SCIENCE IN ARCADY.

SCIENCE IN ARCADY

BY

GRANT ALLEN

LONDON :

LAWRENCE & BULLEN,

16, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.

1892.

Q
111

GBANT BICHABDS,

IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT
OF MANY KIND OFFICES,

Htmncufat (Greeting.

CONTENTS.

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 CHESTEUS ... 274

PBEFACE.

THESE essays deal for the most part with Science in
Arcady. 'Tis rny native country : for I am not of those
who ' praise the busy town.' On the contrary, in the
words of the great poet who has just departed to join
Milton and Shelley in a place of high collateral glory, I
' love to rail against it still,' with a naturalist's bitterness.
For the town is always dead and lifeless. There are who
admire it, they say — poor purblind 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 mortar have killed out all life over square
miles of Middlesex. For myself, I love better the densely-
peopled fields than this human desert, this beflagged and
macadamised man-made solitude. The country teems
with life on every hand ; a thousand different plants and
flowers in the spangled meadows ; a thousand varied
denizens of pond, and air, and heath, and copses. Their

x PREFACE.

ways are endless. They attract me far more with their
infinite diversity than the grey and gloomy haunts of the
cab-horse and the stock-broker.

But my Arcady, as you will see, is none the less
tolerably broad and eclectic in its limits. These various
essays have been suggested to my pen by rambles far and
wide between its elastic confines. The little tractate on
Mud, for example, recalls to mind some pleasant weeks
among 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-note struck by a fortnight in the
Tyrol. Tropical Education is a dim reminiscence of old
Jamaican experiences. Our Eight-Legged Friends were
observed at leisure on the window-panes of our own little
nook at Dorking. A Hill-Top Stronghold was sketched
in situ at Florence by a window that looked across the
valley to Fiesole. Excursions into books or into the
remoter past have given occasion for the archaeological
essays relegated here to the end of the volume.

My thanks are due to Messrs. Longmans for permission
to reprint from their magazine My Islands, A Hill-Top
Stronghold, A Desert Fruit, The Isle of Buim, Eight-
Legged Friends, and Tropical Education. I have also to
acknowledge a similar courtesy on the part of Messrs.
Smith & Elder with regard to Mud, The Bronze Axe>

PREFACE.

xi

High Life, Pretty Poll, The Greemvood Tree, On the
Wings of the Wind, Casters and Chesters, and Fish as
Fathers, all of which originally appeared in the Cornhill.
Messrs. Chatto & Windus have been equally kind 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 English audience.

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 islands first appeared above
the stormy sheet of the North-West Atlantic as a little
rising group of mountain tops, capping a broad boss of
submarine volcanoes. My attention was originally
called to the new archipelago by a brother investigator
of my own aerial race, who pointed out to me on the
wing that at a spot some 900 miles to the west of the
Portuguese coast, just opposite the place where your
mushroom city of Lisbon now stands, the water of the
ocean, as seen in a bird's-eye view from some three
thousand feet above, formed a distinct greenish patch
such as always betokens shoals or rising ground at the
bottom. Flying out at once to the point he indicated,
and poising myself above it on my broad pinions at a
giddy altitude, I saw at a glance that my friend was
quite right. Land ma.king was in progress. A volcanic
upheaval was taking place on the bed of the sea. A new
island group was being forced right up by lateral pressure

2 MY ISLANDS.

or internal energies from a depth of at least two
thousand fathoms.

I had always had a great liking for the study of
material plants and animals, and I was so much
interested in the occurrence of this novel phenomenon —
the growth and development of an oceanic island before
my very eyes — that I determined to devote the next few
thousand centuries or so of my aeonian existence to
watching the course of its gradual evolution.

If I trusted to unaided memory, however, for my
dates and facts, I might perhaps at this distance of time
be uncertain whether the moment was really what I
have roughly given, within a geological age or two, the
period of the Mid-Miocene. But existing remains on
one of the islands constituting my group (now called in
your new-fangled terminology Santa Maria) help me to
fix with comparative certainty the precise epoch of
their original upheaval. For these remains, still in
evidence on the spot, consist of a few small marine
deposits of Upper Miocene age; and I recollect dis-
tinctly that after the main group had been for some time
raised above the surface of the ocean, and after sand and
streams had formed a small sedimentary deposit con-
taining Upper Miocene fossils beneath the shoal water
surrounding the main group, a slight change of level
occurred, during which this minor island was pushed up
with the Miocene deposits on its shoulders, as a sort of
natural memorandum to assist my random scientific
recollections. With that solitary exception, however,
the entire group remains essentially volcanic in its com-
position, exactly as it was when I first saw its youthful

MY ISLANDS. 3

craters and its red-hot ash-cones pushed gradually up,
century after century, from the deep blue waters of the
Mid-Miocene ocean.

All round my islands the Atlantic then, as now, had a
depth, as I said before, of two thousand fathoms ; indeed,
in some parts between the group and Portugal the plum-
met of your human navigators finds no bottom, I have
often heard them say, till it reaches 2,500 ; and out of
this profound sea-bed the volcanic energies pushed up
my islands as a small submarine mountain range, whose
topmost summits alone stood out bit by bit above the
level of the surrounding sea. One of them, the most
abrupt and cone-like, by name now Pico, rises to this
day, a magnificent sight, sheer seven thousand feet
into the sky from the placid sheet that girds it round
on every side. You creatures of to-day, approaching it
in one of your clumsy new-fashioned fire-driven canoes
that you call steamers, must admire immensely its
conical peak, as it stands out silhouetted against the
glowing horizon in the deep red glare of a sub-tropical
Atlantic sunset.

But when I, from my solitary aerial perch, saw my
islands rise bare and massive first from the water's edge,
the earliest idea that occurred to me as an investigator of
nature was simply this : how will they ever get clad with
soil and herbage and living creatures ? So naked and
barren were their black crags and rocks of volcanic slag,
that I could hardly conceive how they could ever come
to resemble the other smiling oceanic islands which I
looked down upon in my flight from day to day over so
many wide and scattered oceans. I set myself to watch,

B2

4 MY ISLANDS.

accordingly, whence they would derive the first seeds of
life, and what changes would take place under dint of
time upon their desolate surface.

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

My primitive idea, as I watched my islands in this
their almost lifeless condition, was that the Gulf Stream
and the trade winds from America would bring the
earliest higher plants and animals to our shores. But in
this I soon found I was quite mistaken. The distance to be
traversed was so great, and the current so slow, that the
few seeds or germs of American species cast up upon the
shore from time to time were mostly far too old and
water-logged to show signs of life in such ungenial con-
ditions. It was from the nearer coasts of Europe, on
the contrary, that our earliest colonists seemed to come.
Though the prevalent winds set from the west, more
violent storms reached us occasionally from the eastward
direction ; and these, blowing from Europe, which lay

MY ISLANDS. 5

so much closer to our group, were far more likely to
bring with them by waves or wind some waifs and
strays of the European fauna and flora.

I well remember the first of these great storms that
produced any distinct impression on my islands. The
plants that followed in its wake were a few small ferns,
whose light spores were more readily carried on the
breeze than any regular seeds of flowering plants. For a
month or two nothing very marked occurred in the way
of change, but slowly the spores rooted, and soon pro-
duced a small crop of ferns, which, finding the ground
unoccupied, spread when once fairly started with extra-
ordinary rapidity, till they covered all the suitable
positions throughout the islands.

For the most part, however, additions to the flora, and
still more to the fauna, were very gradually made ; so
much so that most of the species now found in the group
did not arrive there till after the end of the Glacial epoch,
and belong essentially to the modern European assem-
blage of plants and animals. This was partly because the
islands themselves were surrounded by pack-ice during
that chilly period, which interrupted for a time the
course of my experiment. It was interesting, too, after
the ice cleared away, to note what kinds could manage
by stray accidents to cross the ocean with a fair
chance of sprouting or hatching out on the new soil,
and which were totally unable by original constitution
to survive the ordeal of immersion in the sea. For
instance, I looked anxiously at first for the arrival of
some casual acorn or some floating filbert, which might
stock my islands with waving greenery of oaks and hazel

6 MY ISLANDS.

bushes. But I gradually discovered, in the course of a
few centuries, that these heavy nuts never floated se-
curely so far as the outskirts of my little archipelago ; and
that consequently no chestnuts, apple trees, beeches,
alders, larches, or pines ever came to diversify my island
valleys. The seeds that did really reach us from time to
time belonged rather to one or other of four special
classes. Either they were very small and light, like the
spores of ferns, fungi, and club-mosses; or they were
winged and feathery, like dandelion and thistle-down ;
or they were the stones of fruits that are eaten by birds,
like rose-hips and hawthorn ; or they were 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 to the islands ; and if they
were of kinds adapted to the climate they grew and
flourished, living down the first growth of ferns and
flowerless herbs in the rich valleys.

The time which it took to people my archipelago with
these various plants was, of course, when judged by
your human standards, immensely long, as often the
group received only a single new addition in the lapse of
two or three centuries. But I noticed one very curious
result of this haphazard and lengthy mode of stocking
the country : some of the plants which arrived the
earliest, having the coast all clear to themselves, free
from the fierce competition to which they had always
boon exposed on the mainland of Europe, began to sport
a great deal in various directions, and being acted upon
here by new conditions, soon assumed under stress of

MY ISLANDS. 7

natural selection totally distinct specific forms. (You
see, I have quite mastered your best modern scientific
vocabulary.) For instance, there were at first no insects
of any sort on the islands ; and so those plants which
in Europe depended for their fertilisation upon bees or
butterflies had here either to adapt themselves somehow
to the wind as a carrier of their pollen or else to die out
for want of crossing. Again, the number of enemies
being reduced to a minimum, these early plants tended
to lose various defences or protections they had acquired
on the mainland against slugs or ants, and so to become
different in a corresponding degree from their European
ancestors. The consequence was that by the time you
men first discovered the archipelago no fewer than forty
kinds of plants had so far diverged from the parent
forms in Europe or elsewhere that your savants con-
sidered them at once as distinct species, and set them
down at first as indigenous creations. It amused me
immensely.

For out of these forty plants thirty-four were to my cer-
tain knowledge of European origin. I had seen their seeds
brought over by the wind or waves, and I had watched
them gradually altering under stress of the new
conditions into fresh varieties, which in process of time
became distinct species. Two of the oldest were
flowers of the dandelion and daisy group, provided with
feathery seeds which enable them to fly far before the
carrying breeze ; and these two underwent such pro-
found modifications in their insular home that the
systematic botanists who at last examined them insisted
upon putting each into a new genus, all by itself,

8 MY ISLANDS.

invented for the special purpose of their reception.
One almost equally ancient inhabitant, a sort of hare-
bell, also became in process of time extremely unlike
any other harebell I had ever seen in any part of my airy
wanderings. But the remaining thirty new species or so
evolved in the islands by the special circumstances of the
group had varied so comparatively little from their
primitive European ancestors, that they hardly deserved
to be called anything more than very distinct and
divergent varieties.

Some five or six plants, however, I noted arrive in my
archipelago, not from Europe, but from the Canaries or
Madeira, whose distant blue peaks lay dim on the
horizon far to the south-west of us, as I poised in mid-
air high above the topmost pinnacle of my wild craggy
Pico. These kinds, belonging to a much warmer region,
soon, as I noticed, underwent considerable modification
in our cooler climate, and were all of them adjudged
distinct species by the learned gentlemen who finally
reported upon my island realm to British science.

As far as I can recollect, then, the total number of
flowering plants I noted in the islands before the arrival
of man was about 200 ; and of these, as I said before,
only forty had so far altered in type as to be considered
at present peculiar to the archipelago. The remainder
were either comparatively recent arrivals or else had
found the conditions of their new home so like those of
the old one from which they migrated, that compara-
tively little change took place in their forms or habits.
Of course, just in proportion as the islands got stocked
1 noticed that the changes were less and less marked ;

MY ISLANDS. 9

for each new plant, insect, or bird that established itself
successfully tended to make the balance of nature more
similar to the one that obtained in the mainland oppo-
site, and so decreased the chances of novelty of variation.

Hence, it struck me that the oldest arrivals were the
ones which altered most in adaptation to the circumstan-
ces, while the newest, finding themselves in comparatively
familiar surroundings, had less occasion to be selected
for strange and curious freaks or sports of form or
colour.

The peopling of the islands with birds and animals,
however, was to me even a more interesting and en-
grossing study in natural evolution than its peopling by
plants, shrubs, and trees. I may as well begin, there-
fore, by telling you at once that no furry or hairy quad-
ruped of any sort — no mammal, as I understand your
men of science call them — was ever stranded alive upon
the shores of my islands. For twenty or thirty centuries
indeed, I waited patiently, examining every piece of
driftwood cast up upon our beaches, in the faint hope
that perhaps some tiny mouse or shrew or water-vole
might lurk half drowned in some cranny or crevice of the
bark or trunk. But it was all in vain. I ought to have
known beforehand that terrestrial animals of the higher
types never by any chance reach an oceanic island in any
part of this planet. The only three specimens of mam-
mals I ever saw tossed up on the beach were two
drowned mice and an unhappy squirrel, all as dead as
doornails, and horribly mauled by the sea and the
breakers. Nor did we ever get a snake, a lizard, a frog,
or a fresh-water fish, whose eggs I at first fondly

10 MY ISLANDS.

supposed might occasionally be transported to us on
bits of floating trees or matted turf, torn by floods
from those prehistoric Lusitanian or African forests.
No such luck was ours. Not a single terrestrial verte-
brate of any sort appeared upon our shores before the
advent of man with his domestic animals, who played
havoc at once with my interesting experiment.

It was quite otherwise with the unobtrusive small
deer of life — the snails, and beetles, and flies, and earth-
worms— and especially with the winged things : birds,
bats, and butterflies. In the very earliest days of niy
islands' existence, indeed, a few stray feathered fowls
of the air were driven ashore here by violent storms, at
a time when vegetation had not yet begun to clothe the
naked pumice and volcanic rock ; but these, of course,
perished for want of food, as did also a few later
arrivals, who came under stress of weather at the period
when only ferns, lichens, and mosses had as yet obtained
a foothold on the young archipelago. Sea-birds, of
course, soon found out our rocks ; but as they live off fish
only, they contributed little more than rich beds of
guano to the permanent colonising of the islands. As
well as I can remember, the land-snails were the earliest
truly terrestrial casuals that managed to pick up a stray
livelihood in these first colonial days of the archipelago.
They came oftenest in the egg, sometimes clinging to
water-logged leaves cast up by storms, sometimes hidden
in the bark of floating driftwood, and sometimes
swimming free on the open ocean. In one case, as I
recall to myself well, a swallow, driven off from the Portu-
guese coast, a little before the Glacial period had begun to

MY ISLANDS. 11

whiten the distant mountains of central and northern
Europe, fell exhausted at last upon the shore of Terceira.
There were no insects then for the poor bird to feed
upon, so it died of starvation and weariness before the
day was out ; but a little earth that clung in a pellet to
one of its feet contained the egg of a land-shell, while
the prickly seed of a common Spanish plant was
entangled among the winged feathers by its hooked awns.
The egg hatched out, and became the parent of a large
brood of minute snails, which, outliving the cold spell of
the Ice Age, had developed into a very distinct type in
the long period that intervened before the advent of man
in the islands ; while the seed sprang up on the natural
manure heap afforded by the swallow's decaying body,
and clinging to the valleys during the Glacial Age on the
hill-tops, gave birth in due season to one of the most
markedly indigenous of our Terceira plants.

Occasionally, too, very minute land-snails would
arrive alive on the island after their long sea-voyage on
bits of broken forest-trees — a circumstance which I
would perhaps hesitate to mention in mere human
society were it not that I have been credibly informed
your own great naturalist, Darwin, tried the experiment
himself with one of the biggest European land-molluscs,
the great edible Eoman snail, and found that it still lived
on in vigorous style after immersion in sea-water for
twenty days. Now, I myself observed that several of
these bits of broken trees, torn down by floods in heavy
storm time from the banks of Spanish or Portuguese
rivers, reached my island in eight or ten days after
leaving the mainland, and sometimes contained eggs of

12 MY ISLANDS.

small land- snails. But as very long periods often
passed without a single new species being introduced
into the group, any kind that once managed to establish
itself on any of the islands usually remained for ages
undisturbed by new arrivals, and so had plenty of oppor-
tunity to adapt itself perfectly by natural selection to
the new conditions. The consequence was, that out of
some seventy land-snails now known in the islands,
thirty-two had assumed distinct specific features before
the advent of man, while thirty-seven (many of which, I
think, I never noticed till the introduction of cultivated
plants) are common to my group with Europe or with
the other Atlantic islands. Most of these, I believe,
came in with man and his disconcerting agriculture.

As to the pond and river snails, so far as I could
observe, they mostly reached us later, being conveyed
in the egg on the feet of stray waders or water-birds,
which gradually peopled the island after the Glacial epoch.

Birds and all other flying creatures are now very
abundant in all the islands ; but I could tell you some
curious and interesting facts, too, as to the mode of their
arrival and the vicissitudes of their settlement. For
example, during the age of the Forest Beds in Europe,
a stray bullfinch was driven out to sea by a violent storm,
and perched at last on a bush at Fayal. I wondered at
first whether he would effect a settlement. But at that
time no seeds or fruits fit for bullfinches to eat existed
on the islands. Still, as it turned out, this particular
bullfinch happened to have in his crop several undigested
seeds of European plants exactly suited to the bullfinch
taste; so when he died on the spot, these seeds,

MY ISLANDS. 13

germinating abundantly, gave rise to a whole valleyful
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 few hundred years
later, a single cock bird did reach the island alone, much
exhausted with his journey, and managed to pick up a
living for himself off the seeds introduced by his unhappy
predecessor. But as he had 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 third bullfinch — which didn't surprise me, for
bullfinches are very woodland birds, and non-migratory
into the bargain — so that they didn't often get 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 a time,
as I imagined they must, into a distinct species. These
local bullfinches now form the only birds peculiar to the
islands ; and the reason is one well divined by one of
your own great naturalists (to whom I mean before I
end to make the amende honorable). In almost all other
cases the birds kept getting reinforced from time to time
by others of their kind blown out to sea accidentally —
for only such species were likely to arrive there — and
this kept up the purity of the original race, by ensuring
a cross every now and again with the European com-
munity. But the bullfinches, being the merest casuals,
never again to my knowledge were reinforced from the

14 MY ISLANDS.

mainland, and so they have produced at last a special
island type, exactly adapted to the peculiarities of their
new habitat.

You see, there was hardly ever a big storm on land
that didn't bring at least one or two new birds of some
sort or other to the islands. Naturally, too, the new-
comers landed always on the first shore they could sight ;
and so at the present day the greatest number of species
is found on the two easternmost islands nearest the
mainland, which have forty kinds of land-birds, while
the central islands have but thirty-six, and the western
only twenty-nine. It would have been quite different,
of course, if the birds came mainly from America with
the trade winds and the Gulf Stream, as I at first antici-
pated. In that case, there would have been most kinds
in the westernmost islands, and fewest stragglers in the
far eastern. But your own naturalists have rightly
seen that the existing distribution necessarily implies
the opposite explanation.

Birds, I early noticed, are always great carriers of
fruit-seeds, because they eat the berries, but don't digest
the hard little stones within. It was in that way, I
fancy, that the Portugal laurel first came to my islands,
because it has an edible fruit with a very hard seed ;
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 the peculiar juniper.
Before these shrubs were introduced thus unconsciously
by our feathered guests, there were no fruits on which
berry- eating birds could live ; but now they are the only

MY ISLANDS. 15

native trees or large bushes on the islands — I mean the
only ones not directly planted by you mischief-making
men, who have entirely spoilt my nice little experiment.

It was much the same with the history of some among
the birds themselves. Not a few birds of prey, for
example, were driven to my little archipelago by stress
of weather in its very early days ; but they all perished
for want of sufficient small quarry to make a living out
of. As soon, however, as the islands had got well
stocked with robins, black-caps, wrens, and wagtails, of
European types — as soon as the chaffinches had estab-
lished themselves on the seaward plains, and the canary
had learnt to nest without fear among the Portugal
laurels — then buzzards, long-eared owls, and common
barn-owls, driven westward by tempests, began to pick
up a decent living on all the islands, and have ever
since been permanent residents, to the immense terror
and discomfort of our smaller song-birds. Thus the
older the archipelago got the less chance was there of
local variation taking place to any large degree, because
the balance of life each day grew more closely to re-
semble that which each species had left behind it in its
native European or African mainland.

I said a little while ago we had no mammal in the
islands. In that I was not quite strictly correct. I
ought to have said, no terrestrial mammal. A little
Spanish bat got blown to us once by a rough nor'-easter,
and took up its abode at once among the caves of our
archipelago, where it hawks to this day after our flies
and beetles. This seemed to me to show very con-
spicuously the advantage which winged animals have

16 MY ISLANDS.

in the matter of cosmopolitan dispersion ; for while it
was quite impossible for rats, mice, or squirrels to cross
the intervening belt of three hundred leagues of sea,
their little winged relation, the flitter-mouse, made the
journey across quite safely on his own leathery vans, and
with no greater difficulty than a swallow or a wood-
pigeon.

The insects of my archipelago tell very much the
same story as the birds and the plants. Here, too,
winged species have stood at a great advantage. To be
sure, the earliest butterflies and bees that arrived in the
fern-clad period were starved for want of honey ; but as
soon as the valleys began to be thickly tangled with
composites, harebells, and sweet-scented myrtle bushes,
these nectar-eating insects established themselves
successfully, and kept their breed true by occasional
crosses with fresh arrivals blown to sea afterwards.
The development of the beetles I watched with far
greater interest, as they assumed fresh forms much more
rapidly under their new conditions of restricted food and
limited enemies. Many kinds I observed which came
originally from Europe, sometimes in the larval state,
sometimes in the egg, and sometimes flying as full-grown
insects before the blast of the angry tempest. Several
of these changed their features rapidly after their arrival
in the islands, producing at first divergent varieties, and
finally, by dint of selection, acting in various ways,
through climate, food, or enemies, on these nascent
forms, evolving into stable and well-adapted species.
But I noticed three cases where bits of driftwood thrown
up from South America on the western coasts contained

MY ISLANDS. 17

the eggs or larvae of American beetles, while several
others were driven ashore from the Canaries or Maderia ;
and in one instance even a small insect, belonging to a
type now confined to Madagascar, found its way safely
by sea to this remote spot, where, being a female with
eggs, it succeeded in establishing a flourishing colony.
I believe, however, that at the time of its arrival it still
existed on the African continent, but becoming 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 I devoted myself entirely to the task of
watching my fauna and flora develop itself, to look out
from day to day for any chance arrival by wind or
waves, and to follow the course of its subsequent vicissi-
tudes and evolution. In a great many cases, especially
at first, the new-comer found no niche ready for it in the
established order of things on the islands, and was fain
at last, after a hard struggle, to retire for ever from the
unequal contest. But often enough, too, he made a
gallant fight for it, and, adapting himself rapidly to his
new environment, changed his form and habits with
surprising facility. For natural selection, I found, is a
hard schoolmaster. If you happen to fit your place in
the world, you live and thrive, but if you don't happen
to fit it, to the wall with you without quarter. Thus
sometimes I would see a small canary beetle quickly
take to new food and new modes of life on my islands
under my very eyes, so that in a century or so I judged
him myself worthy of the distinction of a separate

o

18 MY ISLANDS.

species; while in another case, I remember, a south
European weevil evolved before long into something so
wholly different from his former self that a systematic
entomologist would have been forced to enrol him in a
distinct genus. I often wish now that I had kept a
regular collection of all the intermediate forms, to pre-
sent as an illustrative series to one of your human
museums ; but in those days, of course, we none of us
imagined anybody but ourselves would ever take an
interest in these problems of the development of life, and
we let the chance slide till it was too late to re-
cover it.

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

MY ISLANDS. 19

Up to the moment of the arrival of man in the archipel-
ago, the whole population, animal and vegetable, consisted
entirely of these waifs and strays, blown out to sea from
Europe or Africa, and modified more or less on the spot
in accordance with the varying needs of their new home.
But the advent of the obtrusive human species spoilt the
game at once for an independent observer. Man
immediately introduced oranges, bananas, sweet potatoes,
grapes, plums, almonds, and many other trees or shrubs,
in which, for selfish reasons, he was personally
interested. At the same time he quite unconsciously
and unintentionally stocked the islands with a fine
vigorous crop of European weeds, so that the number of
kinds of flowering plants included in the modern flora
of my little archipelago exceeds, I think, by fully one-
half that which I remember before the date of the
Portuguese occupation. In the same way, besides his
domestic animals, this spoil-sport colonist man broughb
in his train accidentally rabbits, weasels, mice, and rats,
which now abound in many parts of the group, so that
the islands have now in effect a wild mammalian fauna.
What is more odd, a small lizard has also got about in
the walls — not as you would imagine, a native-born
Portuguese subject, but of a kind found only in Madeira
and Teneriffe, and, as far as I could make out at the
time, it seemed to me to come over with cuttings of
Madeira vines for planting at St. Michael's. It was about
the same time, I imagine, that eels and gold-fish first got
loose from glass globes into the ponds and water-courses.

I have forgotten to mention, what you will no doubt
your.self long since have inferred, that my archipelago is

c 2

20 MY ISLANDS.

known among human beings in modern times as the
Azores ; and also that traces of all these curious facts
of introduction and modification, which T have detailed
here in their historical order, may still be detected by an
acute observer and reasoner in the existing condition of
the fauna and flora. Indeed, one of your own country-
men, Mr. Goodman, has collected all the most salient
of these facts in his ' Natural History of the Azores/ and
another of your distinguished men of science, Mr. Alfred
Eussel Wallace, has given essentially the same explana-
tions beforehand as those which I have here ventured to
lay, from another point of view, before a critical human
audience. But while Mr. Wallace has arrived at them
by a process of arguing backward from existing facts to
prior causes and probable antecedents, it occurred to me,
who had enjoyed such exceptional opportunities of
watching the whole process unfold itself from the very
beginning, that a strictly historical account of how I had
seen it come about, step after step, might possess for
some of you a greater direct interest than Mr. Wallace's
inferential solution of the self -same problem. If, through
lapse of memory or inattention to detail at so remote a
period, I have set down aught amiss, I sincerely trust
you will be kind enough to forgive me. But this little
epic of the peopling of a single oceanic archipelago by
casual strays, which I alone have had the good fortune
to follow through all its episodes, seemed to me too
unique and valuable a chapter in the annals of life to be
withheld entirely from the scientific world of your eager,
ephemeral, nineteenth century humanity.

TEOPICAL EDUCATION.

IF any one were to ask me (which is highly unlikely) ' In
what university would an intelligent young man do best
to study ? ' I think I should be very much inclined in-
deed to answer offhand, ' In the Tropics.'

No doubt this advice sounds on first hearing just a
trifle paradoxical ; and no doubt, too, the proposed
university has certain serious drawbacks (like many
others) on the various grounds of health, expense, faith,
and morals. Senior Proctors are unknown at Honolulu ;
Select Preachers don't range as far as the West Coast.
But it has always seemed to me, nevertheless, that
certain elements of a liberal education are to be acquired
tropically which can never be acquired in a temperate,
still less in an arctic or antarctic academy. This is more
especially true, I allow, in the particular cases of the
biologist and the sociologist ; but it is also true in a some-
what less degree of the mere common arts course, and
the mere average seeker after liberal culture. Vast
aspects of nature and human life exist which can never
adequately be understood aright except in tropical
countries ; vivid side-lights are cast upon our own history

22 TROPICAL EDUCATION.

and the history of our globe which can never adequately
be appreciated except beneath the searching and all too
garish rays of a tropical sun.

Whenever I meet a cultivated man who knows his
Tropics — and more particularly one who has known his
Tropics during the formative period of mental develop-
ment, say from eighteen to thirty — I feel instinctively
that he possesses certain keys of man and nature, certain
clues to the problems of the world we live in, not
possessed in anything like the same degree by the mere
average annual output of Oxford or of Heidelberg. I
feel that we talk like Freemasons together — we of the
Higher Brotherhood who have worshipped the sun,
prcesentiorem deum, in his own nearer temples.

Let me begin by positing an extreme parallel. How
obviously inadequate is the conception of life enjoyed by
the ordinary Laplander or the most intelligent Fuegian !
Suppose even he has attended the mission school of his
native village, and become learned there in all the
learning of the Egyptians, up to the extreme level of the
sixth standard, yet how feeble must be his idea of the
planet on which he moves ! How much must his horizon
be cabined, cribbed, confined by the frost and snow, the
gloom and poverty, of the bare land around him ! He
lives in a dark cold world of scrubby vegetation and scant
animal life : a world where human existence is neces-
sarily preserved only by ceaseless labour and at severe
odds ; a world out of ^which all the noblest and most
beautiful living creatures have been ruthlessly pressed ;
a world where nothing great has been or can be ; a world
doomed by its mere physical conditions to eternal

TROPICAL EDUCATION. 23

poverty, discomfort, and squalor. For green fields he
has snow and reindeer moss : for singing birds and
flowers, the ptarmigan and the tundra. How can he
ever form any fitting conception of the glory of life — of
the means by which animal and vegetable organisms
first grew and flourished ? How can he frame to himself
any reasonable picture of civilised society, or of the
origin and development of human faculty and human
organisation ?

Somewhat the same, though of course in a highly
mitigated degree, are the disadvantages under which the
pure temperate education labours, when compared with
the education unconsciously drunk in at every pore by
an intelligent mind in tropical climates. And fully to
understand this pregnant educational importance of the
Tropics we must consider with ourselves how large a
part tropical conditions have borne in the development
of life in general, and of human life and society in
particular.

The Tropics, we must carefully remember, are the
norm a of nature : the way things mostly are and always
have been. They represent to us the common condition
of the whole world during by far the greater part of its
entire existence. Not only are they still in the strictest
sense the biological head-quarters : they are also the
standard or central type by which we must explain all
the rest of nature, both in man and beast, in plant and
animal.

The temperate and arctic worlds, on the other hand,
are a mere passing accident in the history of our planet :
a hole-and-corner development ; a special result of the

24 TROPICAL ED UCA TION.

great Glacial epoch, and of that vast slow secular
cooling which preceded and led up to it, from the
beginning of the Miocene or Mid-Tertiary period. Our
European ideas, poor, harsh, and narrow, are mainly
formed among a chilled and stunted fauna and flora,
under inclement skies, and in gloomy days, all of which
can give us but a very cramped and faint conception of
the joyous exuberance, the teeming vitality, the fierce
hand-to-hand conflict, and the victorious exultation of
tropical life in its full free development.

All through the Primary and Secondary epochs of
geology, it is now pretty certain, hothouse conditions
practically prevailed almost without a break over the
whole world from pole to pole. It may be true, indeed,
as Dr. Croll believes (and his reasoning on the point I
confess is fairly convincing), that from time to time
glacial periods in one or other hemisphere broke in for a
while upon the genial warmth that characterised the
greater part of those vast and immeasurable primaeval
aeons. But even if that were so — if at long intervals the
world for some hours in its cosmical year was chilled and
frozen in an insignificant cap at either extremity — these
casual episodes in a long story do not interfere with the
general truth of the principle that life as a whole during
the greater portion of its antique existence has been
carried on under essentially tropical conditions. No
matter what geological formation we examine, we find
everywhere the same tale unfolded in plain inscriptions
before our eyes. Take, for example, the giant club-
mosses and luxuriant tree-ferns nature-printed on shales
of the coal age in Britain : and we see in the wild under-

TROPICAL EDUCATION. 25

growth of those palaeozoic forests ample evidence of a
warm and almost West Indian climate among the low
basking islets of our northern carboniferous seas. Or
take once more the oolitic epoch in England, lithographed
on its own mud, with its puzzle-monkeys and its sago-
palms, its crocodiles and its deinosaurs, its winged
pterodactyls and its whale-like lizards. All these huge
creatures and these broad-leaved trees plainly indicate
the existence of a temperature over the whole of Northern
Europe almost as warm as that of the Malay Archipelago
in our own day. The weather report for all the earlier
ages stands almost uninterruptedly at Set Fair.

Eoughly speaking, indeed, one may say that through
the long series of Primary and Secondary formations
hardly a trace can be found of ice or snow, autumn or
winter, leafless boughs or pinched and starved deciduous
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, we get passing indi-
cations of what seems very like a glacial epoch, partially
comparable to that great glaciation on whose last fringe
we still 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 up to the very poles
under conditions which we would now describe as essen-
tially tropical.

It was with the Tertiary period — perhaps, indeed, only
with the middle subdivision of that period — that the
gradual cooling of the polar and intermediate regions
began. We know from the deposits of the chalk epoch

26 TROPICAL EDUCATION.

in Greenland that late in Secondary times ferns,
magnolias, myrtles, and sago-palms — an Indfon or
Mexican flora — flourished exceedingly in what is now
the dreariest and most ice-clad region of the northern
hemisphere. Later still, in the Eocene days, though
the plants of Greenland had grown slightly more
temperate in type, we still find among the fossils, not
only oaks, planes, vines, and walnuts, but also welling-
tonias like the big trees of California, Spanish chestnuts,
quaint southern salisburias, broad-leaved liquidambars,
and American sassafras. Nay, even in glacier-clad
Spitzbergen itself, where the character of the flora already
begins to show signs of incipient chilling, we nevertheless
see among the Eocene types such plants as the swamp-
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, this vegetation still bespeaks a
climate considerably more genial, mild, and equable than
that of modern England.

It was in this basking world of the chalk and the Eocene
that the great mammalian fauna first took its rise ; it was
in this easy world of fruits and sunshine that the primitive
ancestors of man first began to work upwards toward the
distinctively human level of the palaeolithic period.

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 arctic and antarctic worlds
were chilled and cramped, degree after degree, by the grad-
ual on-coming of the Great Ice Age. I am not going to deal
here with either the causes or the extent of that colossal

TROPICAL EDUCATION. 27

cataclysm ; I shall take all those for granted at present :
what we are concerned with now are the results it left
behind — the changes which it wrought on fauna and flora
and on human society. Especially is it of importance
in this connection to point out that the Glacial epoch is
not yet entirely finished — if, indeed, it is ever destined to
be finished. We are living still on the fringe of the Ice Age,
in a cold and cheerless era, the legacy of the accumu-
lated glaciers of the northern and southern snow-fields.

If once that ice were melted off — ah, well, there is
much virtue in an if. Still, Mr. Alfred Eussel Wallace
seems to suggest somewhere that the sun is gradually
making inroads even now on those great glacier-sheets
of the northern cap, just as we know he is doing on the
smaller glacier-sheets of Switzerland (most of which are
receding), and that in time perhaps (say in a hundred
thousand years or so) warm ocean currents may once
more penetrate to the very poles themselves. That,
however, is neither here nor there. The fact remains
that we of Northern Europe live to-day in a cramped,
chilled, contracted world ; a world from which all the
larger, fiercer, and grander types have either been
killed off or driven south ; a world which stands to the
full and vigorous world of the Eocene and Miocene
periods in somewhat the same relation as Lapland
stands to-day to Italy or the Eiviera.

This being so, it naturally results that if we want
really to understand the history of life, its origin and its
episodes, we must turn nowadays to that part of our
planet which still most nearly preserves the original con-
ditions— that is to say, the Tropics. And it has always

28 TROPICAL EDUCATION.

seemed to me, both d priori and d posteriori, that the
Tropics on this account do really possess for every one
of us a vast and for the most part unrecognised
educational importance.

