ came down upon Canada and interruptedthis interesting experiment in industrial development by springing theseventeenth century upon the unsophisticated red man at one fell blow, with all its inherited wealth of European science. Nevertheless, theIndians must have known that fire melted copper; for the heat of thealtars was great enough, say Squier and Davis, to fuse the implementsand ornaments laid upon them in sacrificial rites; and so the fact ofits fusibility could hardly have escaped them. A people who hadadvanced so far on the road towards the invention of casting couldhardly have been prevented from taking the final step, save by thesudden intervention of some social cataclysm like the European invasionof Eastern America. And how awful a calamity that was for the Indiansthemselves we at this day can hardly even realize. 

In some similar way, no doubt, the Asiatic people who first inventedbronze must have learned the fact of the fusibility of metals, and haveapplied it in time, at first, perhaps, by accident, to the manufactureof that hard alloy. I say Asiatic, because there seems good reason tobelieve that Asia was the original home of the nascent bronze industry. For a Bronze Age almost necessarily implies a brief preceding age ofcopper; and there is no proof of pure copper implements ever havingbeen largely used in Europe, while there is ample proof of their havingbeen used to a very considerable extent in Asia. Hence we mayreasonably infer that the art of bronze-making was developed in Asia bya copper-using people, and that when metallurgy was first introducedinto Europe the method of mixing the copper with tin had already beenperfected. The abundance of tin in the south-eastern islands of Asiarenders this view probable; while in Europe there are no tin minesworth mentioning, except in the remotest part of a remote outlyingisland--to wit, in Cornwall. 

Be this as it may, the earliest and simplest forms of bronze axe withwhich we are acquainted are profoundly interesting, as casting a floodof light upon the general process of human evolution all the worldover. Every new human invention is always at first directly modelledupon the other similar products which have preceded it. There is noreally new thing under the sun. For example, the earliest Englishrailway carriages were built on the model of the old stage-coach, onlythat three stage-coaches, as it were, were telescoped together, side byside--the very first bore the significant motto, _Tria juncta inuno_--and it was this preconception of the English coachbuilder thathas hampered us ever since with our hateful 'compartments, ' instead ofthe commodious and comfortable open American saloon carriages. So, too, the earliest firearms were modelled on the stock of the old cross-bow, and the earliest earthenware pots and pans were shaped like the stillmore primitive gourds and calabashes. It need not surprise us, therefore, to find that the earliest metal axes of which we have anyknowledge were directly moulded on the original shape of the stonetomahawk. 

Such a copper hatchet, cast in a mould formed by a polished neolithicstone celt, was found in an early Etruscan tomb, and is still preservedin the Museum at Berlin. See how natural this process would be. For, inthe first place, the primitive workman, knowing already only one formof axe, the stone tomahawk, would naturally reproduce it in the newmaterial, without thinking what improvements in shape and design themalleability and fusibility of the metal would render possible or easy. But, more than that, the idea of coating the polished stone axe withplastic clay, and thereby making a mould for the molten metal, would beso very simple that even the neolithic savage, already accustomed tothe manufacture of coarse pottery upon natural shapes, could hardlyfail to think of it. As a matter of fact, he did think of it: for celtsof bronze or copper, cast in moulds made from stone hatchets, have beenfound in Cyprus by General di Cesnola, on the site of Troy by Dr. Schliemann, and in many other assorted localities by less distinguishedbut equally trustworthy archæologists. 

To the neolithic hunter, herdsman, and villager this progress from thestone to the metal axe probably seemed at first a mere substitution ofan easier for a more difficult material. He little knew whither hisdiscovery tended. It was pure human laziness that urged the change. Hownice to save yourself all that long trouble of chipping and polishing, with ceaseless toil, in favour of a stone which you could melt at onego and pour while hot into a ready-made mould! It must have looked, bycomparison, like weapon-making by magic; for properly to cut and polisha stone axe is the work of weeks and weeks of elbow-grease. Yet here, in a moment, a better hatchet could be turned out all finished! But theimplied effects lay deeper far than the neolithic hunter could everhave imagined. The bronze axe was the beginning of civilization; itbrought the steam-engine, the telephone, woman's rights, and the countycouncillor directly in its train. With the eye of faith, had he onlypossessed that useful optical organ, the Stone Age artizan mightdoubtless have beheld Pears' soap and the deceased wife's sisterlooming dimly in the remote future. Till that moment human life hadbeen almost stationary: thenceforth, it proceeded by leaps and bounds, like a kangaroo society, on its upward path towards triumphantdemocracy and the penny post. The nineteenth century and all its wileshung by a thread upon the success of his melting pot. 

Indeed, the whole history of human civilization has been one of aconstantly accelerated progress. The Older Stone Age, when men knewonly how to chip flint implements, but hadn't yet invented the art ofgrinding and polishing them, was one of immense and incalculableduration, to be reckoned perhaps by tens of thousands of years--somebold chronologists would even suggest by hundreds of thousands. Improvement there was, to be sure, during all that long epoch of slowdevelopment; but it was improvement at a snail's pace. The very rudechipped axes of the naked drift age give way after thousands andthousands of years to the shapelier chipped lances, javelins, andarrowheads of the skin-clad cavemen. M. Gabriel de Mortillet, indeed, most indefatigable of theorists, has even pointed out four stages ofculture, marked by four different types of weapons, into which hesubdivides the Older Stone Age. Yet vast epochs elapsed before someprehistoric Stephenson or dusky Morse first, half by accident, smoteout the idea of grinding his tomahawk smooth to a sharp cutting edge, instead of merely chipping it sharp, and so initiated the NeolithicPeriod. This Neolithic Period itself, again, was immensely long ascompared with the Bronze Age which followed, though short by comparisonwith the Palæolithic epoch which preceded it. Then the Bronze Age sawenormous changes come faster and faster, till the use of iron stillfurther accelerated the rate of progress. For each new improvementbecomes, in turn, the parent of yet newer triumphs, so that at last, asin the present day, a single century sees vaster changes in the worldof man than whole ages before it have done in far longer intervals. 

But the invention of bronze, or, in other words, the introduction ofhard metal, was really perhaps the very greatest epoch of all, the mostdistinct turning-point in the whole history of humanity. True, somebeginnings of civilisation were already found in the Newer Stone Age. Man did not then live by slaughter alone. Hand-made pottery and rudetissues of flax are found in neolithic lake dwellings in Switzerland. Agriculture was already practised in a feeble way on small openclearings, cautiously cleaved with fire or hewn with the tomahawk inthe native forests. The cow, the sheep, and the goat were more or lessdomesticated, though the horse was yet riderless; and the pastoral hadtherefore, to some extent, superseded the pure hunting stage. But whatinroad could the stone hatchet make unaided upon the virgin forests ofthose remote days? The neolithic clearing must have been a mere strayoasis in a desert of woodland, like the villages of the New Guineasavages at the present day, lying few and far between among vaststretches of primæval forest. 

With the advent of bronze, everything was different; and the differenceshowed itself with extraordinary rapidity. One may compare therevolution effected by bronze in the early world, indeed, with therevolution effected by railways in our own time; only the neolithicworld had been so very simple a one that the change was perhaps evenmore marvellous in its suddenness and its comprehensiveness. Metalitself implied metal-working; and metal-working brought about, not onlythe arts of smelting and casting, but also endless incidental arts ofdesign and decoration. The bronze hatchets, for example, to take ourtypical implement, begin by being mere copies of the stone originals;but, as time goes on, they acquire rapidly innumerable improvements. First, metal is economized in the upper part which fits into thehandle, while the lower or cutting edge is widened out sideways, so asto form an elegant and gracefully curved outline for the wholeimplement. Next come the flanged axes, with projecting ledges on eitherside; and then the palstaves with loops and ribs, each marking some newimprovement in the character of the weapon, which the inventor would nodoubt have patented but for the unfortunate fact that patents were asyet wholly unknown to Bronze Age humanity. Later still come thesocketed hatchets of many patterns, with endless ingenious littledevices for securing some small advantage to the special manufacturer. I can fancy the Bronze Age smith showing them off with pride to hisinterested customers: 'These are our own patterns--the newest thing outin bronze axes; observe the advantage you gain from the ribs andpellets, and the peculiar character which the octagonal socket gives tothe hafting!' Indeed, in this single department of bronze celts alone, Mr. Evans in his great monumental work figures over a hundred andeighty distinct specimens (out of thousands known), each one presentingsome well-marked advance in type upon its predecessor. There is almosta Yankee ingenuity of design in many of the dodges thus registered forour inspection. 

Many of the celts, I may add, are most beautifully decorated withgeometrical patterns, some of which belong to a very high order ofornamental art. This is still more the case with the daggers, swords, and defensive armour, often intended for the use of great chieftains, and executed with an amount of taste and feeling long since dead amongthe degenerate workmen of our iron age. 

But the indirect effects of the introduction of metal working were farmore interesting and important in their way than the direct effects. With bronze began the great age of agriculture, of commerce, and ofnavigation. 

Of agriculture first, because the bronze hatchet enabled men to makesuch openings in the forest as neolithic man had never ever dreamed of. For the first time in the history of our race, whole tracts of countryat once began to be cleared and cultivated. Stone Age tillage was thetillage of tiny plots in the forest's depths; Bronze Age tillage wasthe tillage of fields and wide open spaces in the champaign country. The Stone Age knew no specials implements of agriculture as such; itstomahawk was indiscriminately applied to all purposes alike of war orgardening. You scalped your enemy with it, or you cut up your dinner, or you dug your field, or you planted your seed-corn, according astaste or circumstances directed. But while the Bronze Age men had axesto hew down the wood, they had also sickles and reaping-hooks to cuttheir crops, and a sort of hoe or scraper to till the soil with. Specialisation reached a very high pitch. All the remains of the BronzeAge show us an agricultural people by no means idyllic in their habitsto be sure, and not all disposed to join the Peace PreservationSociety, but cultivating large stretches of wheat or barley, grindingtheir meal in regular mills, and possessed of implements ofconsiderable diversity, some of which I shall proceed to notice later. 

The evidences of commerce and of navigation are equally obvious. Bronzeitself consists of tin and copper: and there are only two parts of theworld from which tin in any large quantities can be procured--namely, Cornwall and the Malay Archipelago. The very existence of bronze, therefore, necessarily implies the existence of a sea-going trade intin, for which some corresponding benefits must of course have beenoffered by the early purchaser. As a matter of fact, we know with someprobability that it was Cornish tin which first tempted the Phoeniciansout of the inland sea, past the Pillars of Hercules, to brave theterrors of the open Atlantic. Long before the days of such advancednavigation, however, the Cornish tin was transported by land across thewhole breadth of Southern Britain and shipped for the Continent fromthe Isle of Thanet. A very old trackway runs along the crest of theDowns from the West Country to Kent, known now as the Pilgrim's Way, because it was followed in far later times by mediæval wayfarers fromSomerset and Dorset to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. But Mr. Charles Elton has shown conclusively that the Pilgrim's Way ismany centuries more ancient than the martyr of King Henry's epoch, andthat it was used in the Bronze Age for the transport of tin from themines in Cornwall to the port of Sandwich. To this day antique ingotsof the valuable metal are often dug up in hoards or finds along theline of the ancient track. They were evidently buried there in fear andtrembling, long ages since, in what Indian _voyageurs_ still call a_cache_, by caravans hurriedly surprised by the enemy; and owing to theunfortunate accident of the possessors all getting killed off in theensuing fray, the ingots have been left undisturbed for centuries forthe benefit of antiquaries at the present time. 'It's an ill wind thatblows nobody good. ' Probably the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeiihad very little notion what valuable relics their bodies and houseswould prove in the end for curious posterity. 

The converse evidence of a return trade in other goods is no lessstriking. Not only are articles in amber found in Bronze Age tombs allover Europe (though the gum itself belongs to the Baltic and the NorthSea alone), but also gold objects of southern workmanship occur inBritish barrows; while sometimes even ivory from Africa is noticed inthe inlaid handles of some Welsh or Brigantian chieftain's sword. Glassbeads were likewise imported into Britain, as were also ornaments ofEgyptian porcelain. In fact, the Bronze Age clearly marks for us theperiod when trade routes extended in every direction from theMediterranean, north and south, and when the world began to becommercially solidified by a primitive theory of foreign exchange. Itis a little odd that the basis of all this traffic was tin, and that westill use the name of that same metal as a brief equivalent for coin ingeneral: but persons of serious economical or philological intelligenceare particularly requested not to enter into grave correspondence withthe author of this paper on any possible levity which they may detectlurking in this innocent remark. 

Some small idea of the rapid advance in civilization which marked theBronze Age may perhaps be formed from a brief enumeration of theprincipal classes of remains which have come down to us intact fromthat first epoch of metal. Besides all the various celts, hatchets, andadzes, whose name is legion, and whose patterns are manifold, manyother tools or implements occur abundantly in the barrows or _caches_. Chisels, either plain, tanged, with lugs, or socketed; gouges, hammers, anvils, and tongs; punches, awls, drills, and prickers; tweezers, needles, fish-hooks, and weights; all these are found by dozens inendless variety of design. Knives are common, and the vanity of BronzeAge man made him even put up without a murmur with the pangs of shavingwith a bronze razor. Daggers and rapiers naturally abound, many of themof rare and beautiful workmanship. Halberds turn up less frequently, but swords are abundant, and are sometimes tastefully decorated withgold or ivory. Even the scabbards sometimes survive, while the shields, adorned with concentric rings or with knobs and bosses, would put toshame the rank and file of cheap modern metal work. Nay, the verytrumpets which sounded the onset often lie buried by the warrior'sside, and the bells which adorned his horse's neck bring back to usvividly the Homeric pictures of Bronze Age warfare. 

The private life of Bronze Age man and his correlative wife isillustrated for us by another great group of more strictly personalrelics. There are pins simple and pins of the infantile safety-pinorder: there are brooches which might be worn by modern ladies, andear-rings so huge that even modern ladies would in all probabilityobject to wearing them, unless, indeed, a princess or an actress madethem the fashion. The torques, or necklets, are among the best knownmale decorations, and are still famous in Ireland, where Malachi(whoever he may have been) wore the collar of gold which he tore fromthe proud invader. Many of the bracelets are extremely beautiful; but, strange to say, as if on purpose to spite the common prejudice aboutthe degeneracy of modern man, they are all so small in girth as tobetoken a race with arms and legs hardly any bigger than the Finns orLaplanders. Of the clasps, buttons, and buckles I will say nothinghere. I have enumerated enough to suggest to even the most casualobserver the vastness of the revolution which the Bronze Age wrought inthe mode of life and the civilisation of ancient man. 

Bronze found our early ancestor, in fact, a half-developed savage: itleft him a semi-civilized Homeric Greek. It came in upon a world ofskin-clad hunters and fishers: it went out upon a world of Phoeniciannavigators, Egyptian architects, Achæan poets, and Roman soldiers. Andall this wide difference was wrought in a period of some eight or tencenturies at the outside, almost entirely by the advent of the simplebronze axe. 

 THE ISLE OF RUIM. 

Perhaps you have never heard its name before; yet in the earlier agesof this kingdom of Britain, Ruim Isle, rising dim through the mist ofprehistoric oceans, was once in its own way famous and important. 

Off the old and obliterated south-eastern promontory of our island, where the land of Kent shelved almost imperceptibly into the WantsumStrait, Ruim Island--the Holm of the Headland--stood out with its whitewall of broken cliffs into the German Sea. The greater part of itconsisted of gorse-clad chalk down, the last subsiding spur of thatgreat upland range which, starting from the central boss of SalisburyPlain, runs right across the face of Surrey and Kent, and, bifurcatingnear Canterbury, falls sheer into the sea at the end of either fork byRamsgate or Dover. But in earlier days Ruim Isle was not joined as nowby flats and marshes to the adjacent mainland; the chalk dipped underthe open Wantsum Strait, much as the chalk of Hampshire dips to-dayunder the Solent Sea, and reappeared again on the other side in theThanet Downs, as it reappears in the Isle of Wight at the ridge of St. Boniface and the central hills about Newport and Carisbrooke. For nowthe murder indeed is out, and you have discovered already thatRuim--his dim, mysterious Ruim--is only just the commonplace, vulgarized Isle of Thanet. 

Still, it is not without cause that I have ventured to call it by thatstrange and now almost forgotten old-world name. There is reason, weknow, in the roasting of eggs, and, if I have gone out of my way tointroduce the ancient isle to you by its title of Ruim, it is in orderthat we might start clear of the odour of tea and shrimps, theartificial niggers, and cheap excursionists, that the name of Thanetbrings up most prominently at the present day before the travelled mindof the modern Londoner. I want to carry you back to a time whenRamsgate was still but a green gap in the long line of chalk cliff, andMargate but the chine of a little trickling streamlet that tumbledseaward over the undesecrated sands; when a broad arm of the sea stillcut off Westgate from the Reculver cliffs, and when the tide sweptunopposed four times a day over the submerged sands of Minster Level. You must think of Thanet as then greatly resembling Wight ingeographical features, and the Wantsum as the equivalent of the SolentSea. 

In the very earliest period of our history, before ever the existingnames had been given at all to the towns or villages--nay, when thetowns and villages themselves were not--Ruim was already a noteworthyisland. For there is now very little doubt indeed that Thanet is theIctis or 'Channel Island' to which Cornish tin was conveyed acrossBritain for shipment to the continent. The great harbour of Britain wasthen the Wantsum Sea, known afterwards as the Rutupine Port, and laterstill as Sandwich Haven. To that port came Gaulish and Phoenicianvessels, or possibly even at times some belated Phocæan galley fromMassilia. But the trade in tin was one of immense antiquity, longantedating these almost modern commercial nations: for tin is anecessary component of bronze, and the bronze age of Europe wasentirely dependent for its supply of that all-important metal upon theCornish mines. From a very early date, therefore, we may be sure thatingots of tin were exported by this route to the continent, and thentransported overland by the Rhone valley to the shores of theMediterranean. 

The tin road, to give it its more proper name, followed the crest ofthe Hog's Back and the Guildford downs, crossing the various rivers atspots whose very names still attest the ancient passages--the Wey atShalford, the Mole at Burford, the Medway at Aylesford, and the WantsumStrait at Wade, in which last I seem to hear the dim echo to this dayof the Roman Vada. Ruim itself, as less liable to attack than an inlandplace, formed the depôt for the tin trade, and the ingots were no doubtshipped near the site of Richborough. We may regard it, in fact, as asort of prehistoric Hong-Kong or Zanzibar, a trading island, wheremerchants might traffic at ease with the shy and suspicious islanders. 

Ruim at that time must have consisted almost entirely of open down, sloping upward from the tidal Wantsum, and extending a little fartherout to sea than at the present moment. Pegwell Bay was then a widesea-mouth; Sandwich flats did not yet exist; and the Stour itself fellinto the Wantsum Strait at the place which still bears the historicname of Stourmouth. Round the outer coast only a few houseless gapsmarked the spots where 'long lines of cliff, breaking, had left achasm'--the gaps that afterwards bore the familiar names of Ramsgate, that is to say Ruim's Gate, or 'the Door of Thanet;' Margate, that isto say, Mere Gate, the gap of the mere (Kentish for a brook), Broadstairs, Kingsgate, Newgate, and Westgate. The present condition ofDumpton Gap (minus the telegraph) will give some idea of what theseGates looked like in their earliest days; only, instead of seeing thecultivated down, we must imagine it wildly clad with primævalundergrowth of yew and juniper, like the beautiful tangled districtnear Guildford, still known as Fairyland. Thanet is now allsea-front--it turns its face, freckled with summer resorts, towards theopen German Ocean. Ruim had then no sea-front at all, save the bare andinaccessible white cliffs; it turned, such as it was, not toward thesea, but toward the navigable Wantsum. Even until late in the middleages Minster was the most important place in the whole island; andafter it ranked Monkton, St. Nicholas, and Birchington--villages, allof them, on the flat western slope. The growth in importance of theseaward escarpment dates only from the days when Thanet becamepractically a London suburb. 

With the Roman invasion Ruim saw a new epoch begin. A greatorganization took hold of Britain. Roads were made and coloniesestablished. Verulam and Camulodun gave place in part as centres oflife and trade to York and London. Even in the native days, I believe, the Thames must always have been a great commercial focus, and the Poolby Tower Hill must always have been what Bede called it many centurieslater, 'a mart of many nations. ' But under the Romans London grew intoa considerable city; and as the regular sea highway to the Thames laythrough the Wantsum, in the rear of Thanet, that strip of estuarybecame of immense importance. In those days of coasting navigation, indeed, the habit was to avoid headlands, and take advantage everywhereof shallow short cuts. Ships from the continent, therefore, avoided theNorth Foreland by running through the Wantsum at the back of Thanet; asthey avoided Shellness and Warden Point by running through the Swale, at the back of Sheppey. 

To protect this main navigable channel, accordingly, the Romans builtthe two great guardian fortresses of the coast, Rutupiæ, orRichborough, at the southern entrance, and Regulbium, or Reculver, atthe northern exit. Under the walls of these powerful strongholds, whosegrim ruins still frown upon the dry channel at their feet, ships weresafe from piracy, while Ruim itself sheltered them from the heavy seathat now beats with north-east winds upon the Foreland beyond. In fact, the Wantsum was an early Spithead: it stood to Rutupiæ as the Solentstands to Portsmouth and Southampton. But Thanet Isle hardly shared atall in this increased civilisation; on the contrary, Rutupiæ (theprecursor of Sandwich Haven) seems to have diverted all its earlycommerce. For Rutupiæ became clearly the naval capital of our island, the seat of that _vir spectabilis_, the Count of Saxon Shore, and therendezvous of the fleets of those British 'usurpers' Maximus andCarausius. It was also the Dover of its own day, the favourite landingplace for continental travellers; while its famous oysters, the truenatives, now driven by the silting up of their ancient beds toWhitstable, were as much in repute with Roman epicures as theirdescendants are to-day with the young Luculluses of the Gaiety and theCriterion. 

I have ventured by this time to speak of Ruim as Thanet; and indeedthat was already one of the names by which the island was known to itsown inhabitants. The ordinary history books, to be sure, will tell youin their glib way that Thanet is 'Saxon' for Ruim; but, when they sayso, believe not the fond thing, vainly imagined. The name is every dayas old as the Roman occupation. Solinus, writing in the third century, calls it Thanaton, and in the torn British fragment of the PeutingerTables--that curious old map of the later empire--it is marked asTenet. Indeed, it is a matter of demonstration that every spot whichhad a known name in Roman Britain retained that name after the Englishconquest. Kent itself is a case in point, and every one of its townsbears out the law, from Dover and Lymne to Reculver and Richborough, which last is spelt 'Ratesburg' by Leland, Henry the Eighth'scommissioner. 

In some ways, however, Thanet, under the Romans, must have shared inthe general advance of the country. Solinus says it was 'glad withcorn-fields'--_felix frumentariis campis_--but this could only havebeen on the tertiary slope facing Kent, as agriculture had not yetattempted to scale the flanks of the chalk downs. As lying so nearRutupiæ, too, villas must certainly have occupied the soil in places, as we know they did in the Isle of Wight; while the immense number ofRoman coins picked up in the island appears to betoken a somewhat denseprovincial population. 

The advent of the English brings Thanet itself, as distinct from itsancient port, the Wantsum, into the full glare of legendary history. According to tradition, it was at Ebb's Fleet, a little side creek nearMinster, that Hengest and Horsa first disembarked in Britain. As amatter of fact, there is reason to suppose that at a very early time anEnglish colony did really settle down in peace in Thanet. On OsengalHill, not far from Ebb's Fleet, the cemetery of these earliest Englishpioneers in England was laid bare by the building of the South EasternRailway. The graves are dug very shallow in the chalk, seldom as deepas four feet; and in them lie the remains of the old heathen pirates, buried with their arms and personal ornaments, their amber beads andstrings of glass, and the coins that were to pay their way in the otherworld. But, what is oddest of all, a few of the graves in this earliestEnglish cemetery are Roman in character, and in them the interment ismade in the Roman fashion. The inference is almost irresistible thatthe first settlement of Thanet by the English was a purely friendlyone, and that Roman and Jute lived on side by side as neighbours andallies on the Kentish island. 

I don't doubt, myself, that the whole settlement of Kent was equallyfriendly, and that the population of the county contains throughout analmost balanced mixture of Celtic and Teutonic elements. 

However, the century and a half that succeeded the English colonizationof south-eastern Britain were, no doubt, a time of great retrogressiontowards barbarism, as everywhere else in Romanised Europe. The villasthat must have covered the gentle slopes towards the Wantsum fell intodecay; the fortresses were destroyed; the roads ran wild; and the seaand river began slowly to slit up the central part of the greatnavigable backwater. A hundred and fifty years after Hengest and Horsa, if those excellent gentlemen ever really existed, another famouslanding took place in Thanet. Augustine and his companions disembarkedat Ebb's Fleet, and held close by (on the hill behind Prospect House)their first interview with Æthelberht. But though this epoch-makingevent happened to occur in Thanet, it has no special connection withthe history of the island, any further than as a component of Englandgenerally. And indeed, even through the garbled version of Bede, it isplain enough to see that British Christendom was not yet wholly wipedout in eastern Britain. The conversion of Kent was essentially aconversion of the king and nobles to the Roman communion; it broughtback once more the part of Britain most in connection with thecontinent into the broad fold of continental Christendom. It is quiteclear, in fact, that Rutupiæ and Durovernum, Richborough andCanterbury, had never ceased to hold close intercourse with theopposite shore, whose cliffs still shine so distinctly from the hillsabout Ramsgate. For Æthelberht himself was married to a ChristianFrankish princess of the house of the Merwings; and coins of theFrankish kings and of the Byzantine emperors have been found on thesurface or in contemporary Jutish graves in Kent. 

It is interesting to observe, too, that of the monks whom Gregory choseto accompany Augustine on his easy mission, one was Lawrence, whosucceeded his leader as second Archbishop of Canterbury, and anotherwas Peter, the first Abbot of St. Augustine's monastery. Out ofcompliment to these pioneer missionaries, or to their Roman house ofSt. Andrew's, almost every old church in that part of Kent is dedicatedaccordingly, either to St. Augustine, St. Lawrence, St. Peter, St. Gregory, St. Andrew, or St. Martin (patron of Bertha's first church atCanterbury). Thus, as we shall see hereafter, St. Lawrence was themother church of Ramsgate, and St. Peter's of Broadstairs, while theentire lathe bears the name of St. Augustine. 

In Thanet, too, the first evidence of the new order of things was thefoundation in the island of that great civilizing agency of mediævalEngland, a monastery. The site chosen for its home was still, however, characteristic of the old point of view of Thanet. It was the placethat yet bears the name of Minster, situated on a little creek of theWantsum sea, where some slight remains of an ancient pier may even nowbe traced among the silt of the marshes. The island still lookedtowards the narrow seas and the port of Rutupiæ, not, as now, towardsthe tall cliffs and the German Ocean. Ecgberht, fourth Christian kingof Kent, by the advice of Theodore, the monk of Tarsus who becameArchbishop of Canterbury, made over to the lady whose name isconveniently Latinised as Dompneva, first abbess, some forty-eightplough-lands in the Isle of Thanet. This cultivated district, boundedby the ancient earthwork known (from the name of the second abbess) asSt. Mildred's Lynch, lay almost entirely within the westward-slopingand mainly tertiary lands; the higher chalk country was as yetapparently considered unfit for tillage. The existing remains ofMinster Abbey are, of course, of comparatively late Plantagenet date;but as parts of a great grange, whose still larger granary was burntdown only in the last century, they serve well to show the importanceof the monastic system as a civilizing agency in the country districtsof England. 

Already in Bede's time the Wantsum was beginning to get silted up, mainly by the muddy deposits brought down by the Stour. It was thenonly three furlongs wide, and could be forded at two points, near Sarrand at Wade. The seaward mouth was also beginning to be encumbered withsand, and the first indication we get of this important impendingchange is the fact that we now hear less of Richborough, and more ofSandwich, the new port a little nearer the sea, whose very name of theWick or haven on the Sand, in itself sufficiently tells the history ofits origin. As the older port got progressively silted up, the newerone grew into ever greater importance, exactly as Norwich oustedCaister, or as Portsmouth has taken the place of Porchester. Nevertheless, the central channel still remained navigable for thevessels of that age--they can only have drawn a very few feet ofwater--and this made the Wantsum in time the great highway for theDanish pirates on their way to London, and exposed Thanet exceptionallyto their relentless incursions. 