I say ' for every one of us,' of deliberate design. I
don't mean merely for the biologist, though to him, no
doubt, their value in this respect is greatest of all.
Indeed, I doubt whether the very ideas of the struggle
for life, natural selection, the survival of the fittest,
would ever have occurred at all to the stay-at-home
naturalists of the Linnaean epoch. It was in the depths
of Brazilian forests, or under the broad shade of East
Indian palms, that those fertile conceptions first flashed
independently upon two southern explorers. It is very
noteworthy indeed that all the biologists who have done
most to revolutionise the science of life in our own day —
Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, Bates, Fritz Miiller, and
Belt — have without exception formed their notions
of the plant and animal world during tropical travels
in early life. No one can read the ' Voyage of the
Beagle,' the ' Naturalist on the Amazons,' or the ' Malay
Archipelago ' without feeling at every page how profoundly
the facts of tropical nature had penetrated and modified
their author's minds. On the other hand, it is well worth
while to notice that the formal opposition to the new and
more expansive evolutionary views came mainly from the
museum and laboratory type of naturalists in London
and Paris, the official exponents of dry bones, who knew
nature only through books and preserved specimens, or
through her impoverished and far less plastic develop-
ments in northern lands. The battle of organic evolution

TROPICAL EDUCATION. 29

has been waged by the Darwins, the Huxleys, and the
Miillers on the one hand, 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 of the Tropics in early life exerts a marked
widening and philosophic influence upon a man's whole
mental horizon. In ten thousand ways, in that great
tropical university, men feel themselves in closer touch
than elsewhere with the ultimate facts and truths of
nature. I don't know whether it is all fancy and pre-
conceived opinion, but I often imagine when I talk with
new-met men that I can detect a certain difference in
tone and feeling at first sight between those who have
and those who have not passed the Tropical Tripos. In
the Tropics, in short, we seem to get down to the very
roots of things. Thousands of questions, social, political,
economical, ethical, present themselves at once in new
and more engagingly simple aspects. Difficulties vanish,
distinctions disappear, conventions fade, clothes are
reduced to their least common measure, man stands
forth in his native nakedness. Things that in the North
we had come to regard as inevitable — garments, firing,
income tax, morality — evaporate or simplify themselves
with instructive ease and phantasmagoric readiness.
Malthus and the food question assume fresh forms, as
in dissolving views, before our very eyes. How are
slums conceivable or East Ends possible where every
man can plant his own yam and cocoa-nut, and reap
their fruit four-hundred-fold ? How can Mrs. Grundy
thrive where every woman may rear her own ten
children on her ten-rood plot without aid or assistance

30 TROPICAL EDUCATION.

from their indeterminate fathers? What need of
carpentry where a few bamboos, cut down at random,
can be fastened together with thongs into a comfortable
chair ? What use of pottery where calabashes hang on
every tree, and cocoa-nuts, with the water fresh and
pure within, supply at once the cup, and the filter, and
the Apollinaris within ?

Of course I don't mean to assert, either, that this
tropical university will in itself suffice for all the needs of
educated or rather of educable men. It must be taken,
bien entendu, as a supplementary course to the Literse
Humaniores. There are things which can only be learnt
in the crowded haunts and cities of men — in London,
Paris, New York, Vienna. There are things which can only
be learnt in the centres of culture or of artistic handicraft
— in Oxford, Munich, Florence, Venice, Eome. There
is only one Grand Canal and only one Pitti Palace. We
must have Shakespeare, Homer, Catullus, Dante ; we
must have Phidias, Fra Angelico, Kafael, Mendelssohn ;
we must have Aristotle, Newton, Laplace, Spencer.
But after all these, and before all these, there is some-
thing more left to learn. Having first read them, we
must read ourselves out of them. We must forget all
this formal modern life ; we must break away from this
cramped, cold, northern world ; we must find ourselves
face to face at last, in Pacific isles or African forests,
with the underlying truths of simple naked nature. For
that, in its perfection, we must go to the Tropics ; and
there, we shall learn and unlearn much, coming back,
no doubt, with shattered faiths and broken gods, and
strangely disconcerted European prejudices, but looking

TROPICAL EDUCATION. 31

out upon life with a new outlook, an outlook undimmed
by ten thousand preconceptions which hem in the vision
and obstruct the view of the mere temperately educated.
Nor is it only 011 the elite 'of the world that this
tropical training has in its own way a widening influence.
It is good, of course, for our Galtons to have seen South
Africa ; good for our Tylors to have studied Mexico ;
good for our Hookers to have numbered the rhododen-
drons and deodars of the Himalayas. I sometimes
fancy, even, that in the works of our very greatest
stay-at-home thinkers on anthropological or sociological
subjects, I detect here and there a certain formalist and
schematic note which betrays the want of first-hand
acquaintance with the plastic and expansive nature of
tropical society. The beliefs and relations of the actual
savage have not quite that definiteness of form and
expression which our University Professors would fain
assign to them. But apart from the widening influence
of the Tropics on these picked minds, there is a widen-
ing influence exerted insensibly on the very 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 all removed. Men live in a freer,
wider, warmer air ; their doors and windows stand open
day and night; the scent of flowers and the hum of
insects blow in upon them with every breeze ; their
brother man and sister woman are more patent in every
action to their eyes; the world shows itself more
frankly ; it has fewer secrets, and readier sympathies. I
don't mean to say the result is all gain. Far from it.

32 TROPICAL EDUCATION.

There are evils inherent in tropical life which, as a noble
lord remarks of nature generally, " no preacher can
heal." But viewed as education, like Saint-Simon's
thieving, it is all valuable. I should think most men
who have once passed through a tropical experience
would no more wish that full chapter blotted out of
their lives than they would consent to lose their
university culture, their Continental travel, or their
literary, scientific, or artistic education.

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

In the first place, because first in order of realisation,
there is its value as a mental bouleversement, a revolu-
tion in ideas, a sort of moral and intellectual cold
shower-bath, a nervous shock to the system generally.
The patient or pupil gets so thoroughly upset in all his
preconceived ideas ; he finds all round him a life so
different from the life to which he has been accustomed
in colder regions, that he wakes up suddenly, rubs his
eyes hard, and begins to look about him for some general
explanation of the world he lives in. It is good for the
ordinary man to get thus unceremoniously upset. Take
the average young intelligence of the London streets,
with its glib ideas already formed from supply and
demand in a civilised country, where soil is appropriated,
and classes distinct, and commodities drop as it were
from the clouds upon the middle-class breakfast-table —
take such an intelligence, self-satisfied and empty, and
place its possessor all at once in a new environment, where

TROPICAL EDUCATION. 33

everything material, mental, and moral seems topsy-
turvy, where life is real and morals are rudimentary—
and unless he is a very particular fool indeed, what a
lot you must really give that blithe newcomer to turn over
and think about ! The sun that shifts now north, now south
of him ; the seasons that go by fours instead of twos ;
the trees that blossom and bear fruit from January to
December, with no apparent regard for the calendar
months as by law established; the black, brown, or
yellow people, who know not his creed or his social
code ; the castes and cross-divisions that puzzle and
surprise him ; the pride and the scruples, deeper than
those of civilised life, but that nevertheless run counter
to his own ; the economic conditions that defy his pre-
conceptions ; the virtues and the vices that equally rub
him up the wrong way — all these things are highly
conducive to the production of that first substratum of
philosophic thinking, a Socratic attitude of supreme
ignorance, a pure Cartesian frame of universal doubt.

Then again there is the marvellous exuberance and
novelty of the fauna and flora. And this once more has
something better for us all than mere specialist interest.
Sugar and ginger grow for all alike. For we must re-
member that not only do the Tropics represent the vastly
greater portion of the world's past : they also represent
the vastly greater portion of the world's present. By
far the larger part of the land surface of the earth is
tropical or subtropical ; the temperate and arctic
regions make up but a minor and unimportant fraction
of the soil of our planet. And if we include the sea as
well, this truth becomes even more strikingly evident :

D

34 TROPICAL EDUCATION.

the Tropics are even now the rule of life ; the colder
regions are but an abnormal and outlying eccentricity
of nature. Yet it is from this starved and dwarfed
and impoverished northern area that most of us have
formed our views of life, to the total exclusion of the
wider, richer, more varied world that calls for our
admiration in tropical latitudes.

Insensibly this richness and vividness of nature all
around one, on a first visit to the Tropics, sinks into
one's mind, and produces profound, though at first
unconscious, modifications in one's whole mode of re-
garding man and his universe. Especially is this the
case in early life, when the character is still plastic and
the eye still keen : pictures are formed in that brilliant
sunshine and under those dim arches of hot grey sky
that photograph themselves for ever on the lasting
tablets of the human memory. John Stuart Mill in his
Autobiography dwells lovingly, I remember, on the pro-
found effect produced on himself by his childish visits to
Jeremy Bentham at Ford Abbey in Dorsetshire, on the
delightful sense of space and freedom and generous
expansion given to his mind by the mere act of living
and moving in those stately halls and wide airy gardens.
Every university man must look back with pleasure of
somewhat the same sort to the free breezy memories of
the quadrangles and common rooms of Christ Church
or of Trinity. But in the tropical university everybody
passes his time in arcades of Greek or Pompeian airiness :
the palm-trees wave and whisper around his head as he
sits for coolness on his wide verandah ; the humming-
birds dart from flower to flower on the delicate bouquets

TROPICAL EDUCATION. 35

that crowd his drawing-room. I knew a lady who made
a capital collection of butterflies and moths at her own
dinner-table by simply impounding in paper boxes
the insects that flitted about the lamp at dessert.
Why, if it comes to that, the very bread itself comprises
generally a whole entomological cabinet, and contains in
fragments the disjecta membra of specimens enough to
stock entire glass cases at severe South Kensington.
How's that for an inducement to study life where it is
richest and most abundant in its native starting-place ?

But above all in educational importance I rank the
advantage of seeing human nature in its primitive sur-
roundings, far from the squalid and chilly influences of
the tail-end of the Glacial epoch. I admit at once that
cold has done much, exceeding much, for human develop-
ment— has been the mother of civilisation in somewhat
the same sense that necessity has been the mother of
invention. To it, no doubt, we owe to a great extent, in
varying stages, clothing, the house, fire, the steam-engine.
Yet none the less is it true that the first levels of society
must needs have been passed under essentially tropical
conditions, and that nascent civilisation spread but slowly
northward, from Egypt and Asia, through Greece and
Italy, to the cloudy regions where its chief centres are
at present domiciled under canopies of coal smoke. And
even to-day the sight of the tropics, green and luxuriant,
brings us into touch at once with earlier ideas and habits
of the race — makes us more able not only to understand,
but also to sympathise with, our ancient ancestors of the
naked-and-not-ashamed era of culture. Views formed
exclusively in the North tend too much to imitate the

D 2

86 TROPICAL EDUCATION.

reduced gentlewoman's outlook upon life ; views formed
in the Tropics correct this refractive influence by a certain
genial and tolerant virile expansion, not to be learned at
the Common, Clapham.

To one whose economic pendulum has hitherto oscillated
between selfish luxury in Mayfair and squalid poverty in
Seven Dials, there is indeed a world of novelty in the first
view of the tropical poverty that is not squalid but con-
tentedly luxurious— of the dusky father with his wife or
wives (the mere number is a detail) sprawling at full
length, half clad, in the eye of the sun, before the palm-
thatched hut, while the fat black babies and the fat black
little pigs wallow together almost indistinguishably in the
dust at his side, just out of reach of the muscular foot
that might otherwise of pure wantonness molest them.
What a flood of light it all casts upon the future possi-
bilities of society, that leisured, cultureless household, on
whose garden-plot yam or bread-fruit or bananas or sweet
potatoes can be grown in sufficient quantity to support
the family without more labour than in England would
pay for its kitchen coals ; where the hut is but a shelter
from rain, or a bed-curtain for night, and where the
untaxed sun supplies the place of a drawing-room fire all
the year round, and warms the water for the baby's bath
at nothing the gallon ! If there is any man who doesn't
sympathise with his dusky brother when he sees him thus
at home in his airy palace — any man who doesn't frater-
nise closely with his kind when thus brought face to face
with our primitive existence, I don't envy him his stern
and wild Caledonian ethics, The beach-comber instinct
should be strong in all sane minds. Or if that blunt way

TROPICAL EDUCATION. 37

of putting it perchance offend the weaker brethren, let us
say rather, the spirit of the Lotus-eaters. For the man
who doesn't want to eat of the Lotus just once in his life
has become too civilised : the iron of the Gradgrind era
of universal competition and payment by results has
entered to deeply into his sordid soul. He wants a
course of Egypt and Tahiti.

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 tend rather to encourage a
certain genial and friendly tolerance of all possible human
forms of society — even the lowest. They are essentially
democratic, not to say socialistic and revolutionary in
tone. By bringing us all down to the underlying verities
of life, apart from its conventions, they beget perhaps a
somewhat hasty impatience of Court dress and the Lord
Chamberlain's regulations. But, per contra, they teach
us to feel that every man, whether black, brown, or
white, is very human, and every woman and child, if
possible, even a trifle more so. Wicked as it all is, there
is yet in tropical political economy more of the Gospel
according to St. John, and less of Adam Smith, Eicardo,
and Malthus, than in any orthodox political economy
prescribed by examiners for the University of London.
It is something to see a world where ceaseless toil is not
the necessary and inevitable lot of all who don't pay
income tax on a thousand a year, even if Board schools
are unknown and quadratic equations a vanishing
quantity. It is something to see a stick of sugar-cane
protruding from the mouth of every child, and oranges
retailed at twelve for a ha'penny. It is something to

38 TROPICAL EDUCATION.

know how the vast majority of the human race still live
and move and have their being, and to feel that after all
their mode of life, though lacking in Greek iambics, wall-
papers, and the Saturday Review, yet appeals in its own
beach-comberish way to some of one's inmost and deepest
yearnings. The hibiscus that flames before the wattled
hut, the parrot that chatters from the green and golden
mango-tree, the lithe, healthy figures of the children in
the stream, are some compensation for the lack of
London mud, London fog, and London illustrations of
practical Christianity in the Isle of Dogs and the Ber-
mondsey purlieus. I don't know whether I am knocking
the last nail into the completed coffin of my own conten-
tion, but I believe every right-minded man returns from
the Tropics a good deal more of a Communist than when
he went there.

One word of explanation to prevent mistake. I am
not myself, like Kingsley or Wallace, an enthusiastic
tropicist. On the contrary, viewed as a place of per-
manent residence, I don't at all like the Tropics to live
in. I am pleading here only for their educational value,
in small doses. Spending two or three years there in
the heydey of life is very much like reading Herodotus —
a thing one is glad one had once to do, but one would
never willingly do again for any money. We northern
creatures are remote products of the Great Ice Age, and
by this time, like Polar bears, we have grown adapted to
our glacial environment. All the more, therefore, is it a
useful shaking-up for us to get transported bodily from
our cramped and poverty-stricken northern slums, just
once in our life, to the palms and temples of the South,

TROPICAL EDUCATION. 39

the lands where the human body is a hardy plant, not a
frail exotic. We come back to our chilly home among
the fogs and bogs with wider projects for the thawing
clown of the social ice-heap, and the introduction of the
bread-fruit-tree and the currant-bun-bush into the re-
motest wilds of the borough of Hackney. I am not even
quite sure that tropical experience doesn't predispose us
somewhat in favour of planting the sweet potato instead
of grazing battering-rams in the uplands of Connemara.
But hush ; I hear an editorial frown. No more of this
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 find hirn. On all waste
ground outside most southern cities — Nice, Cannes,
Florence : Eome, Algiers, Granada : Athens, Palermo,
Tunis, where you will — the soil is thickly covered by
dark trailing vines which bear on their branches a queer
hairy green fruit, much like a common cucumber at that
early stage of its existence when we know it best in the
commercial form of pickled gherkins. As long as you
don't interfere with them, these hairy green fruits do
nothing out of the common in the way of personal
aggressiveness. Like the model young lady of the
books on etiquette, they don't speak unless they're
spoken to. But if perad venture you chance to brush up
against the plant accidentally, or you- irritate it of set
purpose with your foot or your cane, then, as Mr. Eider
Haggard would say, ' a strange thing happens ' : off
jumps the little green fruit with a startling bounce, and
scatters its juice and pulp and seeds explosively through
a hole in the end where the stem joined on to it. The

ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 41

entire central part of the cucumber, in short (answering
to the seeds and pulp of a ripe melon), squirts out
elastically through the breach in the outer wall, leaving
the hollow shell behind as a mere empty windbag.

Naturally, the squirting cucumber knows its own
business best, and is not without sufficient reasons of its
own for this strange and, to some extent, unmannerly
behaviour. By its queer trick of squirting, it manages
to kill at least two birds with one stone. For, in the
first place, the sudden elastic jump of the fruit frightens
away browsing animals, such as goats and cattle. Those
meditative ruminants are little accustomed to finding
shrubs or plants take the aggressive against them; and
when they see a fruit that quite literally flies in their
faces of its own accord, they hesitate to attack the
uncanny vine which 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 impresses
itself on the memory by stinging like red pepper. So
the trick of squirting serves in a double way as a pro-
tection to the plant against the attacks of herbivorous
animals and other enemies.

But that's not all. Even when no enemy is near, the
ripe fruits at last drop off of themselves, and scatter their
seeds elastically in every direction. This they do simply
in order to disseminate their kind in new and unoccupied
spots, where the seedlings will root and find an opening
in life for themselves. Observe, indeed, that the very
word ' disseminate ' implies a general vague recognition
of this principle of plant-life on the part of humanity.

42 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

It means, etymologically, to scatter seed ; and it points
to the fact that everywhere in nature seeds are scattered
broadcast, infinite pains being taken by the mother-plant
for their general diffusion over wide areas of woodland,
plain, or prairie.

Let us take as examples a single little set of instances,
familiar to everybody, but far commoner in the world at
large than the inhabitants of towns are at all aware of :
I mean, the winged seeds, that fly about freely in the
air by means of feathery hairs or gossamer, like thistle-
down and dandelion. Of these winged types we have
many hundred varieties in England alone. All the
willow-herbs, for example, have such feathery seeds (or
rather fruits) to help them on their way through life ;
and one kind, the beautiful pink rose-bay, flies about so
readily, and over such wide spaces of open country, that
the plant is known to farmers in America as fireweed,
because it always springs up at once over whole square
miles of charred and smoking soil after every devastating
forest fire. It travels fast, for it travels like Ariel. In
much the same way, the coltsfoot grows on all new
English railway banks, because its winged seeds are
wafted everywhere in myriads on the winds of March.
All the willows and poplars have also winged seeds : so
have the whole vast tribe of hawkweeds, groundsels, rag-
worts, thistles, fleabanes, cat's-ears, dandelions, and
lettuces. Indeed, one may say roughly, there are very
few plants of any size or importance in the economy of
nature which don't deliberately provide, in one way or
another, for the dispersal and dissemination of their
fruits or seedlings.

ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 43

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

The answer is a more profound jpne than you would at
first imagine. Plants discovered the grand principle of
the rotation of crops long before man did. The farmer
now knows that if he sows wheat or turnips too many
years running on the same plot, he ' exhausts the soil,'
as we say — deprives it of certain special mineral or
animal constituents needful for that particular crop,
and makes the growth of the plant, therefore, feeble or
even impossible. To avoid this misfortune, he lets the
land lie fallow, or varies his crops from year to year
according to a regular and deliberate cycle. Well,
natural selection forced the same discovery upon the
plants themselves long before the farmer had dreamed
of its existence. For plants, being, in the strictest sense,
'rooted to the spot,' absolutely require that all their
needs should be supplied quite locally. Hence, from
the very beginning, those plants which scattered their
seeds widest throve the best ; while those which merely
dropped them on the ground under their own shadow,
and on soil exhausted by their own previous demands
upon it, fared ill in the struggle for life against their
more discursive competitors. The result has been that
in the long run few species have survived, except those
which in one way or another arranged beforehand for
the dispersal of their seeds and fruits over fresh and
unoccupied areas of plain or hillside.

I don't, of course, by any means intend to assert that

44 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

seeds always do it by the simple device of wings or
feathery projections. Every variety of plan or dodge or
expedient has been adopted in turn to secure the self-
same end ; and provided only it succeeds in securing it,
any variety of them all is equally satisfactory. One
might parallel it with the case of hatching birds' eggs.
Most birds sit upon their eggs themselves, and supply
the necessary warmth from their own bodies. But any
alternative plan that attains the same end does just as
well. The felonious cuckoo drops her foundlings un-
awares in another bird's nest : the ostrich trusts her
unhatched offspring to the heat of the burning desert
sand : and the Australian brush-turkeys, with vicarious
maternal instinct, collect great mounds of decaying and
fermenting leaves and rubbish, 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 method of dispersion will serve the plant's purpose
equally well, provided only it succeeds in carrying a few
of the young seedlings to a proper place in which they
may start fair at last in the struggle for existence.

As in the case of the fertilization of flowers, so in that
of the dispersal of seeds, there are two main ways in
which the work is effected — by animals and by wind-
power. I will not insult the intelligence of the reader at
the present time of day by telling him that pollen is
usually transferred from blossom to blossom in one or
other of these two chief ways — it is carried on the heads
or bodies of bees and other honey-seeking insects, or else
it- is wafted on the wings of the wind to the sensitive

ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 45

surface of a sister-flower. So, too, seeds are for the
most part either dispersed by animals or blown about by
the breezes of heaven to new situations. These are the
two most obvious means of locomotion provided by
nature ; and it is curious to see that they have both been
utilized almost equally by plants, alike for their pollen
and their seeds, just as they have been utilized by man
for his own purposes on sea or land, in ship, or windmill,
or pack-horse, or carriage.

There are two ways in which animals may be
employed to disperse seeds — voluntarily and involun-
tarily. They may be compelled to carry them against
their wills : or they may be bribed and carjoled and
flattered into doing the plant's work for it in return for
some substantial advantage or benefit the plant confers
upon them. The first plan is the one adopted by burrs
and cleavers. These adhesive fruits are like the man
who buttonholes you and won't be shaken off : they are
provided with little curved hooks or bent and barbed hairs
which catch upon the wool of sheep, the coat of cattle,
or the nether integuments of wayfaring humanity, and
can't be got rid of without some little difficulty. Most
of them, you will find on examination, belonged to con-
firmed hedgerow or woodside plants : they grow among
bushes or low scrub, and thickets of gorse or bramble.
Now, to such plants as these, it is obviously useful to
have adhesive fruits and seeds : for when sheep or
other animals get them caught in their coats, they carry
them away to other bushy spots, and there, to get rid of
the annoyance caused by the foreign body, scratch them
oil' at once against some holly-bush or blackthorn. You

46 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

may often find seeds of this type sticking on thorns as
the nucleus of a little matted mass of wool, so left by the
sheep in the very spots best adapted for the free growth
of their vigorous seedlings.

Even among plants which trust to the involuntary
services of animals in dispersing their seeds, a great
many varieties of detail may be observed on close inspec-
*on. For example, in hound's-tongue and goose-grass,
two of the best-known instances among our common
English weeds, each little nut is covered with many
small hooks, which make it catch on firmly by several
points of attachment to passing animals. These are the
kinds we human beings of either sex oftenest find cling-
ing to our skirts or trousers after a walk in a rabbit-
warren. But in herb-bennet and avens each nut has a
single long awn, crooked near the middle with a very
peculiar S-shaped joint, which effectually catches on to
the wool or hair, but drops at the elbow after a short
period of withering. Sometimes, too, the whole fruit
is provided with prehensile hooks, while sometimes it is
rather the individual seeds themselves that are so
accommodated. Oddest of all is the plan followed by
the common burdock. Here, an involucre or common
cup-shaped receptacle of hooked bracts surrounds an
entire head of purple tubular flowers, and each of these
flowers produces in time a distinct fruit ; but the hooked
involucre contains the whole compound mass, and, being
pulled off bodily by a stray sheep or dog, effects the
transference of the composite lot at once to some fitting
place for their germination.

Those plants, on the other hand, which depend rather,

ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 47

like London hospitals, upon the voluntary system,
produce that very familiar form of edible capsule which
we commonly call in the restricted sense a fruit or berry.
In such cases, the seed-vessel is usually swollen and
pulpy : it is stored with sweet juices to attract the birds
or other animal allies, and it is brightly coloured so as
to advertise to their eyes the presence of the alluring
sugary foodstuff. These instances, however, are now -.0
familiar to everybody that I won't dwell upon them at
any length. Even the degenerate schoolboy of the
present day, much as he has declined from the high
standard set forth by Macaulay, knows all about the way
the actual seed itself is covered (as in the plum or the
cherry) by a hard stony coat which * resists the action
of the gastric juice ' (so physiologists put it, with their
usual frankness), and thus passes undigested through the
body of its swallower. All I will do here, therefore, is to
note very briefly that some edible fruits, like the two just
mentioned, as well as the apricot, the peach, the nectarine,
and the mango, consist of a single seed with its outer
covering ; in others, as in the raspberry, the blackberry,
the cloudberry, and the dew-berry, many seeds are massed
together, each with a separate edible pulp ; in yet others,
as in the gooseberry, the currant, the grape, and the
whortleberry, several seeds are embedded within the
fruit in a common pulpy mass ; and in others again, as
in the apple, pear, quince, and medlar, they are surrounded
by a quantity of spongy edible flesh. Indeed, the variety
that prevails among fruits in this respect almost defies
classification : for sometimes, as in the mulberry, the
separate, little fruits of several distinct flowers grow

48 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

together at last into a common berry : sometimes, as in a
fig, the general flower-stalk of several tiny one-seeded
blossoms forms the edible part : and sometimes, as in the
strawberry, the true little nuts or fruits appear as mere
specks or dots on the bloated surface of the swollen an<?
overgrown stem, which forms the luscious morsel dear
to the human palate.

Yet in every case it is interesting to observe that, while
the seeds which depend for dispersion upon the breeze
are easily detached from the parent plant and blown
about by every wind of doctrine, the seeds or fruits which
depend for their dispersion upon birds or animals always,
on the contrary, hang on to their native boughs to the
very last, till some unconscious friend pecks them off and
devours them. Havts, rose-hips, and holly-berries will
wither and wilt on the tree in mild winters, because they
can't drop off of themselves without the aid of birds,
while the birds are too well supplied with other food to
care for them. One of the strangest cases of all, however,
is that of the mistletoe, which, living parasitically upon
the forest-boughs and apple-trees, would of course be
utterly lost if its berries dropped their seeds on to the
ground beneath it. To avoid such a misfortune, the
mistletoe berries are filled with an exceedingly viscid and
sticky pulp, surrounding the hard little nut-like seeds':
and this pulp makes the seeds cling to the bills and feet
of various birds which feed upon the fruit, but most par-
ticularly of the missel thrush, who derives his commc
English name from his devotion to the mistletoe,
birds then carry them away, unwittingly to some
bouring tree, and rub them off, when they get uncorn-

ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 49

fortable, against a forked branch — the exact spots that
best ^uits the young mistletoe for sprouting in. Man, in
turn, makes use of the sticky pulp for the manufacture of
bird-lime, and so employs against the birds the very
Dualities which the plant intended as a bribe for their
jdndly 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 in the poppies and campions.
At first sight, to be sure, a casual observer might suppose
there existed in these cases no recognisable device at all
for the dissemination of the seedlings. But you and I,
most excellent and discreet reader, are emphatically not,
of course, mere casual 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 all capsules open —
where ? why, at the top, so that the seeds can only be
shaken out when there is a high enough wind blowing to
sway the stems to and fro with some violence, and scatter
the small black grains inside to a considerable distance.
Furthermore, in many instances, of which the common
poppy-head is an excellent example, the capsule opens by
lateral pores at the top of a flat head — a further precaution
which allows the seeds to get out only by a few at a time,
after a distinct jerk, and so scatters them pretty evenly,
with different winds, over a wide circular space around
the mother plant. Experiment will show how this simple
dodge works. Try to shake out the poppy-seed from a
ripe poppy-head on the plant as it grows, without break-
ing the stem or bending it unnaturally, and you will
easily see how much force of wind is required in order to

9

50 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

put this unobtrusive but very effective mechanism into
working order.

The devices of this character employed by various
plants for the dispersal of seeds even in ordinary dry cap-
sules are far too numerous for me to describe in full detail,
though they form a delightful subject for individual study
in any small suburban garden. I will only give one more
illustrative case, just to show the sort of point an amateur
should always be on the look-out for. There is an
extremely common, though inconspicuous, English weed,
the mouse-ear chickweed, found everywhere in flower-
beds or grass-plots, however small, and noticeable for its
quaint little horn-shaped capsules. These have a very
odd sort of twist or cock-up in the middle, just above the
part where the seeds lie ; and they open at the top by
ten small teeth, pointed obliquely outward for no appar-
ent reason. Yet every point has a meaning of its own
for all that. The plant is one that lies rather close upon
the ground ; and the effect of this twist in the capsule
is that the seeds, which are relatively heavy, and well
stored with nutriment, can never get out at all, unless a
very strong wind is blowing, which sweeps over the
herbage in long quick waves, and carries everything it
shakes out for great distances before it. So much design
have even the smallest weeds put into the mechanism for
the dispersion of their precious seeds, the hope of their
race and the earnest of their 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 the method of dispersion,
the capsule itself bursts open explosively, and scatters its

ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 51

contents to the four winds of heaven. Such plants may
be said to discharge their grains on the principle of
the bow and arrow. The balsam is a familiar example
of this startling mode of moving to fresh fields and
pastures new : its capsule consists of five long straight
valves, which break asunder elastically the moment they
are touched, when fully ripe, and shed their seeds on all
sides, like so many small bombshells. Our friend the
squirting cucumber, which served as the prime text for
this present discourse, falls into somewhat the same
category, though in other ways it rather resembles the
true succulent fruits, and belongs, indeed, to the
same family as the melon, the gourd, the pumpkin, and
the vegetable-marrow, almost all of which are edible and
in every way fruit-like. Among English weeds, the
little bifctercress that grows on dry walls and hedge-
banks forms an excellent example of the same device.
Village children love to touch the long, ripe, brown
capsules on the top with one timid finger, and then
jump away, half -laughing, half terrified, when the mild-
looking little plant goes off suddenly with a small bang
and shoots its grains like a catapult point-blank in their
faces.

It is in the tropics, however, that these elastic fruits
reach their highest development. There they have to
fight, not merely against such small fry as robins,
squirrels, and harvest-mice, but against the aggressive
parrot, the hard-billed touchan, the persistent lemur,
and the inquisitive monkey. Moreover, the elastic fruits
of the tropics grow often on spreading forest trees, and
must therefore shed their seeds to immense distances if

£ 2

52 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

they are to reach comparatively virgin soil, unexhausted
by the deep-set roots of the mother trunk. Under such
exceptional circumstances, the tropical examples of these
elastic capsules are by no means mere toys to be lightly
played with by babes and sucklings. The sand-box tree
of the West Indies has large round fruits, containing
seeds about as big as an English horsebean ; and the
capsule explodes, when ripe, with a detonation like a
pistol, scattering its contents with as much violence as a
shot from an air-gun. It is dangerous to go too near
these natural batteries during the shooting season. A
blow in the eye from one would blind a man instantly.
I well remember the very first night I spent in my own
house in Jamaica, where I went to live shortly after the
repression of ' Governor Eyre's rebellion,' as everybody
calls it locally. All night long I heard somebody, as I
thought, practising with a revolver in my own back garden :
a sound which somewhat alarmed me under those very
unstable social conditions. An earthquake about mid-
night, it is true, diverted my attention temporarily from
the recurring shots, but didn't produce the slightest effect
upon the supposed rebel's devotion to the improvement
of his marksmanship. When morning dawned, however,
I found it was only a sand-box tree, and that the shots
were nothing more than the explosions of the capsules.
As to the wonderful tales told about the Brazilian
cannon-ball tree, I cannot personally endorse them from
original observation, and will not stain this veracious
page with any second-hand quotations from the strange
stories of modern scientific Munchausens.

Still higher in the evolutionary scale than the elastic

ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 53

fruits are those airy species which have taken to them-
selves wings like the eagle, and soar forth upon the free
breeze in seaioh of what the Americans describe as 'fresh
locations.' Of this class the simplest type may be seen
in those forest-trees, like the maple and the sycamore,
whose fruits are flattened out into long expansions or
parachutes, technically known as ' keys,' by whose aid
they flutter down obliquely to the ground at a consider-
able distance. The keys of the sycamore, to take a
single instance, when detached from the tree in autumn,
fall spirally through the air owing to the twist of the
winged arm, and are carried so far that, as every
gardener knows, young sycamore trees rank among the
commonest weeds among our plots and flower-beds. A
curious variant upon this type is presented by the lime,
or linden, whose fruits are in themselves small wingless
nuts ; but they are born in clusters upon a common
stalk, which is winged on either side by a large
membranous bract. When the nuts are ripe, the whole
cluster detaches itself in a body from the branch, and
flutters away before the breeze by 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 and thither wherever the wind
may bear them. An immense number of the very
highest plants — the aristocrats of the vegetable kingdom,
such as the lordly composites, those ultimate products
of plant evolution — possess such floating feathery seeds ;
though here, again, the varieties of detail are too infinite

54 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

for rapid or popular classification. Indeed, among the
composites alone — the thistle and dandelion tribe with
downy fruits — I can reckon up more than a hundred
and fifty distinct variations of plan among the winged
seeds known to me in various parts of Europe. But if I
am strong, I am merciful : I will let the public off with
a hundred and forty-eight of them. My two exceptions
shall be John-go-to-bed-at-noon and the hairy hawkweed,
both of them common English meadow-plants. The
first, and more quaintly named, of the two has little
ribbed fruits that end in a long and narrow beak,
supporting a radial rib- work of spokes like the frame of
an umbrella ; and from rib to rib of this frame-work
stretch feathery cross-pieces, continuous all round, BO as
to make of the whole mechanism a perfect circular para-
chute, resembling somewhat the web of a geometrical
spider. But the hairy hawkweed is still more cunning
in its generation ; for that clever and cautious weed pro-
duces its seeds or fruits in clustered heads, of which the
central ones are winged, while the outer are heavy, squat,
and wingless. Thus does the plant make the best of all
chances that may happen to open before it : if one lot
goes far and fares but ill, the other is pretty sure to score
a bull's-eye.

These are only a few selected examples of the infinite
dodges employed by enlightened herbs and shrubs to
propagate their scions in foreign parts. Many more,
equally interesting, must be left undescribed. Only for
a single case more can I still find room — that of the
subterranean clover, which has been driven by its
numerous enemies to take refuge at last in a very

ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND. 55

remarkable and almost unique mode of protecting its off-
spring. This particular kind of clover affects smooth and
close-cropped hillsides, where the sheep nibble down the
grass and other herbage almost as fast as it springs up
again. Now, clover seeds resemble their allies of the pea
and bean tribe in being exceedingly rich in starch and
other valuable foodstuffs. Hence, they are much sought
after by the inquiring sheep, which eat them off wherever
found, as exceptionally nutritious and dainty morsels.
Under these circumstances, the subterranean clover has
learnt to produce small heads of bloom, pressed close to
the ground, in which only the outer flowers are perfect
and fertile, while the inner ones are transformed into tiny
wriggling corkscrews. As soon as the fertile flowers have
begun to set their seed, by the kind aid of the bees, the
whole stem bends downward, automatically, of its own
accord ; the little corkscrews then worm their way into
the turf beneath ; and the pods ripen and mature in the
actual soil itself, where no prying ewe can poke an
inquisitive nose to grub them up and devour them.
Cases like this point in certain ways to the absolute
high- water-mark of vegetable ingenuity : they go nearest
of all in the plant-world to the similitude of conscious
animal intelligence.