In fact, the Danes and Northmen were just what they loved to callthemselves, vik-ings or wickings, men of the viks, wicks, bays, orestuaries. What they loved was a fiord, a strait, a peninsula, anisland. Everywhere round the coast of Britain they seized and fortifiedthe projecting headlands. But in the neighbourhood of the Thames, thehigh road to the great commercial port of London, the mementoes oftheir presence are particularly frequent. The whole nomenclature of thelower Thames navigation, as Canon Isaac Taylor has pointed out, isScandinavian to this day. Deptford (the deep fiord), Greenwich (thegreen reach), and Woolwich (the hill reach) all bear good Norse names. So do the Foreness, the Whiteness, Shellness, Sheerness, Shoeburyness, Foulness, Wrabness, and Orfordness. Walton-on-the-Naze near Harwich inlike manner still recalls the time when a Danish 'wall'--that is tosay, a _vallum_, or earthwork--ran across the isthmus to defend theScandinavian peninsula from its English enemies. 

At such a time Sandwich, with its shallow fiord, was sure to affordgood shelter to the northern long ships; and isolated Thanet, overlooking the navigable strait, was a predestined depôt for thenorthern pirates, as four centuries earlier it had been for thefollowers of those mythical personifications, Hengest and Horsa. Longbefore the unification of England under a single West Saxonoverlordship the Danes used to land in the island every year, toplunder the crops, and in 851, when Æthelwulf was lord of Wessex atWinchester, 'heathen men, ' says the Winchester Chronicle, with itsusual charming conciseness, 'first sat over winter in Tenet. ' From thattime forward the 'heathen men' continually returned to the island, which they used apparently as a base of operations, with their shipslying in Sandwich Haven; in fact, Thanet must long have been a sort ofirregular Danish colony. Still, St. Mildred's nuns appear to have livedon somehow at Minster through the dark time, for in 988 the Daneslanded and burnt the abbey, as they did again under Swegen in 1011, killing at the same time the abbess and all the inmates. On the whole, it is probable that life and property in Thanet were far from secureany time in the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries. 

At least as late as the Norman conquest the Wantsum remained anavigable channel, and the usual route to London by sea was in atSandwich and out at Northmouth. It was thus that King Harold's fleetsailed on its plundering expedition round the coast of Kent (a smallunexplained incident of the early English type, only to be understoodby the analogies of later Scotch history), and thus too, that manyother expeditions are described in the concise style of ourunsophisticated early historians. But from the eleventh century onwardwe hear little of the Wantsum as a navigable channel; it has dwindleddown almost entirely to Sandwich Haven, 'the most famous of Englishports, ' says the writer of the life of Emma of Normandy, about 1050. Sandwich is indeed the oldest of the Cinque Ports, succeeding in thismatter to the honours of Rutupiæ, and all through the middle ages itremained the great harbour for continental traffic. Edward III. Sailedthence for France or Flanders, and as late as 1446 it is still spokenof by a foreign ambassador as the resort of ships from all quarters ofEurope. 

Still, the Wantsum was all this while gradually silting up, a grain ata time, and the Isle of Ruim was slowly becoming joined to the oppositemainland. When Leland visited it, in Henry VIII. 's reign, the changewas almost complete. 'At Northmouth, ' says the royal commissioner, inhis quaint dry way, 'where the estery of the se was, the salt waterswelleth yet up at a Creeke a myle or more toward a place called Sarre, which was the commune fery when Thanet was fulle iled. ' Sandwich Havenitself began to be difficult of access about 1500 (Henry VII. Beingking), and in 1558 (under Mary) a Flemish engineer, 'a cunning andexpert man in waterworks, ' was engaged to remedy the blocking of thechannel. By a century later it was quite closed, and the Isle of Thanethad ceased to exist, except in name, the Stour now flowing seaward by along bend through Minster Level, while hardly a relic of the Wantsumcould be traced in the artificial ditches that intersect the flat andbanked-up surface of the St. Nicholas marshes. 

Meanwhile, Thanet had been growing once more into an agriculturalcountry. Minster, untenable by its nuns, had been made over after theDanish invasions to the monks of St. Augustine at Canterbury, and itwas they who built the great barn and manor house which were the outersymbol of its new agricultural importance. Monkton, close by, belongedto the rival house of Christ Church at Canterbury (the cathedralmonastery), as did also St. Nicholas at Wade, remarkable for its largeand handsome Early English church. All these ecclesiastical lands wereexcellently tilled. After the Reformation, however, things changedgreatly. The silting up of the Wantsum and the decay of Sandwich Havenleft Thanet quite out of the world, remote from all the main highroadsof the new England. Ships now went past the North Foreland to London, and knew it only as a dangerous point, not without a sinisterreputation for wrecking. On the other hand, on the land side, theisland lay off the great highways, surrounded by marsh orhalf-reclaimed levels; and it seems rapidly to have sunk into a stateresembling that of the more distant parts of Cornwall. The inhabitantsdegenerated into good wreckers and bad tillers. They say an Orkney manis a farmer who owns a boat, while a Shetlander is a fisherman who ownsa farm. In much the same spirit, Camden speaks of the ElizabethanThanet folks as 'a sort of amphibious creatures, equally skilled inholding helm and plough'; while Lewis, early in the last century, tellsus they made 'two voyages a year to the North Seas, and came home soonenough for the men to go to the wheat season. ' With genial tolerancethe Georgian historian adds, 'It's a thousand pities they are so apt topilfer stranded ships. ' Piracy, which ran in the Thanet blood, seemedto their good easy local annalist a regrettable peccadillo. 

In all this, however, we begin to catch the first faintly-resoundingnote of modern Thanet. The intelligent reader will no doubt haveobserved, with his usual acuteness, that up to date we have heardpractically nothing of Ramsgate, Margate, and Broadstairs, which nowform the real centres of population in the nominal island. Itsrelations have all been with Rutupiæ, Sandwich, Canterbury, and themainland. But the silting up of the Wantsum turned the new Thanetseaward, by the chalky cliffs; and the gaps or gates in that naturalsea-wall now began to be of comparative importance as fishing stationsand small havens. Ebb's Fleet was no longer the port of Ruim. Thecentre of gravity of the island shifts at this point, accordingly, fromMinster to Ramsgate. The change is well marked by certain interestingecclesiastical facts. Neither Ramsgate nor Broadstairs had originallychurches of their own. The first formed part of the parish of St. Lawrence, which was itself a mere chapelry of Minster till late in thethirteenth century. The old village lies half a mile inland, andRamsgate itself was throughout the middle ages nothing more than a meregap and cove where the fishermen of St. Lawrence kept their boats. Thefirst church in the town proper was not erected till 1791. Similarly, Broadstairs formed part of the parish of St. Peter's, the village ofwhich lies back at about the same distance from the sea as St. Lawrence; and St Peter's, too, was at first a chapelry of Minster. Thecliffs were then nothing; the inward slope was everything. 

Margate seems to have been the first place in the new Thanet to attainthe honour of a place in history. As in two previous cases, the MereGate was at first but a fisherman's station for the village of St. John's, which gathered about the old church at the south end of theexisting town. But as the Northmouth closed up, and Sandwich Havendecayed, the Mere Gate naturally became the little local port for corngrown on the island and wool raised on the newly-reclaimed MinsterLevel. A wooden pier existed at Margate long before the reign of HenryVIII. , when Leland found it "sore decayed, " and the village was inrepute for fishery and coasting trade. Throughout the Stuart periodMargate was the ordinary place of departure and arrival for Flushingand the Low Countries. William of Orange frequently sailed hence, andMaryborough used it for almost all his expeditions. It was about themiddle of the last century, however, that the real prosperity ofMargate first began. Then it was that citizens of credit and renown inLondon first hit upon the glorious discovery of the seaside, and thatwatering-places tentatively and timidly raised their unobtrusive headsalong the nearer beaches. The journey from London could be made farmore easily by river than that to Brighton by coach; and so Margate, the nearest spot to town (by water) on the real sea with anyaccommodation for visitors, became in point of fact the earliest Londonseaside resort. It was, if not the first place, at least one of thefirst places in England to offer to its guests the perilous joy ofbathing machines, which were inaugurated here about 1790. 

With the introduction of steamers Margate's fortune was made. Floods ofCockneydom were let loose upon the nascent lodging-houses. Then camethe London, Chatham and Dover, and South Eastern Railways, and withthem an ever-increasing inundation of good-humoured cheap-trippers. TheHall-by-the-Sea and other modern improvements and attractions followed. Like the rest of Thanet, Margate has now become a mere suburb ofLondon, and what it resembles at the present day a delicate regard forthe feelings of the inhabitants forbids me to enlarge upon. I willmerely add that the recognized modern name of Margate is anetymological blunder, due to the idea immortalized in the boroughmotto, "Porta maris, Portus salutis, " that it means Door of the Sea. The true word is still universally preserved on the lips of the localfisher-folk, who always religiously call it either Meregate or Mergate. 

Ramsgate, a much more attractive and enjoyable centre, rich inexcursions to points of genuine interest, dates somewhat later. Itfirst came into note about the beginning of the eighteenth century, when it did a modest trade with the Levant and the Black Sea, or, ascontemporary English more prettily phrases it, 'with Russia and theeast country. ' In 1750 the first pier was built, as a national work, mainly to serve as a harbour of refuge for ships caught in gales offthe Downs. The engineer was Smeaton, and he succeeded in creating anartificial harbour of great extent, which has lasted substantially upto the present time. This new port, rendered safer by the enlargementin 1788, made Ramsgate at once into an important seafaring town, thecapital of the Kentish herring trade, alive with smacks in the busyseason. The steamers did it less good at first than they did toMargate; but the completion of the two railways, and the building ofthe handsome extensions on the east and west cliffs, turned it at onceinto a frequented watering-place. It is the fashion nowadays rather tolaugh at Ramsgate. Marine painters know better. Few harbours arelivelier with red and brown sails; few coasts more enjoyable than thecliff walk looking across towards the Goodwins, the low shore bySandwich, the higher ground about Deal and Dover, and the dim whiteline of Cape Blancnez in the distance. 

Broadstairs, close by the lighthouse on the North Foreland (the CantiumPromontorium of Roman geography), is still newer as a place of publicresort. But as a fishing village it dates back to the middle ages, whenthe little chapel of "Our Lady of Bradstow" stood in the gap of thecliffs, and was much addressed by anxious sailors rounding thedangerous point after the silting up of the Wantsum. Ships as theypassed lowered their top-sails to do it reverence. Under Henry VIII. Asmall wooden pier was thrown out to protect the fishing boats; andabout the same time, as part of the general scheme of coast defenceinaugurated by the king, a gate and portcullis were erected to closethe gap seaward, in case of invasion. The archway and portcullis grooveremain to this day, with an inscription recording their repair in 1795by Sir John Henniker. The railway has turned Broadstairs into a minorrival of Ramsgate and Margate and 'a favourite resort for gentry, 'where 'those who require quietness, either from ill health or aretiring disposition, ' says a local guide-book, may enjoy 'the unitedadvantages of tranquillity and seclusion. ' Hundreds of retiring soulsindeed may be observed on the beach any day during the season, seekingtranquillity in a game of cards, repairing their health with thestimulus of donkey exercise, or soothing their souls in secret hourwith music sweet as love, discoursed to them by gentlemen in loose pinksuits and artificially imitated Æthiopian countenances. 

Westgate is the very latest-born of these Thanet gates, a brand-newwatering-place, where every house proclaims the futility of the popularbelief that Queen Anne is dead, and where fashionable physicians sendfashionable patients to cure imaginary diseases by a dose of fresh air. It has no history, for only a few years since it consisted entirely ofa coastguard station and three or four cottages: but it is interestingas casting light on the nature of the revolution which has turnedThanet inside out and hind part before, making the open sea take theplace of the Kentish mainland, and the railway to London that of thesilted Wantsum. 

At the present day Thanet as a whole consists of two parts: the livesea front, which is one long succession of suburban watering-places;and the agricultural interior, including the reclaimed estuary, whichranks among the best-farmed and most productive districts in allEngland, Yet till a very recent date the Thanet farmers still retainedthe use of the old Kentish plough, the coulter of which is reversed atthe end of every furrow; and many other curious insular customs markoff the agriculture of the island even now from that which prevailsover the rest of the country. 

I don't know whether I'm wrong, but it often seems to me the very bestway to gain an idea of the real history of England is thus to take asingle district piecemeal, and trace out for one's self the mainfeatures of its gradual evolution. By so doing we get away from meredynastic or political considerations, leave behind the bang of drums orthe blare of trumpets, and reach down to the living facts of commonhuman activity themselves--the realities of the workaday world oftoilers and spinners. By narrowing our field of view, in fact, we gaina clearer picture on our smaller focus. We see how the big historicalrevolutions actually affected the life of the people; and we trace morereadily the true nature of deep-reaching changes when we follow themout in detail over a particular area. 

 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 

'Why, what did they want to build a city right up here for, anyway?'the pretty American asked, who had come with us to Fiesole, as werested, panting, after our long steep climb, on the cathedral platform. 

Now the question was a pertinent and in its way a truly philosophicalone. Fiesole crests the ridge of a Tuscan hill, and in America theydon't build cities on hill-tops. You may search through the length andbreadth of the United States, from Maine to California, and I ventureto bet a modest dollar you won't find a single town perched anywhere ina position at all resembling that of many a glowing Etrurian fastness, that 'Like an eagle's nest Hangs on the crest Of purple Apennine. 'Towns in America stand all on the level: most of them are built byharbours of sea or inland lake; or by navigable rivers; or at thejunction of railways; or at a point where cataracts (sadly debased)supply ample water-power for saw-mills and factories; or else in theimmediate neighbourhood of coal, iron, oil wells, or gold and silvermines. In short, the position of American towns bears always animmediate and obvious reference to the wants and necessities of ourmodern industrial and commercial system. They are towns that have grownup in a state of profound peace, and that imply advanced means ofcommunication, with a free interchange of agricultural and manufacturedproducts. 

Hence in America it is always quite easy to see at a glance the _raisond'être_ of every town or village one comes across. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore--New Orleans, Montreal, San Francisco, Charleston--are all great ports for the exportation of corn, pork, 'lumber, ' cotton, or tobacco, and the importation of Europeanmanufactured goods. Chicago is the main collecting and distributingcentre for the wide basin of the upper Great Lakes, as Cincinnati isfor the Ohio Valley, and St. Louis for the Mississippi and Missouriconfluents. Pittsburg bases itself upon its coal and its iron; Buffaloexists as the point of transfer where elevators raise the corn ofChicago from lake-going vessels into the long, low barges of the ErieCanal. In every case, in that newest of worlds, one can see for oneselfat a glance exactly why so large a body of human beings has collectedjust at that precise spot, and at no other. 