A DESEET FEUIT.

WHO knows the Mediterranean, knows the prickly
pear. Not that that quaint and uncanny-looking cactus,
with its yellow blossoms and bristling fruits that seem to
grow paradoxically out of the edge of thick fleshy leaves,
is really a native of Italy, Spain, and North Africa, where
it now abounds on every sun-smitten hillside. Like Mr.
Henry James and Mr. Marion Crawford, the Barbary tig,
as the French call it, is, in point of fact, an American
citizen, domiciled and half naturalised on this side of the
Atlantic, but redolent still at heart of its Columbian
origin. Nothing is more common, indeed, than to see
classical pictures of the Alma-Tadema school — not, of
course, from the brush of the master himself, who is
impeccable in such details, but fair works of decent
imitators — in which Caia or Marcia leans gracefully in
her white stole on one pensive elbow against a marble
lintel, beside -a courtyard decorated with a Pompeian
basin, and overgrown with prickly pear or "American
aloes." I need hardly say that, as a matter of plain
historical fact, neither cactuses nor agaves were known
in Europe till long after Christopher Columbus had

A DESERT FRUIT. 57

steered his 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 assure you that its
shores are sandy.) But this is only one among the many
pardonable little inaccuracies of painters, who thrust
scarlet geraniums from the Cape of Good Hope into the
fingers of Aspasia, or supply King Solomon in all his
glory with Japanese lilies of the most recent introduction.
At the present day, it is true, both the prickly-pear
cactus and the American agave (which the world at large
insists upon confounding with the aloe, a member of a
totally distinct family) have spread themselves in an
apparently wild condition over all the rocky coasts both
of Southern Europe and of Northern Africa. The alien
desert weeds have fixed their roots firmly in the sun-
baked clefts of Ligurian Apennines ; the tall candelabrum
of the western agave has reared its great spike of branch-
ing blossoms (which flower, not once in a century, as
legend avers, but once in some fifteen years or so) on all
the basking hillsides of the Mauritanian Atlas. But for
the origin, and therefore for the evolutionary history, of
either plant, we must look away from the shore of the
inland sea to the arid expanse of the Mexican desert.
It was there, among the sweltering rocks of the Tierras
Calientes, that these ungainly cactuses first learned to
clothe themselves in prickly mail, to store in their loose
tissues an abundant supply of sticky moisture, and to
set at defiance the persistent attacks of all external
enemies. The prickly pear, in fact, is a typical instance
of a desert plant, as the camel is a typical instance of a
desert animal. Each lays itself out to endure the long

58 A DESERT FRUIT.

droughts of its almost rainless habitat by drinking as
much as it can when opportunity offers, hoarding up the
superfluous water for future use, and economising
evaporation by every means in its power.

If you ask that convenient fiction, the Man in the
Street, what sort of plant a cactus is, he will probably
tell you it is all leaf and no stem, and each of the leaves
grows out of the last one. Whenever we set up the Man
in the Street, however, you must have noticed we do
it in order to knock him down again like a nine-pin
next moment : and this particular instance is no
exception to the rule ; for the truth is that a cactus is
practically all stem and no leaves, what looks like a leaf
being really a branch sticking out at an angle. The true
leaves, if there are any, are reduced to mere spines or
prickles on the surface, while the branches, in the
prickly-pear and many of the ornamental hot-house
cactuses, are flattened out like a leaf to perform foliar
functions. In most plants, to put it simply, the leaves
are the mouths and stomachs of the organism; their
thin and flattened blades are spread out horizontally in
a wide expanse, covered with tiny throats and lips which
suck in carbonic acid from the surrounding air, and
disintegrate it in their own cells under the influence of
sunlight. In the prickly pears, on the contrary, it is the
flattened stem and branches which undertake this essen-
tial operation in the life of the plant — the sucking-in of
carbon and giving-out of oxygen, which is to the vegetable
exactly what the eating and digesting of food is to the
animal organism. In their old age, however, the stems
of the prickly pear display their true character by be-

A DESERT FRUIT. 59

coming woody in texture and losing their articulated
leaf-like appearance.

Everything on this earth can best be understood by
investigating the history of its origin and development,
and in order to understand this curious reversal of the
ordinary rule in the cactus tribe we must look at the
circumstances under which the race was evolved in the
howling waste of American deserts. (All deserts have a
prescriptive right to howl, and I wouldn't for worlds
deprive them of the privilege.) Some familiar analogies
will help us to see the utility of this arrangement.
Everybody knows our common English stone-crops — or
if he doesn't he ought to, for they are pretty and
ubiquitous. Now stone-crops grow for the most part in
chinks of the rock or thirsty sandy soil; they are
essentially plants of very dry positions. Hence they
have thick and succulent little stems and leaves, which
merge into one another by imperceptible gradations. All
parts of the plant alike are stumpy, green, and cylindrical.
If you squash them with your finger and thumb you find
that though the outer skin or epidermis is thick and
firm, the inside is sticky, moist, and jelly-like. The
reason for all this is plain ; the stone-crops drink greedily
by their roots whenever they get a chance, and store up
the water so obtained to keep them from withering
under the hot and pitiless sun that beats down upon
them for hours in the baked clefts of their granite matrix.
It's the camel trick over again. So leaves and stem
grow thick and round and juicy within; but outside they
are enclosed in a stout layer of epidermis, which con-
sists of empty glassy cells, and which can be peeled off

60 A DESERT FRUIT.

or flayed with a knife like the skin of an animal. This
outer layer prevents evaporation, and is a marked feature
of all succulent plants which grow exposed to the sun on
arid rocks or in sandy deserts.

The tendency to produce rounded stems and leaves,
little distinguishable from one another, is equally notice-
able in many seaside plants which frequent the strip of
thirsty sand beyond the reach of the tides. That belt of
dry beach that stretches between high- water mark and
the zone of vegetable mould, is to all intents and
purpose a miniature desert. True, it is watered by
rain from time to time ; but the drops sink in so fast
that in half an hour, as we know, the entire strip is as
dry as Sahara again. Now there are many shore weeds
of this intermediate sand-belt which mimic to a surprising
degree the chief external features of the cactuses. One
such weed, the common salicornia, which grows in sandy
bottoms or hollows of the beach, has a jointed stem,
branched aud succulent, after the true cactus pattern,
and entirely without leaves or their equivalents in any
way. Still more cactus-like in general effect is another
familiar English seaside weed, the kali or glasswort, so
called because it was formerly burnt to extract the soda.
The glasswort has leaves, it is true, but they are thick
and fleshy, continuous with the stem, and each one
terminating in a sharp, needle-like spine, which effectually
protects the weed against all browsing aggressors.

Now, wherever you get very dry and sandy conditions
of soil, you get this same type of cactus-like vegetation
—pi-antes grasses, as the French well call them. The
species which exhibit it are not necessary related to one

A DESERT FRUIT. 61

another in any way ; often they belong to most widely
distinct families; it is an adaptive resemblance alone,
due to similarity of external circumstances only. The
plants have to fight against the same difficulties, and
they adopt for the most part the same tactics to fight
them with. In other words, any plant of whatever family,
which wishes to thrive in desert conditions, must almost,
as a matter of course, become thick and succulent, so as
to store up water, and must be protected by a stout
epidermis to prevent its evaporation under the fierce
heat of the sunlight. They do not necessarily lose their
leaves in the process ; but the jointed stem usually
answers the purpose of leaves under such conditions far
better than any thin and exposed blade could do in the
arid air of a baking desert. And therefore, as a rule,
desert plants are leafless.

In India, for example, there are no cactuses. But I
wouldn't advise you to 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'hote on the Continent ;
and the wonder is that I'm still alive to tell the story.
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, no indigenous species ; for
prickly pears and epiphyllums may naturally be planted
by the hand of man anywhere. But what people take
for thickets of cactus in the Indian jungle are really
thickets of cactus-like spurges. In the dry soil of India,
many spurges grow thick and succulent, learn to suppress
their leaves, and assume the bizarre forms and quaint
jointed appearance of the true cactuses. In flower and

62 A DESERT FRUIT.

fruit, however, they are euphorbias to* the end; it is only
in the thick and fleshy stem that they resemble their
nobler and more beautiful Western rivals. No true
cactus grows truly wild anywhere on earth except in
America. The family was developed there, and, till man
transplanted it, never succeeded in gaining a foothold
elsewhere. Essentially tropical in type, it was provided
with no means of dispersing its seeds across the enormous
expanse of intervening ocean which separated its habitat
from the sister continents.

But why are cactuses so almost universally prickly ?
From the grotesque little melon-cactuses of our English
hothouses to the huge and ungainly monsters which form
miles of hedgerows on Jamaican hillsides, the members
of this desert family are mostly distinguished by their
abundant spines and thorns, or by the irritating hairs
which break off in your skin if you happen to brush
incautiously against them. Cactuses are the hedgehogs
of the vegetable world ; their motto is Nemo me impune
lacessit. Many a time in the West Indies I have pushed
my hand for a second into a bit of tangled ' bush,' as the
negroes call it, to seize some rare flower or some beautiful
insect, and been punished for twenty-four hours after-
wards by the stings of the almost invisible and glass-like
little cactus-needles. When you rub them they only
break in pieces, and every piece inflicts a fresh wound on
the flesh where it rankles. Some of the species have large,
stout prickles ; some have clusters of irritating hairs at
measured distances ; and some rejoice ia both means of
defence at once, scattered impartially over their entire
surface. In the prickly pear, the bundles of prickles are

A DESERT FRUIT. 63

arranged geometrically with great regularity in a perfect
quincunx. But that is a small consolation indeed to the
reflective mind when you've stung yourself badly with
them.

The reason for this bellicose disposition on the part of
the cactuses is a tolerably easy one to guess. Fodder is
rare in the desert. The starving herbivores that find
themselves from time to time belated on the confines of
such thirsty regions would seize with avidity upon any
succulent plant which offered them food and drink at
once in their last extremity. Fancy the joy with which
a lost caravan, dying of hunger and thirst in the byways
of Sahara, would hail a great bed of melons, cucumbers,
and lettuces ! Needless to say, however, under such cir-
cumstances melon, cucumber, and lettuce would soon be
exterminated : they would be promptly eaten up at dis-
cretion without leaving a descendant to represent them
in the second generation. In the ceaseless war between
herbivore and plant, which is waged every day and all
day long the whole world over with far greater persistence
than the war between carnivore and prey, only those
species of plant can survive in such exposed situations
which happen to develop spines, thorns, or prickles as a
means of defence against the mouths of hungry and
desperate 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 but a slight thickening at the
base, a slight woody deposit at the point, to turn them
forthwith into the stout prickles of the rose or the
bramble. Most leaves are more or less pointed at the

64 A DESERT FRUIT.

end or at the summits of the lobes ; and it needs but a
slight intensification of this pointed tendency to produce
forthwith the sharp defensive foliage of gorse, thistles,
and holly. Often one can see all the intermediate stages
still surviving under one's very eyes. The thistles, them-
selves, for example, vary from soft and unarmed species
which haunt out-of-the-way spots beyond the reach of
browsing herbivores, to such trebly-mailed types as that
enemy of the agricultural interest, the creeping thistle,
in which the leaves continue themselves as prickly wings
down every side of the stem, so that the whole plant is
amply clad from head to foot in a defensive coat of fierce
and bristling spearheads. There is a common little Eng-
lish meadow weed, the rest-harrow, which in rich and
uncropped fields produces no defensive armour of any
sort ; but on the much-browsed-over suburban commons
and in similar exposed spots, where only gorse and black-
thorn stand a chance for their lives against the cows and
donkeys, it has developed a protected variety in which
some of the branches grow abortive, and end abruptly in
stout spines like a hawthorn's. Only those rest-harrows
have there survived in the sharp struggle for existence
which happened most to baffle their relentless pursuers.
Desert plants naturally carry this tendency to its
highest point of development. Nowhere else is the
struggle for life so fierce ; nowhere else is the enemy so
goaded by hunger and thirst to desperate measures. It
is a place for internicine warfare Hence, all desert
plants are quite absurdly prickly. The starving herbivores
will attack and devour under such circumstances even
thorny weeds, which tear or sting their tender tongues

A DESERT FRUIT. 65

and palates, but which supply them at. least with a little
food and moisture : so the plants are compelled in turn
to take almost extravagant precautions. Sometimes the
leaves end in a stout dagger-like point, as with the agave,
or so-called American aloe ; sometimes they are reduced
to mere prickles or bundles of needle-like spikes ; some-
times they are suppressed altogether, and the work of
defence is undertaken in their stead by irritating hairs
intermixed with caltrops of spines pointing outward from
a common centre in every direction. When one remem-
bers how delicately sensitive are the tender noses of most
browsing herbivores, one can realize what an excellent
mode of defence these irritating hairs must naturally con-
stitute. I have seen cows in Jamaica almost maddened
by their stings, and even savage bulls will think twice in
their rage before they attempt to make their way through
the serried spears of a dense cactus hedge. To put it
briefly, plants have survived under very arid or sandy
conditions precisely in proportion as they displayed this
tendency towards the production of thorns, spines,
bristles, and prickles.

It is a marked characteristic of the cactus tribe to be
very tenacious of life, and when hacked to pieces, to
spring afresh in full vigour from every scrap or fragment.
True vegetable hydras, when you cut down one, ten
spring in its place : every separate morsel of the thick
and succulent stem has the power of growing anew into
a separate cactus. Surprising as this peculiarity seems
at first sight, it is only a special desert modification of a
faculty possessed in a less degree by almost all plants
and by many animals. If you cut off the end of a rose

F

66 A DESERT PRUIT.

branch and stick it in the ground under suitable condi"
tions, it grows into a rose tree. If you take cuttings of
scarlet geraniums or common verbenas, and pot them in
moist soil, they bud out apace into new plants like their
parents. Certain special types can even be propagated
from fragments of the leaf ; for example, there is a par-
ticularly vivacious begonia off which you may snap a
corner of one blade, and hang 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 from its
edges. A certain German professor went even further
than that; he chopped up a liverwort very fine into
vegetable mincemeat, which he then spread thin over a
saucerful of moist sand, and lo ! in a few days the
whole surface of the mess was covered with a perfect
forest of sprouting little liverworts. Roughly speaking,
one may say that every fragment of every organism has
in it the power to rebuild in its entirety another organism
like the one of which it once formed a component
element.

Similarly with animals. Cut off a lizard's tail, and
straightway a new tail grows in its place with surprising
promptitude. Cut off a lobster's claw, and in a very few
weeks that lobster is walking about airily on his native
rocks, with two claws as usual. True, in these cases the
tail and the claw don't bud out in turn into a new lizard
or a new lobster. But that is a penalty the higher
organisms have to pay for their extreme complexity.
They have lost that plasticity, that freedom of growth,
which characterizes the simpler and more primitive forms
of life ; in their case the power of producing fresh

A DESERT FRUIT. 67

organisms entire from a single fragment, once diffused
equally over the whole body, is now confined to certain
specialized cells which, in their developed form, we know
as seeds or eggs. Yet, even among animals, at a low
stage of development, this original power of reproducing
the whole from a single part remains inherent in the
organism ; for you may chop up a fresh- water hydra into
a hundred little bits, and every bit will be capable o^
growing afresh into a complete hydra.

Now, desert plants would naturally retain this primi-
tive tendency in a very high degree ; for they are specially
organized to resist drought — being the survivors of
generations of drought-proof ancestors — and, like the
camel, they have often to struggle on through long periods
of time without a drop of water. Exactly the same
thing happens at home to many of our pretty little
European stone-crops. I have a rockery near my house
overgrown with the little white sedum of our gardens.
The birds often peck off a tiny leaf or branch ; it drops
on the dry soil, and remains there for days without
giving a sign of life. But its thick epidermis effectually
saves it from withering ; and as soon as rain falls, wee
white rootlets sprout out from the under side of the frag-
ment as it lies, and it grows before long into a fresh
small sedum plant. Thus, what seem like destructive
agencies themselves, are turned in the end by mere
tenacity of life into a secondary means of propa-
gation.

That is why the prickly pear is so common in all
countries where the climate suits it, and where it has once
managed to gain a foothold. The more you cut it down,

F 2

68 A DESERT FRUIT.

the thicker it springs ; each murdered bit becomes the
parent in due time of a numerous offspring. Man, how-
ever, with his usual ingenuity, has managed to best the
plant, on this its own ground, and turn it into a useful
fodderfor his beasts of burden. The prickly pear is planted
abundantly on bare rocks in Algeria, where nothing else
would grow, and is cut down when adult, divested of its
thorns by a rough process of hacking, and used as food
for camels and cattle. It thus provides fresh moist
fodder in the African summer when the grass is
dried up and all other pasture crops have failed
entirely.

The flowers of the prickly pear, as of many other
cactuses, grow apparently on the edge of the leaves,
which alone might give the observant mind a hint as to
the true nature of those thick and flattened expansions.
For whenever what look like leaves bear flowers or fruit
on their edge or midrib, as in the familiar instance of
butcher's broom, you may be sure at a glance they are
really branches in disguise masquerading as foliage.
The blossoms in the prickly pear are large, handsome,
and yellow ; at least, they would be handsome if one
could ever see them, but they are generally covered so
thick in dust that it is difficult properly to appreciate their
beauty. They have a great many petals in numerous
rows, and a great many stamens in a 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
tropical butterflies ; but on this point, having observed
them but little in their native habitats, I speak under
correction.

A DESERT FRUIT. 69

The fruit itself, to which the plant owes its popular
name, is botauically a berry, though a very big one, and
it exhibits in a highly specialized degree the general
tactics of all its family. As far as their leaf-like stems
go, the main object in life of the cactuses is — not to get
eaten. But when it comes to the fruit, this object in
life is exactly reversed ; the plant desires its fruit to be
devoured by some friendly bird or adapted animal, in
order that the hard little seeds buried in the pulp within
may be dispersed for germination under suitable condi-
tions. At the same time, true to its central idea, it
covers even the pear itself with deterrent and prickly
hairs, meant to act as a defence against useless thieves
or petty depredators, who would eat the soft pulp on
the plant as it stands (much as wasps do peaches)
without benefiting the species in return by dispersing its
seedlings. This practice is fully in accordance with the
general habit of tropical or sub-tropical fruits, which lay
themselves out to deserve the kind offices of monkeys,
parrots, toucans, hornbills, and other such large and
powerful fruit- feeders. Fruits which arrange themselves
for a clientele of this character have usually thick or
nauseous rinds, prickly husks, or other deterrent
integuments; but they are full within of juicy pulp,
embedding stony or nutlike seeds, which pass undigested
through the gizzards of their swallowers.

For a similar reason, the actual prickly pears them-
selves are attractively coloured. I need hardly point
out, I suppose, at the present time of day, that such
tints in the vegetable world act like the gaudy posters of
our London advertisers. Fruits and flowers which

70 A DESERT FRUIT.

desire to attract the attention of beasts, birds, or insects,
are tricked out in flaunting hues of crimson, purple, blue,
and yellow ; fruits and flowers which could only be
injured by the notice of animals are small and green, or
dingy and inconspicuous.

PKETTY POLL.

IT is an error of youth to despise parrots for their much
talking. Loquacity isn't always a sign of empty-headed-
ness, nor is silence a sure proof of weight and wisdom.

Biologists, for their part, know better than that. By
common consent, they rank the parrot group as the very
head and crown of bird creation. Not, of course,
because pretty Poll can talk (in a state of nature, parrots
only chatter somewhat meaninglessly to one another), but
because the group display on the whole, all round, a
greater amount of intelligence, of cleverness, and of
adaptability to circumstances than any other birds,
including even their cunning and secretive rivals, the
ravens, the jackdaws, the crows, and the magpies.

What are the efficient causes of this exceptionally
high intelligence in parrots? Well, Mr. Herbert
Spencer, I believe, was the first to point out the
intimate connection that exists throughout the animal
world between mental development and the power of
grasping an object all round so as to know exactly its
shape and its tactile properties. The possession of an
effective prehensile organ— a hand or its equivalent —

72 PRETTY POLL.

seems to be the first great requisite for the evolution of
a high order of intellect. Man and the monkeys, for
example, have a pair of hands; and in their case one
can see at a glance how dependent is their intelligence
upon these grasping organs. All human arts base
themselves ultimately upon the human hand ; and even
the apes approach nearest to humanity in virtue of their
ever-active and busy little fingers. The elephant, again,
has his flexible trunk, which, as we have all heard over
and over again, usque ad nauseam, is equally well
adapted to pick up a pin or to break the great boughs of
tropical forest trees. (That pin, in particular, is now a
well-worn classic.) The squirrel, once more, celebrated
for his unusual intelligence when judged by a rodent
standard, uses his pretty little paws as veritable
hands, by which he can grasp a nut or fruit all round,
and so gain in his 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; no high intelligence without a highly developed
prehensile and grasping organ.

Perhaps the opossum is the very best and most crucial
instance that could possibly be adduced of the intimate
connection which exists between touch and intellect.
For the opossum is a marsupial ; it belongs to the same
group of lowly-organized, antiquated, and pouch-bearing
animals as the kangaroo, the wombat, and the other
belated Australian mammals. Now everybody knows
the marsupials as a class are nothing short of preter-
naturally stupid. They are just about the very dullest

PRETTY POLL. 73

and silliest of all existing quadrupeds. And this is
reasonable enough, when one comes to think of it, for
they represent a very antique and early type, the first
rough sketch of the mammalian idea, if I may so describe
them, with wits unsharpened as yet by contact with the
world in the fierce competition of the struggle for life as
it displays itself on the crowded stage of the great
continents. They stand, in short, to the lions and
tigers, the elephants and horses, the monkeys and
squirrels, of Europe and America, as the Australian
blackfellow stands to the Englishman or the Yankee.
They are the last relic of the original secondary
quadrupeds, stranded for ages in a remote southern
island, and still keeping up among Australian forests
the antique type of life that went out of fashion in
Europe, Asia, and America before the chalk was laid
down or the London Clay deposited on the bed of our
northern oceans. Hence they have still very narrow
brains, and are so extremely stupid that a kangaroo, it
is said — though I don't vouch for it myself — when struck
a smart blow, will turn and bite the stick that hurts
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 a marsupial too, differs inexpressibly in
psychological development from the kangaroo and the
wombat. Your opossum, in short, is active, sly, and
extremely intelligent. He knows his way about the
world he lives in. ' A 'possum up a gum-tree ' is
accepted by the observant American mind as the very
incarnation of animal cleverness, cunning, and duplicity.

74 PRETTY POLL.

In negro folk-lore the resourceful 'possum takes the
place of Beynard the Fox in European stories : he is the
Macchiavelli of wild beasts : there is no ruse on earth of
which he isn't amply capable, no artful trick which he
can't design and execute, no wily manoeuvre which he
can't contrive and carry to an end successfully. All
guile and intrigue, the 'possum can circumvent even
Uncle Eemus himself by his crafty diplomacy. And
what is it that makes all the difference between this
'cute Yankee marsupial and his backward and belated
Australian cousins ? Why, nothing but the possession of
a prehensile hand and tail. Therein lies the whole
secret. The opossum's hind foot has a genuine opposable
thumb ; and he also uses his tail in climbing as a super-
numerary hand, almost as much as do any of the
monkeys. He often suspends himself by it, like an
acrobat, swings his body to and fro to get up steam,
then lets go suddenly, and flies away to a distant branch,
which he clutches by means of his hand-like hind feet.
If the toes play him false, he can ' recover his tip/ as
circus-folk put it, with his prehensile tail. The con-
sequence is that the opossum, being able to form for
himself clear and accurate conceptions of the real shapes
and relations of things by these two distinct grasping
organs, has acquired an unusual amount of general
intelligence. And further, in the keen competition of
the American continent, he has been forced to develop an
amount of cleverness and low cunning which leaves his
Australian poor relations far behind in the Middle Ages
of evolution.

At the risk of seeming to run off at a tangent and for-

PRETTY POLL. 75

sake our ostensible subject, pretty Poll, altogether, 1
must just pause for one moment more to answer an
objection which I know has been trembling on the tip of
your tongue any time the last five minutes. You've
been waiting till you could get a word in edgeways to
give me a friendly nudge and remark very wisely, ' But
look here, I say ; how about the dog and the horse in your
argument ? They've got no prehensile organ that ever
I heard of, and yet they're universally allowed to be the
cleverest and most intelligent of all earthly quadrupeds.'
True, 0 most sapient and courteous objector. I grant it
you at once. But observe the difference. The clever-
ness of the horse and the dog is acquired, not original.
It has probably arisen in the course of their long
hereditary intercourse and companionship with man, the
cleverest and most serviceable individuals being deliber-
ately selected from generation to generation as dams and
sires to breed from. We can't fairly compare these
artificial human products, therefore, with wild races
whose intelligence is all native and self-evolved. More-
over, the horse at least has to some slight extent a
prehensile organ in his very mobile and sensitive lip, which
he uses like an undeveloped or rudimentary proboscis to
feel things all over with. So that the dog alone remains as
a contradictory instance ; and even the dog derives his
cleverness indirectly from man, whose hand and thumb
in the last resort are really at the bottom of his vicarious
wisdom.

We may conclude, then, I believe, that touch, as Mr.
Herbert Spencer admirably words it, is ' the mother-tongue
of the senses ; ' and that in proportion as animals have or

76 PRETTY POLL.

have not highly developed and serviceable tactile organs
will they rank high or low in the intellectual hierarchy of
nature. Now, how does this bear upon the family of
parrots? Well, in the first place, everybody who has
ever kept a cockatoo or a macaw in domestic slavery
is well aware that in no other birds do the claws so
closely resemble a human or simian hand, not indeed in
outer form or appearance, but in opposability of the
thumbs and in perfection of grasping power. The toes
on each foot are arranged in opposite pairs — two turning
in front and two backward, which gives all parrots their
peculiar firmness in clinging on a perch or on the branch
of a tree with one foot only, while they extend the other
to grasp a fruit or 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 fingers with
a whole large group of allied birds, called, in the
charmingly concise and poetical language of technical
ornithology, the Scansorial Picarians, and more generally,
known to the unlearned herd (meaning you and me) by
their several names of woodpeckers, cuckoos, toucans,
and plantain-eaters. All the members of this great
group, of which the parrots proper are only the most
advanced and developed family, possess the same arrange-
ment of the digits into front-toes and back-toes. But in
none is the arrangement so perfect as in the parrots, and
in none is the power of grasping an object all round so
completely developed and so pregnant in moral and
intellectual consequences.

All the Scansorial Picarians, however (if the reader

PRETTY POLL. 77

with his proverbial courtesy will kindly pardon me the
Inevitable use of such very bad words), are essentially
tree-haunters ; and the tree-haunting and climbing
habit, as is well beknown, seems particularly favourable
to the growth of intelligence. Thus schoolboys climb
trees — but I forgot : this is a scientific article, and such
levity is inconsistent with the dignity of science. Let us
be serious ! Well, at any rate, monkeys, squirrels,
opossums, wild cats, are all of them climbers, and all of
them, in the act of clinging, jumping, and balancing
themselves on boughs, gain such an accurate idea of
geometrical figure, perspective, distance, and the true
nature of space-relations, as could hardly be acquired in
any other manner. In one word, they thoroughly
understand space of three dimensions, and the tactual
realities that answer to and underlie each visible appear-
ance. This is the very substratum of all intelligence ;
and the monkeys, possessing it more profoundly than any
other animals, have accordingly taken the top of the form
in the competitive examination perpetually conducted by
survival of the fittest.

So, too, among birds, the parrots and their allies climb
trees and rocks with exceptional ease and agility. Even
in their own department they are the great feathered
acrobats. Anybody who watches a woodpecker, for
example, grasping the bark of a tree with its crooked
and powerful toes, while it steadies itself behind by
digging its stiff tail-feathers into the crannies of the
outer rind, will readily understand how clear a notion
the bird must gain into the practical action of the laws
of gravity. But the true parrots go a step further in the

78 PRETTY POLL,

same direction than the woodpeckers or the toucans ; for,
in addition to prehensile feet, they have also a highly-
developed prehensile bill, and within it a tongue which
acts in reality as an organ of touch. They use their
crooked beaks to help them in climbing from branch to
branch ; and being thus provided alike with wings, legs,
hands, fingers, bill and tongue, they are in fact the most
truly arboreal of all known animals, and present in the
fullest and highest degree all the peculiar features of the
tree-haunting existence.

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

Parrots are vegetarians ; with a single degraded
exception to whom I shall recur hereafter, Sir Henry
Thompson himself couldn't find fault with their regimen.
They live chiefly upon a light but nutritious diet of fruit
and seeds, or upon the abundant nectar of rich tropical
flowers. And it is mainly for the sake of getting at their
chosen food that they have developed the large and
powerful bills which characterise the family. You may
have perhaps noted that most tropical fruit-eaters, like
the hornbills and the toucans, are remarkable for the
size and strength of their beaks : if you haven't, I dare

PRETTY POLL. 79

say you will generously take my word for it. And, per
contra, it may also have struck you that most tropical
fruits have thick or hard or nauseous rinds, which need
to be torn off before the monkeys or birds for whose use
they are intended, can get at them and eat them. Our
little northern strawberries, and raspberries, and
currants, and whortleberries, developed with a single
eye to the petty robins and finches of temperate climates,
can be popped into the mouth whole and eaten as they
stand : they are meant for small birds to devour, and to
disperse the tiny undigested nut-like seeds in return for
the bribe of the soft pulp that surrounds them. But it
is quite otherwise with oranges, shaddocks, bananas,
plantains, mangoes, and pine-apples : those great tropical
fruits can only be eaten properly with a knife and fork,
after stripping off the hard and often acrid rind that
guards and preserves them. They lay themselves out
for dispersion by monkeys, toucans, and other relatively
large and powerful fruit-eaters ; and the rind is put there
as a barrier against small thieves who would rob the
sweet pulp, but be absolutely incapable of carrying away
and dispersing the large and richly-stored seeds it
covers.

Parrots and toucans, however, have no knives and forks
to cut off the rind with; but as monkeys use their
fingers, so the birds use for the same purpose their sharp
and powerful bills. No better nut-crackers and fruit-
parers could possibly be found. The parrot, in particular,
has developed for the purpose his curved and inflated beak
— a wonderful weapon, keen as a tailor's scissors, and
moved by powerful muscles on either side of the face

80 PRETTY POLL.

which bring together the cutting edges with extraordinary
energy. The way the bird holds the fruit gingerly in one
claw, while he strips off the rind dexterously with his
under-hung lower mandible, and keeps a sharp look-out
meanwhile on either side with those sly and stealthy
eyes of his for a possible intruder, suggests to the observ-
ing mind the whole living drama of his native forest.
One sees in that vivid world the watchful monkey ever
ready to swoop down upon the tempting tail-feathers of
his hereditary foe : one sees the canny parrot ever pre-
pared for his rapid attack, and ever eager to make him
pay with five joints of his tale for his impertinent inter-
ference with an unoffending fellow-citizen of the arboreal
community.

Still, there are parrots and parrots, of course. Not all
this vast family are in all things of like passions one with
another. The great black cockatoo, for example, the
largest of the tribe, lives almost entirely off the central
shoot or * cabbage ' of palm-trees : an expensive kind of
food, for when once the ' cabbage ' is eaten the tree
dies forthwith, so that each black cockatoo must have
killed in his time whole groves of cabbage-palms.
Others, again, feed off fruits and seeds ; and not a few
are entirely adapted for flower-haunting and honey-
sucking.

As a group, the parrots are comparatively modern
birds. Indeed, they could have no place in the world
till the big tropical fruits and nuts were beginning to be
developed. And it is now pretty certain that fruits and
nuts are for the most part of very recent and special
evolution. To put it briefly, the monkeys and parrots

PRETTY POLL. 81

developed the fruits and nuts, while the fruits and nuts
returned the compliment by developing conversely the
monkeys and parrots. In other words, both types grew
up side by side in mutual dependence, and evolved
themselves pari passu for one another's benefit. With-
out the fruits there could be no fruit-eaters ; and
without the fruit-eaters to disperse their seeds, there
could just to the same extent be no fruits to speak of.

Most of the parrots very much resemble the monkeys
and other tropical fruit-feeders in their habits and
manners. They are gregarious, mischievous, noisy, and
irresponsible. They have no moral sense, and are fond
of practical jokes and other schoolboy horseplay. They
move about in flocks, screeching aloud as they go, and
alight together on some tree well covered with berries.
No doubt, they herd together for the sake of protection
and screech both to keep the flock in a body and to
strike alarm and consternation into the breasts of their
enemies. When danger threatens, the first bird that per-
ceives it sounds a note of 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 which may be
roughly interpreted as stating in English that they don't
want to fight, but by Jingo, if they do, they'll tear their
enemy to shreds and drink his blood up too.

The common grey parrot, the best known in confine-
ment of all his kind, and unrivalled as an orator for his
graces of speech, is a native of West Africa ; so that he
shares with other West Africans that perfect command
of language which has always been a marked char-
acteristic of tho negro race. He feeds in a general way

a

82 PRETTY POLL.

upon palm-nuts, bananas, mangoes, and guavas, but he
is by no means averse, if opportunity offers, to the
Indian corn of the industrious native. His wife
accompanies him in his solitary rambles, for they are not
gregarious. In her native haunts, indeed, Polly is an
unsociable bird. It is only in confinement that her
finer qualities come out, and that she develops into a
speech-maker of distinguished attainments.

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

PRETTY POLL. 83

Australia and New Zealand, as everybody knows, are
the countries where everything goes by contraries. And
it is here that the parrot group has developed some of
its strangest and most abnormal offshoots. One would
imagine beforehand that no two birds could be more
unlike in every respect than the gaudy, noisy, gregarious
cockatoos and the sombre, nocturnal, solitary owls.
Yet the New Zealand owl-parrot is, to put it plainly, a
lory which has assumed all the outer appearance and
habits of 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 brown plumage like the owls, with
an undertone of green to bespeak its parrot origin : while
its face is entirely made up of two great disks, surrounding
the eyes, which succeed in giving it a most marked
and unmistakable owl-like appearance.

Now, why should a parrot so strangely disguise itself
and belie its ancestry ? The reason is plain. It found
a place for it ready made in nature. New Zealand is a
remote and sparsely-stocked island, peopled by mere
casual waifs and strays of life from adjacent but still
very distant continents. There are no dangerous
enemies there. Here, then, was a clear chance for a
nightly prowler. The owl-parrot with true business
instinct saw the opening thus clearly laid before it, and
took to a nocturnal and burrowing life, with the natural
consequence that it acquired in time the dingy plumage,
crepuscular eyes, and broad disk-like reflectors of other
prowling night-fliers. Unlike the owls, however, the
owl-parrot, true to the vegetarian instincts of the whole
lory race, lives almost entirely upon sprigs of mosses and

G 2

84 PRETTY POLL.

other creeping plants. It is thus essentially a ground
bird ; and as it feeds at night in a country possessing no
native beasts of prey, it has almost lost the power of
flight, and uses its wings only as a sort of parachute to
break its fall in descending from a rock or tree to its
accustomed feeding-ground. To get up again, it climbs,
parrot-like, with its hooked claws, up the surface of the
trunk or the face of a precipice.