But when you have toiled up, hot and breathless, through olive andpine, from the Viale at Florence to the antique Cyclopean walls ofEtruscan Fæsulæ, you wonder to yourself, like our American friend, asyou pant on the terrace of the Romanesque cathedral, what on earth theycould ever have wanted to build a town up there for, anyway. 

If we look away from Tuscany to our own England, however, we shall findon many a deserted down or lonely tor ample evidence of the causeswhich led the people of this ancient Etruscan town to build theircitadel at so great a height above the neighbouring valley. Fiesole, says Dante, in a well-known verse, was the mother of Florence. Even soin England, Old Sarum was indeed the mother of Salisbury, and CaerBadon or Sulis was the mother of Bath. And when there was first aFæsulæ on the hill here there could be no Florence, as when first therewas an Old Sarum on the Wiltshire downs there could be no Salisbury, and when first there was a Caer Badon on the heights of Avon therecould be no Bath. 

In very early times indeed, in the European land area, when men beganfirst to gather together into towns or villages, two necessitiesdetermined their choice of a place to dwell in: first, food-supply(including water); and second, defence. Hence every early communitystands, to start with, near its own cultivable territory, usually abroad river-valley, an alluvial plain, a 'carse' or lowland, foruplands as yet were incapable of tillage by the primitive agricultureof those early epochs. But it does not stand actually _in_ the carse;it occupies as a rule the nearest convenient height or hill-top, mostoften the one that juts out farthest into the subjacent plain, by wayof security against the attack of enemies. This is the beginning ofalmost every great historical European town; it is an arx or acropolisoverhanging its own tilth or _ager_; and though in many cases the towncame down at last into the valley, retaining still its old name, yetthe remains of the old earthworks or walls on the hill-top above oftenbear witness to our own day to the original site of the antiquesettlement upon the high places. 

One can mark, too, various stages in this gradual process of seculardescent from the wind-swept hills into the valleys below, as freercommunications and greater security made access to water, roads, andrivers of greater importance than mere defence or elevated position. AtBath, for example, it was the Pax Romana that brought down the townfrom the stockaded height of Caer Badon, and the Hill of Solisbury tothe ford and the hot springs in the valley of the Avon. At Old Sarum, on the other hand, the hill-top town remained much longer: it livedfrom the Celtic first into the Roman and then into the West Saxonworld; it had a cathedral of its own in Norman times; and even longafter Bishop Roger Poore founded the New Sarum, which we now callSalisbury, at the point where the great west road passed the riverbelow, the hill-top town continued to be inhabited, and, as everybodyknows, when all its population had finally dwindled away, retained somevestige of its ancient importance by returning a member of its own fora single farmhouse to the unreformed Parliament till '32. As forFiesole, though Florence has long since superseded it as the capital ofthe Arno Valley, the town itself still lives on to our own time in adead-alive way, and, like Norman. Old Sarum, retains even now itsbeautiful old cathedral, its Palazzo Pretorio, and its acknowledgedclaims to ancient boroughship. In England, I know by personalexperience only one such hill-top town of the antique sort stillsurviving, and that is Shaftsbury; but I am told that Launceston, withits strong castle overlooking the Tamar, is even a finer example. Thisrelatively early disappearance of the hill-top fortress from our ownmidst is in part due, no doubt, to the early growth of the industrialspirit in England, and our long-continued freedom from domesticwarfare. But all over Southern Europe, as everybody must have noticed, the hill-top town, perched, like Eza, on the very summit of a pointedpinnacle, still remains everywhere in evidence as a common object ofthe country in our own day. 

I said above that Fiesole was the mother of Florence, and, in spite offormal objections to the contrary, I venture to defend that nowsomewhat obsolete and heretical opinion. For why does Fiesole standjust where it does? What made them build a city up there, anyway? Well, a town always exists just where it does exist for some good and amplysufficient reason. Even if, like Fiesole, it is mainly a survival(though at Fiesole there are, indeed, olives in plenty and other livetrades to keep a town going), it yet exists there in virtue of factswhich once upon a time were quite sufficient to bring the world to thespot, and it goes on existing, partly by mere conservative use andwont, no doubt, but partly also because there are houses, churches, mills, and roads all ready built there. Now, a town must always, from avery early period, have existed upon the exact site of Fiesole. Andwhy? To answer that question you have only to look at the view from theplatform. I do not mean to suggest that the ancient Etruscans camethere to enjoy the prospect as we go nowadays to the hotels on the Rigior to the summit of Mount Washington. The ancient Etruscan was apractical man, and his views about views were probably rudimentary. Butgaze down for a moment from the cathedral platform upon the valley ofthe Arno, spread like a glowing picture at your feet, and see howimmediately it resolves the doubt. Not, indeed, the valley of the Arnoas it stands at present, thick set with tower and spire and palace. Inorder to arrive at the _raison d'être_ of Fiesole you must blot outmentally Arnolfo's vast pile, and Brunelleschi's dome, and Giotto'scampanile, and Savonarola's monastery, and the tall and slender towerof the Palazzo Vecchio, rising like a shaft sheer into the air far, farbelow--you must blot out, in short, all that makes the world nowcongregate at Florence, and all Florence itself into the bargain. Nowhere on earth do I know a more peopled plain than that plain of Arnoin our own time, seen on a sunny autumn day, when the light glintsclearly on each white villa and church and hamlet, from this specularmount of antique Fiesole. But to understand why Fiesole itself standsthere at all you must neglect all this, neglect all the wealth of artthat makes each inch of that valley classic ground, and look only, ifyou can for a brief moment, at the bare facts of primitive nature. 

And what then do you see? Spread far below you, and basking in thesunshine, a comparatively flat and wide, open valley; olive and stonepine and mulberry on its slopes; pasture land and flowery vale in itsmidst. North and south, in two long ridges, the Apennines stretch theirhard, blue outlines from Carrara to Siena against the afternoonsky--outlines of a sort that one never gets in northern lands, butwhich remind one so exactly of the painted background to afifteenth-century Italian picture that nature seems here, to ourtopsy-turvy fancy, to be whimsically imitating an effect from art. Butin between those two tossed and tumbled guardian ridges, the valley ofthe Arno, as it flows towards Pisa, with the minor basins of itstributary streams, expands for a while about Florence itself into abroad and comparatively level plain. In a mountain country so brokenand heaved about as Peninsular Italy, every spare inch of cultivableplain like that has incalculable value. True, on the terraced slopes ofthe hillsides generation after generation of ingenious men have managedto build up, tier by tier, a wonderful expanse of artificial tilth. Butwhile oil and wine can be produced upon the terraces, it is on theriver valleys alone that the early inhabitants had to depend for theircorn, their cheese, and their flesh-meat. Hence, in primitive Italy andin primitive England alike, every such open alluvial plain, fit fortilth or grazing, had overhanging it a stockaded hill-fort, which grewwith time into a mediæval town or a walled city. It is just so thatCaer Badon at Bath overhangs, with its prehistoric earthworks, theplain of Avon on which Beau Nash's city now spreads its streets, and itis just so that Old Sarum in turn overhangs, with its regular Romanfosses and gigantic glacis, the dale of the namesake river in Wilts, near its point of confluence with the stream of the Wily. 

We find it hard, no doubt, to imagine nowadays that once upon a timeEngland was almost as thickly covered with hill-top villages (though onminor heights) as Italy is in the present century. Yet such wasundoubtedly the case in prehistoric times. I know no better instance ofthe way these stockaded villages were built than the magnificent groupof antique earthworks in Dorset and Devon which rings round with adouble row of fortresses the beautiful valley of the Axminster Axe. There, on one side, a long line of strongholds built by the Durotrigescaps every jutting down and hill-top on the southern and eastern bankof the river, while facing them, on the opposite northern and westernside, rises a similar series of Damnonian fortresses, crowning thecorresponding Devonshire heights. Lambert's Castle, Musberry Castle, Hawksdown Castle, and so forth, the local nomenclature still callsthem, but they are castles, or _castra_, only in the now obsolete Romansense; prehistoric earthworks, with dyke and trench, once stockadedwith wooden palings on top, and enclosing the huts and homes of theinhabitants. The river ran between the hostile territories; eachvillage held its own strip of land below its fortress-height, and droveup its cattle, its women, and its children, in times of foray, to thesafety of the kraal or hill-top encampment. 

In such a condition of society, of course, every community wasabsolutely dependent upon its own territory for the means ofsubsistence. And wherever the means of subsistence existed, a villagewas sure to spring up in time upon the nearest hill-top. That is howthe oldest Fiesole of all first came to be perched there. It was ahill-top refuge for the tillers and grazers of the fertile Arno vale atits feet. 

But why did the people of the Arno Valley fix upon the particular siteof Fiesole? Surely on the southern side of the river, about the Vialedei Colli, the hills approach much nearer to the plain. From SanMiniato and the Bello Sguardo one looks down far more directly upon thedomes and palaces and campaniles of Florence spread right at one'sfeet. Why didn't the primitive inhabitants of the valley fix rather ona spur of that nearer range--say the one where Galileo's towerstands--for the site of their village?

If you know Florence and have asked that question within yourself inall seriousness as you read, I see you haven't yet begun to throwyourself into the position of affairs in prehistoric Tuscany. You can'tshuffle off your own century. For between the broad plain and the rangeof hills where the Viale dei Colli now winds serpentine on itsbeautiful way round the glens and ravines, the Arno runs, a broadtorrent flood in times of freshet: the Arno, unbridged as yet (in thedays I speak of) by the Ponte Vecchio, an impassable frontier betweenthe wide territory of prehistoric Fiesole and the narrow fields of someminor village, long since forgotten, on the opposite bank. The greatalluvial plain lies north of the river; the three streams whose siltcontributes to form it flow into the main channel from Pistoja andPrato. To live across the river on the south bank would have beenabsolutely impossible for the owners of the plain. But Fiesole occupiesa central spur of the northern heights, overlooking the valley to eastand west, and must therefore have been always the natural place fromwhich to command the plain of Arno. A little above and a little belowFlorence gorges once more hem the river in. So that the plain ofFlorence (as we call it nowadays), the plain of Fiesole, as it oncewas, formed at the beginning a little natural principality by itself, of which Fiesole was the obvious capital and stronghold. 

For in order to understand Fiesole aright, we must always manage in ourown minds to get rid entirely of that beautiful mushroom growth, Florence, and to think only of the most ancient epoch. While we are inFlorence itself, to be sure, it seems to us always, by comparison withour modern English towns, that Florence is a place of immemorialantiquity. It was civilized when Britain was a den of thieves. While infeudal England Edward I. Was summoning his barons to repress the risingof William Wallace, in Florence, already a great commercial town, Arnolfo di Cambio had received the sublime orders of the Signoria toconstruct for the Duomo 'the most sumptuous edifice that humaninvention could desire or human labour execute, ' and had carried outthose orders with consummate skill. While Edward III. Was dreaming ofhis lawless filibustering expeditions into France, Ciotto wasencrusting the face of his glorious belfry with that magnificentdecoration of many-coloured marbles which makes northern churches lookso cold and grey and barbaric by comparison. While Englishmen wereburning Joan of Arc at Rouen, Fra Angelico was adorning the walls ofSan Marco with those rapt saints and those spotless Madonnas. Even thevery back streets of Florence recall at every step its mediævalmagnificence. But when from Florence itself one turns to Fiesole, thecity by the Arno sinks at once by a sudden revulsion into a mere thingof yesterday by the side of the city on the Etruscan hill-top. Fiesolewas a town of immemorial antiquity while Florence was still, whatperhaps its poetical name imports, a field of flowers. 

But why this particular height rather than any other of the dozen thatjut out into the plain? Well, there we get at another fundamental pointin hill-top town history. Fiesole had water. A spring at such a heightis comparatively rare, but it is a necessary accompaniment, or rather acondition precedent, of all high-place villages. In the Borgo Unto youwill still find this spring--a natural fountain, the Fonte Sotterra--inan underground passage, now approached (so greatly did the Fiesolansappreciate its importance) by a Gothic archway. The water supplies thewhole neighbourhood; and that accounts for the position of the town onthe low _col_ just below the acropolis. 

Who first chose the site it would be impossible to say; the earlieststockaded fort at Fiesole (enclosing the town and arx above) must goback to the very dawn of neolithic history, long before the Etruscanshad ever issued forth from their Rhætian fastnesses to occupy the blueand silver-grey hills of modern Tuscany. Nor do we know who built thegreat Cyclopean walls, whose huge rough blocks still overhang themodern carriage road that leads past Boccaccio's Valley of the Ladiesand Fra Angelico's earliest convent from the town in the Valley. Theyare attributed to the Etruscans, of course, on much the same grounds asStonehenge is attributed to the Druids--because in the minds of thepeople who made the attribution Etruscans and Druids were each in theirown place the _ne plus ultra_ of aboriginal antiquity. But at any rate, at some very early time, the people who held the valley of the Arnoerected these vast megalithic walls round their city and citadel as aprotection, probably, against the people who held the Liguriansea-board. Throughout the early historical period at least we know thatFæsulæ was an Etruscan border-town against the Ligurian freebooters, and we can see that the arx or acropolis of Fæsulæ must have occupiedthe hill-top now occupied by the Franciscan monastery on the heightabove the town, while the houses must have spread, as they still dowithin shrunken limits, about the spring and over the _col_ at itsbase. 

Fæsulæ was not one of the great Etrurian cities, not one of the twelvecities of the Etruscan League. Volterra occupies the site of the largeTuscan town which lorded it over this part of the Lower Apennines. ButFæsulæ must still have been a considerable place, to judge by themagnitude and importance of its fortifications, and it must havegathered into itself the entire population of all the little Arnoplain. As long as _fortis Etruria crevit_, Fæsulæ must always have heldits own as a frontier post against the Ligurian foe. But when _fortisEtruria_ began to decline, and Rome to become the summit of all things, the glory of Fæsulæ received a severe shock. Not indeed byconquest--that counts for little--but the Roman peace introduced intoItaly a new order of things, fatal to the hill-tops. Sulla, who humbledFæsulæ, did far worse than that: he planted a Roman colony in thevalley at its foot--the colony of Florentia--at the point where theroad crossed the Arno--the colony that was afterwards to become themost famous commercial and artistic town of the mediæval world asFlorence. 