Even more aberrant in its ways, however, than the
burrowing owl-parrot, is that other strange and bated
New Zealand lory, the kea, which, alone among its
kind, has abjured the gentle ancestral vegetarianism of
the cockatoos and macaws, in favour of a carnivorous
diet of singular ferocity. And what is odder still, this
evil habit has been developed in the kea since the
colonization of New Zealand by the English, those most
demoralizing of new-comers. The settlers have taught
the Maori to wear tall hats and to drink strong liquors :
and they have thrown temptation in the way of even the
once innocent native parrot. Before the white man
came, in fact, the kea was a mild-mannered fruit-eating
or honey-sucking bird. But as soon as sheep-stations
were established in the inland these degenerate parrots
began to acquire a distinct taste for raw mutton. At
first, to be sure, they ate only the sheep's heads and offal
that were thrown out from the slaughter-houses picking
the bones as clean of meat as a dog or a jackal. But in
process of time, as the taste for blood grew upon them, a
still viler idea entered into their wicked heads. The
first step on the downward path suggested the second.
If dead sheep are good to eat, why not also living ones ?

PRETTY POLL. 85

The kea, pondering deeply on this abstruse problem,
solved it at once with an emphatic affirmative. And he
straightway proceeded to act upon his convictions, and
invent a really hideous mode of procedure. Perching on
the backs of the living sheep he has now learnt the exact
spot where the kidneys are to be found ; and he tears
open the flesh to get at these dainty morsels, which he
pulls out and devours, leaving the unhappy animal to
die in miserable agony. As many as two hundred
ewes have thus been killed in a night at a single
station. I need hardly add that the sheep-farmer
naturally resents this irregular proceeding, so opposed to
all ideals of good grazing, and that the days of the kea
are now numbered in New Zealand. But from the
purely psychological point of view the case is an interest-
ing one, as being the best recorded instance of the growth
of a new and complex instinct actually 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 because that colour enables them
best to escape notice among the monotonous verdure of
equatorial woodland scenery. In the north, to be sure,
green is a very conspicuous colour; but that is only
because for half the year our trees are bare, and even
during the other half they lack that ' breadth of tropic
shade ' which characterises the forests of all hot
countries. Therefore, in temperate climates, the common
ground-tone of birds is brown, to harmonise with the
bare boughs and leafless twigs, the clods of earth and
dead turf or stubble. But in the evergreen tropics

86 PRETTY POLL,

green is the right hue for concealment or defence.
Therefore the parrots, the most purely tropical family of
birds on earth, are mostly greenish ; and among the
smaller and more defenceless sorts, like the familiar
little love-birds, where the need for protection is greatest,
the green of the plumage is almost unbroken. Of the
tiny Pigmy Parrots of New Guinea, for instance, Mr.
Bowdler Sharpe says : ' Owing to their small size and
the resemblance of their green colouring to the forests
they inhabit, they are not easily seen, and until recent
years were very hard to procure.' And of the green
parrot of Jamaica, Mr. Gosse remarks : ' Often we hear
their voices proceeding from a certain tree, or else have
marked the descent of a flock on it ; but on proceeding
to the spot, though the eye has not wandered from it,
we cannot discover an individual. We go close to the
tree, but all is silent and still as death. We institute
a careful survey of every part with the eye, to detect the
slightest motion, or the form of a bird among the leaves,
but all in vain. We begin to think they have stolen off
unperceived ; but on throwing a stone into the tree, a
dozen throats burst forth into a cry, and as many green
birds rush forth upon the wing,' 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 and humming-birds — seeking their food ever
among the bright berries and brilliant flowers, almost
invariably acquire in the long run an aesthetic taste for
pure and varied colouring, and by the aid of sexual
selection this taste stereotypes itself at last in their

PRETTY POLL. 87

own wings and plumage. They choose their mates for
colour as they choose their foodstuffs. Hence all the
larger and more gregarious parrots, in which the need
for concealment is less, tend to diversify the fundamental
green of their coats with crimson, yellow, or blue, which
in some cases take possession of the entire body. The
largest kinds of all, like the great blue and yellow or
crimson macaws, are as gorgeous as Solomon in all
his glory : and they are also the species least afraid of
enemies ; for in Brazil you may often see them wending
their way homeward openly in pairs every evening, with
as little attempt at concealment as rooks in England.
In the Moluccas and New Guinea, says Mr. Wallace,
white cockatoos and gorgeous lories in crimson and blue
are the very commonest objects in the local fauna.
Even the New Zealand owl-parrot, however, still retains
many traces of his original greenness, mixed with the
dirty brown and dingy yellow of his acquired nocturnal
and burrowing nature.

If fruit-eaters are fine, flower-haunters are magnificent.
And the brush-tongued lories, that search for nectar
among the bells of Malayan blossoms, are the brightest-
coloured of all the parrot tribes. Indeed, no group of
birds, according to Mr. Alfred Eussel Wallace (who
ought to know, if anybody does), exhibits within the
same limited number of types so extraordinary a diversity
and richness of colouring as the parrots. ' As a rule,' he
says, ' parrots may be termed green birds, the majority
of the species having this colour as the basis of their
plumage, relieved by caps, gorgets, bands and wing-
spots of other and brighter hues. Yet this general green

88 PRETTY POLL.

tint sometimes changes into light or deep blue, as in some
macaws ; into pure yellow or rich orange, as in some of
the American macaw-parrots ; into purple, grey or dove-
colour, as in some American, African, and Indian species ;
into the purest crimson, as in some of the lories ; into
rosy- white and pure white, as in the cockatoos ; and
into a deep purple, ashy or black, as in several Papuan,
Australian, and Mascarene species. There is in fact
hardly a single distinct and definable colour that cannot be
fairly matched among the 39C species of known parrots.
Their habits, too, are such as to 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, and towards sunset return home-
ward in noisy flocks, or in constant pairs. Their forms
and motions are often beautiful and attractive. The
immensely long tails of the macaws and the more
slender tails of the Indian parroquets, the fine crest of
the cockatoos, the swift flight of many of the smaller
species, and the graceful motions of the little love-birds
and allied forms, together with their affectionate natures,
aptitude for domestication, and power of mimicry, com-
bine to render them at once the most conspicuous and
the most attractive of all the specially tropical forms of
bird life.'

I have purposely left to the last the one point about
parrots which most often attracts the attention of the
young, the gay, the giddy, and the thoughtless : I mean
their power of mimicry in human language. And I
Relieve I am justified in passing it over lightly. For ;a

PRETTY POLL. 89

fact this power is but a very incidental result of the
general intelligence of parrots, combined with the other
peculiarities of their social life and forestine character.
Dominant woodland animals, indeed, like monkeys,
parrots, toucans, and hornbills, at least if vegetarian in
their habits, are almost always gregarious, noisy,
mischievous, and imitative. And the imitation results
directly from the unusual intelligence ; for, after all,
what is the power of learning itself — at least, in all save
its very highest phases — but the faculty of accurately
imitating another ? Monkeys for the most part imitate
action only, because they haven't very varied or flexible
voices. Parrots and many other birds, on the contrary
— like the starling and still more markedly the American
mocking-bird — being endowed with considerable flexi-
bility of voice, imitate either songs or spoken words with
great distinctness. In the parrot the power of attention
is also very considerable, for the bird will often try over
with itself repeatedly the lesson it has set itself to learn.
But people too generally forget that at best the parrot
knows only the general application of a sentence, not the
separate meanings of its component words. It knows,
for example, that ' Polly wants a lump of sugar 'is a
phrase often followed by a present of food. But to'
believe it can understand an abstract expression, like the
famous ' By Jove ! what a beastly lot of parrots ! ' is to
confound learning by rote with genuine comprehension.
A careful review of all the evidence makes almost every
scientific observer conclude that at most a parrot knows a
word of command as a horse knows ' Whoa ! ' or a dog
knows the order to hunt for rats in the wainscot,

HIGH LIFE.

EVERYBODY knovrs mountain flowers are beautiful. As
one rises up any minor height in the Alps or the Pyrenees
below snow-level, one notices at once the extraordinary
brilliancy and richness of the blossoms one meets there.
All nature is dressed in its brightest robes. Great belts
of blue gentian hang like a zone on the mountain slopes ;
masses of yellow globe-flower star the upland pastures ;
nodding heads of soldanella lurk low among the rugged
boulders by the glacier's side. No lowland blossoms
have such vividness of colouring, or grow in such con-
spicuous patches. To strike the eye from afar, to attract
and allure at 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 ? Why do they flaunt their golden
glories so openly before the world, instead of shrinking
in modest reserve beneath their own green leaves, like
the Puritan primrose and the retiring violet ? The
answer is, Because of the extreme rarity of the mountain
air. It's the barometer that does it. At first sight, I
will readily admit, this explanation seems as fanciful
as the traditional connection between Goodwin Sands

HIGH LIFE. 91

and Tenterden Steeple. But, like the amateur stories
in country papers, it is c founded on fact,' for all that.
(Imagine, by the way, a tale founded entirely on fiction !
How charmingly aerial !) By a roundabout road,
through varying chains of cause and effect, the rarity of
the air does really account in the long run for the beauty
and conspicuousness of the mountain flowers.

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

92 HIGH LIFE.

And how does the preponderance of butterflies in the
upper regions of the 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, are industrious
creatures which employ each shining hour (well-chosen
epithet, ' shining ') for the good of the community, and
to the best purpose. The bee, in fact, is the bon bourgeois
of the insect world : he attends strictly to business,
loses no time in wild or reckless excursions, and flies
by the straightest path from flower to flower of the 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. No flitting for him, no
coquetting, no fickleness. Therefore, the flowers that have
adapted themselves to his needs, and that depend upon him
mainly or solely for fertilisation, waste no unnecessary
material on those big flaunting coloured posters which we
human observers know as petals. They have, for the most
part, simple blue or purple flowers, tubular in shape and,
individually,' inconspicuous in hue ; and they are oftenest
arranged in long spikes of blossom to avoid wasting the
time of their winged Mr. Bultitudes. So long as they are
just bright enough to catch the bee's eye a few yards away,
they are certain to receive a visit in due season from that
industrious and persistent commercial traveller. Having
a circle of good customers upon whom they can depend
with certainty for fertilisation, they have no need to
waste any large proportion of their substance upon
expensive advertisements or gaudy petals.

It is just the opposite with butterflies. Those gay and

HIGH LIFE. 93

irrepressible creatures, the fashionable and frivolous
element in the insect world, gad about from flower to
flower over great distances at once, and think much more
of sunning themselves and of attracting their fellows than
of attention to business. And the reason is obvious, if
one considers for a moment the difference in the
political and domestic economy of the two opposed
groups. For the honey-bees are neuters, sexless pur-
veyors of the hive, with no interest on earth save the
storing of honey for the common benefit of the phalanstery
to which they belong. But the butterflies are full-fledged
males and females, on the hunt through the world for
suitable partners : they think far less of feeding than of
displaying their charms : a little honey to support them
during their flight 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.' The
butterflies are of his kind. The high mountain zone is
for them a true ball-room : the flowers are light refresh-
ments laid out in the vestibule. Their real business in
life is not to gorge and lay by, but to coquette and display
themselves and find fitting partners.

So while the bees with their honey-bags, like the
financier with his money-bags, are storing up profit for
the composite community, the butterfly, on the contrary,
lays himself out for an agreeable flutter, and sips nectar
where he will, over large areas of country. He flies
rather high, flaunting his wings in the sun, because he
wants to show himself off in all his airy beauty : and
when he spies a bed of bright flowers afar off on the

94 HIGH LIFE.

sun-smitten slopes, he sails off towards them lazily, like
a grand signior who amuses himself. No regular plod-
ding through a monotonous spike of plain little bells for
him : what he wants is brilliant colour, bold advertise-
ment, good honey, and plenty of it. He doesn't care to
search. Who wants his favours must make himself con-
spicuous.

Now, plants are good shopkeepers ; they lay themselves
out strictly to attract their customers. Hence the
character of the flowers on this beeless belt of mountain
side is entirely determined by the character of the
butterfly fertilisers. Only those plants which laid
themselves out from time immemorial to suit the butter-
flies, in other words, have succeeded in the long run in
the struggle for existence. So the butterfly-plants of the
butterfly-zone are all strictly adapted to butterfly 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 long proboscis of the insect can
easily penetrate : and they habitually grow close together
in broad belts or patches, so that the colour of each
reinforces and aids the colour of the others. It is this
cumulative habit that accounts for the marked flower-
bed or jam-tart character which everybody must have
noticed in the high Alpine flora.

Aristocracies usually pride themselves on their anti-
quity : and the high life of the mountains is undeniably
ancient. The plants and animals of tho butterfly-zone
belong to a special group which appears everywhere in
Europe and America about the limit of snow, whether

HIGH LIFE. 95

northward or upward. For example, I was pleased to
note near the summit of Mount Washington (the highest
peak in New Hampshire) that a large number of the
flowers belonged to species well known on the open plains
of Lapland and Finland. The plants of the High Alps
are found also, as a rule, not only on the High Pyrenees,
the Carpathians, the Scotch Grampians, and the
Norwegian fjelds, but also round the Arctic Circle in
Europe and America. They reappear at long distances
where suitable conditions recur : they follow the snow-
line as the snow-line recedes ever in summer higher north
toward the pole or higher vertically toward the mountain
summits. And this bespeaks in one way to the reasoning
mind a very ancient ancestry. It shows they date back
to a very old and cold epoch.

Let me give a single instance which strikingly illus-
trates the general principle. Near the top of Mount
Washington, as aforesaid, lives to this day a little
colony of very cold-loving and mountainous butterflies,
which never descend below a couple of thousand feet
from the wind-swept summit. Except just there, there
are no more of there sort anywhere about : and as far as
the butterflies themselves are aware, no others of their
species exist on earth : they never have seen a single one
of their kind, save of their own little colony. One might
compare them with the Pitcairn Islanders in the South
Seas — an isolated group of English origin, cut -off. by a
vast distance from all their congeners in Europe or
America. But if you go north some eight or nine hun-
dred miles from New Hampshire to Labrador, at a
certain point the same butterfly reappears, and spreads

96 HIGH LIFE.

northward toward the pole in great abundance. Now,
how did this little colony of chilly insects get separated
from the main body, and islanded, as it were, on a
remote mountain-top in far warmer New Hampshire ?

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

A couple of hundred thousand years ago or there-
abouts— don't let us haggle, I beg of you, over a few
casual centuries — the whole of northern Europe and
America was covered from end to end, as everybody
knows, by a sheet of solid ice, like the one which
Frithiof Nansen crossed from sea to sea on his own
account in Greenland. Eor many thousand years, with
occasional warmer spells, that vast ice-sheet brooded,
silent and grim, over the face of the two continents.
Life was extinct as far south as the latitude of New
York and London. No plant or animal survived the
general freezing. Not a creature broke the monotony of
that endless glacial desert. At last, as the celestial
cycle came round in due season, fresh conditions
supervened. Warmer weather set in, and the ice began
to melt. Then the plants and animals of the sub-glacial
district were pushed slowly northward by the warmth
after the retreating ice-cap. As time went on, the cli-
mate of the plains got too hot to hold them. The summer
was too much for the glacial types to endure. They
remained only on the highest mountain peaks or close to
the southern limit of eternal snow. In this way, every
isolated range in either continent has its own little
colony of arctic or glacial plants and animals, which still
survive by themselves, unaffected by intercourse with

HIGH LIFE. 97

their unknown and unsuspected fellow-creatures else-
where.

Not only has the Glacial epoch left these organic traces
of its existence, however ; in some parts of New Hamp-
shire, where the glaciers were unusually thick and deep,
fragments of the primaeval ice itself still remain on the
spots where they were originally stranded. Among the
shady glens of the white mountains there occur here and
there great masses of ancient ice, the unmelted remnant
of primaeval glaciers ; and one of these is so large that an
artificial cave has been cleverly excavated in it, as an
attraction for tourists, by the canny Yankee proprietor.
Elsewhere the old ice-blocks are buried under the dibris
of moraine-stuff and alluvium, and are only accidentally
discovered by the sinking of what are locally known as
ice-wells. No existing conditions can account for the
formation of such solid rocks of ice at such a depth in
the soil. They are essentially glacier-like in origin and
character : they result from the pressure of snow into a
crystalline mass in a mountain valley : and they must
have remained there unmelted ever since the close of the
Glacial epoch, which, by Dr. Croll's calculations, must
most probably have ceased to plague our earth some
eighty thousand years ago. Modern America, however,
has no respect for antiquity : and it is at present engaged
in using up this palaeocrystic deposit — this belated store-
house of prehistoric ice — in the manufacture of gin slings
and brandy cocktails.

As one scales a mountain of moderate height— say
seven or eight thousand feet — in a temperate climate,
one is sure to be struck by the gradual diminution as one

H

98 HIGH LIFE.

goes in the size of the trees, till at last they tail off into
mere shrubs and bushes. This diminution — an old
commonplace of tourists — is a marked characteristic of
mountain plants, and it depends, of course, in the main
upon the effect of cold, and of the wind in winter. Cold,
however, is by far the more potent factor of the two,
though it is the least often insisted upon : and this can
be seen in a moment by anyone who remembers that
trees shade off in just the self-same manner near the
southern limit of permanent snow in the Arctic regions.
And the way the cold acts is simply this : it nips off the
young buds in spring in exposed situations, as the chilly
sea-breeze does with coast plants, which, as we com-
monly but incorrectly say, are " blown sideways" from
seaward.

Of course, the lower down one gets, and the nearer to the
soil, the warmer the layer of air becomes, both because
there is greater radiation, and because one can secure
a little more shelter. So, very far north, and very near
the snow-line on mountains, you always find the vegeta-
tion runs low and stunted. It takes advantage of every
crack, every cranny in the rocks, every sunny little nook,
every jutting point or wee promontory of shelter. And
as the mountain plants have been accustomed for ages
to the strenuous conditions of such cold and wind-swept
situations, they have ended, of course, by adapting them-
selves to that station in life to which it has pleased the
powers that be to call them. They grow quite naturally
low and stumpy and rosette-shaped : they are compact
of form and very hard of fibre : they present no surface
of resistance to the wind in any way ; rounded and boss-

HIGH LIFE. 99

like, they seldom rise above the level of the rocks and
stones, whose interstices they occupy. It is this combina-
tion of characters that makes mountain plants such
favourites with florists : for they possess of themselves
that close-grown habit and that rich profusion of clustered
flowers which it is the grand object of the gardener by
artificial 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 or Pickwickian sense,
and that it is only the size, not the type, of the vegetation
that is really in question. For trees exist even on the
highest hill-tops : only they have accommodated them-
selves to the exigencies of the situation. Smaller and
ever smaller species have been developed by natural
selection to suit the peculiarities of these inclement spots.
Take, for example, the willow and poplar group.
Nobody would deny that a weeping willow by an English
river, or a Lombardy poplar in an Italian avenue, was as
much of a true tree as an oak or a chestnut. But as one
mounts towards the bare and wind-swept mountain
heights one finds that the willows begin to grow down-
ward gradually. The ' netted willow ' of the Alps and
Pyrenees, which shelters itself under the lee of little
jutting rocks, attains the height of only a few inches ;
while the 'herbaceous willow,' common on all very
high mountains in Western Europe, is a tiny creeping
weed, which nobody would ever take for a forest tree by
origin at all, unless he happened to see it in the catkin-
bearing stage, when its true nature and history would
become at once apparent to him.

H 2

100 HIGH LIFE.

Yet this little herb-like willow, one of the most
northerly and hardy of 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 on it
sometimes as many rings of annual growth as on a lordly
Scotch fir-tree. But where? Why, underground. For
see how cunning it is, this little stunted descendant of
proud forest lords : hard-pressed by nature, it has learnt
to make the best of its difficult and precarious position.
It has a woody trunk at core, like all other trees ; but this
trunk never appears above the level of the soil : it creeps
and roots underground in tortuous zigzags between the
crags and boulders that lie strewn through its thin sheet
of upland leaf- mould. By this simple plan the willow
manages to get protection in winter, on the same
principle as when we human gardeners lay down the
stems of vines : only the willow remains laid down all
the year and always. But in summer it sends up its
short-lived herbaceous branches, covered with tiny green
leaves, and ending at last in a single silky catkin. Yet
between the great weeping willow and this last degraded
mountain representative of the same primitive type, you
can trace in Europe alone at least a dozen distinct
intermediate forms, all well marked in their differences,
and all progressively dwarfed by long stress of un-
favourable conditions.

From the combination of such unfavourable conditions
in Arctic countries and under the snow-line of mountains
there results a curious fact, already hinted at above,
that the coldest floras are also, from the purely human
point of view, the most beautiful. Not, of course, the

HIGH LIFE. 101

most luxuriant : for lush richness of foliage and ' breadth
of tropic shade ' (to quote a noble lord) one must go, as
everyone knows, to the equatorial regions. But, con-
trary to the common opinion, the tropics, hoary shams,
are not remarkable for the abundance or beauty of their
flowers. Quite otherwise, indeed : an unrelieved green
strikes the keynote of equatorial forests. This is my
own experience, and it is borne out (which is far more
important) by Mr. Alfred Eussel Wallace, who has seen
a wider range of the untouched tropics, in all four
hemispheres — northern, southern, eastern, western —
than any other man, I suppose, that ever lived on this
planet. And Mr. Wallace is firm in his conviction that
the tropics in this respect are a complete fraud. Bright
flowers are there quite conspicuously absent. It is
rather in the cold and less favoured regions of the world
that one must look for fine floral displays and bright
masses of colour. Close up to the snow-line the wealth
of flowers is always the greatest.

In order to understand this apparent paradox one
must remember that the highest type of flowers, from
the point of view of organisation, is not at 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 in very brilliant hues, and to run
to very large sizes in order to attract the attention of a
great number of visitors, one or other of whom may
casually fertilise them ; while plants with very special
adaptations, like the sage and mint group, or the little
English orchids, are so cunningly arranged that they

102 HIGH LIFE.

can't fail of fertilisation at the very first visit, which of
course enables them to a great extent to dispense with
the aid of big or brilliant petals. So that, where the
struggle for life is fiercest, and adaptation most perfect,
the flora will on the whole be not most, but least,
conspicuous in the matter of very handsome flowers.

Now, the struggle for life is fiercest, and the wealth of
nature is greatest, one need hardly say, in tropical
climates. There alone do we find every inch of soil
' encumbered by its waste fertility,' as Comus puts it ;
weighed down by luxuriant growth of tree, shrub, herb,
creeper. There alone do lizards lurk in every hole ;
beetles dwell manifold 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; and
tangled richness, not beauty of colour, becomes the
dominant note of the equatorial forests. Now and then,
to be sure, as you wander through Brazilian or
Malayan woods, you may light upon some bright tree
clad in scarlet bloom, or some glorious orchid drooping
pendant from a bough with long sprays ol beauty : but
such sights are infrequent. Green, and green, and ever
green again — that is the general feeling of the equatorial
forest : as different as possible from the rich mosaic of a
high alp in early June, or a Scotch hillside deep in
golden gorse and purple heather in broad August
sunshine.

In very cold countries, on the other hand, though the
conditions are severe, the struggle for existence is not
really so hard, because, in one word, there are fewer

HIGH LIFE. 103

competitors. The field is less occupied ; life is less rich,
less varied, less self-strangling. And therefore speciali-
sation hasn't gone nearly so far in cold latitudes
or altitudes. Lower and simpler types everywhere
occupy the soil ; mosses, matted flowers, small beetles,
dwarf butterflies. Nature is less luxuriant, yet in some
ways more beautiful. As we rise on the mountains the
forest trees disappear, and with them the forest beasts,
from bears to squirrels ; a low, wind-swept vegetation
succeeds, very poor in species, and stunted in growth,
but making a floor of rich flowers almost unknown
elsewhere. The humble butterflies and beetles of the
chillier elevation produce in the result more beautiful
bloom than the highly 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 of believing tropical nature to be so
rich in colouring, and circumpolar nature to be so dingy
and unlovable ? Simply thus, I believe. The tropics
embrace the largest land areas in the world, and are
richer by a thousand times in species of plants and
animals than all the rest of the earth in a lump put to-
gether. That richness necessarily results from the
fierceness of the competition. Now among this
enormous mass of tropical plants it naturally happens
that some have finer flowers than any temperate species ;
while as to the animals and birds, they are undoubtedly,
on the whole, both larger and handsomer than the fauna
of colder climates. But in the general aspect of tropical
nature an occasional bright flower or brilliant parrot

104 HIGH LIFE.

counts for very little among the mass of lush green which
surrounds and conceals it. On the other hand, in our
museums and conservatories we sedulously pick out the
rarest and most beautiful of these rare and beautiful
species, and we isolate them completely from their
natural surroundings. The consequence is that the un-
travelled mind regards the tropics mentally as a sort of
perpetual replica of the hot-houses at Kew, superimposed
on the best of Mr. Bull's orchid shows. As a matter of
fact, people who know the hot world well can tell you
that the average tropical woodland is much more like the
dark shade of Box Hill or the deepest glades of the
Black Forest. For really fine floral display in the mass,
all at once, you must go, not to Ceylon, Sumatra,
Jamaica, but to the far north of Canada, the Bernese
Oberland, the moors of Inverness-shire, the North Cape
of Norway. Flowers are loveliest where the climate is
coldest ; forests are greenest, most luxuriant, least
blossoming, where the conditions of life are richest,
warmest, fiercest. In one word, High Life is always
poor but beautiful.

EIGHT-LEGGED FBIENDS.

A SINGULAR opportunity was afforded me last summer
for making myself thoroughly at home with the habits
and manners of the common English geometrical spider.
By the pure chance of circumstance, two ladies of that
intelligent and interesting species were kind enough to
select for their temporary residence a large pane of glass
just outside my drawing-room window. Now, it so
happened that this particular pane was constructed not
to open, being, in fact, part of a big bow-window, the
alternate sashes of which were alone intended for
ventilation. Hence it came to pass that by diligent
care I was enabled to preserve my two eight-legged
acquaintances from the devouring broom of the
British housemaid, and to keep them constantly
under observation at all times and seasons during a
whole summer. Of course this result was only obtained
by a distinct exercise of despotic authority, for I know
those poor spiders were a constant eyesore in Ellen's
sight — the housemaid of the moment bore the name of
Ellen — but I persisted in my prohibition of any forcible
ejectment, and I carried my point in the end in the

106 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS.

very teeth of that constituted domestic authority. So
successful was I, indeed, that when at last we flitted
southwards ourselves with the swallows on our annual
migration to the Mediterranean shores, we left Lucy
and Eliza — those were the names we had given them —
in undisturbed possession 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 great juicy-looking creatures. Nobody could
say that any form of spider is precisely what our Italian
friends prettily describe in their liquid way as simpatico.
At times, indeed, the conduct of Lucy and Eliza was so
peculiarly horrible and blood-curdling in its atrocity, that
even I, their best friend, who had so often interceded for
their lives and saved them from the devastating duster
of the aggressive housemaid — even I myself, I say, more
than once debated in my own mind whether I was
justified in letting them go on any longer in their career
of crime unchecked, or whether I ought not rather
to rush out at once, avenging rag in hand, and sweep
them away at one fell swoop from the surface of a world
they disgraced with their unbridled wickedness. Eliza,
in particular, I'm constrained to allow, was a perfect
monster of vice — a sort of undeveloped arachnid Borgia,
quick to slay and relentless in pursuit ; a mass of eight-
legged sins, stained with the colourless gore of ten
thousand struggling victims, and absolutely without a
single redeeming point in her hateful character. And
yet, whenever any more than usually horrible massacre
of some pretty and innocent fly almost moved me in my

EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. 107

righteous wrath to rush out into the garden in hot haste
and put an end at once to the cruel wretch's existence
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 conscience just in time to ensure that wicked
Eliza a fresh spell of life in which to continue unabashed
her atrocious behaviour.

Has man, I asked myself at such moments, mere human
man, any right to set himself up in the place of earthly
providence, as so much better and more moral than
insentient nature ? If the spider cruelly devours living
flies and intelligent or highly sensitive bees, we must at
least remember that she has no choice in the matter, and
that, as the poet justly remarks, ''tis her nature to.'
But then, on the other hand, it might be plausibly
argued that 'tis our nature equally to kill the creature
that we see so hatefully fulfilling the law of its own cruel
being. And yet again it might be pleaded by any able
counsel who undertook the defence of Lucy or Eliza on
her trial for her life against her human accusers, that she
was impelled to all these evil deeds by maternal affection,
one of the noblest and most unselfish of animal instincts.
Moreover, if the spider didn't prey, it would obviously
die ; and it seems rather hard on any creature to condemn
it to death for no better reason than because it happens
to have been born a member of its own kind, and not
of any other and less morally objectionable species.
Jedburgh justice of that sort rather savours of the
method pursued by the famous countryman who was
ofund cutting a harmless amphibian into a hundred

103 RIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS.

pieces with his murderous spade, and saying spitefully as
he did so, at every particularly savage cut : ' I'll larn ye
to be a twoad, I will ; I'll larn ye to be a twoad ! '

Nevertheless, in spite of all this my vaunted philo-
sophy, I will frankly confess that more than once Eliza
and Lucy sorely tried my patience, and that I was often
a good deal better than half-minded in my soul to rush
out in a feverish fit of moral indignation and put an end
to their ghastly career of crime without waiting to hear
what they had to say in their own favour, showing cause
why sentence of death should not be executed upon
them. And I would have done it, I believe, had it not
been for that peculiar arrangement of the drawing-room
windows, which made it impossible to get at the culprits
direct, without going out into the garden and round the
house; which, of course, is a severe strain in wet or
windy weather to put upon anybody's moral enthusiasm.
In the end, therefore, I always gave the evil-doers the
benefit of the doubt ; and I only mention my ethical
scruples in the matter here lest scoffers should say, when
they come to read what manner of things Lucy and
Eliza did : ' Oh yes, that's just like those scientific
folks ; they're always so cold-blooded. He could stand
by and see these poor helpless flies tortured slowly to
death, without a chance for their lives, and never put out
a helping hand to save 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 one spider, you
merely make room in the overflowing economy of nature
for another to pick up a dishonest livelihood ? Have you
ever reflected that the prime blame of spiderhood rests

EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. 109

with Nature herself (if we may venture to personify that
impersonal entity) ; and that she has provided such a
constant supply or relay of spiders as will amply suffice
to fill up all the possible vacancies that can ever occur in
insect-eating circles? Unless you have considered all
these points carefully, and have an answer to give about
them, you are not in a position to pronounce upon the
subject, and you had better be referred for six months
longer, as the medical examiners gracefully put it, to your
ethical, psychological, and biological studies.

The great point about the position in which Eliza
and Lucy had placed themselves was simply this.
They stood full against the light, so that we could
see right through their translucent bodies, which were
almost liquid to look upon, and beautifully dappled
with dark spots on a grey ground in a very pretty
and effective pattern. So favourable was the oppor-
tunity for observation, indeed, that we could clearly
make out with the naked eye even the joints of their legs,
the hairs on their tarsi — excuse the phrase — and the very
shape of their cruel tigerlike claws, as they rushed forth
upon their prey in a sort of carnivorous frenzy. At all
hours of the day we could notice exactly what they were
doing or suffering ; and so familiar did we become with
them individually and personally, that before the end of
the season we recognized in detail all the differences of
their characters almost as one might do with cats or dogs,
and spoke of them by their Christian names like old and
well-known acquaintances.

As the webs which Lucy and Eliza spun were several
times broken or mutilated during the year, either by

110 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS.

accident or the gardener, we had plenty of chances for
seeing how they proceeded in making them. The lines
were in both cases stretched between a white rose-bush
that climbed up one side of the window, and a purple
clematis that occupied and draped the opposite mullion.
But Lucy and Eliza didn't live in the webs — those were
only their snares or traps for prey ; each of them had in
addition a private home or apartment of her own under
shelter of a rose-leaf at some distance from the treacherous
geometrical structure. The house itself consisted merely
of a silken cell, built out from the rose-leaf, and connected
with the snare by a single stout cord of very solid con-
struction. On this cord the spider kept one foot — I had
almost said one hand — constantly fixed. She poised it
lightly by her claws, and whenever an insect got entangled
in the web, a subtle electric message, so to speak, seemed
to run along the line to the ever-watchful carnivore. In
one short second Lucy or Eliza, as the case might be, had
darted out upon her quarry, and was tackling it might
main, according to the particular way its size and strength
rendered then and there advisable. The method of
procedure, which I shall describe more fully by-and-by,
differed considerably from case to case, as these very
large and strong spiders have sometimes to deal with
mere tiny midges, and sometimes 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 Eliza showed from the first no inconsiderable
personal differences. Lucy began hers by spinning a
long line from her spinnerets, and letting the wind carry

EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. Ill

it wherever it would ; while Eliza, more architectural in
character, preferred- to take her lines personally from
point to point, and see herself to their proper fastening.
In either case, however, the first thing done was to stretch
some eight or ten stout threads from place to place on
the outside of the future web, to act as points d'appuy for
the remainder of the structure. To these outer threads,
which the spiders strengthened so as to bear a consider-
able strain by doubling and trebling them, other thinner
single threads were then carried radially at irregular
distances, like the spokes of a wheel, from a point in the
centre, where they were all made fast and connected
together. As soon as this radiating framework or
scaffolding was finished, like the woof on a loom, the
industrious craf tswoman started at the middle, and began
the task of putting in the cross-pieces or weft which were
to complete and bind together the circular pattern. These
she wove round and round in a continuous spiral, setting
out at the centre, and keeping on in ever- widening cir-
clets, till she arrived at last at the exterior or foundation
threads. How she fastened these cross-pieces to the ray-
lines I could never quite make out, though I often
followed the work closely from inside through the pane of
glass with a platyscopic lens; for, strange to say, the
spiders were not in the least disturbed by being watched
at their work, and never took the slightest notice of
anything that went on at the other side of the window.
My impression is, however, that she gummed them
together, letting them harden into one as they dried ; for
the thread itself is always semi-liquid when first exuded.
The cross-pieces, we observed from the very beginning,

112 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS.

were invariably covered by little sparkling drops of some-
thing wet and beadlike, which at first in our ignorance
we took for dew ; for until I began systematically
observing Lucy and Eliza, I will frankly confess I had
never paid any particular attention to the spider-kind
with the solitary exception of my old winter friends, the
trap-door spiders of the Mediterranean shores. But,
after a little experience, we soon found out that these
pearly drops on the web were not dew at all, but a
sticky substance, akin to that of the web, secreted by
the animals themselves from their own bodies. We also
quickly discovered, coming to the observation as we did
with minds unbiassed by previous knowledge, that the
viscid liquid in question was of the utmost importance to
the spiders in securing their prey, and that unfortunate
insects were not merely entangled but likewise gummed
down or glued by it, like birds in bird-lime or flies in
treacle. So necessary is the sticky stuff, indeed, to the
success of the trap, that Lucy and Eliza used to renew
the entire set of cross-pieces in the web every morning,
and thus ensure from day to day a perfectly fresh supply
of viscid fluid; but, so far as I could see, they only
renewed the rays and the foundation-threads under
stress of necessity, when the snare had been so greatly
injured by large insects struggling in it, or by the wind or
the gardener, as to render repairs absolutely unavoidable.
The whole structure, when complete, is so beautiful and
wonderful a sight, with its geometrical regularity and
its beaded drops, that if it were produced by a rare
creature from Madag?uscar or the Cape, in the insect-
house at the Zoo, all the world, I'm convinced, would

EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. 113

rush to look at it as a nine-days' wonder. But since it's
only the trap of the common English garden spider, why,
we all pass it by without deigning even to glance at it.

At night my eight-legged friends slept always in their
own homes or nests under shelter of the rose-leaves.
But during the day they alternated between the nest
and the centre of the web, which last seemed to serve
them as a convenient station where they waited for their
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 any disturbance on the
webs ; and the instant any unhappy little fly got
entangled in their meshes, the ever-watchful spider was
out like a flash of lightning, and down at once in full
force upon that incautious intruder. I was convinced
after many observations that it is by touch alone the
spider recognizes the presence of prey in its web, and
that it hardly derives any indications worth speaking of
from its numerous little eyes, at least as regards the
arrival of booty. If a very big insect has got into the
web, then a relatively large volume of disturbance is
propagated along the telegraphic wire that runs from the
snare to the house, or from the circumference to the
centre ; if a small one, 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 would jump upon it at once with that strange
access of apparently personal animosity with seems in some
mysterious way a characteristic of all hunting carnivorous

114 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS.

animals. She would then carelessly wind a thread or
two about it, in a perfunctory way, bury her jaws in its
body, and in less than half a minute suck out its juices
to the last drop, leaving the empty shell unhurt, like a
dry skeleton or the slough of a dragon-fly larva. But
when wasps or other large and dangerous insects got
entangled in the webs, the hunters proceeded with
far greater caution. Lucy, indeed, who was a decided
coward, would stand and look anxiously at the doubtful
intruder for several seconds, feeling the web with her
claws, and running up and down in the most undecided
manner, as if in doubt whether or not to tackle the
uncertain customer. But Eliza, whose spirits always
rose like Nelson's before the face of danger, and whose
motto seemed to be 'De I'audace, de I'audace, et toujours
de I'audace, ' would rush at the huge foe in a perfect
transport of wild fury, and go to work at once to enclose
him in her toils of triple silken cables. I always
fancied, indeed, that Eliza was in a thoroughly house-
wifely tantrum at seeing her nice new web so ruthlessly
torn and tattered by the unwelcome visitor, and that she
said to herself in her own language : ' Oh well, then,
if you will have it, 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 fain admit, 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 great sympathy with wasps — they have done
me so many bad turns in my time that I don't pretend
to regard them as deserving of exceptional pity — but I
must say Eliza's way of going at them was unduly

EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. 115

barbaric. She treated them for all the world as if they
were entirely devoid of a nervous system. I wouldn't
treat a Saturday Reviewer myself as that spider treated
the wasps when once she was sure of them. She went at
them with a sort of angry, half-contemptuous dash, kept
cautiously out of the way of the protruded sting, began
in most business-like fashion at the head, and rolling
the wasp round and round with her legs and feelers,
swathed him rapidly and effectually, with incredible
speed, in a dense network of web poured forth from her
spinnerets. In less than half a minute the astonished
wasp, accustomed rather to act on the offensive than the
defensive, found himself helplessly enclosed in a perfect
coil of tangled silk, which confined him from head to
sting without the possibility of movement in any direc-
tion. The whole time this had been going on the
victim, struggling and writhing, had been pushing out
its sting and doing the very best it knew to deal the wily
Eliza a poisoned death-blow. But Eliza, taught by
ancestral experience, kept carefully out of the way ; and
the wasp felt itself finally twirled round and round in
those powerful hands, and tied about as to its wings by a
thousand-fold cable. Sometimes, after the wasp was
secured, Eliza even took the trouble to saw off the wings
BO as to prevent further struggling and consequent
damage to the precious web ; but more often she merely
proceeded to eat it alive without further formality, still
avoiding its sting as long as the creature had a kick left
in it, but otherwise entirely ignoring its character as a
sentient being in the most inhuman fashion. And all
the time, till the last drop of his blood was sucked out,

i 2

116 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS.

the wasp would continue viciously to stick out his deadly
sting, which the spider would still avoid with hereditary
cunning. It was a horrid sight— a duel a entrance between
two equally hateful and poisonous opponents ; a living
commentary on the appalling but o'er-true words of the
poet, that * Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher
can heal.' Though these were the occasions when one
sometimes felt as if the cup of Eliza's iniquities was
really full, and one must pass sentence at last, without
respite or reprieve, upon that life-long murderess.

One insect there was, however, before which even
Eliza herself, hardened wretch as she seemed, used to
cower and shiver ; and that was the great black bumble-
bee, the largest and most powerful of the British bee-kind.
When one of these dangerous monsters, a burly, buzzing
bourgeois, got entangled in her web, Eliza, shaking in
her shoes (I allow her those shoes by poetical licence)
would retire in high dudgeon to her inmost bower, and
there would sit and sulk, in visible bad temper, till the
clumsy big thing, after many futile efforts, had torn its
way by main force out of the coils that surrounded it.
Then, the moment the telegraphic communication told
her the lines in the web were once more free, Eliza would
sally forth again with a smiling face — oh yes, I assure
you, we could tell by her look when she was smiling —
and would repair afresh with cheerful alacrity the damage
done to her snare by the unwelcome visitor. Humming-
bird hawk-moths, on the other hand, though so big and
quick, she would kill immediately. As for Lucy, craven
soul, she had so little sense of proper pride and arachnid
honour, that she shrank even from the wasps which

EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. 117

Eliza so bravely and unhesitatingly tackled ; and more
than once we caught her in the very act of cutting them
out entire, with the whole piece of web in which they
were immeshed, and letting them drop on to the ground
beneath, merely as a short way of getting rid of them
from her premises. I always rather despised Lucy.
She hadn't even the one redeeming virtue of most
carnivorous or predatory races — an insensate and almost
automatic courage.

I need hardly say, however, that the spider does not
kill her prey by a mere fair-and- square bite alone. She
has recourse to the art of the Palmers and Brinvilliers.
All spiders, as far as known, are provided with poison-
fangs in the jaws, which sometimes, as in the tarantula
and many other large tropical kinds, well known to me
in Jamaica and elsewhere, are sufficiently powerful to
produce serious effects upon man himself; while even
much smaller spiders, like Eliza and Lucy, have poison
enough in their falces, as the jawlike organs are called, to
kill a good big insect, such as a wasp or a bumble-bee.
These channelled poison-glands, combined with their
savage tigerlike claws, make the spiders as a group
extremely formidable and dominant creatures, the
analogues in their own smaller invertebrate world of
the serpents and wolves in the vertebrate creation.

Lucy and Eliza's family relations, I am sorry to say,
were not, we found, of a. kind to endear them to a critical
public already sufficiently scandalized by their general
mode of behaviour to their inoffensive neighbours. As
mothers, indeed, gossip itself had not a word of blame to
whisper against them ; but as wives, their conduct was

118 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS.

distinctly open to the severest animadversion. The
males of the garden spider, as in many other instances,
are decidedly smaller than their big round mates ; so
much so is this the case, indeed, in certain species that
they seem almost like parasites of the immensely larger
sack-bodied females. Now, just as the worker bees kill
off the drones as soon as the queen-bee has been duly
fertilized, regarding them as of no further importance or
value to the hive, so do the lady-spiders not only kill but
eat their husbands as soon as they find they have no
further use for them. Nay, if a female spider doesn't
care for the looks of a suitor who is pressing himself too
much upon her fond attention, her way of expressing her
disapprobation of his appearance and manners is to make
a murderous spring at him, and, if possible, devour him.
Under these painful circumstances the process of court-
ship is necessarily to some extent a difficult and delicate
one, fraught with no small danger to the adventurous
swain who has the boldness to commend himself by
personal approach to these very fickle and irascible fair
ones. It was most curious and exciting, accordingly, to
watch the details of the strange courtship, which we
could only observe in the case of the cruel Eliza, the
rather gentler Lucy having been already mated, ap-
parently, before she took up her quarters in our climbing
white rose-bush. One day, however, a timid-looking
male spider, with inquiry and doubt in every movement
of his tarsi, strolled tentatively up on the neat round web
where Eliza was hanging, head downward as usual, all
her feet on the thread, on the look-out for house-flies.
We knew he was a male at once by his longer and

EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. 119

thinner body, and by his natural modesty. He walked
gingerly on all eights, like an arachnid Agag, in the
direction of the object of his ardent affections, with a
most comic uncertainty in every step he took towards
her. His claws felt the threads as he moved with
anxious care ; and it was clear he was ready at a
moment's notice to jump away and flee for his life with
headlong speed to his native obscurity if Eliza showed
the slightest disposition, by gesture or movement, to turn
and rend him. Now and again, as he approached,
Eliza, half coquettish, moved her feet a short step, and
seemed to debate within her own mind in which spirit
she should meet his flattering advances — whether to
accept him or to eat him. At each such hesitation, the
unhappy male, fearing the worst, and sore afraid, would
turn on his heel and fly for dear life as fast as eight
trembling legs would carry him. Then, after a minute
or two, he would evidently come to the conclusion that
he had wronged his lady-love, and that her movement
was one of true, true love rather than of carnivorous and
cannibalistic appetite. At last, as I judged, his constancy
was rewarded, though his ominous disappearance very
shortly afterwards 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, in shape a balloon, and secreted, like the
web, by her invaluable spinnerets. Indeed, the real
reason — I won't say excuse — for the rapacity and
Gargantuan appetite of the spider lies, no doubt, in
the immense amount of material she has to supply for
her daily-renewed webs, her home, and her cocoon, all

120 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS.

which have actually to be spun out of the assimilated
food-stuffs in her own body ; to say nothing of the
additional necessity imposed upon her by nature for
laying a trifle of six 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 hour
one looked in upon them, they were pretty constantly
engaged in devouring some inoffensive fly, or weaving
hateful labyrinths of hasty cord round some fiercely-
struggling wasp or some unhappy beetle.

We weren't fortunate enough, I regret to say, to see
Eliza's eggs hatch out from the cocoon; but in other
instances, especially in Southern Europe, I have noticed
the little heap of well-covered ova, glued together into a
mass, and attached to a branch or twig by stout silken
cables. 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 a living and moving congeries
of little balls or seedlets. The common garden spider
lays some seven hundred or more such eggs at a sitting,
and out of those seven hundred only two on an average
reach maturity and once more propagate their kind.
For if only four lived and throve, then clearly, in the
next generation, there would be twice as many spiders as
in this ; and in the generation after that again, four
times as many ; and then eight times ; and so on ad
infinitum, until the whole world was just one living and
seething mass of common garden spiders.

What keeps them down, then, in the end to their
average number? What prevents the development of
the whole seven hundred ? The simple answer is, con-

EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. 121

tinuous starvation. As usual, nature works with cruel
lavishness. There are just as many spiders at any
given minute as there are insects enough in the world or
in their area to feed upon. Every spider lays hundreds
of eggs, so as to make up for the average infant mortality
by starvation, or by the attacks of ichneumon flies, or by
being eaten themselves in the young stage, or by other
casualties. And so with all other species. Each produces
as many young on the average as will allow for the
ordinary infant mortality of their kind, and leave 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 Eliza for their misdeeds in this world. Kill
them off if you will, and before next week a dozen more
like them will dispute with one another the vacant place
you have thus created in the balanced economy of that
microcosm the garden.

Our observations upon Lucy and Eliza, however, had
the effect of making us take an increased interest thence-
forth in spiders in general, which till that time we had
treated with scant courtesy, and set us about learning
something as to the extraordinary variety of life and
habit to be found within the range of this single group
of arthropods, at first sight so extremely alike in their
shapes, their appearance, their morals, and their manners.
It's perfectly astonishing, though, when one comes to
look into it in detail, how exceedingly diverse spiders are
in their mode of life, their structure, and the variety of
uses to which they put their one extremely distinctive
structural organ, the spinnerets. I will only say here
that some spiders use these peculiar glands to form light

122 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS.

webs by whose aid, though wingless, they float balloon-
wise through the air ; that others employ them to line
the sides of their underground tunnels, and to make the
basis of their marvellously ingenious earthen trap-doors ;
that yet others have learnt how to adapt these same
organs to a subaquatic existence, and to fill cocoons with
air, like miniature diving bells ; while others, again, have
taught themselves to construct webs thick enough to
catch and hold even creatures so superior to themselves
in the scale of being as humming-birds and sunbirds.
This extraordinary variety in the utilization of a single
organ teaches once more the same lesson which is
impressed upon us elsewhere by so many other forms of
organic evolution : whatever enables an animal or plant
to gain an advantage over others in the struggle for life,
no matter in what way, is sure to survive, and to be
turned in time to every conceivable use of which its
structure is capable, in the infinite whirligig of ever-
varying nature.

MUD.

EVEN a prejudiced observer will readily admit that the
most valuable mineral on earth is mud. Diamonds and
rubies are just nowhere by comparison. I don't mean
weight for weight, of course — mud is ' cheap as dirt,' to
buy in small quantities — but aggregate for aggregate. Quite
literally, and without hocus-pocus of any sort, the money
valuation of the mud in the world must outnumber many
thousand times the money valuation of all the other
minerals put together. Only we reckon it usually not by
the ton, but by the acre, though the acre is worth most
where the mud lies deepest. Nay, more, the world's
wealth is wholly based on mud. Corn, not gold, is the
true standard of value. Without mud there would be no
human life, no productions of any kind : for food stuffs
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 only parts of the
world that count much for human habitation are the mud
deposits of the great rivers, and notably of the Nile, the
Euphrates, the Ganges, the Indus, the Irrawaddy, the

124 MUD.

Hoang Ho, the Yang-tse-Kiang ; of the Po, the Ehone,
the Danube, the Ehine, the Volga, the Dnieper ; of the
St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Orinoco,
the Amazons, the La Plata. A corn-field is just a big
mass of mud ; and the deeper and purer and freer from
stones or other impurities it is the better.

But England, you say, is not a great river-rnud field ;
yet it supports the densest population in the world.
True ; but England is an exceptional product of modern
civilization. She can't feed herself : she is fed from
Odessa, Alexandria, Bombay, New York, Montreal,
Buenos Ayres— in other words, from the mud fields of
the Eussian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the American, the
Canadian, the Argentine rivers. Orontes, said Juvenal,
has flowed into Tiber ; Nile, we may say nowadays, 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 on the deck of your dahabieh,
and drink in geography almost without knowing it. The
voyage forms a perfect introduction to the study of mud-
ology, and suggests to the observant mind (meaning you
and me) the real nature of mud as nothing else on earth
that I know of can suggest it. For in Egypt you get
your phenomenon isolated, as it were, from all disturbing
elements. You have no rainfall to bother you, no local
streams, no complex denudation : the Nile does all, and
the Nile does everything. On either hand stretches
away the bare desert, rising up in grey rocky hills. Down
the midst runs the one long line of alluvial soil — in other
words, Nile mud — which alone allows cultivation and

MUD. 125

life in 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 crude brick
buildings that dissolve in dust are Nile mud solidified ;
the red pottery of Assiout is Nile mud baked hard ; the
village mosques and minarets are Nile mud whitewashed.
I have even seen a ship's bulwarks neatly repaired with
mud. It pervades the whole land, when wet, as mud
undisguised ; when dry, as dust-storm.

Egypt, says Herodotus, is a gift of the Nile. A truer
or more pregnant word 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 Arkansas are gifts of
the Mississippi ; but with this difference, that in the case
of the Nile the dependence is far more obvious, far freer
from disturbing or distracting details. For that reason,
and also because the Nile is so much more familiar to
most English-speaking folk than the American rivers, I
choose Egypt first as my type of a regular mud-land.
But in order to understand it fully you mustn't stop all
your time in Cairo and the Delta ; you mustn't view it
only from the terrace of Shepheard's Hotel or the rocky
platform of the Great Pyramid at Ghizeh : you must
push up country early, under Mr. Cook's care, to Luxor
and the First Cataract. It is up country that Egypt
unrolls itself visibly before your eyes in the very process
of making : it is there that the full importance of good,
rich black mud first forces itself upon you by undeniable
evidence.

For remember that, from a point above Berber to the

126 MUD.

sea, the dwindling Nile never receives a single tributary,
a single drop of fresh water. For more than fifteen
hundred miles the ever-lessening river rolls on between
bare desert hills and spreads fertility over the deep valley
in their midst — just as far as its own mud sheet can
cover the barren rocky bottom, and no farther. For the
most part the line of demarcation between the grey bare
desert and the cultivable plain is as clear and as well-
defined as the margin of sea and land : you can stand
with one foot on the barren rock and one on the green
soil of the tilled and irrigated mud-land. For the water
rises up to a certain level, and to that level accordingly
it distributes both mud and moisture : above it comes
the arid rock, as destitute of life, as dead and bare and
lonely as the centre of Sahara. In and out, in waving
line, up to the base of the hills, cultivation and greenery
follow, with absolute accuracy, the line of highest flood-
level; beyond it the hot rock stretches dreary and
desolate. Here and there islands of sandstone stand
out above the green sea of doura or cotton; here and
there a bay of fertility runs away up some lateral valley,
following the course of the mud ; but one inch above the
inundation-mark vegetation and life stop short all at
once with absolute abruptness. In Egypt, then, more
than anywhere else, one sees with one's own eyes that
mud and moisture are the very conditions of mundane
fertility.

Beyond Cairo, as one descends seaward, the mud
begins to open out fan-wise and form a delta. The narrow
mountain ranges no longer hem it in. It has room to
expand and spread itself freely over the surrounding

MUD. 127

country, won by degrees from the Mediterranean. At
the mouths the rnud pours out into the sea and forms
fresh deposits constantly on the bottom, which are
gradually silting up still newer lands to seaward. Slow
as is the progress of this land-forming action, there can
be no doubt that the Nile has the intention of filling up
by degrees the whole eastern Mediterranean, and that
in process of time — say in no more than a few million
years or so, a mere bagatelle to the geologist — with the
aid of the Po and some other lesser streams, it will
transform the entire basin of the inland sea into a level
and cultivable plain, like Bengal or Mesopotamia, them-
selves (as we shall see) the final result of just such
silting action.

It is so very important, for those who wish to see
things "as clear as mud," to understand this prime
principle of the formation of mud-lands, that I shall
make no apology for insisting on it further in some little
detail ; for when one comes to look the matter plainly in
the face, one can see in a minute that almost all the big
things in human history have been entirely dependent
upon the mud of the great rivers. Thebes and Memphis,
Barneses and Amenhotep, based their civilisation absolutely
upon the mud of Nile. The bricks of Babylon were
moulded of Euphrates mud ; the greatness of Nineveh
reposed on the silt of the Tigris. Upper India is the
Indus; Agra and Delhi are Ganges and Jumna mud;
China is the Hoang Ho and the Yang-tse-Kiang ;-•
Burmah is the paddy field of the Irrawaddy delta.
And so many great plains in either hemisphere consist
really of nothing else but mud-banks of almost incredible

128 MUD.

extent, filling up prehistoric Baltics and Mediterraneans,
that a glance at the probable course of future evolution
in this respect may help us to understand and to realize
more fully the gigantic scale of some past accumulations.

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 and eyes of the tweed-
clad English tourist. Everybody who has looked down
upon the wide Lombard plain from the pinnacled roof
of Milan Cathedral, or who has passed by rail through
that monotonous level of poplars and vines between
Verona and Venice, knows well what a mud flat due to
inundation and gradual silting up of a valley looks like.
What I want to do now is to inquire into its origin, and
to follow up in fancy the same process, still in action,
till it has filled the Adriatic from end to end with one
great cultivable lowland.

Once upon a time (I like to be at least as precise as a
fairy tale in the 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, in
other words, of Alpine mud — which has all accumulated
where it now lies at a fairly recent period. We know
it is recent, because no part of Italy has ever been
submerged since it began to gather there. To put it
more definitely, the entire mass has almost certainly
•been laid down since the first appearance of man on our
earth : the earliest human beings who reached the Alps
or the Apennines — black savages clad in skins of extinct
wild beasts — must have looked down from their slopes,

MUD. 129

with shaded eyes, not on a level plain such as we see
to-day, but on a great arm of the sea which stretched
like a gulf far up towards the base of the hills about
Turin and Eivoli. Of this ancient sea the Adriatic forms
the still unsilted portion. In other words, the great
gulf which now stops short at Trieste and Venice once
washed the foot of the Alps and the Apennines to the
Superga at Turin, covering the sites of Padua, Ferrara,
Bologna, Eavenna, Mantua, Cremona, Modena, Parma,
Piacenza, Pavia, Milan, and Novara. The industrious
reader who gets out his Baedeker and looks up the
shaded map of North Italy which forms its frontispiece
will be rewarded for his pains by a better comprehension
of the district thus demarcated. The idle must be
content to take my word for what follows. I pledge
them my honour that I'll do my best not to deceive their
trustful innocence.

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

A parallel elsewhere will make this easier of belief.
You have looked down, no doubt, from the garden of the
hotel at Glion upon the lake of Geneva and the valley of
the Ehone about Villeneuve and Aigle. If so, you can
understand from personal knowledge the first great stage
in the mud-filling process ; for you must have observed
for yourself from that commanding height that the lake
once extended a great deal farther up country towards
Bex and St. Maurice than it does at present. You can

K

130 MUD.

still trace at once on either side the old mountainous
banks, descending into the plain as abruptly and unmis-
takably as they still descend to the water's edge at
Montreux and Vevey. But the silt of the Ehone, brought
down in great sheets of glacier mud (about which more
anon) from the Furca and the Jungfrau and the Monte
Eosa chain, has completely filled in the upper nine miles
of the old lake basin with a level mass of fertile alluvium.
There is no doubt about the fact : you can see it for
yourself with half an eye from that specular mount (to
give the Devil his due, I quote Milton's Satan) : the mud
lies even from bank to bank, raised only a few inches
above the level of the lake, and as lacustrine in effect as
the veriest geologist on earth could wish it. Indeed, the
process of filling up still continues unabated at the present
day where the mud-laden Ehone enters the lake at
Bouveret, to leave it again, clear and blue and beautiful,
under the bridge at Geneva. The little delta which the
river forms at its mouth shows the fresh mud in sheets
gathering thick upon the bottom. Every day this new
mud-bank pushes out farther and farther into the water,
so that in process of time the whole basin will be filled
in, and a level plain, like that which now spreads from
Bex and Aigle to Villeneuve, will occupy the entire bed
from Montreux to Geneva.

Turn mentally to the upper feeders of the Po itself,
and you find the same causes equally in action. You
have stopped at Pallanza — Garoni's is so comfortable.
Well, then, you know how every Alpine stream, as it
flows, full-gorged, into the Italian lakes, is busily engaged
in filling them up as fast as ever it can with turbid mud

MUD. 131

from the uplands. The basins of Maggiore, Como,
Lugano, and Garda are by origin deep hollows scooped
out long since during the Great Ice Age by the pressure
of huge glaciers that then spread far down into what is
now the 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 Val Leventina and
the Val Maggia, the mud has been hard at work, doing
its level best to fill those great ice- worn bowls up again.
Near the mouth of each main stream it has already suc-
ceeded in spreading a fan-shaped delta. I will not insult
you by asking you at the present time of day whether you
have been over the St. Gothard. In this age of trains de
luxe I know to my cost everybody has been everywhere.
No chance of pretending to superior knowledge about
Japan or Honolulu ; the tourist knows them. Very well,
then ; you must remember as you go past Bellinzona —
revolutionary little Bellinzona with its three castled
crags — 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 or shifting quicksand. That is
the first stage in the abolition of the lakes : the mud is
annihilating them.

Maggiore, indeed, least fortunate of the three main
sheets, is being attacked by the insidious foe at three
points simultaneously. At the upper end, the Ticino,
that furious radical river, has filled in a large arm, which
once spread far away up the valley towards Bellinzona.
A little lower down, the Maggia near Locarno carries in
a fresh contribution of mud, which forms another fan-
shaped delta, and stretches its ugly mass half across the

K 2

132 MUD.

lake, compelling the steamers to make a considerable
detour eastward. This delta is rapidly extending into
the open water, and will in time fill in the whole remain-
ing space from bank to bank, cutting off the upper end
of the lake about Locarno from the main basin by a par-
tition of lowland. This upper end will then form a
separate minor lake, and the Ticino will flow out of it
across the intervening mud flat into the new and smaller
Maggiore of our great-great-grandchildren. If you doubt
it, look what the torrent of the Toce, the third assailing
battalion of the persistent mud force, has already done in
the neighbourhood of Pallanza. It has entirely cut off
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 own day a separate lake, the
Lago di Mergozzo, divided from the main sheet by an
uninteresting mud bank. In process of time, no doubt,
the whole of Maggiore will be similarly filled in by the
advancing mud sheet, and will become a level alluvial
plain, surrounded by mountains, and greatly admired by
the astute Piedmontese cultivator.

What is going on in Maggiore is going on equally in
all the other sub-Alpine lakes of the Po valley. They
are being gradually filled in, every one of them, by the
aggressive mud sheet. The upper end of Lugano, for
example, has already been cut off, as the Lago del Piano,
from the main body; and the piano itself, from which
the little isolated tarn takes its name, is the alluvial
mud flat of a lateral torrent — the mud flat, in fact,
which the railway from Porlezza traverses for twenty
minutes before it begins its steep and picturesque climb

MUD, 133

by successive zigzags over the mountains to Menaggio.
Similarly the influx of the Adda at the upper end of
Corno has cut off the Lago di Mezzola from the main
lake, and has formed the alluvial level that stretches so
drearily all around Colico. Slowly the mud fiend
encroaches everywhere on the lakes ; and if you look for
him when you go there you can see him actually at
work every spring under your very eyes, piling up fresh
banks and deltas with alarming industry, and preparing
(in a few hundred thousand years) to ruin the tourist
trade of 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 same action on a vastly
greater scale. A glance at the map will show the
intelligent and ever courteous reader that the * wander-
ing Po ' — I drop into poetry after Goldsmith — flows
much nearer the foot of the Apennines than of the Alps
in the course of its divagations, and seems purposely to
bend away from the greater range of mountains. Why
is this, since everything in nature must needs have a
reason ? Well, it is because, when the mud first began
to accumulate in the old Lombard bay of the Adriatic,
there was no Po at all, whether wandering or otherwise:
the big river has slowly grown up in time by the union
of the lateral torrents that pour down from either side,
as the growth of the mud flat brought them gradually
together. Careful study of a good map will show how
this has happened, especially if it has the plains and
mountains distinctively tinted after the excellent
German fashion. The Ticino, the Adda, the Mincio,

134 MUD.

if you look at them close, reveal themselves as tribu-
taries of the Po, which once flowed separately into the
Lombard bay ; the Adige, the Piave, the Tagliamento
farther along the coast, reveal themselves equally as
tributaries of the future Po, when once the great river
shall have filled up with its mud the space between
Trieste and Venice, though for the moment they empty
themselves and their store of detritus into the open
Adriatic.

Fix your eyes for a moment on Venetia proper, and
you will see how this has all happened and is still
happening. Each mountain torrent that leaps 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 fifty miles wide, from the base of the mountains
to the modern coast-line of the province. Near the sea
— or, in other words, at the temporary outlet — it forms
banks and lagoons, of which those about Venice are the
best known to tourists, though the least characteristic.
For miles and miles between Venice and Trieste the
shifting north shore of the Adriatic consists of nothing
but such accumulating mud banks. Year after year
they push farther seaward, and year after year fresh
islets and shoals grow out into the waves beyond the
temporary deltas. In time, therefore, the gathering
mud banks of these Alpine torrents must join the greater
mud bank that runs rapidly seaward at the delta of the
Po. As soon as they do so the rivers must rush together,
and what was once an independent stream, emptying
itself into the Adriatic, must become a tributary of the
Po, helping to swell the waters of that great united

MUD. 135

river. The Adige has now just reached this state : its
delta is continuous with the delta of the Po, and their
branches interosculate. The Mincio and the Adda
reached it ages since : the Piave and the Livenia will
not reach it for ages. In Eoman days Hatria was still
on the sea : it is now some fifteen miles inland.

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

And this land-making action is ceaseless and con-
tinuous. About Venice, Cnioggia, Maestra, Comacchio,
the delta of the Po is still spreading seaward. In the
course of ages — if nothing unforeseen occurs meanwhile
to prevent it— the Alpine mud will have filled in the
entire Adriatic ; and the Ionian Isles will spring like
isolated mountain ridges from the Adriatic plain, as the
Euganean hills — those ' mountains Euganean ' where
Shelley ' stood listening to the paean with which the
legioned rocks did hail the sun's uprise majestical ' —
spring in our own time from the dead level of Lombardy.
Once they in turn were the Euganean islands, and even

136 MUD.

now to the trained eye of the historical observer they
stand up island-like from the vast green plain that
spreads flat around them.

Perhaps it seems to you a rather large order to be
asked to believe that Lombardy and Venetia are nothing
more than an outspread sheet of deep Alpine mud. Well,
there is nothing so good for incredulity, don't you know,
as capping the climax. If a man will not swallow
an inch of fact, the best remedy is to make him gulp
down an ell of it. And, indeed, the Lombard plain is
but an insignificant mud flat compared with the vast
alluvial plains of Asiatic and American rivers. The
alluvium of the Euphrates, of the Mississippi, of the
Hoang Ho, of the Amazons would take in many
Lornbardies and half-a-dozen Venetias without noticing
the addition. But I will insist upon only one example —
the rivers of India, which have formed the gigantic deep
mud flat of the Ganges and the Jumna, one of the very
biggest on earth, and that because the Himalayas are
the highest and newest mountain chain exposed to
denudation. For, as we saw foreshadowed in the case
of the Alps and Apennines, the bigger the mountains
on which we can draw the greater the resulting mass
of alluvium. The Eocky Mountains give rise to the
Missouri (which is the real Mississippi) ; the Andes give
rise to Amazons and the La Plata; the Himalayas
give rise to the Ganges and the Indus. Great mountain,
great river, great resulting mud sheet.

At a very remote period, so long ago that we cannot
reduce it to any common measure with our modern
chronology, the southern table-land of India— the Dec-
can, as we call it— formed a great island like Australia,

MUD. 137

separated from the continent of Asia by a broad ann of
the sea which occupied what is now the great plain of
Bengal, the North- West, and the Punjaub. This ancient
sea washed the foot of the Himalayas, and spread south
thence for 600 miles to the base of the Vindhyas. But
the Himalayas are high and clad with gigantic glaciers.
Much ice grinds much mud on those snow-capped
summits. The rivers that flowed from the Eoof of the
World carried down vast sheets of alluvium, which
formed fans at their mouths, like the cones still de-
posited on a far smaller scale in the Lake of Geneva by
little lateral torrents. Gradually the silt thus brought
down accumulated on either side, till the rivers ran
together into two great systems — one westward — the
Indus, with its four great tributaries, Jhelum, Chenab,
Eavee, Sutlej ; one eastward, the Ganges, reinforced
lower down by the sister streams of the Jumna and the
Brahmapootra. The colossal accumulation of silt thus
produced filled up at last all the great arm of the sea
between the two mountain chains, 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 the detritus of the Ganges, and the Arabian Sea on
the other by the sand-banks of the Indus.

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

One question more. Whence comes the mud? The

138 MUD.

answer is, Mainly from the detritus of the mountains.
There it has two origins. Part of it is glacial, part of it
is leaf-mould. In order to feel we have really got to the
very bottom of the mud problem — and we are nothing
if not thorough — 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 mill-
stone of ice that rolls slowly over the bed, and deposited
in part as ' terminal moraine ' near the summer melting-
point. It is the quantity of mud thus produced, and
borne down by mountain torrents, that makes the
alluvial plains collect so quickly at their base. The
mud flats of the world are in large part the wear and
tear of the eternal hills under the planing action of the
eternal glaciers.

But let us be just to our friends. A large part is also
due to the industrious earth-worm, whose place in nature
Darwin first taught us to estimate at its proper worth.
For there is much detritus and much first-rate soil even
on hills not covered by glaciers. Some of this takes its
origin, it is true, from disintegration by wind or rain, but
much more is caused by the earth-worm in person. That
friend of humanity, so little recognized in his true light,
has a habit of drawing down leaves into his subterranean
nest, and there eating them up, so as to convert thei
remains into vegetable mould in the form of worm-casts.
This mould, the most precious of soils, gets dissolved
again by the rain, and carried off in solution by the
streams to the sea or the lowlands, where it helps to form
the future cultivable area. At the same time the earth-

t,

;

>S.

MUD. 139

worms secrete an acid, which acts upon the bare surface
of rock beneath, and helps to disintegrate it in preparation
for plant life in unfavourable places. It is probable that
we owe almost more on the whole to these unknown but
conscientious and industrious annelids than even to those
1 mills of God ' the glaciers, of which 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 humanity in all countries bases itself. Every
great plain is the alluvial deposit of a great river,
ultimately derived from a great mountain chain. The
substance consists as a rule of the debris of torrents,
which is often infertile, owing to its stoniness and its
purely mineral character ; but wherever it has lain long
enough to be covered by earth-worms with a deep black
layer of vegetable mould, there the resulting soil shows
the surprising fruitfulness one gets (for example) in
Lombardy, where twelve crops a year are sometimes
taken from the meadows. Everywhere and always
the amount and depth of the mud is the measure of
possible fertility ; and even where, as in the Great
American Desert, want of water converts alluvial plains
into arid stretches of sand-waste, the wilderness can be
made to blossom like the rose in a very few years by
artificial irrigation. The diversion of the Arkansas Eiver
has spread plenty over a vast sage scrub ; the finest
crops in the world are now raised over a tract of country
which was once the terror of 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 and plants grow out of the ground. And of course,
having thus begun by calling it bad names, I will not for
a moment insult the intelligence of my readers by sup-
posing them to share so foolish a delusion. I beg to
state from the outset that I write this article entirely
for the benefit of Other People. You and I, O pro-
verbially Candid and Intelligent One, it need hardly be
said, are better informed. But Other People fall into
such ridiculous blunders that it is just as well to put
them on their guard beforehand against the insidious
advance of false opinions. I have known otherwise good
and estimable men, indeed, who for lack of sound early
teaching on this point went to their graves with a
confirmed belief in the terrestrial origin of all earthly
vegetation. They were probably victims of what the
Church in its succinct way describes and denounces as
Invincible Ignorance.

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

I

THE GREENWOOD TREE. 141

Of course, when people see a wallflower rooted in- the
clefts of some old church tower, they don't jump at once
to the inane conclusion that it is made of rock — that it
derives its nourishment direct from the solid limestone ;
nor when they observe a barnacle hanging by its sucker
to a ship's hull, do they imagine it to draw up its food
incontinently from the copper bottom. But when they
see that familiar pride of our country, a British oak, with
its great underground buttresses spreading abroad through
the soil in every direction, they infer at once that the
buttresses are there, not — as is really the case — to
support it and uphold it, but to drink in nutriment from the
earth beneath, which is just about as capable of producing
oak-wood as the copper plate on the ship's hull is capable
of producing the flesh of a barnacle. Sundry familiar
facts about manuring and watering, to which I will return
later on, give a certain colour of reasonableness, it is true,
to this mistaken inference. But how mistaken it really
is for all that, a single and very familiar little experiment
will easily show one.