The position of the new town marks the change that had come over theconditions of life in Upper Italy. Florence was a Fiesole descended tothe plain. And it descended for just the selfsame reason that madeBishop Poore thirteen centuries later bring down Sarum from its loftyhill-top to the new white minster by the ford of Avon. Roads, communications, internal trade were henceforth to exist and to countfor much; what was needed now was a post and trading town on the riverto guard the passage from north to south against possible aggression. Fiesole had been but a mountain stronghold; Florence was marked fromthe very beginning by its mere position as a great commercial andmanufacturing town. 

Nevertheless, just as in mediæval England the upper town on the hill, the castled town of the barons, often existed for many years side byside with the lower town on the river, the high-road town of themerchant guilds--just as Old Sarum, for example, continued to existside by side with Salisbury--so Fæsulæ continued to exist side by sidewith Florentia. As a military post, commanding the plain, it wasneedful to retain it; and so, though Sulla destroyed in part itspopulation, he reinstated it before long as one of his own Romancolonies. And for a long time, during the ages of doubtful peace thatsucceeded the first glorious flush of the military empire, Fæsulæ musthave kept up its importance unchanged. The remains of the Roman theatreon the slope behind the cathedral--great stone semicircles carved on ascale to seat a large audience--betoken a considerable Roman town. Andfrom a very early period it seems to have possessed a Christian church, whose first bishop, according to a tradition as good as most, was aconvert of St. Peter's, and was martyred, says his legend, in theNeronian persecution. The existing cathedral, its later representative, is still an early and very simple Tuscan basilica, with picturesquecrypt and raised choir, of a very plain Romanesque type. It looks likea fitting church for the mother-town of Florence; it seems to recall inits own cold and austere fabric the more ancient claims of the sombreEtruscan hill-top city. 

It was the middle ages, however, that finally brought down Fiesole inearnest to the plain. Pisa had been the earliest Tuscan town to attainimportance and maritime supremacy after the dark days of barbarianincursion; but as soon as land-transit once more assumed generalimportance, Florence, seated on the great route from the north to Romeby Siena, and commanding the passage of the Arno and the gate of theApennines, naturally began to surpass in time its distanced rival. Asearly as the Roman days a bridge is said to have spanned the Arno onthe site of the existing Ponte Vecchio. The mediæval walls enclosed thesouthern _tête du pont_ within their picturesque circuit, thus securingthe passage of the river and giving Florence its little Janiculus, theOltrarno, with its southern exit by the Porta Romana. The real 'makersof Florence' were the humble workmen who thus extended the firm hold ofthe growing republic to the southern bank. By so doing, they gave theircity undoubted command of the imperial route from Germany Romeward, andbrought in their train Dante and Giotto, Brunelleschi and Donatello, Fra Angelico and Savonarola, the Medici and the Pitti, Michael Angeloand Raffaele, and all the glories of the Renaissance epoch. For as atAthens, so in Florence, art and literature followed plainly in the wakeof commerce. But the rise of Florence was the fall of Fiesole. Alreadyin the eleventh century the undutiful daughter had conquered andannexed her venerable mother; and in proportion as the mercantileimportance of the city in the plain waxed greater and greater, that ofthe city on the hill-top must slowly have waned to less and less. Atthe present day Fiesole has degenerated into a mere suburb of Florence, which, indeed, it had almost become when Lorenzo the Magnificent heldhis country court at the Villa Mozzi, or even earlier, when Boccaccio'slively narrators fled from the plague to the gardens of the Palmieri, though it still retains the dignity of its ancient cathedral, itsmunicipal palace, its gigantic seminary, and its great overgrownFranciscan monastery, that replaces the citadel on the height above thetown. Nay, more, with its local museum, its bishop's palace, and itsquaint churches, it keeps up, to some extent, all the airs and gracesof a real living town. But in reality these few big buildings, and thegraceful campanile which makes so fair a show in all the neighbouringviews, are the best of the little city. Fiesole looks biggest seen fromafar. All that is vital in it is the ecclesiastical establishment, which still clings, with true ecclesiastical conservatism, to thehill-top city, and the trade of the straw plaiters, who make Leghornstraw goods and pester the visitor with their flimsy wares, taking noanswer to all their importunities save one in solid coin of good KingUmberto. 

One last question. How does it come that in these southern climates thehill-top town has survived so much more generally to our own day thanin Northern Europe? The obvious answer seems at first sight to be thatin the warmer climates life can be carried on comfortably, andagriculture can yield good results, at a greater height than in a coldclimate. Olives, vines, chestnuts, maize will grow far up on Italianhill sides, and that, no doubt, counts for something; but I do notbelieve it covers all the ground. Two other points seem to me at leastequally important, especially when we remember that the hill-top townwas once as common in the north as in the south, and that what we havereally to account for in Italy is not its existence merely, but ratherits late survival into newer epochs. One point is that in SouthernEurope the state of perpetual internal warfare lasted much longer thanin the feudal north. The other point is that each little patch ofcountry in the south is still far more self-supporting, has had itseconomic conditions far less disturbed by modern rearrangements andcommercial necessities, than in Northern Europe. In England every townand village stands upon some high road; the larger stand almostinvariably upon some railway or some navigable river. In Italy it isstill quite possible, where agricultural conditions are favourable, tohave a comparatively flourishing town perched upon some out-of-the-waymountain height. Even a carriage road is scarcely a necessity; a mulepath will do well enough for wine and oil and the other simplecommodities of southern life. The hill-top town, in short, belongs toan earlier type of civilisation than ours; it survives, unaltered, onits own pinnacle wherever that type of civilisation is still possible. 

And I sincerely hope our pretty American friend will pardon me forhaving thus publicly answered, at so great length, her naturalquestion. 

 A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY. 

Standing to-day before the dim outline of Orcagna's "Hell" in theChurch of Santa Maria Novella, at Florence, and mentally comparingthose mediæval demons and monsters and torturers on the frescoed wallin front of me with the more antique Etruscan devils and tormentorspictured centuries earlier on the ancient tombs of Etrurian princes, the thought, which had often occurred to me before, how essentiallysimilar were the Tuscan intellect and Tuscan art in all ages, forceditself upon me once more at a flash with an irresistible burst ofinternal conviction. The identity of old and new seemed to standconfessed. Etruria throughout has been one and the same; and it isalmost impossible for any one to over-estimate the influence of thepowerful, but gloomy, Etruscan character upon the whole tone, not onlyof popular Christianity, but of that modern civilisation which is itsoffspring and outcome. 

I suppose it is hardly necessary, "in this age of enlightenment" (aspeople used to say in the last century), to insist any longer upon theobvious fact that conquest and absorption do not in any way meanextermination. Most people still vaguely fancy to themselves, to besure, that, when Rome conquered and absorbed Etruria, the ancientEtruscan ceased at once to exist--was swallowed, as it were, and becameforthwith, in some mysterious way, first a Roman, and then a modernItalian. And, in a certain sense, this is, no doubt, more or less true;but that sense is decidedly not the genealogical one. Manners change, but blood persists. The Tuscan people went on living and marrying underconsul and emperor just as they had done under _lar_ and _lucumo_;Latin and Gaul, Lombard and Goth, mingled with them in time, but didnot efface them; and I do not doubt that the vast mass of thepopulation of Tuscany at the present day is still of preponderatinglyEtruscan blood, though qualified, of course (and perhaps improved), bymany Italic, Celtic, and Teutonic elements. 

Again, when we remember that Florence, Pisa, Siena, Perugia are allpractically in Tuscany, and that Florence alone has really given to theworld Dante and Boccaccio, Galileo and Savonarola, Cimabue and Giotto, Botticelli and Fra Angelico, Donatello and Ghiberti, Michael Angelo andRaffael, Leonardo da Vinci and Macchiavelli and Alfieri, and a host ofother almost equally great names, it will be obvious to every one thatthe problem of the origin of this Tuscan nationality must be one thatprofoundly interests the whole world. Nay, more, we must remember, too, that Etruria had other and earlier claims than these; that it spread upto the very walls of Rome; that the Etruscan element in Rome itself wasimmensely strong; that the Roman religion owed, confessedly, much toTuscan ideas; that Latin Christianity, the Christianity of all theWestern world, took its shape in semi-Tuscan Rome; that the RomanEmpire was largely modelled by the Etruscan Mæcenas; that the Italianrenaissance was largely influenced by the Florentine Medici; that Leothe Tenth was himself a member of that great house; and that theartists whom he summoned to the metropolis to erect St. Peter's and tobeautify the Vatican were, almost all of them, Florentines by birth, training, or domicile. I think, when we have run over mentally theseand ten thousand other like facts, we will readily admit to ourselvesthe magnitude of the world's debt to Tuscany--social, artistic, intellectual, religious--both in ancient, mediæval, and modern times. 

And what, now, was this strong Tuscan nationality, which persists sothoroughly through all external historical changes, and which hascontributed so large and so marvellous a part to the world's thoughtand the world's culture? It is a curious consideration for those whotalk so glibly, about the enormous natural superiority of the Aryanrace, that the ancient Etruscans were the one people of the antiqueEuropean world, who, by common consent, did _not_ belong to the Aryanfamily. They were strangers in the land, or, rather, perhaps they wereits oldest possessors. Their language, their physique, their creed, their art, all point to a wholly different origin from the Aryans. I amnot going, in a brief essay like this, to settle dogmatically, off-hand, the vexed question of the origin and affinities of theEtruscan type; more nonsense, I suppose, has been talked and writtenupon that occult subject by learned men than even learned men have everpoured forth upon any other sublunary topic; but one thing at least, Itake it, is absolutely certain amid the conflicting theories ofingenious theorists about the Etruscan race, and that one thing is thatthe Rasennæ stand in Europe absolutely alone, the sole representativesof some ancient and elsewhere exterminated stock, surviving only inTuscany itself, and in the Rhætian Alps of the Canton Grisons. 

At the moment when the Etruscans first appear in history, however, theyappear as a race capable of acquiring and assimilating culture withgreat ease, rapidity, and certainty. No sooner do they come intocontact with the Greek world than they absorb and reproduce all thatwas best and truest in Greek civilization. 'Merely receptive--EuropeanChinese, ' says, in effect, Mommsen, the great Roman historian: to me, that judgment, though true in some small degree, seems harsh indeed ona wider view, when applied to a people who begot at last the 'DivinaCommedia, ' the campanile of Florence, the dome of St. Peter's, and theglories of the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. It is quite true that theEtruscans themselves, like the Japanese in our own time, did at firstaccept most imitatively the Hellenic culture; but they graduallyremoulded it by their own effort into something new, growing andchanging from age to age, until at last, in the Italian renaissance, they burst out with a wonderful and novel message to all the rest ofdormant Europe. 

One of the most persistent key-notes of this underlying Etruscancharacter is the solemn, weird, and gloomy nature of so much of thetrue Etruscan workmanship. From the very beginning they are strong, butsullen. Solidity and power, rather than beauty and grace, are what theyaim at; and in this, Michael Angelo was a true Tuscan. If we look atthe massive old Etruscan buildings, the Cyclopean walls of Fæsulæ andVolterræ, with their gigantic unhewn blocks, or the gloomy tombs ofClusium, with their heavy portals, and then at the frowning façade ofthe Strozzi or the Pitti Palace, we shall see in these, their earliestand latest terms, the special marks of Tuscan architecture. 'Piled bythe hands of giants for mighty kings of old, ' says Macaulay, well, ofthe Cyclopean walls. 'It somewhat resembles a prison or castle, and isremarkable for its bold simplicity of style, the unadorned huge blocksof stone being hewn smooth at the joints only, ' says a modern writer, of Brunelleschi's palatial masterpiece. Every visitor to Florence musthave noticed on every side the marks of this sullen and rugged Etruscancharacter. Compare for a moment the dark bosses of the Palazzo Strozzi, the '_âpre énergie_' of the Palazzo Vecchio, the '_beauté sombre etsévère_' of the mediæval Bargello, with the open, airy brightness ofthe Doge's Palace, or the glorious Byzantine gold-and-blue of St. Mark's at Venice, and you get at once an admirable measure of thispersistent trait in the Etruscan idiosyncrasy. Tuscan architecture ismassive and morose where Venetian architecture is sunny and smiling. 

Now, Tuscan religion has in all times been specially influenced by thepeculiarly gloomy tinge of the Tuscan character. It has always been areligion of fear rather than of love; a religion that strove harder toterrorize than to attract; a religion full of devils, flames, tortures, and horrors; in short, a sort of horrible Chinese religion of dragonsand monstrosities, and flames and goblins. In the painted tombs ofancient Etruria you may see the familiar devil with his three-prongedfork thrusting souls back into the seething flood of a heathen hell, asOrcagna's here thrust them back similarly into that of its more modernChristian successor. All Etruscan art is full throughout of suchhorrors. You find their traces abundantly in the antique Etruscanmuseum at Florence; you find them on the mediæval Campo Santo at Pisa;you find them with greater skill, but equal repulsiveness, in the workof the great Renaissance artists. The 'ghastly glories of saints' theTuscan revels in. The most famous portion of the most famous Tuscanpoem is the 'Inferno'--the part that gloats with minute and trulyTuscan realism over the torments of the damned in every department ofthe mediæval hell. And, as if still further to mark the continuity ofthought, here in Orcagna's frescoes at Santa Maria Novella you haveevery horror of the heathen religion incongruously mingled with everyhorror of the Christian--gorgons and harpies and chimæras dire aretormenting the wicked under the eyes of the Madonna; centaurs areshooting and prodding them before the God of Love from the torrid banksof fiery lakes; furies with snaky heads are directing theirpunishments; Minos and Æacus are superintending their tasks; and, inthe centre of all, a huge Moloch demon is devouring them bodily in hisfiery jaws, with hideous tusks as of a Japanese monster. 

It would be a curious question to inquire how far these old andingrained Etruscan ideas may have helped to modify and colour thegentler conceptions of primitive Christianity. Certainly, one mustnever for a moment forget that Rome was at bottom nearly one-halfEtruscan in character; that during the imperial period it became, infact, the capital of Etruria; that myriads of Etruscans flocked toRome; and that many of them, like Sejanus, had much to do with mouldingand building up the imperial system. I do not doubt, myself, thatEtruscan notions large interwove themselves, from the very outset, withRoman Christianity; and whenever in the churches or galleries of ItalyI see St. Lawrence frying on his gridiron, or St. Sebastian piercedthrough with many arrows, or the Innocents being massacred inunpleasant detail, or hell being represented with Dantesque minutenessand particularity of delineation, I say to myself, with an internalsmile, 'Etruscan influence. '

How interesting it is, too, to observe the constant outcrop, under allforms and faiths, of this strange, underlying, non-Aryan type! TheEtruscans are and always were remarkable for their intellect, theiringenuity, their artistic faculty; and even to this day, after so manyvicissitudes, they stand out as a wholly superior people to the roughGenoese and the indolent Neapolitans. They have had many crosses ofblood meanwhile, of course; and it seems probable that the crosses havedone them good: for in ancient times it was Rome, the Etrurianisedborder city of the Latins, that rose to greatness, not Etruria itself;and at a later date, it was after the Germans had mingled their racewith Italy that Florence almost took the place of Rome. Nay, it isknown as a fact that under Otto the Great a large Teutonic colonysettled in Florence, thus adding to the native Etrurian race(especially to the nobility) that other element which the Tuscan seemsto need in order that he may be spurred to the realisation of his bestcharacteristics. But allow as we may for foreign admixture, two pointsare abundantly clear to the impartial observer of Tuscan history: one, that this non-Aryan race has always been one of the finest andstrongest in Italy; and the other, that from the very dawn of historyits main characteristics, for good or for evil, have persisted mostuninterruptedly till the present day. 

 CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 

Everybody knows, of course, that up and down over the face of England awhole crop of places may be found with such terminations as Lancaster, Doncaster, Manchester, Leicester, Gloucester, or Exeter; and everybodyalso knows that these words are various corruptions or alterations ofthe Latin _castra_, or perhaps we ought rather to say of the singularform, _castrum_. So much we have all been told from our childhoodupward; and for the most part we have been quite ready to acquiesce inthe statement without any further troublesome inquiry on our ownaccount. But in reality the explanation thus vouchsafed us does nothelp us much towards explaining the real origin and nature of theseancient names. It is true enough as far as it goes, but it does not gonearly far enough. It reminds one a little of Charles Kingsley'saccomplished pupil-teacher, with his glib derivation of amphibious, 'from two Greek words, _amphi_, the land, and _bios_, the water. ' Adetailed history of the root 'Chester' in its various British usagesmay serve to show how far such a rough-and-ready solution as thepupil-teacher's falls short of complete accuracy and comprehensiveness. 

In the first place, without troubling ourselves for the time being withthe diverse forms of the word as now existing, a difficulty meets us atthe very outset as to how it ever got into the English language at all. 'It was left behind by the Romans, ' says the pupil teacherunhesitatingly. No doubt; but if so, the only language in which itcould be left would be Welsh; for when the Romans quitted Britain therewere probably as yet no English settlements on any part of the easterncoast. Now the Welsh form of the word, even as given us in the veryancient Latin Welsh tract ascribed to Nennius, is 'Caer' or 'Kair;' andthere is every reason to believe that the Celtic _cathir_ or the Latin_castrum_ had been already worn down into this corrupt form at least asearly as the days of the first English colonisation of Britain. IndeedI shall show ground hereafter for believing that that form surviveseven now in one or two parts of Teutonic England. But if this be so, itis quite clear that the earliest English conquerors could not haveacquired the use of the word from the vanquished Welsh whom they sparedas slaves or tributaries. The newcomers could not have learned to speakof a Ceaster or Chester from Welshmen who called it a Caer; nor couldthey have adopted the names of Leicester or Gloucester from Welshmenwho knew those towns only as Kair Legion or Kair Gloui. It is clearthat this easy off-hand theory shirks all the real difficulties of thequestion, and that we must look a little closer into the matter inorder to understand the true history of these interesting philologicalfossils. 

Already we have got one clear and distinct principle to begin with, which is too often overlooked by amateur philologists. The Latinlanguage, as spoken by Romans in Britain during their occupation of theisland, has left and can have left absolutely no directs marks upon ourEnglish tongue, for the simple reason that English (or Anglo-Saxon aswe call it in its earlier stages) did not begin to be spoken in anypart of Britain for twenty or thirty years after the Romans retired. Whatever Latin words have come down to us in unbroken succession fromthe Roman times--and they are but a few--must have come down from Welshsources. The Britons may have learnt them from their Italian masters, and may then have imparted them, after the brief period of precariousindependence, to their Teutonic masters; but of direct intercoursebetween Roman and Englishman there was probably little or none. 

Three ways out of this difficulty might possibly be suggested by anyhumble imitator of Mr. Gladstone. First, the early English pirates mayhave learnt the word _castrum_ (they always used it as a singular)years before they ever came to Britain as settlers at all. For duringthe long decay of the empire, the corsairs of the flat banks and isletsof Sleswick and Friesland made many a light-hearted plunderingexpedition upon the unlucky coasts of the maritime Roman provinces; andit was to repel their dreaded attacks that the Count of the Saxon Shorewas appointed to the charge of the long exposed tract from the fenlandof the Wash to the estuary of the Rother in Sussex. On one occasionthey even sacked London itself, already the chief trading town of thewhole island. During some such excursions, the pirates would be certainto pick up a few Latin words, especially such as related to newobjects, unseen in the rude society of their own native heather-cladwastes; and amongst these we may be sure that the great Romanfortresses would rank first and highest in their barbaric eyes. Indeed, modern comparative philologists have shown beyond doubt that a fewsouthern forms of speech had already penetrated to the primitiveEnglish marshland by the shores of the Baltic and the mouth of the Elbebefore the great exodus of the fifth century; and we know that Roman orByzantine coins, and other objects belonging to the Mediterraneancivilisation, are found abundantly in barrows of the first Christiancenturies in Sleswick--the primitive England of the colonists whoconquered Britain. But if the word _castrum_ did not get into earlyEnglish by some such means, then we must fall back either upon oursecond alternative explanation, that the townspeople of thesouth-eastern plains in England had become thoroughly Latinised inspeech during the Roman occupation; or upon our third, that they spokea Celtic dialect more akin to Gaulish than the modern Welsh of Wales, which may be descended from the ruder and older tongue of the westernaborigines. This last opinion would fit in very well with the views ofMr. Rhys, the Celtic professor at Oxford, who thinks that allsouth-eastern Britain was conquered and colonised by the Gauls beforethe Roman invasion. If so, it maybe only the western Welsh who saidCaer; the eastern may have said _castrum_, as the Romans did. In eitherof the latter two cases, we must suppose that the early English learntthe word from the conquered Britons of the districts they overran. ButI myself have very little doubt that they had borrowed it long beforetheir settlement in our island at all. 

However this may be--and I confess I have been a little puritanicallyminute upon the subject--the English settlers learned to use the wordfrom the first moment they landed in Britain. In its earliest Englishdress it appears as Ceaster, pronounced like Keaster, for the softsound of the initial in modern English is due to later Normaninfluences. The new comers--Anglo-Saxons, if you choose to call themso--applied the word to every Roman town or ruin they found in Britain. Indeed, all the Latin words of the first crop in English--those usedduring the heathen age, before Augustine and his monks introduced theRoman civilisation--belong to such material relics of the olderprovincial culture as the Sleswick pirates had never before known:_way_ from _via_, _wall_ from _vallum_, _street_ from _strata_, and_port_ from _portus_. In this first crop of foreign words Ceaster alsomust be reckoned, and it was originally employed in English as a commonrather than as a proper name. Thus we read in the brief _Chronicle_ ofthe West Saxon kings, under the year 577, 'Cuthwine and Ceawlin foughtagainst the Welsh, and offslew three kings, Conmail and Condidan andFarinmail, and took three ceasters, Gleawan ceaster and Ciren ceasterand Bathan ceaster. ' We might modernise a little, so as to show thereal sense, by saying 'Glevum city and Corinium city and Bath city. 'Here it is noticeable that in two of the cases--Gloucester andCirencester--the descriptive termination has become at last part of thename; but in the third case--that of Bath--it has never succeeded indoing so. Ages after, in the reign of King Alfred, we still find theword used as a common noun; for the _Chronicle_ mentions that a body ofDanish freebooters 'fared to a waste ceaster in Wirral; it is hightLega ceaster;' that is to say, Legionis castra, now Chester. The grandold English epic of Beowulf, which is perhaps older than thecolonisation of Britain, speaks of townsfolk as 'the dwellers inceasters. '

As a rule, each particular Roman town retained its full name, in a moreor less clipped form, for official uses; but in the ordinary colloquiallanguage of the neighbourhood they all seem to have been described as'the Ceaster' simply, just as we ourselves habitually speak of 'town, 'meaning the particular town near which we live, or, in a more generalsense, London. Thus, in the north, Ceaster usually means York, theRoman capital of the province; as when the _Chronicle_ tells us that'John succeeded to the bishopric of Ceaster'; that 'Wilfrith washallowed as bishop at Ceaster'; or that 'Æthelberht the archbishop diedat Ceaster. ' In the south it is employed to mean Winchester, thecapital of the West Saxon kings and overlords of all Britain; as whenthe _Chronicle_ says that 'King Edgar drove out the priests at Ceasterfrom the Old Minster and the New Minster, and set them with monks. ' So, as late as the days of Charles II. , 'to go to town' meant in Shropshireto go to Shrewsbury, and in Norfolk to go to Norwich. In only oneinstance has this colloquial usage survived down to our own days in alarge town, and that is at Chester, where the short form has quiteousted the full name of Lega ceaster. But in the case of small towns orunimportant Roman stations, which would seldom need to be mentionedoutside their own immediate neighbourhood, the simple form is quitecommon, as at Caistor in Norfolk, Castor in Hunts, and elsewhere. Attimes, too, we get an added English termination, as at Casterton, Chesterton, and Chesterholme; or a slight distinguishing mark, as atGreat Chesters, Little Chester, Bridge Casterton, and Chester-le-Street. All these have now quite lost their old distinctive names, though theyhave acquired new ones to distinguish them from _the_ Chester, or fromone another. For example, Chester-le-Street was Conderco in Romantimes, and Cunega ceaster in the early English period. Both names arederived from the little river Cone, which flows through the village. 

Before we pass on to the consideration of those _castra_ which, likeManchester and Lancaster, have preserved to the present day theiroriginal Roman or Celtic prefixes in more or less altered shapes, wemust glance briefly at a general principle running through themodernised forms now in use. The reader, with his usual acuteness, willhave noticed that the word Ceaster reappears under many separatedisguises in the names of different modern towns. Sometimes it is_caster_, sometimes _chester_, sometimes _cester_, and sometimes evenit gets worn down to a mere fugitive relic, as _ceter_ or _eter_. Butthese different corruptions do not occur irregularly up and down thecountry, one here and one there; they follow a distinct law and are dueto certain definite underlying facts of race or language. Each set ofnames lies in a regular stratum; and the different strata succeed oneanother like waves over the face of England, from north-east tosouth-westward. In the extreme north and east, where the English orAnglian blood is purest, or is mixed only with Danes and Northmen toany large extent, such forms as Lancaster, Doncaster, Caistor, andCasterton abound. In the mixed midlands and the Saxon south, the soundsoftens into Chesterfield, Chester, Winchester, and Dorchester. In theinner midlands and the Severn vale, where the proportion of Celticblood becomes much stronger, the termination grows still softer inLeicester, Bicester, Cirencester, Gloucester, and Worcester, while atthe same time a marked tendency towards elision occurs; for these wordsare really pronounced as if written Lester, Bister, Cisseter, Gloster, and Wooster. Finally, on the very borders of Wales, and of thatDamnonian country which was once known to our fathers as West Wales, weget the very abbreviated forms Wroxeter, Uttoxeter, and Exeter, ofwhich the second is colloquially still further shortened into Uxeter. Sometimes these tracts approach very closely to one another, as on thebanks of the Nene, where the two halves of the Roman Durobrivæ havebecome castor on one side of the river, and Chesterton on the other;but the line can be marked distinctly on the map, with a slight outwardbulge, with as great regularity as the geological strata. It will bemost convenient here, therefore, to begin with the _casters_, whichhave undergone the least amount of rubbing down, and from them to passon regularly to the successively weaker forms in _chester_, _cester_, _ceter_, and _eter_. 

Nothing, indeed, can be more deceptive than the common fashion, ofquoting a Roman name from the often blundering lists of theItineraries, and then passing on at once to the modern English form, without any hint of the intermediate stages. To say that Glevum is nowGloucester is to tell only half the truth; until we know that the twowere linked together by the gradual steps of Glevum castrum, Gleawanceaster, Gleawe cester, Gloucester, and Gloster, we have not reallyexplained the words at all. By beginning with the least corrupt formswe shall best be able to see the slow nature of the change, and weshall also find at the same time that a good deal of incidental lightis shed upon the importance and extent of the English settlement. 

Doncaster is an excellent example of the simplest form ofmodernisation. It appears in the Antonine Itinerary and in the _NotitiaImperii_ as Danum. This, with the ordinary termination affixed, becomesat once Dona ceaster or Doncaster. The name is of course originallyderived in either form from the river Don, which flows beside it; andthe Northumbrian invaders must have learnt the names of both river andstation from their Brigantian British serfs. It shows the fluctuatingnature of the early local nomenclature, however, when we find that Bæda('the Venerable Bede') describes the place in his Latinised vocabularyas Campodonum--that is to say, the Field of Don, or, moreidiomatically, Donfield, a name exactly analogous to those ofChesterfield Macclesfield, Mansfield, Sheffield, and Huddersfield inthe neighbouring region. The comparison of Doncaster and Chesterfieldis thus most interesting: for here we have two Roman Stations, each ofwhich must once have had two alternative names; but in the one case theold Roman name has ultimately prevailed, and in the other case themodern English one. 