Cut down that British oak with your Gladstonian axe ;
lop him of his branches ; divide him into logs ; pile him
up into a pyramid ; put a match to his base ; in short,
make a bonfire of him ; and what becomes of robust
majesty ? He is reduced to ashes, you say. Ah, yes, but
what proportion of him? Conduct your experiment
carefully on a small scale ; dry your wood well, and
weigh it before burning ; weigh your ash afterwards, and
what will you find? Why, that the solid matter which
remains after the burning is a mere infinitesimal fraction
of the total weight : the greater part has gone off into

142 THE GREENWOOD TREE.

the air, from whence it came, 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 truth remains, that trees and plants grow out
of the atmosphere, not out of the ground. They are, in
fact, solidified air ; or to be more strictly correct, solidi-
fied gas — carbonic acid.

Take an ordinary soda-water syphon, with or without
a wine-glassful of brandy, and empty it till only a few
drops remain in the bottom. Then the bottle is full of
gas ; and that gas, which will rush out with a spurt when
you press the knob, is the stuff that plants eat — the raw
material of life, both animal and vegetable. The tree
grows and lives by taking in the carbonic acid from the
air, and solidifying its carbon ; the animal grows and
lives by taking the solidified carbon from the plant, and
converting it once more into carbonic acid. That, in its
ideally simple form, is the Iliad in a nutshell, the core
and kernel of biology. The whole cycle of life is one
eternal see-saw. First the plant collects its carbon com-
pounds from the air in the oxidized state ; it deoxidizes
and rebuilds them : and then the animal proceeds to burn
them up by slow combustion within his own body, and to
turn them loose upon the air, once more oxidized. After
which the plant starts again on the 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 most people do vainly talk, but

THE GREENWOOD TREE. 143

directly out of the air ; and that when they die or get
consumed, they return once more to the atmosphere from
which they were taken. Trees undeniably eat carbon.

Of course, therefore, all the ordinary unscientific
conceptions of how plants feed are absolutely erroneous.
Vegetable physiology, indeed, got beyond these concep-
tions a good hundred years ago. But it usually takes
a hundred years for the world at large to make up its
leeway. Trees don't suck up their nutriment by the
roots, they don't derive their food from the soil, they
don't need to be fed, like babies through a tube, with
terrestrial solids. The solitary instance of an orchid
hung up by a string in a conservatory on a piece of
bark, ought to be sufficient at once to dispel for ever this
strange illusion — if people ever thought ; but of course
they don't think — I mean Other People. The true
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 the soil, but is inhaled through tiny
channels from the air; the mass of their material is
carbon, as we can all see visibly to the naked eye
when a log of wood is reduced to charcoal : and that
carbon the leaves themselves drink in, by a thousand
small green mouths, from the atmosphere around them.

But how about the juice, the sap, the qualities of the
soil, the manure required? is the incredulous cry of
Other People. What is the use of the roots, and
especially of the rootlets, if they are not the mouths and
supply-tubes of the plants? Well, I plainly perceive I
can get ' no forrarder,' like the farmer with his claret,
till I've answered that question, provisionally at least ;

144 THE GREENWOOD TREE.

so I will say here at once, without further ado — the
plant requires drink as well as food, and the roots are
the mouths that supply it with water. They also suck
up a few other things as well, which are necessary
indeed, but far from forming the bulk of the nutriment.
Many plants, however, don't need any roots at all,
while none can get on without leaves as mouths and
stomachs. That is to say, no true plantlike plants, for
some parasitic plants are practically, to all intents and
purposes, animals. To put it briefly, every plant has
one set of aerial mouths to suck in carbon, and many
plants have another set of subterranean mouths as well,
to suck up water and mineral constituents.

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

The way the plant really eats is little known to
gardeners, but very interesting. All over the lower
surface of the green leaf lie scattered dozens of tiny
mouths or apertures, each of them guarded by two small

THE GREENWOOD TREE. 145

pursed-up lips which have a ridiculously human appear-
ance when seen through a simple microscope. When
the conditions of air and moisture are favourable, these
lips open visible to admit gases ; and then the tiny
mouths suck in carbonic acid in abundance from the air
around then. A series of pipes conveys the gaseous
food thus supplied to the upper 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 than chlorophyll; and where the sunlight plays upon
this mysterious chlorophyll, it severs the oxygen from the
carbon in the carbonic acid, turns the free gas loose
upon the atmosphere once more through the tiny
mouths, and retains the severed carbon intact in its own
tissues. That is the whole process of feeding in plants :
they eat carbonic acid, digest it in their leaves, get rid
of the oxygen with which it was formerly combined, and
keep the carbon stored up for their own purposes.

Life as a whole depends entirely upon this property of
chlorophyll ; for every atom of organic matter in your
body or mine was originally so manufactured by sun-
light 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 compose their tissues — to build up their wood,
their leaves, their fruits, their blossoms — plants require
hydrogen, nitrogen, and even small quantities of oxygen
as well; but these various materials are sufficiently
supplied in the water which is taken up by the roots,
and they really contribute very little indeed to .the bulk

L

146 THE GREENWOOD TREE.

of the tree, which consists for the most part of almost
pure carbon. If you were to take a thoroughly dry
piece of wood, and then drive off from it by heat these
extraneous matters, you would find that the remainder,
the pure charcoal, formed the bulk of the weight, the
rest being for the most part very light and gaseous.
Briefly put, plants are mostly carbon and water, and the
carbon which forms their solid part is extracted direct
from the air around them.

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

Oxygen is an absolute necessary of human life. Even
food itself is hardly so important an element ,in our daily
existence ; for Succi, Dr. Tanner, the prophet Elijah, and
other adventurous souls too numerous to mention, have
abundantly shown us that a man can do without food
altogether for forty days at a stretch, while he can't do
without oxygen for a single minute. Cut off his supply
of that life-supporting gas, choke him, or suffocate him,
or place him in an atmosphere of pure carbonic acid, or
hold his head in a bucket of water, and he dies at once.
Yet, except in mines or submarine tunnels, nobody ever

THE GREENWOOD TREE. 147

takes into account practically this most important factor
in human and animal life. We toil for bread, but we
ignore the supply of oxygen. And why ? Simply because
oxygen is universally diffused everywhere. It costs
nothing. Only in the Black Hole of Calcutta or in a
broken tunnel shaft do men ever begin to find themselves
practically short of that life-sustaining gas, and then they
know the want of it far sooner and far 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
even heard of oxygen . A prime necessary of life passed
unnoticed for ages in human history, only because there
was abundance of it to be had everywhere.

Now it isn't quite the same, I admit, with the
carbonaceous food of plants. 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 show by-
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 to eat. Still, carbonic acid
is present in very large quantities in the air in most
situations, and is freely brought by the wind to all the
open spaces which alone man uses for his crops and
his gardening. The most important element in the food
of plants is thus in effect almost everywhere available,
especially from the point of view of the mere practical
everyday human agriculturist. The wind that bloweth
where it listeth brings fresh supplies of carbon on its
wings with every breeze to the mouths and throats of
the greedy and eager plants that long to absorb it.

L 2

148 THE GREENWOOD TREE.

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 and Mr. A. E. Wallace —
land is ' naturally limited in quantity.' Every plant
therefore struggles for a foothold in the soil far more
fiercely and far more tenaciously than it struggles for its
share in the free air of heaven. Your plant is a land-
grabber of Eob Eoy proclivities ; it believes in a fair
fight and no favour. A sufficient supply of food it
almost takes for granted, if only it can once gain a
sufficient ground-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 spare inch of
earth is permeated and pervaded with matted fibres ;
and each is striving to withdraw from each the small
modicum of moisture, mineral matter, and manure for
which all alike are eagerly battling.

Now, what the plant wants from the soil is three
things. First and foremost it wants support ; like all
the rest of us it must have its pou sto, its pied-a-terre,
its locus standi. It can't hang aloft, like Mahomet's
coffin, miraculously suspended on an aerial perch between
earth and heaven. Secondly, it wants water, and this
it can take in, as a rule, only or mainly by means of the
rootlets, though there are some peculiar plants which
grow (not parasitically) on the branches of trees, and
absorb all the moisture they need by pores on their sur-
face. And thirdly, it wants small quantities of nitrogen-
ous matter — in the simpler language of everyday life
called rnanme— as well as of mineral matter — in the

THE GREENWOOD TKEE. 149

simpler language of everyday life called ashes. It is
mainly the first of these three, support, that the farmer
thinks of when he calculates crops and acreage ; for the
second, he depends upon, rainfall or irrigation ; but the
third, manure, he can supply artificially ; and as
manure makes a great deal of incidental difference to
some of his crops, especially corn — which requires
abundant phosphates — he is apt to over-estimate vastly
its importance from a theoretical point of view.

Besides, look at it in another light. Over large areas
together, the conditions of air, climate, and rainfall are
practically identical. But soil differs greatly from place
to place. Here it's black ; there it's yellow ; here it's
rich loam ; there it's boggy mould or sandy gravel. And
some soils are better adapted .to growing certain plants
than others. Rich lowlands and oolites suit the cereals ;
red marl produces wonderful grazing grass ; bare up-
lands are best for gorse and heather. Hence everything
favours for the practical man the mistaken idea that
plants 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 his face ; while the real
act of feeding off the carbon in the air is wholly
unknown 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 experiment that plants can grow and produce
excellent results without any aid from the soil at all.
You have only to suspend the seeds freely in the air by
a string, and supply the rootlets of the sprouting

150 THE GREENWOOD TREE,

seedlings with a little water, containing in solution
small quantities of manure-stuffs, and the plants will
grow as well as on their native heath, or even better.
Indeed, nature has tried the same experiment on a larger
scale1 in many cases, as with the cliff-side plants that
root themselves in the naked clefts of granite rocks ; the
tropical orchids that fasten lightly on the bark of huge
forest trees ; and the mosses that spread even over the
bare face of hard brick walls, with scarcely a chink or
cranny in which to fasten their minute rootlets. The
insect-eating plants are also interesting examples in their
way of the curious means which nature takes for keeping
up the manure supply under trying circumstances.
These uncanny things are all denizens of loose, peaty
soil, where they can root themselves sufficiently for
purposes of foothold and drink, but where the water
rapidly washes away all animal matter. Under such
conditions the cunning sundews and the ruthless pitcher-
plants set deceptive honey traps for unsuspecting insects,
which they catch and kill, absorbing and using up the
protoplasmic contents of their bodies, by way of manure,
to supply their quota of nitrogenous material.

It is the literal fact, then, that plants really eat and
live off carbon, just as truly as sheep eat grass or lions
eat antelopes ; and that the green leaves are the mouths
and stomachs with which they eat and digest it. From
this it naturally results that the growth and spread of
the leaves must largely depend upon the supply of
carbon, as the growth and fatness of sheep depends upon
the supply of pasturage. Under most circumstances, to
be sure, there is carbon enough and to spare lying about

THE GREENWOOD TREE. 151

loose for every one of them ; but conditions do now and
again occur where we can clearly see the importance of
the carbon supply. Water, for example, contains prac-
tically much less carbonic acid than atmospheric air,
especially when the water is stagnant, and therefore not
supplied fresh to the plant from moment to moment.
As a consequence, almost all water-plants have sub-
merged leaves very narrow and waving, while floating
plants, like the water-lilies, have them large and round,
owing to the absence of competition from other kinds
about, which enables them to spread freely in every
direction from the central stalk. Moreover, these
leaves, lolling on the water as they do, have their
mouths on the upper instead of the under surface.
But the most remarkable fact of all is that many water
plants have two entirely different types of leaves, one
submerged and hair-like, the other floating and broad or
circular. Our own English water-crowfoot, for example,
has the leaves that spring from its stem, below the
surface, divided into endless long waving filaments,
which look about in the water for the stray particles of
carbon ; but the moment it reaches the top of its native
pond the foliage expands at once into broad lily-like
lobes, that recline on the water like oriental beauties,
and absorb carbon from the air to their heart's content,
The one type may be likened to gills, that similarly
catch the dissolved oxygen diffused in water ; the other
type may be likened to lungs, that drink in the free and
open air of heaven.

Equally important to the plant, however, with the
supply of carbonic acid, is the supply of sunshine by

152 THE GREENWOOD TREE.

whose aid to digest it. The carbon alone is no good
to the tree if it can't get something which will separate
it from the oxygen, locked in close embrace with it.
That thing is sunshine. There is nothing, therefore, for
which herbs, trees, and shrubs compete more eagerly
than for their fair share of solar energy. In their
anxiety for this they jostle one another down most
mercilessly, in the native condition, grasses struggling up
with their hollow stems above the prone low herbs,
shrubs overtopping the grasses in turn, and trees once
more killing out the overshadowed undershrubs. One
must remember that wherever nature has free play,
instead of being controlled by the hand of man, dense
forest covers every acre of ground where the soil is deep
enough ; gorse, whins, and heather, or their equivalents
grow wherever the forest fails ; and herbs can only hold
their own in the rare intervals where these domineering
lords of the vegetable creation can find no foothold.
Meadows or prairies occur nowhere in nature, except in
places where the liability to destructive fires over wide
areas together crushes out forest trees, or else where
goats, bison, deer, and other large herbivores browse
them ceaselessly down in the stage of seedlings.
Competition for sunlight is thus even keener perhaps
than competition for foodstuffs. Alike on trees, shrubs,
and herbs, accordingly the arrangement of the leaves is
always exactly calculated so as to allow the largest
possible horizontal surface, and the greatest exposure of
the blade to the open sunshine. In trees this arrange-
ment can often be very well observed, all the leaves
being placed at the extremities of the branches, and

THE GREENWOOD TREE. 153

forming a great dome-shaped or umbrella-shaped mass,
every part of which stands an even chance of catching
its fair share of carbonic acid and solar energy.

The shapes of the leaves themselves are also largely
due to the same cause, every leaf being so designed in
form and outline as to interfere as little as possible with
the other leaves on the same stem, as regards supply
both of light and of carbonaceous foodstuffs. It is only
in rare cases, like that of the water-lily, that perfectly
round leaves occur, because the conditions are seldom equal
all round, and the incidence of light and the supply of carbon
are seldom unlimited. But wherever leaves rise free and
solitary into the air, without mutual interference, they
are always circular, as may be well seen in the common
nasturtium and the English pennywort. On the other
hand, among dense hedgerows and thickets, where the
silent, invisible struggle for life is fierce indeed, and
where sunlight and carbonic acid are intercepted by a
thousand competing mouths and arms, the prevailing
types of leaf are extremely cut up and minutely sub-
divided into small lace-like fragments. The plant in such
cases can't afford material to fill up the interstices
between the veins and ribs which determine its under-
lying architectural structure. Often indeed species
which grow under these hard conditions produce leaves
which are, as it were, but skeleton representatives of
their large and well filled-out compeers in the open
meadows.

It is only by bearing vividly in mind this ceaseless
and noiseless struggle between plants for their gaseous
food and the sunshine which enables them to digest it

154 THE GREENWOOD 7 REE.

that we can ever fully understand the varying forms and
habits of the vegetable kingdom. To most people, no
doubt, it sounds like pure metaphor to talk of an inter-
necine struggle between rooted beings which cannot budge
one inch from their places, nor fight with horns, hoofs, or
teeth, nor devour one another bodily, nor tread one
another down with ruthless footsteps. But that is only
because we habitually forget that competition is just as
really a struggle for life as open warfare. The men who
try against one another for a clerkship in the City, or a
post in a gang of builder's workmen, are just as surely
taking away bread and butter out of their fellows' mouths
for their own advantage, as if they fought for it openly
with fists or six-shooters. The white man who encloses
the hunting grounds of the Indian, and plants them with
corn, is just as surely dooming that Indian to death as if
he scalped or tomahawked him. And so too with the
unconscious warfare of plants. The daisy or the plantain
that spreads its rosette of leaves flat against the ground
is just as truly monopolizing a definite space of land as
the noble owner of a Highland deer forest. No blade
of grass can spring beneath the shadow of those tightly
pressed little mats of foliage ; no fragment of carbon,
no ray of sunshine can ever penetrate below that close
fence of living greenstuff.

Plants, in fact, compete with one another all round
for everything they stand in need of. They compete for
their food — carbonic acid. They compete for their
energy — their fair share of sunlight. They compete for
water, and their foothold in the soil. They compete for
the favours of the insects that fertilize their flowers.

THE GREENWOOD TREE. 155

They compete for the good services of the birds or
mammals that disseminate their seeds in proper spots
for germination. And how real this competition is we
can see in a moment, if we think of the difficulties of
human cultivation. There, weeds are always battling
manfully with our crops or our flowers for mastery over
the field or garden. We are obliged to root up with
ceaseless toil these intrusive competitors, if we wish to
enjoy the kindly fruits of the earth in due season. When
we leave a garden to itself for a few short years, we
realize at once what effect the competition of hardy
natives has upon our carefully tended and unstable
exotics. In a very brief time the dahlias and phloxes
and lilies have all disappeared, and in their place the
coarse-growing docks and nettles and thistles have
raised their heads aloft to monopolize air and space and
sunshine.

Exactly the same struggle is always taking place in
the fields and woods and moors around us, and especially
in the spots made over to pure nature. There, the green-
wood tree raises its huge umbrella of foliage to the skies,
and allows hardly a ray of sunlight to struggle through
to the low woodland vegetation of orchid or wintergreen
underneath. Where the soil is not deep enough for trees
to root securely, bushes and heathers overgrow the
ground, and compete with their bell-shaped blossoms for
the coveted favour of bees and butterflies. And in open
glades, where for some reason or other the forest fails,
tall grasses and other aspiring herbs run up apace
towards the free air of heaven. Elsewhere, creepers
struggle up to the sun over the stems and branches of

153 THE GREENWOOD TREE.

stronger bushes or trees, which they often choke and
starve by monopolizing at last all the available carbon
and sunlight. And so throughout ; the struggle for life
goes on just as ceaselessly and truly among these
unconscious combatants as among the lions and tigers of
the tropical jungle, or among the human serfs of the
overstocked market.

An ounce of example, they say, is worth a pound of
precept. So a single concrete case of a fierce vegetable
campaign now actually in progress over all Northern
Europe may help to make my meaning a trifle clearer.
Till very lately the forests of the north were largely
composed in places of the light and airy silver birches.
But with the gradual amelioration of the climate of our
continent, which has been going on for several centuries,
the beech, a more southern type of tree, has begun to
spread slowly though surely northward. Now, beeches
are greedy trees, of very dense and compact foliage ;
nothing else can grow beneath their thick shade, where
once they have gained a foothold ; and the seedlings of
the silver birch stand no chance at all in the
struggle for life against the serried leaves of their
formidable rivals. The beech literally eats them out of
house and home ; and the consequence is that the thick
and ruthless southern tree is at this very moment
gradually superseding over vast tracts of country its
more graceful and beautiful, but far less voracious
competitor.

FISH AS FATHEKS.

COMPAEATIVELY little is known as yet, even in this age of
publicity, about the domestic arrangements and private
life of fishes. Not that the creatures themselves shun
the wiles of the interviewer, or are at all shy and retiring,
as a matter of delicacy, about their family affairs ; on
the contrary, they display a striking lack of reticence in
their native element, and are so far from pushing parental
affection to a quixotic extreme that many of them, like
:he common rabbit immortalised by Mr. Squeers, ' fre-
quently devour their own offspring.' But nature herself
opposes certain obvious obstacles to the pursuit of know-
ledge in the great deep, which render it difficult for the
ardent naturalist, however much he may be so disposed,
to carry on his observations with the same facility as in
the case of birds and quadrupeds. You can't drop in
upon most fish, casually, in their own homes ; and when
you confine them in aquariums, where your opportunities
of watching them through a sheet of plate-glass are con-
siderably greater, most of the captives get huffy under
the narrow restrictions of their prison life, and obstinately
refuse to rear a brood of hereditary helots for the mere
ratification of your scientific curiosity.

158 FISH AS FA THERS.

Still, by hook and by crook (especially the former), by
observation here and experiment there, naturalists in the
end have managed to piece together a considerable mass
of curious and interesting information of an out-of-the-
way sort about the domestic habits and manners of
sundry piscine races. And, indeed, the morals of fish
are far more varied and divergent than the uniform
nature of the world they inhabit might lead an a priori
philosopher to imagine. To the eye of the mere casual
observer every fish would seem at first sight to be a mere
fish, and to differ but little in sentiments and ethical
culture from all the rest of his remote cousins. But
when one comes to look closer at their character and
antecedents, it becomes evident at once that there is a
deal of unsuspected originality and caprice about sharks
and flat-fish. Instead of comforming throughout to a
single plan, as the young, the gay, the giddy, and the
thoughtless are too prone to conclude, fish are in reality
as various and variable in their mode of life as any other
great group in the animal kingdom. Monogamy and
polygamy, socialism and individualism, the patriarchal
and matriarchal types of government, the'oviparous and
viviparous methods of reproduction, perhaps even the
dissidence of dissent and esoteric Buddhism, all alike
are well represented in one family or another of this ex-
tremely eclectic and philosophically unprejudiced class
of animals.

If you want a perfect model of domestic virtue, for
example, where can you find it in higher perfection than
in that exemplary and devoted father, the common great
pipe-fish of the North Atlantic and the British Seas?

FISH AS FA THERS. 159

This high-principled lophobranch is so careful of its
callow and helpless young that it carries about the
unhatched eggs with him under his own tail, in what
scientific ichthyologists pleasantly describe as a sub-
caudal pouch or cutaneous receptacle. There they hatch
out in perfect security, free from the dangers that beset
the spawn and fry of so many other less tender-hearted
kinds ; and as soon as the little pipe-fish are big enough
to look after themselves the sac divides spontaneously
down the middle, and allows them to escape, to shift for
themselves in the broad Atlantic. Even so, however,
the juniors take care always to keep tolerably near that
friendly shelter, and creep back into it again on any
threat of danger, exactly as baby-kangaroos do into their
mother's marsupium. The father-fish, in fact, has gone
to the trouble and expense of developing out of his own
tissues a membranous bag, on purpose to hold the eggs
and young during the first stages of their embryonic
evolution. This bag is formed by two folds of the skin,
one of which grows out from each side of the body, the
free margins being firmly glued together in the middle
by a natural exudation, while the eggs are undergoing
incubation, but opening once more in the middle to let
the little fish out as soon as the process of hatching is
fairly finished.

So curious a provision for the safety of the young in
the pipe-fish may be compared to some extent, as I
hinted above, with the pouch in which kangaroos and
other marsupial animals carry their cubs after birth, till
they have attained an age of complete independence.
But the strangest part of it all is the fact that while in

160 FISH AS FATHERS,

the kangaroo it is the mother who owns the pouch and
takes care of the young, in the pipe-fish it is the father,
on the contrary, who thus specially provides for the
safety of his defenceless offspring. And what is odder
still, this topsy-turvy arrangement (as it seems to us) is
the common rule throughout the class of fishes. For the
most part it must be candidly admitted by their warmest
admirer, fish make very bad parents indeed. They lay
their eggs anywhere on a suitable spot, and as soon as
they have once deposited them, like the ostrich in Job,
they go on their way rejoicing, and never bestow another
passing thought upon their deserted progeny. But if
ever a fish does take any pains in the education and
social upbringing of its young, you're pretty sure to find
on enquiry it's the father — not as one would naturally
expect, the mother — who devotes his time and attention
to the congenial task of hatching or feeding them. It is
he who builds the nest, and sits upon the eggs, and
nurses the young, and imparts moral instruction (with a
snap of his jaw or a swish of his tail) to the bold, the
truant, the cheeky, or the imprudent ; while his unnatu-
ral spouse, well satisfied with her own part in having
merely brought the helpless eggs into this world of sorrow,
goes off on her own account in the giddy whirl of society,
forgetful of the sacred claims of her wriggling offspring
upon a mother's heart.

In the pipe-fish family, too, the ardent evolutionist can
trace a whole series of instructive and illustrative grada-
tions in the development of this instinct and the
corresponding pouch-like structure among the male fish.
With the least highly-evolved types, like the long-nosed

FISH AS FA THERS. 1G1

pipe-fish of the English Channel, and many allied forms
from European seas, there is no pouch at all, but the
father of the family carries the eggs about with him,
glued firmly on to the service of his abdomen by a
natural mucus. In a somewhat more advanced tropical
kind, the ridges of the abdomen are slightly dilated, so
as to form an open groove, which loosely holds the eggs,
though its edges do not meet in the middle as in the
great pipe-fish. Then come yet other more progressive
forms, like the great pipe-fish himself, where the folds
meet so as to produce a complete sac, which opens at
maturity, to let out its little inmates. And finally, in
the common Mediteranean sea-horses, which you can
pick up by dozens on the Lido at Venice, and a specimen
of which exists in the dried form in every domestic mu-
seum, the pouch is permanently closed by coalescence of
the edges, leaving a narrow opening in front, through
which the small hippocampi creep out one by one as
soon as they consider themselves capable of buffeting the
waves of the Adriatic.

Fish that take much care of their offspring naturally
don't need to produce eggs in the same reckless
abundance as those dissipated kinds that leave their
spawn exposed on the bare sandy bottom, at the mercy
of every comer who chooses to take a bite at it. They
can afford to lay a smaller number, and to make each in-
dividual egg much larger and richer in proportion than their
rivals. This plan, of course, enables the young to begin life
far better provided with muscles and fins than the tiny
little fry which come out of the eggs of the improvident
species. For example, the cod-fish lays nine million odd

M

1G2 FISH AS FATHERS.

eggs; but anybody who has ever eaten fried cod's-roe
must needs have noticed that each individual ovum was
so very small as to be almost indistinguishable to the
naked eye. Thousands of these infinitesimal specks are
devoured before they hatch out by predaceous fish ;
thousands more of the young fry are swallowed alive
during their helpless infancy by the enemies of their
species. Imagine the very fractional amount of parental
affection which each of the nine million must needs put
up with ! On the other hand, there is a paternally-
.minded group of cat-fish known as the genus Arius, of
Ceylon, Australia, and other tropical parts, the males of
which carry about the ova loose in their mouths, or
rather in an enlargement of the pharynx, somewhat
-resembling the pelican's pouch ; and the spouses of these
very devoted sires lay accordingly only very few ova, all
told, but each almost as big as a hedge-sparrow's egg — a
wonderful contrast to the tiny mites of the cod-fish. To
put it briefly, the greater the amount of protection
afforded the eggs, the smaller the number and the larger
the size. And conversely, the larger the size of the egg
to start with, the better fitted to begin the battle of life
is the young fish when first turned out on a cold world
upon his own resources.

This is a general law, indeed, that runs through all
nature, from London slums to the deep sea. Wasteful
species produce many young, and take but little care of
them when once produced. Economical species produce
very few young, but start each individual well-equipped
for its place in life and look after them closely till they
can take care of themselves in the struggle for existence.

FISH AS FATHERS. 163

And on the average, however many or however few the
offspring to start with, just enough attain maturity in
the long run to replace their parents in the next genera-
tion. Were it otherwise, the sea would soon become
one solid mass of herring, cod, and mackerel.

These cat-fish, however, are not the only good fathers
that carry their young (like woodcock) in their own mouths.
A freshwater species of the Sea of Galilee, Chromis
Andrea by name (dedicated by science to the memory of
that fisherman apostle, St. Andrew, who must often have
netted them), has the same habit of hatching out its
young in its own gullet : and here again it is the male
fish upon whom this apparently maternal duty devolves,
just as it is the male cassowary that sits upon the eggs
of his unnatural mate, and the male emu that tends the
nest, while the hen bird looks on surperciliously and con-
tents herself with exercising a general friendly supervision
of the nursery department. I may add parenthetically
that in most fish families the eggs are fertilised after they
have been laid, instead of before, which no doubt accounts
for the seeming anomaly.

Still, good mothers too may be found among fish,
though far from frequently. One of the Guiana cat-
fishes, known as Aspredo, very much resembles her
countrywoman the Surinam toad in her nursery arrange-
ments. Of course you know the Surinam toad — whom
not to know argues yourself unknown — that curious
creature that carries her eggs in little pits on her back,
where the young hatch out and pass through their tad-
pole stage in a slimy fluid, emerging at last from the cells
of this living honeycomb only when they have attained

M 2

164 FISH AS FATHERS.

the full amphibian honours of four-legged maturity.
Well, Aspredo among cat-fish manages her brood in
much the same fashion ; only she carries her eggs beneath
her body instead of on her back like her amphibious rival.
When spawning time approaches, and Aspredo's fancy
lightly turns to thoughts of love, the lower side of her
trunk begins to assume, by anticipation, a soft and
spongy texture, honeycombed with pits, between which
are arranged little spiky protuberances. After laying
her eggs, the mother lies flat upon them on the river
bottom, and presses them into the spongy skin, where
they remain safely attached until they hatch out and
begin to manage for themselves in life. It is curious
that the only two creatures on earth which have hit out
independently this original mode of providing for their
offspring should both be citizens of Guiana, where the
rivers and marshes must probably harbour some special
danger to be thus avoided, not found in equal intensity
in other fresh waters.

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

FISH AS FA THERS. 165

Some few fish, indeed, are truly viviparous ; among
them certain blennies and carps, in which the eggs hatch
out entirely within the body of the mother. One of the
most interesting of these divergent types is the common
Californian and Mexican silver-fish, an inhabitant of
the bays and inlets of sub-tropical America. Its chief
peculiarity and 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's scale, while the fry
measure as much as three inches apiece ; so that they
lie, as Professor Seeley somewhat forcibly expresses it,
1 packed in the body of the parent as close as herrings in
a barrel.' This strange habit of retaining the eggs till
after they have hatched out is not peculiar to fish among
egg-laying animals, for the common little brown English
lizard is similarly viviparous, though most of its rela-
tives elsewhere deposit their eggs to be hatched by the
heat of the sun in earth or sandbanks.

Mr. Hannibal Chollop, if I recollect aright, once shot
an imprudent stranger for remarking in print that the
ancient Athenians, that inferior race, had got ahead
in their time of the modern Loco-foco ticket. But several
kinds of fish have undoubtedly got ahead in this respect
of the common reptilian ticket ; for instead of leaving
about their eggs anywhere on the loose to take care of
themselves, they build a regular nest, like birds, and sit
upon their eggs till the fry emerge from them. All the
sticklebacks, for instance, are confirmed nest-builders :
but here once more it is the male, not the female, who
weaves the materials together and takes care of the eggs
during their period of incubation. The receptacle itself is

166 PISH AS FA THERS.

made of fibres of waterweeds or stalks of grass, and is
open at both ends to let a current pass through. As
soon as the lordly little polygamist has built it, he coaxes
and allures his chosen mates into the entrance, one by
one, to lay their eggs ; and then when the nest is full,
he mounts guard over them bravely, fanning them with
his fins, and so keeping up a continual supply of oxygen
which is necessary for the proper development of the
embryo within. It takes a month's sitting before the
young hatch out, and even after they appear, this
excellent father (little Turk though he be, and savage
warrior for the stocking of his harem) goes out attended
by all his brood whenever he sallies forth for a morning
constitutional in search of caddis-worms, which shows
that there may be more good than we imagine, after all,
in the domestic institutions even of people who don't
agree with us.

The bullheads or miller's thumbs, those quaint big-
headed beasts which divide with the sticklebacks the polite
attentions of ingenious British youth, are also nest-
builders, and the male fish are said to anxiously watch
and protect their offspring during their undisciplined
nonage. Equally domestic are the habits of those queer
shapeless creatures, the marine lump-suckers, which
fasten themselves on to rocks, like limpets, by their
strange sucking disks, and defy all the efforts of enemy
or fishermen to dislodge them by main force from their
well-chosen position. The pretty little tropical walking-
fish of the filuroid tribe — those fish out of water — •
carry the nest-making instinct a point further, for
they go ashore boldly at the beginning of the rainy

PISH A3 FA THERS. 167

season in their native woods, and scoop out a hole in
the beach as a place of safety, in which they make
regular nests of leaves and other terrestrial materials
to hold their eggs. Then father and mother take turns?
about at looking after the hatching, and defend
the spawn with great zeal and courage against all
intruders.

I regret to say, however, there are other unprincipled
fish which display their affection and care for their young
in far more questionable and unpleasant manners. For
instance, there is that uncanny creature that inserts its
parasitic fry as a tiny egg inside the unsuspecting shells
of mussels and cockles. Our fishermen are only too well
acquainted, again, with one unpleasant marine lamprey,
the hag or borer, so called because it lives parasitically
upon other fishes, whose bodies it enters, and then slowly
eats them up from within outward, till nothing at all is left
of them but skin, scales, and skeleton. They are
repulsive eel-shaped creatures, blind, soft, and slimy;
their mouth consists of a hideous rasping sucker ; and
they pour out from the glands on their sides a copious
mucus, which makes them as disagreeable to handle as
they are unsightly to look at. Mackerel and cod are
the hag's principal victims ; but often the fisherman
draws up a hag-eaten haddock on the end of his line, of
which not a wrack remains but the hollow shell or bare
outer simulacrum. As many as twenty of these disgust-
ing parasites have sometimes been found within the body
of a single cod-fish.

Yet see how carefully nature provides nevertheless
for the due reproduction of even her most loathsome and

168 FISH AS FATHERS.

revolting creations. The hag not only lays a small num-
ber of comparatively large and well-stored eggs, but
also arranges for their success in life by supplying each
with a bundle of threads at either end, every such thread
terminating at last in a triple hook, like those with which
we are so familiar in the case of adhesive fruits and seeds,
like burrs or cleavers. By means of 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 he proceeds by slow degrees
to devour alive with relentless industry, from the intes-
tines outward. This beautiful provision of nature enables
the infant hag to start in life at once in very snug
quarters upon a ready-made fish preserve. I understand,
however, that cod-fish philosophers, actuated by purely
personal and selfish conceptions of utility, refuse to admit
the beauty or beneficence of this most satisfactory
arrangement for the borer species.

Probably the best known of all fishes' eggs, however
(with the solitary exception of the sturgeon's, commonly
observed between brown bread and butter, under the
name of caviare), are the queer leathery purse-shaped ova
of the sharks, rays, skates, and dog-fishes. Everybody
has picked them up on the seashore, where children
know them as devil's purses and devil's wheelbarrows.
Most of these queer eggs are oblong and quadrangular,
with the four corners produced into a sort of handles or
streamers, often ending in long tendrils, and useful for
attaching them to corallines or seaweeds on the bed of
the ocean. But it is worth noticing that in colour the

FISH AS FATHERS. 169

egg-cases closely resemble the common wrack to which
they are oftenest fastened ; and as they wave up and
down in the water with the dark mass around them, they
must be almost indistinguishable from the wrack itself
by the keenest-sighted of their enemies. This protective
resemblance, coupled with the toughness and slipperiness
of their leathery envelope or egg-shell, renders them
almost perfectly secure from all evil-minded intruders.
As a consequence, the dog-fish lay but very few eggs each
season, and those few, large and well provided with
nutriment for their spotted offspring. It is these purses,
and those of the thornback and the edible skate, that
we oftenest pick up on the English coast. The larger
oceanic sharks are mostly viviparous.