The second best example of a Caster, perhaps, is Lancaster. In allprobability this is the station which appears in the _Notitia Imperii_as Longovico, an oblique case which it might be hazardous to put in thenominative, seeing that it seems rather to mean the town on the Lune orLoan than the Long Village. Here, as in many other cases, the formativeelement, vicus, is exchanged for Ceaster, and we get something likeLon-ceaster or finally Lancaster. Other remarkable Casters areBrancaster in Norfolk, once Branadunum (where the British termination_dun_ has been similarly dropped); Ancaster in Lincolnshire, whoseRoman name is not certainly known; and Caistor, near Norwich, onceVenta Icenorum, a case which may best be considered under the head ofWinchester. On the other hand, Tadcaster gives us an instance where theRoman prefix has apparently been entirely altered, for it appears inthe Antonine Itinerary (according to the best identification) asCalcaria, so that we might reasonably expect it to be modernised asCalcaster. Even here, however, we might well suspect an earlieralternative title, of which we shall get plenty when we come to examinethe Chesters; and in fact, in Bæda, it still bears its old name in aslightly disguised form as Kaelca ceaster. 

First among the softer forms, let us examine the interesting group towhich Chester itself belongs. Its Roman name was, beyond doubt, Diva, the station on the Dee--as Doncaster is the station on the Don, andLancaster the station on the Lune. Its proper modern form ought, therefore, to be Deechester. But it would seem that in certain placesthe neighbouring rustics knew the great Roman town of their district, not by its official title, but as the legion's Camp--Castra Legionis. At least three such cases undoubtedly occur--one at Deva or Chester;one at Ratæ or Leicester; and one at Isca Silurum or Caerleon-upon-Usk. In each case the modernisation has taken a very different form. Divawas captured by the heathen English king, Æthelfrith of Northumbria, ina battle rendered famous by Bæda, who calls the place 'The City ofLegions. ' The Latin compilation by some Welsh writer, ascribed toNennius, calls it Cair Legion, which is also its name in the Irishannals. In the _English Chronicle_ it appears as Lege ceaster, Lægeceaster, and Leg ceaster; but after the Norman Conquest it becomesCeaster alone. On midland lips the sound soon grew into the familiarChester. About the second case, that of Leicester, there is a slightdifficulty, for it assumes in the _Chronicle_ the form of Lægraceaster, with an apparently intrusive letter; and the later Welshwriters seized upon the form to fit in with their own ancient legend ofKing Lear. Nennius calls it Cair Lerion; and that unblushing romancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes it at once into Cair Leir, the city ofLeir. More probably the name is a mixture of Legionis and Ratæ, Leg-ratceaster, the camp of the Legion at Ratæ. This, again, grew into Legraceaster, Leg ceaster, and Lei ceaster, while the word, though writtenLeicester, is now shortened by south midland voices to Lester. Thethird Legionis Castra remained always Welsh, and so hardened on Cymriclips into Kair Leon or Caerleon. Nennius applies the very similar nameof Cair Legeion to Exeter, still in his time a Damnonian or West Welshfortress. 

Equally interesting have been the fortunes of the three towns of whichWinchester is the type. In the old Welsh tongue, Gwent means achampaign country, or level alluvial plain. The Romans borrowed theword as Venta, and applied it to the three local centres of VentaIcenorum in Norfolk, Venta Belgarum in Hampshire, and Venta Silurum inMonmouth. When the first West Saxon pirates, under their real ormythical leader, Cerdic, swarmed up Southampton Water and occupied theGwent of the Belgæ, they called their new conquest Wintan ceaster, though the still closer form Wæntan once occurs. Thence to Winteceaster and Winchester is no far cry. Gwent of the Iceni had adifferent history. No doubt it also was known at first as Wintanceaster; but, as at Winchester, the shorter form Ceaster wouldnaturally be employed in local colloquial usage; and when the chiefcentre of East Anglian population was removed a few miles north toNorwich, the north wick--then a port on the navigable estuary of theYare--the older station sank into insignificance, and was only locallyremembered as Caistor. Lastly, Gwent of the Silurians has left its namealone to Caer-Went in Monmouthshire, where hardly any relics now remainof the Roman occupation. 

Manchester belongs to exactly the same class as Winchester. Its Romanname was Mancunium, which would easily glide into Mancunceaster. In the_English Chronicle_ it is only once mentioned, and then asMameceaster--a form explained by the alternative Mamucium in theItinerary, which would naturally become Mamue ceaster. Colchester ofcourse represents Colonia, corrupted first into Coln ceaster, and sothrough Col ceaster into its present form. Porchester in Hants isPortus Magnus; Dorchester is Durnovaria, and then Dorn ceaster. Grantchester, Godmanchester, Chesterfield, Woodchester, and many othershelp us to trace the line across the map of England, to the mostwestern limit of all at Ilchester, anciently Ischalis, though theintermediate form of Givel ceaster is certainly an odd one. 

Besides these Chesters of the regular order, there are several curiousoutlying instances in Durham and Northumberland, and along the RomanWall, islanded, as it were, beyond the intermediate belt of Casters. Such are Lanchester in Durham, which maybe compared with the morefamiliar Lancaster; Great Chesters in Northumberland, Ebchester on thenorthern Watling Street, and a dozen more. How to account for these israther a puzzle. Perhaps the Casters may be mainly due to Danishinfluence (which is the common explanation), and it is known that theDanes spread but sparingly to the north of the Tees. However, thisrough solution of the problem proves too much: for how then can we havea still softer form in Danish Leicester itself? Probably we shall benearer the truth if we say that these are late names; forNorthumberland was a desert long after the great harrying by Williamthe Conqueror; and by the time it was repeopled, Chester had become therecognised English form, so that it would naturally be employed by thenew occupants of the districts about the Wall. 

No name in Britain, however, is more interesting than that ofRochester, which admirably shows us how so many other Roman names haveacquired a delusively English form, or have been mistaken for memorialsof the English conquest. The Roman town was known as Durobrivæ, whichdoes not in the least resemble Rochester; and what is more, Bædadistinctly tells us that Justus, the first bishop of the West Kentishsee, was consecrated 'in the city of Dorubrevi, which the English callHrofæs ceaster, from one of its former masters, by name Hrof. ' If thiswere all we knew about it, we should be told that Bæda clearlydescribed the town as being called Hrof's Chester, from an Englishconqueror Hrof, and that to contradict this clear statement of an earlywriter was presumptuous or absurd. Fortunately, however, we have theclearest possible proof that Hrof never existed, and that he was a purecreation of Bæda's own simple etymological guesswork. King Alfredclearly knew better, for he omitted this wild derivation from hisEnglish translation. The valuable fragment of a map of Roman Britainpreserved for us in the mediæval transcript known as the _PeutingerTables_, sets down Rochester as Rotibis. Hence it is pretty certainthat it must have had two alternative names, of which the other wasDurobrivæ. Rotibis would easily pass (on the regular analogies) intoRotifi ceaster, and that again into Hrofi ceaster and Rochester; justas Rhutupiæ or Ritupæ passed into Rituf burh, and so finally intoRichborough. Moreover, in a charter of King Ethelberht of Kent, older agood deal than Bæda's time, we find the town described under the mixedform of Hrofi-brevi. After such a certain instance of philologicalblundering as this, I for one am not inclined to place great faith insuch statements as that made by the _English Chronicle_ aboutChichester, which it attributes to the mythical South Saxon king Cissa. Whatever Cissanceaster may mean, it seems to me much more likely thatit represents another case of double naming; for though the Roman townwas commonly known as Regnum, that is clearly a mere administrativeform, derived from the tribal name of the Regni. Considering that thesame veracious _Chronicle_ derives Portsmouth, the Roman Portus, froman imaginary Teutonic invader, Port, and commits itself to other wildstatements of the same sort, I don't think we need greatly hesitateabout rejecting its authority in these earlier and conjecturalportions. 

Silchester is another much disputed name. As a rule, the site has beenidentified with that of Calleva Atrebatum; but the proofs are scanty, and the identification must be regarded as a doubtful one. I havealready ventured to suggest that the word may contain the root Silva, as the town is situated close upon the ancient borders of PamberForest. The absence of early forms, however, makes this somewhat of arandom shot. Indeed, it is difficult to arrive at any definiteconclusions in these cases, except by patiently following up the namefrom first to last, through all its variations, corruptions, andmis-spellings. 

The _Cesters_ are even more degraded (philologically speaking) than the_Chesters_, but are not less interesting and illustrative in their way. Their farthest northeasterly extension, I believe, is to be found atLeicester and Towcester. The former we have already considered: thelatter appears in the _Chronicle_ as Tofe ceaster, and derives its namefrom the little river Towe, on which it is situated. Anciently, nodoubt, the river was called Tofe or Tofi, like the Tavy in Devonshire;for all these river-words recur over and over again, both in Englandand on the Continent. In this case, there seems no immediate connectionwith the Roman name, if the site be rightly identified with that ofLactodorum; but at any rate the river name is Celtic, so that Towcestercannot be claimed as a Teutonic settlement. 

Cirencester, the meeting-place of all the great Roman roads, is theLatin Corinium, sometimes given as Durocornovium, which wellillustrates the fluctuating state of Roman nomenclature in Britain. Asthis great strategical centre--the key of the west--had formerly beenthe capital of the Dobuni, whose name it sometimes bears, it mighteasily have come down to us as Durchester, or Dobchester, instead ofunder its existing guise. The city was captured by the West Saxons in577, and is then called Ciren ceaster in the brief record of theconquerors. A few years later, the _Chronicle_ gives it as Cirnceaster; and since the river is called Chirn, this is the form it mightfairly have been expected to retain, as in the case of Cerney close by. But the city was too far west not to have its name largely rubbed downin use; so it softened both its initials into Cirencester, while Cissanceaster only got (through Cisse ceaster) as far as Chichester. At thatpoint the spelling of the western town has stopped short, but thetongues of the natives have run on till nothing now remains butCisseter. If we had only that written form on the one hand, andDurocornovium on the other, even the boldest etymologist would hardlyventure to suggest that they had any connection with one another. Ofcourse the common prefix Duro, is only the Welsh Dwr, water, and itsoccurrence in a name merely implies a ford or river. The alternativeforms may be Anglicised as Churn, and Churnwater, just like Grasmere, and Grasmere Lake. 

I wish I could avoid saying anything about Worcester, for it is anobscure and difficult subject; but I fear the attempt to shirk it wouldbe useless in the long run. I know from sad experience that if I omitit every inhabitant of Worcestershire who reads this article will huntme out somehow, and run me to earth at last, with a letter demanding afull and explicit explanation of this silent insult to his nativecounty. So I must try to put the best possible face upon a troublesomematter. The earliest existing form of the name, after the EnglishConquest, seems to be that given in a Latin Charter of the eighthcentury as _Weogorna civitas_. (Here it is difficult to disentangle theEnglish from its Latin dress. ) A little later it appears in avernacular shape (also in a charter) as Wigran ceaster. In the laterpart of the _English Chronicle_ it becomes Wigera ceaster, and Wigraceaster; but by the twelfth century it has grown into Wigor ceaster, from which the change to Wire ceaster and Worcester (fully pronounced)is not violent. This is all plain sailing enough. But what is themeaning of Wigorna ceaster or Wigran ceaster? And what Roman or Englishname does it represent? The old English settlers of the neighbourhoodformed a little independent principality of Hwiccas (afterwards subduedby the Mercians), and some have accordingly suggested that the originalword may have been Hwiccwara ceaster, the Chester of the Hwicca men, which would be analogous to Cant-wara burh (Canterbury), the Bury ofthe Kent men, or to Wiht-gara burh (Carisbrooke), the Bury of the Wightmen. Others, again, connect it with the Braunogenium of the Ravennageographer, and the Cair Guoranegon or Guiragon of Nennius, whichlatter is probably itself a corrupted version of the English name. Altogether, it must be allowed that Worcester presents a genuinedifficulty, and that the facts about its early forms are themselvesdecidedly confused, if not contradictory. The only other notable_Ceasters_, are Alcester, once Alneceaster, in Worcestershire, theRoman Alauna; Gloucester or Glevum, already sufficiently explained; andMancester in Staffordshire, supposed to occupy the site ofManduessedum. 

Among the most corrupted forms of all, Exeter may rank first. Its Latinequivalent was Isca Damnoniorum, Usk of the Devonians; Isca being theLatinised form of that prevalent Celtic river name which crops up againin the Usk, Esk, Exe, and Axe, besides forming the first element ofUxbridge and Oxford; while the tribal qualification was added todistinguish it from its namesake, Isca Silurum, Usk of the Silurians, now Caerleon-upon-Usk. In the west country, to this day, _ask_ alwaysbecomes _ax_, or rather remains so, for that provincial form was theKing's English at the court of Alfred; and so Isca became on Devonianlips Exan ceaster, after the West Saxon conquest. Thence it passedrapidly through the stages of Exe ceaster and Exe cester till itfinally settled down into Exeter. At the same time, the river itselfbecame the Exe; and the Exan-mutha of the _Chronicle_ dropped intoExmouth. We must never forget, however, that Exeter, was a Welsh townup to the reign of Athelstan, and that Cornish Welsh was still spokenin parts of Devonshire till the days of Queen Elizabeth. 

Wroxeter is another immensely interesting fossil word. It lies just atthe foot of the Wrekin, and the hill which takes that name in Englishmust have been pronounced by the old Celtic inhabitants much likeUricon: for of course the awkward initial letter has only become silentin these later lazy centuries. The Romans turned it into Uriconium; butafter their departure, it was captured and burnt to the ground by aparty of raiding West Saxons, and its fall is graphically described inthe wild old Welsh elegy of Llywarch the Aged. The ruins are stillcharred and blackened by the West Saxon fires. The English colonists ofthe neighbourhood called themselves the Wroken-sætas, or Settlers bythe Wrekin--a word analogous to that of Wilsætas, or Settlers by theWyly; Dorsætas, or Settlers among the Durotriges; and Sumorsætas, orSettlers among the Sumor-folk, --which survive in the modern counties ofWilts, Dorset, and Somerset. Similar forms elsewhere are the Pecsætasof the Derbyshire Peak, the Elmedsætas in the Forest of Elmet, and theCilternsætas in the Chiltern Hills. No doubt the Wroken-sætas calledthe ruined Roman fort by the analogous name of Wroken ceaster; and thiswould slowly become Wrok ceaster, Wrok-cester, and Wroxeter, by theordinary abbreviating tendency of the Welsh borderlands. Wrexhamdoubtless preserves the same original root. 

Having thus carried the _Castra_ to the very confines of Wales, itwould be unkind to a generous and amiable people not to carry themacross the border and on to the Western sea. The Welsh corruption, whether of the Latin word or of a native equivalent _cathir_, assumesthe guise of Caer. Thus the old Roman station of Segontium, near theMenai Straits, is now called Caer Seiont; but the neighbouring moderntown which has gathered around Edward's new castle on the actual shore, the later metropolis of the land of Arfon, became known to Welshmen asCaer-yn-Arfon, now corrupted into Caernarvon or even into Carnarvon. Gray's familiar line about the murdered bards--'On Arvon's dreary shorethey lie'--keeps up in some dim fashion the memory of the trueetymology. Caermarthen is in like manner the Roman Muridunum orMoridunum--the fort by the sea--though a duplicate Moridunum in SouthDevon has been simply translated into English as Seaton. Innumerableother Caers, mostly representing Roman sites, may be found scattered upand down over the face of Wales, such as Caersws, Caerleon, Caergwrle, Caerhun, and Caerwys, all of which still contain traces of Romanoccupation. On the other hand, Cardigan, which looks delusively like ashortened Caer, has really nothing to do with this group of ancientnames, being a mere corruption of Ceredigion. 

But outside Wales itself, in the more Celtic parts of England proper, agood many relics of the old Welsh Caers still bespeak theincompleteness of the early Teutonic conquest. If we might trust themendacious Nennius, indeed, all our Casters and Chesters were once goodCymric Caers; for he gives a doubtful list of the chief towns inBritain, where Gloucester appears as Cair Gloui, Colchester as CairColun, and York as Cair Ebrauc. These, if true, would be invaluableforms; but unfortunately there is every reason to believe that Nenniusinvented them himself, by a simple transposition of the English names. Henry of Huntingdon is nearly as bad, if not worse; for when he callsDorchester 'Kair Dauri, ' and Chichester 'Kair Kei, ' he was almostcertainly evolving what he supposed to be appropriate old British namesfrom the depths of his own consciousness. His guesswork was on a parwith that of the schoolboys who introduce 'Stirlingia' or 'Liverpolia'into their Ovidian elegiacs. That abandoned story-teller, Geoffrey ofMonmouth, goes a step further, and concocts a Caer Lud for London and aCaer Osc for Exeter, whenever the fancy seizes him. The only examplesamongst these pretended old Welsh forms which seem to me to have anyreal historical value are an unknown Kair Eden, mentioned by Gildas, and a Cair Wise, mentioned by Simeon of Durham, undoubtedly the truenative name of Exeter. 

Still we have a few indubitable Caers in England itself surviving toour own day. Most of them are not far from the Welsh border, as in thecase of the two Caer Caradocs, in Shropshire, crowned by ancientBritish fortifications. Others, however, lie further within the trueEnglish pale, though always in districts which long preserved the Welshspeech, at least among the lower classes of the population. Theearthwork overhanging Bath bears to this day its ancient British titleof Caer Badon. An old history written in the monastery of Malmesburydescribes that town as Caer Bladon, and speaks of a Caer Dur in theimmediate neighbourhood. There still remains a Caer Riden on the lineof the Roman wall in the Lothians. Near Aspatria, in Cumberland, standsa mouldering Roman camp known even now as Caer Moto. In Carvoran, Northumberland, the first syllable has undergone a slight contraction, but may still be readily recognised. The Carr-dyke in Norfolk seems tome to be referable to a similar origin. 

Most curious of all the English Caers, however, is Carlisle. TheAntonine Itinerary gives the town as Luguvallium. Bæda, in hisbarbarised Latin fashion calls it Lugubalia. 'The Saxons, ' says_Murray's Guide_, with charming _naïveté_, 'abbreviated the name intoLuel, and afterwards called it Caer Luel. ' This astounding hotchpotchforms an admirable example of the way in which local etymology is stillgenerally treated in highly respectable publications. So far as weknow, there never was at any time a single Saxon in Cumberland; and whythe Saxons, or any other tribe of Englishmen, should have called a townby a purely Welsh name, it would be difficult to decide. If they hadgiven it any name at all, that name would probably have been Lulceaster, which might have been modernised into Lulcaster or Lulchester. The real facts are these. Cumberland, as its name imports, was long aland of the Cymry--a northern Welsh principality, dependent upon thegreat kingdom of Strathclyde, which held out for ages against theNorthumbrian English invaders among the braes and fells of Ayrshire andthe Lake District. These Cumbrian Welshmen called their chief town CaerLuel, or something of the sort; and there is some reason for believingthat it was the capital of the historical Arthur, if any Arthur everexisted, though later ages transferred the legend of the British heroto Caerleon-upon-Usk, after men had begun to forget that the regionbetween the Clyde and the Mersey had once been true Welsh soil. TheEnglish overran Cumberland very slowly; and when they did finallyconquer it, they probably left the original inhabitants in possessionof the country, and only imposed their own overlordship upon theconquered race. The story is too long a one to repeat in full here: itmust suffice to say that, though the Northumbrian kings had made the'Strathclyde Welsh' their tributaries, the district was neverthoroughly subdued till the days of Edmund the West Saxon, who harriedthe land, and handed it over to the King of Scots. Thus it happens thatCarlisle, alone among large English towns, still keeps unchanged itsCymric name, instead of having sunk into an Anglicised Chester. Thepresent spelling is a mere etymological blunder, exactly similar tothat which has turned the old English word _igland_ into _island_, through the false analogy of _isle_, which of course comes from the oldFrench _isle_, derived through some form akin to the Italian _isola_, from the original Latin _insula_. Kair Leil is the spelling inGeoffrey; Cardeol (by a clerical error for Carleol, I suspect) that inthe _English Chronicle_, which only once mentions the town; and Carleolthat of the ordinary mediæval historians. The surnames Carlyle andCarlile still preserve the better orthography. 

To complete the subject, it will be well to say a few words about thosetowns which were once _Ceasters_, but which have never become Castersor Chesters. Numerous as are the places now so called, a number moremay be reckoned in the illimitable chapter of the might-have-beens; andit is interesting to speculate on the forms which they would havetaken, 'si qua fata aspera rupissent. ' Among these still-born Chesters, Newcastle-upon-Tyne may fairly rank first. It stands on the Roman site, called, from its bridge across the Tyne, Pons Aelii, and known lateron, from its position on the great wall, as Ad Murum. Under the earlyEnglish, after their conversion to Christianity, the monks became theaccepted inheritors of Roman ruins; and the small monastery which wasestablished here procured it the English name of Muneca-ceaster, or, aswe should now say, Monk-chester, though no doubt the localmodernisation would have taken the form of Muncaster. William ofNormandy utterly destroyed the town during his great harrying ofNorthumberland; and when his son, Robert Curthose, built a fortress onthe site, the place came to be called Newcastle--a word whose very formshows its comparatively modern origin. _Castra_ and _Ceasters_ were nowout of date, and castles had taken their place. Still, we stick evenhere to the old root: for of course castle is only the diminutive_castellum_--a scion of the same Roman stock, which, like so many othermembers of aristocratic families, 'came over with William theConqueror. ' The word _castel_ is never used, I believe, in any Englishdocument before the Conquest; but in the very year of William'sinvasion, the _Chronicle_ tells us, 'Willelm earl came from Normandyinto Pevensey, and wrought a castel at Hastings port. ' So, while inFrance itself the word has declined through _chastel_ into _château_, we in England have kept it in comparative purity as castle. 

York is another town which had a narrow escape of becoming Yorchester. Its Roman name was Eburacum, which the English queerly rendered asEoforwic, by a very interesting piece of folks-etymology. _Eofor_ isold English for a boar, and _wic_ for a town; so our rude ancestorsmetamorphosed the Latinised Celtic name into this familiar andsignificant form, much as our own sailors turn the Bellerophon into theBilly Ruffun, and the Anse des Cousins into the Nancy Cozens. In thesame way, I have known an illiterate Englishman speak ofAix-la-Chapelle as Hexley Chapel. To the name, thus distorted, ourforefathers of course added the generic word for a Roman town, and somade the cumbrous title of Eoforwic-ceaster, which is the almostuniversal form in the earlier parts of the _English Chronicle_. Thiswas too much of a mouthful even for the hardy Anglo-Saxon, so we soonfind a disposition to shorten it into Ceaster on the one hand, orEoforwic on the other. Should the final name be Chester or York?--thatwas the question. Usage declared in favour of the more distinctivetitle. The town became Eoforwic alone, and thence gradually declinedthrough Evorwic, Euorwic, Eurewic, and Yorick into the modern York. Itis curious to note that some of these intermediate forms very closelyapproach the original Eburac, which must have been the root of theRoman name. Was the change partly due to the preservation of the oldersound on the lips of Celtic serfs? It is not impossible, for marks ofBritish blood are strong in Yorkshire; and Nennius confirms the idea bycalling the town Kair Ebrauc. 

Among the other _Ceasters_ which have never developed into full-blownChesters, I may mention Bath, given as Akemannes ceaster and Bathanceaster in our old documents, so that it might have becomeAchemanchester or Bathceter in the course of ordinary changes. Canterbury, again, the Roman Durovernum, dropped through Doroberniainto Dorwit ceaster, which would no doubt have turned into a thirdDorchester, to puzzle our heads by its likeness to Dorne ceaster inDorsetshire, and to Dorce ceaster near Oxford; while Chesterton inHuntingdonshire, which was once Dorme ceaster, narrowly escapedburdening a distracted world with a fourth. Happily, the colloquialform Cantwara burh, or Kentmen's bury, gained the day, and so everytrace of Durovernum is now quite lost in Canterbury. North Shields wasonce Scythles-ceaster, but here the Chester has simply dropped out. Verulam, or St. Albans, is another curious case. Its Romano-Britishname was Verulamium, and Bæda calls it Verlama ceaster. But the earlyEnglish in Sleswick believed in a race of mythical giants, theWætlingas or Watlings, from whom they called the Milky Way 'WatlingStreet. ' When the rude pirates from those trackless marshes came overto Britain and first beheld the great Roman paved causeway which ranacross the face of the country from London to Caernarvon, they seemedto have imagined that such a mighty work could not have been thehandicraft of men; and just as the Arabs ascribe the rock-hewn housesof Petra to the architectural fancy of the Devil, so our old Englishancestors ascribed the Roman road to the Titanic Watlings. Even in ourown day, it is known along its whole course as Watling Street. Verulamstands right in its track, and long contained some of the greatestRoman remains in England; so the town, too, came to be considered asanother example of the work of the Watlings. Bæda, in his LatinisedNorthumbrian, calls it Vætlinga ceaster, as an alternative title withVerlama ceaster; so that it might nowadays have been familiar to us alleither as Watlingchester or Verlamchester. This is one of the numerouscases where a Roman and English name lived on during the dark periodside by side. In some of Mr. Kemble's charters it appears as Walingaceaster. But when Offa of Mercia founded his great abbey on the veryspot where the Welsh martyr Alban had suffered during the persecutionof Diocletian, Roman and English names were alike forgotten, and theplace was remembered only after the British Christian as St. Albans. 

There are other instances where the very memory of a Roman city seemsnow to have failed altogether. For example, Bæda mentions a certaintown called Tiowulfinga ceaster--that is to say, the Chester of theTiowulfings, or sons of Tiowulf. Here an English clan would seem tohave taken up its abode in a ruined Roman station, and to have calledthe place by the clan-name--a rare or almost unparalleled case. But itsprecise site is now unknown. However, Bæda's description clearly pointsto some town in Nottinghamshire, situated on the Trent; for St. Paulinus of York baptized large numbers of converts in that river atTiowulfinga ceaster; and the site may therefore be confidentlyidentified with Southwell, where St. Mary's Minster has alwaystraditionally claimed Paulinus as its founder. Bæda also mentions aplace called Tunna ceaster, so named from an abbot Tunna, who existsmerely for the sake of a legend, and is clearly as unhistorical as hispiratical compeer Hrof--a wild guess of the eponymic sort with which weare all so familiar in Greek literature. Simeon of Durham speaks of anequally unknown Delvercester. Syddena ceaster or Sidna cester--theearliest see of the Lincolnshire diocese--has likewise dropped out ofhuman memory; though Mr. Pearson suggests that it may be identical withAncaster--a notion which appears to me extremely unlikely. Wude cesteris no doubt Outchester, and other doubtful instances might easily berecognised by local antiquaries, though they may readily escape thegeneral archæologist. In one case at least--that of Othonæ inEssex--town, site, and name have all disappeared together. Bæda callsit Ythan ceaster, and in his time it was the seat of a monasteryfounded by St. Cedd; but the whole place has long since been swept awayby an inundation of the Blackwater. Anderida, which is calledAndredes-ceaster in the _Chronicle_, becomes Pefenesea, or Pevensey, before the date of the Norman Conquest. 

It must not be supposed that the list given here is by any meansexhaustive of all the Casters and Chesters, past and present, throughout the whole length and breadth of Britain. On the contrary, many more might easily be added, such as Ribbel ceaster, nowRibchester; Berne ceaster, now Bicester; and Blædbyrig ceaster, nowsimply Bladbury. In Northumberland alone there are a large number ofinstances which I might have quoted, such as Rutchester, HaltonChesters, and Little Chesters on the Roman Wall, together withHetchester, Holy Chesters, and Rochester elsewhere--the countycontaining no less than four places of the last name. Indeed, one cantrack the Roman roads across England by the Chesters which accompanytheir route. But enough instances have probably been adduced toexemplify fully the general principles at issue. I think it will beclear that the English conquerors did not usually change the names ofRoman or Welsh towns, but simply mispronounced them about as much as wehabitually mispronounce Llangollen or Llandudno. Sometimes they calledthe place by its Romanised title alone, with the addition of Ceaster;sometimes they employed the servile British form; sometimes they eveninvented an English alternative; but in no case can it be shown thatthey at once disused the original name, and introduced a totally newone of their own manufacture. In this, as in all other matters, thecontinuity between Romano-British and English times is far greater thanit is generally represented to be. The English invasion was a cruel anda desolating one, no doubt; but it could not and it did not sweep awaywholly the old order of things, or blot out all the past annals ofBritain, so as to prepare a _tabula rasa_ on which Mr. Green mightbegin his _History of the English People_ with the landing of Hengestand Horsa in the Isle of Thanet. The English people of to-day is farmore deeply rooted in the soil than that: our ancestors have livedhere, not for a thousand years alone, but for ten thousand or a hundredthousand, in certain lines at least. And the very names of our towns, our rivers, and our hills, go back in many cases, not merely to theRoman corruptions, but to the aboriginal Celtic, and the still moreaboriginal Euskarian tongue. 

THE END. 

HENDERSON & SPALDING, LTD. , 3 & 5, MARYLEBONE LANE, W.