In some few cases, indeed, among the shark and ray
family, the mechanism for protection goes a step or two
further than in these simple kinds. That well-known
frequenter of Australian harbours, the Port Jackson
shark, lays a pear-shaped egg, with a sort of spiral stair-
case of leathery ridges winding round it outside, Chinese
padoga wise, so that even if you bite it ( I speak in the
person of a predaceous fish) it eludes your teeth, and goes
dodging off screw-fashion into the water beyond. There's
no getting at this evasive body anywhere ; when you
think you have it, it wriggles away sideways, and refuses
to give any hold for jaws or palate. In fact, a more
slippery or guileful egg was never yet devised by nature's
unconscious ingenuity. Then, again, the Antarctic
chimsera (so called from its very unprepossessing personal
appearance) relies rather upon pure deception than upon
mechanical means for the security of its eggs. The shell

i?0 FISH AS FATHERS.

or case in this instance is prolonged at the edge into a
kind of broad wing on either side, so that it exactly
resembles one of the large flat leaves of the Antarctic
fucus in whoss midst it lurks. It forms the high-water
mark, I fancy, of protective resemblance amongst eggs,
for not only is the margin leaf-like in shape, but it is
even gracefully waved and fringed with floating hairs, as
is the fashion with the expanded fronds of so many
among the gigantic far-southern sea-weeds.

A most curious and interesting set of phenomena are
those which often occur when a group of fishes, once ma-
rine, take by practice to inhabiting freshwater rivers ; or,
vice-versd, when a freshwater kind, moved by an aspira-
tion for more expansive surroundings, takes up its
residence in the sea as a naturalised marine. Whenever
such a change of address happens, it usually follows that
the young fry cannot stand the conditions of the new
home to which their ancestors were unaccustomed — we
all know the ingrained conservatism of children — and so
the parents are obliged once a year to undertake a
pilgrimage to their original dwelling-place for the
breeding season.

Extreme cases of terrestrial animals, once aquatic in
habits, throw a flood of lurid light (as the newspapers say)
upon the reason why this should be so. For example,
frogs and toads develop from tadpoles, which in all
essentials are true gill-breathing fish. It is, therefore,
obvious that they cannot lay their eggs on dry land,
where the tadpoles would be unable to find anything to
breathe ; so that even the driest and most tree-haunting
toads must needs repair to the water once a year to deposit

FISH AS FATHERS. 171

their spawn in its native surroundings. Once more,
crabs pass their earlier larval stages as free-swimming
crustaceans, somewhat shrimp-like in appearance, and
as agile as fleas : it is only by gradual metamorphosis
that they acquire their legs and claws and heavy pedes-
trian habits. Now there are certain kinds of crab, like
the West Indian land-crabs (those dainty morsels whose
image every epicure who has visited the Antilles still
enshrines with regret in a warm corner of his heart),
which have taken in adult life to walking bodily on
shore, and visiting the summits of the highest mountains,
like the fish of Deucalion's deluge in Horace. But once
a year, as the land-crabs bask in the sun on St.
Catherine's Peak or the Fern Walk, a strange instinctive
longing comes over them automatically to return for a
while to their native element ; and, obedient to that
inner monitor of their race, down they march in
thousands, velut agmine facto, to lay their eggs at their
leisure in Port Eoyal harbour. On the way, the negroes
catch them, all full of rich coral, waiting to be spawned ;
and Chloe or Dinah, serves them up hot, with bread-
crumbs, in their own red shells, neatly nestling between
the folds of a nice white napkin. The rest run away,
and deposit their eggs in the sea, where the young hatch
out, and pass their larval stage once more as free and
active little swimming crustaceans.

Well, crabs, I need hardly explain in this age of
enlightenment, are not fish ; but their actions help to
throw a side-light on the migratory instinct in salmon,
eels, and so many other true fish which have changed
with time their aboriginal habits. The salmon himself,

172 FISH AS FA THERS.

for instance, is by descent a trout, and in the parr stage
he is even now almost indistinguishable from many
kinds of river-trout that never migrate seaward at all.
But at some remote period, the ancestors of the true
salmon took to going down to the great deep in search of
food, and being large and active fish, found much more
to eat in the salt water than ever they had discovered in
their native streams. So they settled permanently 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 did no harm to the tougher constitutions of
the elders. No doubt the change was made gradually,
a bit at a time, through the brackish water, the species
getting further and further seaward down bays and
estuaries with successive generations, but always re-
turning to spawn in its native river, as all well-behaved
salmon do to the present moment. At last, the habit
hardened into an organic instinct, and nowadays the
young salmon hatch out like their fathers as parr in
fresh water, then go to the sea in the grilse stage and
grow enormously, and finally return as full-grown salmon
to spawn and breed in their particular birthplace.

Exactly the opposite fate has happened to the eels.
The salmonoids as a family are freshwater fish, and by
far the greater number of kinds — trout, char, whitefish,
grayling, pollan, vendace, gwyniad, and so forth — are in-
habitants of lakes, steams, ponds, and rivers, only a very
small number having taken permanently or temporarily to a
marine residence. But the eels, as a family, are a salt-
water group, most of their allies, like the congers and
muraenas, being exclusively confined to the sea, and only

FISH AS FATHERS. 173

a very small number of aberrant types having ever taken
to invading inland waters. If the life-history of the
salmon, however, has given rise to as much controversy
as the Mar peerage, the life-history of the eel is a com-
plete mystery. To begin with, nobody has ever so much
as distinguished between male and female eels ; except
microscopically, eels have never been seen in the act of
spawning, nor observed anywhere with mature eggs.
The ova themselves are wholly unknown : the mode of
their production is a dead secret. All we know is this :
that eels never reproduce in fresh water ; that a certain
number of adults descend the rivers to the sea, irregularly,
during the winter months ; and that some of these must
presumably spawn with the utmost circumspection in
brackish water or in the deep sea, for in the course of the
summer myriads of young eels, commonly called grigs,
and proverbial 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 a great deal about their childhood and
youth, or, to speak more eelishly, their grigginess and
elverhood. The young grigs, when they do make their
appearance, leave us in no doubt at all about their
presence or their reality. They wriggle up weirs, walls,
and floodgates ; they force there way bodily through
chinks and apertures ; they find out every drain, pipe,
or conduit in a given plane rectilinear figure ; and when
all other spots have been fully occupied, they take to
dry land, like veritable snakes, and cut straight across
country for the nearest lake, pond, or ornamental waters.

174 FISH AS FA THERS.

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

The sturgeon is another more or less migratory fish,
originally (like the salmon) of freshwater habits, but now
partially marine, which ascends its parent stream for
spawning during the summer season. Incredible quan-
tities are caught for caviare in the great Eussian rivers.
At one point on the Volga, a hundred thousand people
collect in spring for the fishery, and work by relays, day
and night continuously, as long as the sturgeons are going
up stream. On some of the tributaries, when fishing is
intermitted for a single day, the sturgeons have been
known to completely fill a river 360 feet wide, so that the
backs of the uppermost fish were pushed out of the water.
(I take this statement, not from the ' Arabian Nights,'
as the scoffer might imagine, but from that most respec-
table authority, Professor Seeley.) Still, in spite of the
enormous quantity killed, there is no danger of any
falling off in the supply for the future, for every fish lays
from two to three million eggs, each of which, as caviare
eaters well know, is quite big enough to be distinctly
seen with the naked eye in the finished product. The
best caviare is simply bottled exactly as found, with the

FISH AS FA THERS. 175

addition merely of a little salt. No man of taste can
pretend to like the nasty sun-dried sort, in which the in-
dividual eggs are reduced to a kind of black pulp, and
pressed hard with the feet into doubtful barrels.

In conclusion, let me add one word of warning as to
certain popular errors about the young fry of sundry
well-known species. Nothing is more common than to
hear it asserted that sprats are only immature herring.
This is a complete mistake. Believe it not. Sprats are
a very distinct species of the herring genus, and they
never grow much bigger than when they appear, broches,
at table. The largest adult sprat measures only six
inches, while full-grown herring may attain as much as
fifteen. Moreover, herring have teeth on the palate,
always wanting in sprats, by which means the species
may be readily distinguished at all ages. When in doubt,
therefore, do not play trumps, but examine the palate.
On the other hand, whitebait, long supposed to be a
distinct species, has now been proved by Dr. Giinther,
the greatest of ichthyologists, to consist chiefly of the fry
or young of herring. To complete our discomfiture, the
same eminent authority has also shown that the pilchard
and the sardine, which we thought so unlike, are one
and the same fish, called by different names according
as he is caught off the Cornish coast or in Breton, Portu-
guese, or Mediterranean waters. Such aliases are by no
means uncommon among his class. To say the plain
truth, fish are the most variable and ill-defined of
animals ; they differ so much in different habitats, so
many hybrids occur between them, and varieties merge
so readily by imperceptible stages into one another, that

176 FISH AS FA THERS.

only an expert can decide in doubtful ca^es — and every
expert carefully reverses the last man's opinion. Let us
at least be thankful that whitebait by any other name
would eat as nice ; that science has not a single whisper
to breathe against their connection with lemon ; and that
whether they are really the young of Glup&a harengus or
not, the supply at Billingsgate shows no symptom of
falling short of the demand.

AN ENGLISH SHIES.

FOE the reasons which have determined the existence of
Sussex as a county of England, and which have given it
the exact boundaries that it now possesses, we must go
back to the remote geological history of the secondary
ages. Its limits and its very existence as a separate shire
were predetermined for it by the shape and consistence
of the mud or sand which gathered at the bottom of the
great Wealden lake, or filled up the hollowTs of the old
inland cretaceous sea. Parodoxical as it sounds to say
so, the Celtic kingdom of the Eegni, the South Saxon
principality of JElle the Bretwalda, the modern English
county of Sussex, have all had their destinies moulded
by the geological conformation of the rock upon which
they repose. Where human annals see only the handi-
craft and interaction of human beings — Euskarian and
Aryan, Celt and Eoman, Englishman and Norman — a
closer scrutiny of history may perhaps see the working
of still deeper elements — chalk and clay, volcanic
upheaval and glacial denudation, barren upland and
forest-clad plain. The value and importance of these
underlying facts in the comprehension of history has, I
believe, been very generally overlooked ; and I propose

N

178 AN ENGLISH SHIR&.

accordingly here to take the single county of Sussex in
detail, in order to show that when the geological and
geographical factors of the problem are given, all the
rest follows as a matter of course. By such detailed
treatment alone can one hope to establish the truth of
the general principle that human history is at bottom a
result of geographical conditions, acting upon the funda-
mentally identical constitution of man.

In a certain sense, it is quite clear that human life
depends mainly upon soil and conformation, to an extent
that nobody denies. You cannot have a dense population
in Sahara ; and you can hardly fail to have one in the
fruitful valley of the Nile. The growth of towns in one
district rather than another must be governed largely
by the existence of rivers or harbours, of coal or metals,
of agricultural lowlands or defensible heights. Glasgow
could not spring up in inland Leicestershire, nor
Manchester in coalless Norfolk. Insular England must
naturally be the greatest shipping country in Europe ;
while no large foreign trade is possible in any Bohemia
except Shakespeare's. So much everbody admits. But
it seems to me that these underlying causes have coloured
the entire local history of every district to an extent
which few people adequately recognise, and that until
such recognition becomes more general, our views of
history must necessarily be very narrow. We must see
not only that something depends upon geographical con-
figuration, not even merely that a great deal depends upon
it, but that everything depends upon it. We must un-
learn our purely human history, and learn a history of
interaction between nature and man instead.

AN ENGLISH SHIRg. 179

From the great central boss of the chalk system in
Salisbury Plain, two long cretaceous horns or projections
run out to eastward towards the Channel and the
German Sea. These two horns, separated by the deep
valley of the Weald, are known as the North and South
Downs respectively. The first great spur or ridge passes
through the heart of Surrey, and then forms the backbone
of Kent, expanding into a fan at its eastward extremity,
where it topples over abruptly into the sea in the sheer
bluffs which sweep round in a huge arc from the North
Foreland in the Isle of Thanet, to Shakespeare's Cliff
at Dover. The second or southernmost range, that of
the South Downs, parts company from the main boss in
Hampshire, and runs eastward in a narrower but bolder
line, till the Channel cuts short its progress in the water-
worn precipice of Beachy Head. Between these two
ranges of Downs lies tho low forest region of the Weald,
and between the South Downs and the sea stretches a
long but very narrow strip of lowland, beginning at
Chichester, and ending where the chalk cliffs first meet
the shore beside the new Aquarium and Chain Pier at
Brighton. Thus the whole of Sussex consists of three
well-marked parallel belts : the low coast-line on the
south-west, the high chalk Downs in the centre, and the
Weald district on the north and north-west. As these
three belts determine the whole history and very existence
of Sussex as an English shire, I shall make no apology
for treating their origin here in some rapid detail.

The oldest geological formation with which we have
to deal in Sussex (to any considerable extent) is the
Wealden : so that our inquiry need not go any farther

N2

180 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

back in the history of the world than the later secondary
ages. Before that time, and for long aeons afterward, the
the portion of the earth's crust which now forms Sussex
had probably never emerged from the ocean. Britain
was then wholly represented by the primary regions of
Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall, forming a small archi-
pelago or group of rocky islands separated at some
distance by a wide passage from the nucleus of the young
European continent. But by the Wealden period,
the English Channel and the Eastern half of England
had been considerably elevated above the level of the sea.
Great rivers and lakes existed in this new continental
region, much like those which now exist in Sweden,
Northern Russia, and Canada ; and the deposits of sand
or mud formed at their bottoms or in their estuaries
compose the chief part of the Wealden formation in
England r Without going fully into this question (some-
what complicated by frequent changes of level), it will
suffice for our present purpose to say that the Wealden
consists, in the main, of two great divisions, which form,
so to speak, the floor, or lowest story, of the Sussex
formations. The first or bottom division is chiefly com-
posed of a rather soft and friable sandstone, which runs
through the whole Forest Ridges, and crops out in the
grey cliffs of Hastings and Fairlight. The second or
upper division is chiefly composed of a thick greasy clay,
which forms the soil in the greater part of the Weald,
and glides unobtrusively under the sea in the flat shore
on either side of Hastings, giving rise to the lowlands of
Pevensey Bay and the Romney Marshes. Why the
sandstone, which is really the bottom layer, should

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 181

appear higher than the clay in these places, we shall see
a little later.

After the deposition of the gritty or muddy Wealden
beds in the lake and embouchure of the old continental
river, there came a second period of considerable
depression, during which the whole of south-eastern
England was once more covered by a shallow sea. This
sea ran, like an early northern Mediterranean, right
across the face of Central Europe ; and on its bottom
was deposited the soft ooze of globigerina shells and
siliceous sponge skeletons which has now hardened into
chalk and flint. A great cretaceous sheet thus overlay
the Wealden beds and the whole face of Sussex to a depth
of at least 600 feet ; and if it had not been afterwards
worn off in places, as the nursery rhyme says of old
Pillicock, it would be there still. I need hardly say
that the chalk is yet en evidence along the whole range
of South Downs, and forms the tall white cliffs between
Brighton and Beachy Head.

Finally, during the Tertiary period, another layer of
London clay and other soft deposits was spread over the
top of the chalk, certainly on the strip between the South
Downs and the sea, and probably over the whole district
between the Channel and the Thames valley : though
in this case, later denudation has proceeded so far that
very few traces of the Tertiary formations are preserved
anywhere except in the greater hollows.

Such being the original disposition of the strata which'
compose" Sussex, we have next to ask, What are the
causes which have produced its existing configuration ?
If the whole mass had merely been uplifted straight out

182 AN ENGLISH SHIRE,

of the sea, we ought now to find the whole country a flat
and level table-land, covered over its entire surface with
a uniform coat of Tertiary deposits. On digging or
boring below these, we ought to come upon the chalk,
and below the chalk again, with its cretaceous congeners
the greensand or the gault, we ought to meet the Weald
clay and the Hastings sand. Wherever a seaward cliff
exhibited a section for our observation, we ought to find
these same strata all exposed in regular order — the sand-
stone at the bottom, the clay above it, the broad belt of
chalk halfway up, and the Tertiary muds and rubbles at
the top. But in the county as we actually find it, we
get a very different state of things. Here, the surface at
sea-level is composed of London clay ; there, a great
mound of chalk rises into a swelling down ; and yonder,
once more, a steep escarpment leads us down into a
broad lowland of the Weald. The causes which have
led to this arrangement of surface and conformation
must now be considered with necessary brevity.

The North and South Downs, with all the country
between them, form part of a great fold or outward bulge
of the strata above enumerated, having its centre about
the middle line of the Forest Eidge. Imagine these
strata bent or pushed upward by an internal upheaving
force acting along that line, and you will get a rough
picture of the original circumstances which have led to
the existing arrangement of the county. You would
then have, instead of a flat table-land, as supposed
above, a great curved mountain slope, with its centre on
top of the Forest Eidge. This gentle slope would rise
from the sea between Chichester and a point south of

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 183

Beachy, would swell slowly upward till it reached a
height of two or three thousand feet at the Surrey
border, and would fall again gradually towards the
Thames valley at London. On the southern side of the
Downs this is pretty much what we now get, the Tertiary
strata being preserved in the district near Chichester ;
though farther east, around Newhaven and Beachy
Head, the sea has encroached upon the chalk so as to cut
out the great white cliffs which bound the view every-
where along the shore from Brighton to Eastbourne. In
the central portion of the boss, however, almost all the
highest elevated part has been denuded by ice or water
action. Between the North and South Downs, where
we ought to find the mountain ridge, we find instead the
valley of the Weald. Here the chalk has been quite
worn away, giving rise to the steep escarpment on the
northern side of the South Downs, seen from the Devil's
Dyke, so that at the foot of the sudden descent we get
the Weald clay exposed ; while in the very centre of the
upheaved tract the clay itself has been cut through, and
the Hastings sand appears upon the surface. Moreover,
the sand, being upraised by the central force, stands
higher than the clay on either side, which forms the
trough of the Weald ; and thus the forest ridge, which
abuts upon the sea in the cliffs of Hastings Castle, seems to
lie above the clay, under which, however, it really glides
on either side. I need hardly add that this rough
diagrammatic description is only meant as a general
indication of the facts, and that it considerably simplifies
the real geological changes probably involved in the
sculpture of Sussex. Nevertheless, I believe it pretty

184 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

accurately represents the main formative points in the
ante-human history of the county.

So much by way of preface or introduction. These
facts of structure form the data for the reconstruction of
the Sussex annals during the human period. Upon them
as framework all the subsequent development of the
county hangs. And first let us observe how, before the
advent of man upon the scene, the shire was already
strictly demarcated by its natural boundaries. Along
the coast, between Chichester Harbour and Brighton,
stretched a long, narrow, level strip of clay and alluvium,
suitable for the dwelling-place of an agricultural people.
Back of this coastwise belt lay the bare rounded range of
the South Downs — good grazing land for sheep, but
naturally incapable of cultivation. Two rivers, however,
flowed in deep valleys through the Downs, and their
basins, with the outlying combes and glens, were also
the predestined seats of agricultural communities. The
one was the Ouse, passing through the fertile country
around Lewes, and falling at last into the English Chan-
nel at Seaford, not as now at Newhaven ; the other was
the Cuckmere river, which has cut itself a deep glen in
the chalk hills just beneath the high cliffs of Beachy
Head. Beyond the Downs again, to the north, the
country descended abruptly to the deep trough of the
Weald, whose cold and sticky clays or porous sandstones
are never of any use for purposes of tillage. Hence, as
its very name tells us, the Weald has always been a
wild and wood-clad region. The Romans knew it as the
Silva Anderida, or forest of Pevensey ; the early English
as the Andredes weald. Both names are derived from a

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 185

Celtic root signifying ' The Uninhabited.' Even in our
own day, a large part of this tract is covered by the
woodlands of Tolgate Forest, St. Leonard's Forest, and
Ashdown Forest ; while the remainder is only very
scantily laid down in pasture-land or hop-fields, with a
considerable sprinkling of copses, woods, commons, and
parks. From its very nature, indeed, the Weald can
never 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 the point of view of an early people, was
quite naturally cut off from all other parts of England by
obvious limits. This habitable strip consists, of course,
of the coastwise belt from Brighton to the Hampshire
border (which belt I shall henceforward take the liberty
of designating as Sussex Proper), together with the sea-
ward valleys and combes of the South Downs. To the
west, the great tidal flats and swamps about Hayling
Island cut off Sussex from Hampshire ; and before drain-
age and reclamation had done their work, these marshy
districts must have formed a most impassable frontier.
From this point, the great woodland region of the Weald,
thickly covered with primaeval forest, and tenanted by
wolves, bears, wild boars, and red deer, swept round in
a long curve from the swamps at Bosham and Havant
to the corresponding swamps of the opposite end at
Pevensey and Hurstmonceux. The belt of savage
wooded country, thick with the lairs of wild beasts,
which thus ringed round the greater part of the county,
shut off the coastwise strip at once from all possibility
of communication with the rest of England. So Sussex

186 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

Proper and the combes of the Downs were naturally
predestined to form a single Celtic kingdom, a single Saxon
principality, and a single English shire.

It will be observed that this description leaves wholly
out of consideration the strip of country about Hastings,
Eye, and Winchelsea. It does so intentionally. That
strip of country does not belong to Sussex in the same
intimate and strictly necessary manner as the rest of the
county. It probably once formed the seat of a small
independent community by itself; and though there
were good and obvious reasons why it should become
finally united to Sussex rather than to Kent, it may be
regarded as to some extent a debateable island between
them. For an island it practically was in early times.
At Pevensey Bay the Weald ran down into the sea by a
series of swamps and bogs still artificially drained by
dykes and sluices. On the other side, the Eomney
marshes formed a similar though wider stretch of tidal
flats, reclaimed and drained at a far later period, partly
through the agency of the long shingle bank thrown up
round the low modern spit of Dungeness. Between
them, 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 of smaller Sussex, divided,
like the larger one, from all the rest of England by a
semicircular belt of marsh, forest, and marsh once more.
These are the main elements out of which the history of
the county is made up.

How far such conditions may have acted upon the very
earliest human inhabitants of Sussex — the pakeolithiq

AN ENGL ISH SHIRE. 137

savages of the drift — before the last Glacial epoch, it is
impossible to say, because we know that many of them
did not then exist, and that the present configuration of
the county is largely due to subsequent agencies. Britain
was then united to the continent by a broad belt of land,
filling up the bed of the English Channel, and it possessed
a climate wholly different from that of the present day ;
while the position of the drift and the river gravels
shows that the sculpture of the surface was then in many
respects unlike the existing distribution of hill and
valley. We must confine ourselves, therefore, to the later
or recent period (subsequent to the last glaciation of
Britain), during which man has employed implements of
polished stone, of bronze, and of iron.

The Euskarian neolithic population of Britain — a dark
white race, like the modern Basques — had settlements in
Sussex, at least in the coast district between the Downs
and the sea. Here they could obtain in abundance the
flints for the manufacture of their polished stone hatchets ;
while on the alluvial lowlands of Selsea and Shoreham
they could grow those cereals upon which they largely
depended for their daily bread. Neolithic monuments,
indeed, are common along the range of the South Downs,
as they are also on the main mass of the chalk in Salis-
bury Plain ; and at Cissbury Hill, near Worthing, we
have remains of one of the largest neolithic camp refuges
in Britain. The evidence of tumuli and weapons goes to
show that the Euskarian people of Sussex occupied the
coast belt and the combes of the Downs from the
Chichester marshland to Pevensey, but that they did
not spread at all into the Weald. In fact, it is most

188 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

probable that at tbis early period Sussex was divided
into several little tribes or chieftainships, each of which
had its own clearing in the lowland cut laboriously
out of the forest by the aid of its stone axes ; while in
the centre stood the compact village of wooden huts,
surrounded by a stockade, and girt without by the small
cultivated plots of the villagers. On the Downs above
rose the camp or refuge of the tribe — an earthwork
rudely constructed in accordance with the natural lines
of the hills — to which the whole body of people, with
their women, children, and cattle, retreated in case of
hostile invasion from the villagers on either side. It is
not likely that any foreigners from beyond the great
forest belt of the Weald would ever come on the war-
trail across that dangerous and trackless wilderness ;
and it is probable, therefore, that the camps or refuges
were constructed as places of retreat for the tribes
against their immediate neighbours, rather than against
alien intruders from without. Hence we may reasonably
conclude — as indeed is natural at such an early stage of
civilisation — that the whole district was not yet consoli-
dated under a single rule, but that each village still
remained independent, and liable to be engaged in
hostilities with all others. Even if extended chieftain-
ships over several villages had already been set up, as is
perhaps implied by the great tumuli of chiefs and the
size of the camps in some parts of Britain, we must sup-
pose them to have been confined for the most part to a
single river valley. If so, there may have been petty
Euskarian principalities, rude supremacies or chieftain-
ships like those of South Africa, in the Chichester low-

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 189

lands, in the dale of Arun, in the valleys of the Adur,
the Ouse, and the Cuckmere Eiver, and perha-ps, too, in
the insulated Hastings region, between the Pevensey
levels and the Eomney marsh. These principalities
would then roughly coincide with the modern rapes of
Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and
Hastings. Each would possess its own group of villages,
and tilled lowland, its own boundary of forest, and its
own camp of refuge on the hill-tops. Cissbury almost
undoubtedly formed such a camp for the fertile valley of
the Adur and the coast strip from Worthing to Brighton.
On its summit has been discovered an actual manufactory
of stone implements from the copious material supplied
by the flint veins in the chalk of which it is composed.

Such a society, left to itself in Sussex, could never
have got much further than this. It could not discover
or use metals, when it had no metal in its soil except the
small quantity of iron to be found in the then inaccessible
Weald. It had no copper and no tin, and therefore it
could not manufacture bronze. But the geographical
position of England generally, within sight of the Euro-
pean continent, made it certain that if ever anywhere
else bronze should come to be used, the bronze-weaponed

jople must ultimately cross over and subjugate the
stone- weaponed aborigines of the island. Moreover,
bronze was certain to be first hit upon in those countries
where tin and copper were most easily workable — that
is to say, in Asia. From Asia, the secret of its manu-
facture spread to the outlying peninsula of Europe, where
it was quickly adopted by the Aryan Celts, who had
already invaded the outlying continent, armed only with

190 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

weapons of stone. As soon as they had learnt the use of
bronze, certain great changes and improvements followed
naturally — amongst others, an immense advance in the
art of boat-building. The Celts of the bronze age soon
constructed vessels which enabled them to cross the
narrow seas and invade Britain. Their superior weapons
gave them at once an enormous advantage over the
Euskarian natives, armed only with their polished flint
hatchets, and before long they overran the whole island,
save only the recesses of Wales and the north of Scotland.
From that moment, the bronze age of Britain 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 for such a course. They
knew it was better to make them slaves than to destroy
them ; for the Celts had just reached, but had not yet
got beyond, the slave-making stage of culture. To this
day, people of mixed Euskarian parentage, and marked
by the long skull, dark complexion, and black eyes of the
Euskarian type, form a large proportion of the English
peasantry ; r.nd they are found even in Sussex, which
subsequently suffered more than most other parts of
Britain from the destructive deluge of Teutonic barbarism
in the fifth century. But though the Celts did not
exterminate the Euskarians, they completely Celticised
them, just as the Teuton is now Teutonising the old
population of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In South
Wales -and elsewhere, indeed, the aborigines retained
their own language and institutions, as Silures and so
forth ; but in the conquered districts of southern and

AN ENGLISH SH/KS. 191

eastern Britain they learned the tongue of their masters,
and came to be counted as Celtic serfs. Thus, at the
time when Britain comes forth into the full historic glare
of Roman civilisation, we find the country inhabited by
a Celtic aristocracy' of Aryan type — round-headed, fair-
haired, and blue-eyed ; together with a plebs of Celticised
Euskarian or half-caste serfs, retaining, as they still
retain, the long skulls and dark complexions of their
aboriginal ancestors. This was the ethnical composition
of the Sussex population at the date of the first Roman
invasions.

Under the bronze-weaponed Celts, a very different
type of civilisation became possible. In the first place
a more extended chieftainship resulted from the improved
weapons and consequent military power ; and all Britain
(at least, towards the close of the Celtic domination)
became amalgamated into considerable kingdoms, some
of which seem to have spread over several modern shires.
Sussex, however, enclosed by its barrier of forest, would
naturally remain a single little principality of itself, held,
at least in later times, by a tribe known to the Eomans
as Regni. Traces of Celtic occupation are mainly con-
fined to the Downs and the seaward slope of Sussex
Proper ; in the broad expanse of the Weald, they are
few and far between. The Celts occupied the fertile
valleys and alluvial slopes, cut down the woods by the
river sides and on the plains, and built their larger and
more regular camps of refuge upon the Downs, for
protection against the kindred Cantii beyond the Weald,
or the more distantly-related Belgas across the Hayling
tidal flats. Of these hill-forts, Hollingbury Castle, near

192 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

Brighton, may be taken as a typical example. Bronze
weapons and other implements of the bronze age are
found in great numbers about Lewes in particular (where
the isolated height, now crowned by the Norman Castle,
must always have commanded the "fertile river vale of
the Ouse), as well as at Chichester, Bognor, and else-
where. But the great forest, inhabited by savage beasts
and still more terrible fiends, proved a barrier to their
northward extension. Even if they had cleared the
land, they could not have cultivated it with their exist-
ing methods ; and so it is only in a few spots near the
upper river valleys that we find any traces of outlying
Celtic hamlets in the wilderness of the Weald. Some
kind of trade, however, must have existed between the
Eegni and the other tribes of Britain, in order to supply
them with the bronze, whose component elements Sussex
does not possess. WToolsonbury,Westburton Hill, Clayton
Hill, Wilmington, Hangleton Down, Plumpton Plain, and
many other places along the coast have yielded large
numbers of bronze implements ; while the occurrence of the
raw metal in lumps, together with the finished weapons, at
Worthing and Beachy Head, as well the discovery of a
mould for a socketed celt at Wilmington, shows that
the actual foundry work was performed in Sussex itself.
A beautiful torque from Hollingbury Castle attests the
workmanship of the Sussex founders. No doubt the
tin was imported from Cornwall, while the copper was
probably brought over from the continent. Glass
beads, doubtless of Southern (perhaps Egyptian) manu-
facture, have also been found in Sussex, with implements
of the bronze age.

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 193

In the polished stone age, the county had been self-
supporting, because of its possession of flint. In the
bronze age it was dependent upon other places, through
its non-possession of copper or tin. During the former
period it may have exported weapons from Cissbury ;
during the latter, it must have imported the material of
weapons from Cornwall and Gaul.

Before the Eornans came, the Celts of Britain had
learned the use of iron. Whether they ever worked the
iron of the Weald, however, is uncertain. But as the
ores lie near the surface, as wood (to be made into char-
coal) for the smelting was abundant, and as these two
facts caused the Weald iron to be extensively employed
in later times, it is probable that small clearings would
be made in the most accessible spots, and that rude iron-
works would be established.

The same geographical causes which made Britain
part of the Boman world naturally affected Sussex, as
one of its component portions. Even under the Empire,
however, the county remained singularly separate. The
Eomans built two strong fortresses at Anderida and
Eegnum, Pevensey and Chichester, to guard the two
Gwents or lowland plains, where the shore shelves
slowly to seaward ; and they ran one of their great roads
across the coastwise tract, from Dover to the Portus
Magnus (now Porchester), near Portsmouth; but they
left Sussex otherwise very much to its own devices. We
know that the Eegni were still permitted to keep their
native chief, who probably exercised over his tribesmen
somewhat the same subordinate authority which a
Eajput raja now exercises under the British government.

o

194 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

Here, again, we see the natural result of the isolation of
Sussex. The Eomans ruled directly in the open plains
of the Yorkshire Ouse and the Thames, as we ourselves
rule in the Bengal Delta, the Doab, and the Punjab ; but
they left a measure of independence to the native princes
of south Wales, of Sussex, and of Cornwall, as we our-
selves do to the native rulers in the deserts of Rajputana,
the inaccessible mountains of Nipal, and the aboriginal
hill districts of Central India.

When the Koman power began to decay, the outlying
possessions were the first to be given up. The Romans
had enslaved and demoralised the provincial population ;
and when they were gone, the great farms tilled by slave
labour under the direction of Roman mortgagee-proprie-
tors lay open to the attacks of fresh and warlike barbarians
from beyond the sea. How early the fertile east coasts
of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia may have
fallen a prey to the Teutonic pirates we cannot say.
The wretched legends, indeed, retailed to us by Gildas,
Baeda, and the English Chronicle, would have us believe
that they were colonised at a later period ; but as they
lay directly in the path of the marauders from Sleswick,
as they were certainly Teutonised very thoroughly, and
as no real records survive, we may well take it for granted
that the long-boats of the English, sailing down with the
prevalent north-east winds from the wicks of Demmark,
came first to shore on these fertile coasts. After they
had been conquered and colonised, the Saxon and Jutish
freebooters began to look for settlements, on their part,
farther south. One horde, led, as the legend veraciously
assures us, by Hengest and Horsa, landed in Thanet ;

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 195

another, composed entirely of Saxons, and under the
command of a certain dubious .ZElle, came to shore on the
spit of Selsea. It was from this last body that the
county took its newer name of Suth-Seaxe, Suth Sexe,
or Sussex. Let us first frankly narrate the legend, and
then see how far it may fairly be rationalised.

In 477, says the English Chronicle — written down, it
must be remembered, from traditional sources, four
centuries later, at the court of Alfred the West Saxon —
in 477, MII& and his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing, and
Cissa, came to Britain in three ships, and landed at the
stow that is cleped Cymenes-ora. There that ilk day
they slew many Welshmen, and the rest they drave into
the wood hight Andredes-leah. In 485, ^Elle, fighting
the Welsh near Mearcredes Burn, slew many, and the
rest he put to flight. In 491, JElle, with his son Cissa,
beset Andredes-ceaster, and slew all that therein were,
nor was there after one Welshman left. Such is the
whole story, as told in the bald and simple entries of the
West Saxon annalist. A more dubious tradition further
states that JElle was also Bretwalda, or overlord, of all
the Teutonic tribes in Britain.

And now let us see what we can make of this wholly
unhistorical and legendary tale. Whether there ever was
a South Saxon king named JElle we cannot say ; but
that the earliest English pirate fleet on this coast should
have landed near Selsea is likely enough. The marauders
would not land near the Eomney marshes or the Pevensey
flats, where the great fortresses cf Lymne and Anderida
would block their passage ; and they could not beach
their keels easily anywhere along the cliff-girt coast

o 2

196 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

between Beachy Head and Brighton ; so they would
naturally sail along past the marshland and the chalk
cliffs till they reached the open champain shore near
Chichester. Cymenes-ora, where they are said to have
landed, is now Keynor on the Bill of Selsea ; and Selsea
itself, as its name (correctly Selsey) clearly shows us, was
then an island in the tidal flats. This was just the sort
of place which the English pirates loved, for all tradition
represents their first settlements as effected on isolated
spots like Thanet, Hurst Castle, Holderness, and Barn-
borough. Thence they would march upon Eegnum, the
square Eoman town at the harbour head, and reduce it
by storm, garrisoned as it doubtless was by a handful
of semi-Eomanised Welshmen or Britons. The town
took the English name of Cissanceaster, or Chichester.
Moreover, all around the Chichester district, we still find
a group of English clan villages, with the characteristic
patronymic termination ing. Such are East and West
Wittering, Donnington, Funtington, Didling, and others.
It is vraisemblable enough that the little strip of very low
coast between Hayling Island and the Arun may have
been the first original South Saxon colony. Nor is it by
any means impossible that the names of Keynor and
Chichester Cymenes-ora and Cissanceaster — may still
enshrine the memory of two among the old South Saxon
freebooters.

The tradition of a battle at Mearcredes Burn, when
the Welsh were again defeated, may refer to an advance
by which, a few years later, the South Saxon pirates
pushed eastward along the coast, and occupied the strip
of shore as far as Brighton, together with the fertile

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 197

valley of the Lewes Ouse. In the first-named district
we find a large group of English Clan villages, includ-
ing Patching, Poling, Angmering, Goring, Worthing,
Tarring, Washington, Lullington, Blatchingden, Oving-
dean, Eottingdean, and many others. Amongst them is
one which has clearly given rise to the name of .ZElle's
third son, and that is Lancing. Unfortunately for the
legend, we must decide that this was really the settle-
ment of an English clan of Lancingas, as Washington
was the tun or enclosure of the Weasingas, and Bedding-
ham was the ham or home of the Beddingas. Around
Lewes, in like manner, we find Tarring, Mailing,
Piddinghoe, Bletchington, and others; while in the
valley just to the east we have ten or eleven such names
as Lullington, Wilmington, Folkington, and Littlington.
These districts, I imagine, represent the second advance
of the English conquerors.

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

But did they really exterminate the native Celt-
Euskarian population? I venture to say, no. Some
no doubt, especially the men, they slew ; but the women

198 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

and children, as even Mr. Freeman admits, were
probably spared in large numbers. Even of the men,
many doubtless became slaves -to the Saxon lords;
while others maintained themselves in isolated bands in
the Weald. To this day the Euskarian type of humanity
is not uncommon among the Sussex peasantry, and all the
rivers still bear the Celtic names of Arun, Adur, Ouse,
and Calder. That there was 'no Welshmen left' is
only another way of saying that the armed Welsh
resistance ceased. The Eomanised Britons became
English churls and serfs — nay, the very name for a serf
in ordinary conversation was Weala or Welshman. The
population received a new element — the English
Saxons — but it was not completely changed. The
Weorthingas and Goringas simply became masters of
the lands formerly held by Eoman owners ; and the
cabins of their British serfs still clustered around the
wooden hall of the English lords.

Nevertheless, Sussex is one of the most thoroughly
Teutonised counties in England. The proportion of
Saxon blood is very marked : light hair and blue eyes,
together with the broad and short English skull, are
common even among the peasantry. The number
of English Clan names noticed by Mr. Kemble in
the towns and villages of Sussex is 68 as against
60 in almost equally Teutonic Kent, 48 in Essex,
21 in largely Celtic Dorset, 6 in Cumberland, 2 in Corn-
wall, and none in Monmouth. The size and number of
the hundreds into which the county is divided tells us
much the same tale. Each hundred was originally a
group of one hundred free English families, settled on

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. i&

the soil, and holding in check the native subject popu-
lation of Anglicised Celt-Euskarian churls. Now, in
Sussex we get 61 hundreds, and in Kent 61, as against
13 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 from Mr. Isaac Taylor, in
Sussex there is one hundred to every 23 square miles ; in
Kent to every 24 ; in Dorset to every 30 ; in Surrey to
every 58 ; in Herts to every 79 ; in Gloucester to every
97 ; in Derby to every 162 ; in Warwick to every 179 ;
and in Lancashire to every 302. In other words, while
in Kent, Sussex, and the east the free English inhabit-
ants clustered thickly on the soil, with a relatively small
servile population, in Mercia and the west the English
population was much more sparsely scattered, with a
relatively great servile population. So, as late as the
time of Domesday, in Kent and Sussex the slaves men-
tioned in the great survey (only a small part, probably,
of the total) numbered only 10 per cent, of the population,
while in Devon and Cornwall they numbered 20 per
cent., and in Gloucestershire 33 per cent.

These results are all inevitable. It is obvious that the
first attacks must necessarily be made upon the east and
south coasts, and that the inland districts and the west
must only slowly be conquered afterward. Especially
was it easy to found Teutonic kingdoms in the four
isolated regions of Lincolnshire, East Anglia, Kent, and
Sussex, each of which was 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 Welsh
fighting population, to drive the remnants into the Pen

200 AN ENGLISH S III RE.

Country or the Weald, to enslave the captives, the
women, and the children, and to secure the Teutonic
colony by a mark or border of woodland, swamp, or hill.
On the other hand, Wessex, Northumbria, and Mercia,
with a vague and ill- denned internal border, had harder
work to fight their way in against a united Welsh
resistance ; and it was only very slowly that they pushed
across the central watershed, to dismember the uncon-
quered remnant of the Britons at last into the three
isolated bodies of Damnonia (Cornwall and Devon),
Wales Proper, and Strathclyde. This is probably why
the earliest settlements were made in these isolated
coast regions, and why the inward progress of the
other colonies was so relatively slow.

The South Saxons, then, at first occupied the three
fertile bits of the county — the coast belt of Sussex
Proper, the Valley of the Ouse, and the isolated Hastings
district — because these were the best adapted for their
strictly agricultural life. In spite of the legend of JElle,
I do not suppose that they were all united from the first
under a single principality. It seems far more probable
that each little clan settlement was at first wholly inde-
pendent ; that afterwards three little chieftainships grew
up in the three fertile strips — typified, perhaps, by the
story of file's three sons — and that the whole finally
coalesced into a single kingdom of the South Saxons,
which is the state in which we find the county in Baeda's
time. As ever, its boundaries were marked out for it by
nature, for the Weald remained as yet an almost unbroken
forest ; and the names of Selsea, Pevensey, Winchelsea,
Roumey, and many others, show by their common

AN ENGLISH SHIR&. 201

insular termination (found in all isles round the British
coast, as in Sheppey, Walney, Bardsea, Anglesea, Fursey,
Wallasey, and so forth,) that the marshland was still
wholly undrained, and that a few islands alone stood
here and there 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 less for-
midable than those which severed it from the latter.
Most probably the South Saxons intentionally aided
nature in cutting off their territory from all other parts
of Britain ; for every English kingdom loved to surround
itself with a distinct mark or border of waste, as a
defence against invasion from outside. The Bomans had
brought Sussex within the great network of their road
system ; but the South Saxons no doubt took special
pains to cut off those parts of the roads which led across
their own frontier. At any rate, it is quite clear that
Sussex did not largely participate in the general life of
the new England, and that 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 fashion generally, in many other parts
of their territory ; and they moved about from one to the
other, with their suite of thegns, eating up in each what
food was provided by their serfs for their use, and then
moving on to the next. The isolation of Sussex is
strikingly shown by its long adherence to the primitive
paganism. Missionaries from Borne, under the guidance
of Augustine, converted Kent as early as 597. For Kent

202 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

was the nearest kingdom to the continent ; it contained
the chief port of entry for continental travellers, Eich-
borough — the Dover of those days — and its king,
accustomed to continental connections, had married a
Christian Frankish princess from Paris. Hence Kent
was naturally the first Teutonic principality to receive
the faith. Next came Northumbria, Lindsey, East
Anglia, Wessex, and even inland Mercia. But Sussex
still held out for Thor and Woden as late as 679, three-
quarters of a century after the conversion of Kent, and
twenty years after Mercia itself had given way to the new
faith. Even when Sussex was finally converted, the
manner in which the change took place was characteristic.
It was not by missionaries from beyond the Weald in
Kent or Surrey, nor from beyond the marsh in Wessex.
An Irish monk, Baeda 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 old historian
significantly, 'girt round by sea and forest.' (It lies
just on the mark between Wessex and the South Saxons.)
JEthelwealh, the king — a curious name, for it means
' noble Welshman ' (perhaps he was of mixed blood) — had
already been baptized in Mercia, and his wife was the
daughter of a Christian ealdorman of the Worcester-men ;
but the rest of the principality was heathen. The Irish
monk effected nothing ; but shortly after Wilfrith, the
fiery Bishop of York, on one of his usual flying visits to
Rome, got shipwrecked off Selsea. With his accustomed
vigour, he went ashore, and began a crusade in the
heathen land. He was able at once to baptize, the

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 203

* leaders and soldiers ' — that is to say, the free military
English population ; while his attendant priests — Eappa,
Padda, Burghelm, and Oiddi (it is pleasant to preserve
these little personal touches) — proceeded to baptize the
' plebs ' — that is to say, the servile Anglicised Celt-
Euskarian substratum — up and down the country villages.
It was to Wilfrith, too, that Sussex owed her first
cathedral. JEthelwealh made him a present of Selsea,
' a place surrounded by the sea on every side save one,
where an isthmus about as broad as a stone's-throw
connects it with the mainland,' and there the ardent
bishop founded a regular monastery, in which he himself
remained for five 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 was
made a separate bishopric, with its seat at Selsea ; and
it was not till after the Norman Conquest that the
cathedral was removed to Chichester. It may be noted
that all these arrangements were in strict accordance
with early English custom. The kings generally gave
their bishops a seat near their own chief town, as
Cuthbert had his see at Lindisfarne, close to the royal
Northumbrian capital of Bamborough ; so that the prox-
imity of Selsea to Chichester made it the most natural
place for a bishopstool ; and, again, it was usual to make
over spots in the fens or marshes to the monks, who, by
draining and cultivating them, performed a useful secular
work. No traces now remain of old Selsea Cathedral,
its site having long been swallowed up by incursions of
the sea. Baeda has the ordinary number of miracles to
record in connection with the monastery.

204 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

As time went on, however, the isolation of Sussex
became less complete. ^Ethelwealh had got himself into
complications with Wessex by accepting the sovereignty
of the Isle of Wight and the Meonwaras about South-
hampton from the hands of a Mercian conqueror.
Perhaps JEthelwealh then repaired the old Eoman roads
which led from his own ham at Chichester to Portsmouth
in Wessex, and broke down the mark, so as to connect
his old and his new dominions with one another. At
any rate, shortly after, Caedwalla, the West Saxon, an
setheling at large on the look-out for a kingdom, attacked
him suddenly with his host of thegns from this unexpected
quarter, killed the King himself, and harried the South
Saxons from marsh to marsh. Two South Saxons thegns
expelled him for a time, and made themselves masters
of the country. But afterwards, Caedwalla, becoming
King of the West Saxons, recovered Sussex once more,
and handed it on to his successor, Ini. Hence the South
Saxons had no bishopric of their own during this period,
but were included in the see of the West Saxons at
Winchester.

During the hundred years of the Mercian Supremacy,
coincident, roughly speaking, with the eighth century, we
hear little of Sussex ; but it seems to have shaken off the
yoke of Wessex, and to have been in subjection to the great
Mercian over-lords alone. It had its own under- kings and
its own bishops. Early in the ninth century, however,
when Ecgberht the West Saxon succeeding in throwing
off the Mercian yoke, the other Saxon States of South
Britain willingly joined him against the Anglian
oppressors. ' The men of Kent and Surrey, Sussex and

, AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 205

Essex, gladly submitted to King Ecgberht.' When the
royal house of the South Saxons died out, Sussex still
retained a sort of separate existence within the West
Saxon State, as Wales does in the England of our own
day. -ZEthelwulf 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 pro-
vinces or shires.

From the period of union with the general West
Saxon Kingdom (which grew slowly into the Kingdom
of England under Eadgar and Cnut), the markland of
the Weald seems to have been gradually encroached
upon from the south. Most of the names in that dis-
trict are distinctly ' Anglo-Saxon ' in type ; by which
I mean that they were imposed before the Norman
Conquest, and belong to the stage of the language then
in use. Even during the Eoman period, settlements for
iron-mining existed in the Weald, and these clearings
would of course be occupied by the English colonists at
a comparatively early time. Just at the foot of the
Downs, too, on the north side, we find a few clan
settlements on the edge of the Weald, which must date
from the first period of English colonisation. Such are
Poynings, Didling, Ditchling, Chillington, and Chilting-
ton. Farther in, however, the clan names grow rarer;
and where we find them they are not hams or tuns, regular
communities of Saxon settlers, but they show, by their
forestine terminations of hurst, ley, den, and field, that
they were mere outlying shelters of hunters or swineherds

20 6 AN ENGLISH SHIRE,

in the trackless forest. Such are Billinghurst, Warming-
hurst, Itchingfield, and Ardingley. On the Cuckmere
river, the villages in the combes bear names like Jevington
and Lullington ; but in the upper valley of the little stream,
where it flows through the Weald, we find instead
Chiddingley and Hellingley. Most of the Weald villages,
however, bear still more woodland titles — Midhursb,
Farnhurst, Nuthurst, Maplehurst, and Lamberhurst ;
Cuckfield, Mayfield, Eotherfield, Hartfield, Heathfield,
and Wivelsfield ; Crawley, Cowfold, Loxwood, Linchmere,
and Harden. Hams and tons, the sure signs of early
English colonisation, are almost wholly lacking ; in their
place we get abundance of such names as Coney hurst Com-
mon, Water Down Forest, Hayward's Heath, Milland
Marsh, and Bell's Oak Green. To this day even, the greater
part of the Weald is down in park, copse, heath, forest,
common, or marshland. Throughout the whole expanse
of the woodland region in Sussex, with the outlying
portions in Kent, Surrey, and Hants, Mr. Isaac Taylor
has collected no fewer 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 slowly colonised in
a few favourable spots. Its use as a mark was now gone,
and it might be safely employed for the peaceful pur-
poses of the archer and the swineherd. Names referring
to pasture and the wild beasts are therefore common.

To the same time must doubtless be assigned the
exact delimitation of the Sussex frontiers. During the
early periods, the Kentings, the Suthrige, and the West
Saxons would all extend on their side as far as the

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 207

Weald, which would be treated as a sort of neutral zone.
But when the Woodland itself began to be occupied, a
demarcation would naturally be made between the
neighbouring provinces. The boundary follows the most
obvious course. It starts on the east from the old
mouth of the Bother (now diverted to Bye New Har-
bour), known as the Kent Ditch, in what was then the
central and most impassible part of the marshland. It
runs along the Bother to its bifurcation, and then makes
for the heaven-water-parting or dividing back of the
Forest Bidge, beside two or three lesser streams. Then
it passes along the crest of the ridge from Tunbridge
Wells, past East Grinstead and Crawley, till it strikes
the Hampshire border. There it follows the line between
the two watersheds to the sea, which it reaches at
Emsworth. There is, however, one long insulated spur
of Hampshire running down from Haslemere to Graff-
ham (in apparent defiance of geographical features),
whose origin and meaning I do not understand.

With the Norman Conquest, the history of Sussex, and
of England generally, for the most part ceases abruptly ;
all the rest is mere personal gossip about Prince Edward
and the battle of Lewes, or about George IV. and the
Brighton Pavilion. Not, of course, that there is not
real national history here as elsewhere ; but it is hard to
disentangle from the puerile personalities of historians
generally. Nevertheless, some brief attempt to recon-
struct the main facts in the subsequent history of Sussex
must still be undertaken. The part which Sussex bore
passively in the actual Conquest is itself typical of the
new relations. England was getting drawn into the

203 . AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

general run of European civilisation, and the old isolation
of Sussex was beginning to be broken down. Lying so
near the Continent, Sussex was naturally the landing-
place for an army coming from Normandy or Ponthieu.
William's fleet came ashore on the low coast at Pevensey.
Naturally he turned towards Hastings, whence a road
now led through the Weald to London. On the tall cliffs
he threw up an earthwork, and then marched towards
the great town. Harold's army met him on the heights
of Senlac, part of the solitary ridge between the marshes,
by which alone London could be reached. Harold fell
on the spot now marked by the ruined high altar of
Battle Abbey — a national monument at present in the
keeping of an English duke. Once the native army
was routed, William marched on resistlessly to London,
and Sussex and England were at his feet.

The new feudal organisation of the county is doubtless
shadowed forth in the existing rapes. Of these there are
six, called respectively after Chichester, Arundel, Bram-
ber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings. It will be noticed
at once that these were the seats of the new bishopric
and of the five great early castles. In one form or
another, more or less modernised, Arundel Castle,
Bramber Castle, Lewes Castle, Pevensey Castle, and
Hastings Castle all survive to our own day. In accor-
dance with their ordinary policy of removing cathedrals
from villages to chief towns, and so concentrating
the civil and ecclesiastical government, the Normans
brought the bishopstool from Selsea to Chichester. The
six rapes are fairly coincident — Chichester with the
marsh district ; Arundel with the dale of Arun ; Bramber

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 209

with the dale of Aclur ; Lewes with the western dale of
Ouse ; Pevensey with the eastern dale of Ouse ; and
Hastings with the insulated region between the marshes.
In other words, Sussex seems to have been cut up into
six natural divisions along the sea-shore ; while to each
division was assigned all the Weald back of its own shore
strip as far as the border. Thus the rapes consist of
six long longitudinal belts, each with a short sea front and
a long stretch back into the Weald.

Increased intercourse with the Continent brought
the Cinque Ports into importance ; and, as premier
Cinque Port, Hastings grew to be one of the chief towns
in Sussex. The constant French wars made them
prominent in mediaeval history. As trade grew up, other
commercial harbours gave rise to considerable mercan-
tile towns. Eye and Winchelsea, at the mouth of the
Bother, were great ports of entry from France as late as
the days of Elizabeth. Seaford, at the mouth of the
Ouse, was also an important harbour till 1570, when a
terrible storm changed the course of the stream to the
town called from that fact Newhaven. Lewes was like-
wise a port, as the estuary of the Ouse was navigable
from the mouth up to the town. Brighthelmstone was
still a village ; but old Shoreham on the Adur was a
considerable place. Arundel Haven and Chichester
Harbour recalls the old mercantile importance of their
respective neighbourhoods. The only other places of
any note in mediaeval Sussex were Steyning, under the
walls of Bramber Castle ; Hurstmonceux, which the
Conqueror bestowed upon the lord of Eu ; Battle, where
he planted his great expiatory abbey ; and Hurst Pier-

p

210 AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

pont, which also dates from William's own time. The
sole important part of the county was still the strip
along the coast 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 parts of the island
rose quickly into great importance. Sussex, with its
large expanse of chalk downs, naturally formed one of
the best wool-producing tracts ; and in the reign of
Edward III., Chichester was made one of the ' staples '
to which the wool trade was confined by statute. Sussex
Proper and the Lewes valley were now among the most
thickly populated regions of England.

The Weald, too, was beginning to have its turn.
English iron was getting to be in request for the cannon,
armour, and arms required in the French wars ; and no-
where was iron more easily procured, side by side with
the fuel for smelting it, than in the Sussex Weald. From
the days of the Edwards to the early part of the eighteenth
century, the woods of the Weald were cut down in
quantities for the iron works. During this time, several
small towns began to spring up in the old forest region,
of which the chief are Midhurst, Petworth, Billinghurst,
Horsham, Cuckfield, and East Grinstead. Many of the
deserted smelting-places may still be seen, with their in-
variable accompaniment of a pond or dam. The wood
supply began to fail as early as Elizabeth's reign, but
iron was still smelted in 1760. From that time onward,
the competition of Sheffield and Birmingham — where
iron was prepared by the ' new method ' with coal — •
blew out the Sussex furnaces, and the WTeald relapsed

AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 211

once more into a wild heather-clad and wood-covered
region, now thickly interspersed with parks and country
seats, of which Petworth, Cowdry, and Ashburnham are
the best known.

Modern times, of course, have brought their changes.
With the northward revolution caused by steam and
coal, Sussex, like the rest of southern England, has fallen
back to a purely agricultural life. The sea has blocked
up the harbours of Rye, Winchelsea, Seaford, and Lewes.
Man's hand has drained the marshes of the Bother, of
Pevensey, and of Selsea Bill ; and railways have broken
down the isolation of Sussex from the remainder of the
country. Still, as of old, the natural configuration con-
tinues to produce its necessary effects. Even now there
are no towns of any size in the Weald : few, save Lewes,
Arundel, and Chichester, anywhere but on the coast.
The Downs are given up to sheep-farming ; the Weald
to game and pleasure-grounds ; the shore to holiday-
making. The proximity to London is now the chief
cause of Sussex prosperity. In the old coaching days,
Brighton was a foregone conclusion. Sixty miles by
road from town, it was the nearest accessible spot by the
seaside. As soon as people began to think of annual
holidays, Brighton must necessarily attract them.
Hence George IV. and the Pavilion. The railroad has
done more. It has made Brighton into a suburb, and
raised its population to over 100,000. At the same time,
the South Coast line has begotten watering-places at
Worthing, Bognor, and Littlehampton. In the other
direction, it has created Eastbourne. Those who do
not love chalk (as the Georges did), choose rather the

p 2

212 AN ENGLISH SHIRR.

more broken and wooded country round Hastings and
St. Leonards, where the Weald sandstone runs down
to the sea. The difference between the rounded Downs
and saucer-shaped combes of the chalk, and the deep
glens traversing the soft friable strata of the Wealden, is
well seen in passing from Beachy Head to Ecclesbourne
and Fairlight. Shoreham is kept half alive by the
Brighton coal trade : Newhaven struggles on as a port
for Dieppe. But as a whole, the county is now one
vast seaside resort from end to end, so that to-day the
fiat coasts at Selsea, Pevensey, and Eye, are alone left
out in the cold. The iron trade and the wool trade have
long since gone north to the coal districts. Brighton
and Hastings sum up in themselves all that is vital in
the Sussex of 1881,

THE BKONZE AXE.

THERE is always a certain fascination in beginning a
subject at the wrong end and working backward : it has
the charm which inevitably attaches to all evil practices ;
you know you oughtn't, and so you can't resist the
temptation to outrage the proprieties and do it. I can't
myself resist the temptation of beginning this article
where it ought to break off — with Chinese money, which
is not the origin, but the final outcome and sole remain-
ing modern representative of that antique and 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 in anthropological science — which isn't, per-
haps, saying a great deal. The familiar little brass
cash, with the square hole for stringing them together
on a thread in the centre, well known to the frequenter
of minor 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 where

214 THE BRONZE AXE.

the one leaves off and the other begins— where the
implement merges into the medium of exchange, and
settles down finally into the root of all evil.

Here is how this curious pedigree first worked itself
out. In early times, before coin was invented, barter
was usually conducted between producer and consumer
with metal implements, as it still is in Central Africa at
the present day with Venetian glass beads and rolls of
red calico. Payments were all made in kind, and bronze
was the commonest form of specie. A gentleman de-
sirous of effecting purchases in foreign parts went about
the world with a number of bronze axes in his pocket (or
its substitute), which he exchanged for other goods with
the native traffickers in the country where he did hia
primitive business. At first, the early Chinese in that
unsophisticated age were content to use real hatchets
for this commercial purpose ; but, after a time, with the
profound mercantile instinct of their race, it occurred to
some of them that when a man wanted half a hatchet's
worth of goods he might as well pay for them with half a
hatchet. Still, as it would be a pity to spoil a good
working implement by cutting it in two, the worthy Ah
Sin ingeniously compromised the matter by making thin
hatchets, of the usual size and shape, but far too slender
for practical usage. By so doing he invented coin : and,
what is more, he invented it far earlier than the rival
claimants to that proud distinction, the Lydians, whose
electrum staters were first struck in the seventh century,
B.C. But, according to Professor Terrien de la Couperie,
some of the fancy Chinese hatchets which we still retain
date back as far as the year 1000 (a good round number),

THE BRONZE AXE. 215

and are so thin that they could only have been intended
to possess exchange value. And when a distinguished
Sinologist gives us a date for anything Chinese, it
behoves the rest of the unlearned world to open its
mouth and shut its eyes, and thankfully receive whatever
the distinguished Sinologist may send it.

In the seventh century, then, these mercantile axes,
made in the strictest sense to sell and not to use, were
stamped with an official stamp to mark their amount,
and became thereby converted into true coins — that was
the root of the 'root of all evil.' Thence the declension
to the ' cash ' is easy ; the form grew gradually more and
more regular, while the square hole in the centre, once
used for the handle, was retained by conservatism and
practical sense as a convenient means of stringing them
together.

So this was the end of the old bronze hatchet,
perhaps the most wonderful civilizing agent ever invented
by human ingenuity. Let us hark back now, and from
the opposite side see what was its first beginning.

' But why,' you ask, ' the most wonderful civilizing
agency ? What did the bronze axe ever do for humanity? '
Well, nearly everything. I believe I have really not said
too much. We are apt to talk big nowadays about the
steam-engine, and that marvellous electricity which is
always going to do wonders for us all — to-morrow ; but
I don't know whether either ever produced so great a
revolution in human life, or so completely metamor-
phosed human existence, as that simple and common-
place bronze hatchet.

For, consider that before the days of bronze man knew

216 THE BRONZE AXE,

no weapon or implement of any sort save the stone axe,
or tomahawk, and the flint-tipped arrow. Consider, that
the highest stage of human culture he had then reached
was hardly higher than that of the scalp-hunting Bed
Indian or the seal-spearing Esquimaux. Consider, that
in his Stone Age agriculture and grains were almost
unknown — the forest uncleared, the soil untilled, and
hunting and fishing the sole or principal human activities.
It was the bronze axe that first enabled man to make
clearings in the woodland on the large scale, and to sow
on those clearings in good big fields the wheat and barley
which determined the first great upward step in the
drama of civilization. All these things depend in
ultimate analysis upon that pioneer of culture, the bronze
hatchet.

And how did the first Watt or Edison of metallurgy
come to make that earliest bronze implement ? Well, it
seems probable that between the Stone Age and the
Bronze Age there intervened everywhere, or nearly
everywhere, a very short and transient age of copper.
And the reason for thus thinking is threefold. In the
first place, bronze is an alloy of tin and copper ;
and it seems natural to suppose that men would use the
simple metals in isolation to begin with, before they dis-
covered that they could harden and temper them by
mixing the two together. In the second place, copper
occurs in the pure or native state (without the trouble of
smelting) in several countries, and was therefore a very
natural metal for early man to cast his inquiring glance
upon. And in the third place, weapons of unmixed
copper, apparently of very antique types, have been found

THE BRONZE AXE. 217

in various parts of the world, both in Asia and America.
According to Mr. John Evans, the most learned historian
of the Bronze Age, the greatest copper ' find ' of the
eastern hemisphere was that at Gungeria, in Central
India ; and the copper implements there found consisted
entirely of flat celts of a very early and almost primitive
pattern.

The copper weapons of America, however, have greater
illustrative and ethnological interest, because the noble
red man, at the period when Columbus first discovered
him, and when he first discovered Columbus, was still in
the Stone Age of his very imperfect culture, or, to speak
more correctly, of extreme barbarism. The fact is, the
Indians of Lake Superior were only just beginning to
employ copper, and were on the eve of independently
inaugurating a Bronze Age of their own, when the
intrusive white man came and spoiled the fun by the
incontinent introduction of iron, firearms, missionaries,
whisky, and all the other resources of civilization. On
the shores of Lake Superior native copper exists in
abundance ; and the intelligent Eed Indian, finding this
handsome red stone in the cliffs by his side, was pretty
sure to try his hand at chipping a tomahawk out of the
rare material. But, as soon as he did so, Mr. Evans
suggests, he would find to his surprise that it yielded to
his blows ; in short, that he had got that singular
phenomenon, a malleable stone, to deal with. Hammer-
ing away at his new invention, he must shortly have
hammered it into a shapely axe. The new process took
his practical fancy at once : vistas of an untold wealth
pf scalps floated gaily before his fevered brain • and he

218 THE BRONZE AXE.

proceeded to hammer himself various weapons and
implements without delay. Amongst others, he produced
for himself very neat spear-heads, with sockets adapted
for the reception of a shaft, made by hammering out the
base flat, and then turning over the edges so as to enclose
the wood between them, like a modern hoe-handle. In
Wisconsin alone more than a hundred of such copper
axes, spear-heads, and knives have been unearthed by
antiquaries 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 De Champlain and his
voyageurs came down upon Canada and interrupted this
interesting experiment in industrial development by
springing the seventeenth century upon the unsophisti-
cated red man at one fell blow, with all its inherited
wealth of European science. Nevertheless, the Indians
must have known that fire melted copper ; for the heat
of the altars was great enough, say Squier and Davis, to
fuse the implements and ornaments laid upon them
in sacrificial rites ; and so the fact of its fusibility
could hardly have escaped them. A people who had
advanced so far on the road towards the invention of
casting could hardly have been prevented from taking
the final step, save by the sudden intervention of some
social cataclysm like the European invasion of Eastern
America. And how awful a calamity that was for
the Indians themselves we at this day can hardly even
realize.

In some similar way, no doubt, the Asiatic people who
first invented bronze must have learned the fact qf the

THE BRONZE AXE. 219

fusibility of metals, and have applied it in time, at first,
perhaps, by accident, to the manufacture of that hard
alloy. I say Asiatic, because there seems good reason to
believe that Asia was the original home of the nascent
bronze industry. For a Bronze Age almost necessarily
implies a brief preceding age of copper ; and there is no
proof of pure copper implements ever having been largely
used in Europe, while there is ample proof of their having
been used to a very considerable extent in Asia. Hence
we may reasonably infer that the art of bronze-making
was developed in Asia by a copper-using people, and that
when metallurgy was first introduced into Europe the
method of mixing the copper with tin had already been
perfected. The abundance of tin in the south-eastern
islands of Asia renders this view probable; while in
Europe there are no tin mines worth mentioning, except
in the remotest part of a remote outlying island — to wit,
in Cornwall.

Be this as it may, the earliest and simplest forms of
bronze axe with which we are acquainted are profoundly
interesting, as casting a flood of light upon the general
process of human evolution all the world over. Every
new human invention is always at first directly modelled
upon the other similar products which have preceded it.
There is no really new thing under the sun. For
example, the earliest English railway carriages were
built on the model of the old stage-coach, only that three
stage-coaches, as it were, were telescoped together, side
by side — the very first bore the significant motto, Tria
juncta in uno — and it was this preconception of the
English coachbuilder that has hampered us ever since

220 THE BRONZE AXE.

with our hateful 'compartmints,' inst3.il of the corn
modious 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 still more primitive gourds
and calabashes. It need not surprise us, therefore, to
find that the earliest metal axes of which we have any
knowledge were directly moulded on the original shape
of the stone tomahawk.

Such a copper hatchet, cast in a mould formed by a
polished neolithic stone celt, was found in an early
Etruscan tomb, and is still preserved in the Museum at
Berlin. See how natural this process would be. For, in
the first place, the primitive workman, knowing already
only one form of axe, the stone tomahawk, would natur-
ally reproduce it in the new material, without thinking
what improvements in shape and design the malleability
and fusibility of the metal would render possible or easy.
But, more than that, the idea of coating the polished
stone axe with plastic clay, and thereby making a mould
for the molten metal, would be so very simple that even
the neolithic savage, already accustomed to the manufac-
ture of coarse pottery upon natural shapes, could hardly
fail to think of it. As a matter of fact, he did think of
it : for celts of bronze or copper, cast in moulds made
from stone hatchets, have been found in Cyprus by
General di Cesnola, on the site of Troy by Dr. Schlie-
mann, and in many other assorted localities by less
distinguished but equally trustworthy archaeologists.

To the neolithic hunter, herdsman, and villager this
progress from the stone to the metal axe probably seemed

THE &RONZE AXE. 221

at first a mere substitution of an easier for a more;
difficult material. He little knew whither his discovery
tended. It was pure human laziness that urged the
change. How nice to save yourself all that long trouble
of chipping and polishing, with ceaseless toil, in favour of
a stone which you could melt at one go and pour while
hot into a ready-made mould ! It must have looked, by
comparison, like weapon-making by magic ; for properly
to cut and polish a 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 the implied
effects lay deeper far than the neolithic hunter could ever
have imagined. The bronze axe was the beginning of
civilization ; it brought the steam-engine, the telephone,
woman's rights, and the county councillor directly in its
train. With the eye of faith, had he only possessed that
useful optical organ, the Stone Age artizan might doubt-
less have beheld Pears' soap and the deceased wife's
sister looming dimly in the remote future. Till that
moment human life had been almost stationary : thence-
forth, it proceeded by leaps and bounds, like a kangaroo
society, on its upward path towards triumphant democ-
racy and the penny post. The nineteenth century and
all its wiles hung by a thread upon the success of his
melting pot.

Indeed, the whole history of human civilization has
been one of a constantly accelerated progress. The Older
Stone Age, when men knew only how to chip flint imple-
ments, but hadn't yet invented the art of grinding and
polishing them, was one of immense and incalculable
duration, to be reckoned perhaps by tons of thousands of

222 THE BRONZE AXE.

years — some bold chronologists would even suggest by
hundreds of thousands. Improvement there was, to be
sure, during all that long epoch of slow development ;
bub it was improvement at a snail's pace. The very rude
chipped axes of the naked drift age give way after
thousands and thousands of years to the shapelier chipped
lances, javelins, and arrowheads of the skin-clad cavemen.
M. Gabriel de Mortillet, indeed, most indefatigable of
theorists, has even pointed out four stages of culture,
marked by four different types of weapons, into which he
subdivides the Older Stone Age. Yet vast epochs elapsed
before some prehistoric Stephenson or dusky Morse first,
half by accident, smote out the idea of grinding his
tomahawk smooth to a sharp cutting edge, instead of
merely chipping it sharp, and so initiated the Neolithic
Period. This Neolithic Period itself, again, was
immensely long as compared with the Bronze Age which
followed, though short by comparison with the Palaeolithic
epoch which preceded it. Then the Bronze Age saw
enormous changes come faster and faster, till the use of
iron still further accelerated the rate of progress. For
each new improvement becomes, in turn, the parent of
yet newer triumphs, so that at last, as in the present
day, a single century sees vaster changes in the world
of man than whole ages before it have done in far longer
intervals.

But the invention of bronze, or, in other words, the
introduction of hard metal, was really perhaps the very
greatest epoch of all, the most distinct turning-point
in the whole history of humanity. True, some beginnings
of civilisation were already found in the Newer Stone Age»

THE BRONZE AXE. 223

Man did not then live by slaughter alone. Hand-made
pottery and rude tissues of flax are found in neolithic lake
dwellings in Switzerland. Agriculture was already
practised in a feeble way on small open clearings,
cautiously cleaved with fire or hewn with the tomahawk
in the native forests. The cow, the sheep, and the goat
were more or less domesticated, though the horse was
yet riderless ; and the pastoral had therefore, to some
extent, superseded the pure hunting stage. But what
inroad could the stone hatchet make unaided upon the
virgin forests of those remote days ? The neolithic
clearing must have been a mere stray oasis in a desert of
woodland, like the villages of the New Guinea savages at
the present day, lying few and far between among vast
stretches of primaeval forest.

With the advent of bronze, everything was different ;
and the difference showed itself with extraordinary
rapidity. One may compare the revolution effected by
bronze in the early world, indeed, with the revolution
effected by railways in our own time ; only the neolithic
world had been so very simple a one that the change
was perhaps even more marvellous in its suddenness and
its comprehensiveness. Metal itself implied metal- work-
ing ; and metal- working brought about, not only the arts
of smelting and casting, but also endless incidental arts
of design and decoration. The bronze hatchets, for
example, to take our typical 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 the handle, while the lower or cutting edge ia

224 THE BRONZE AXE.

widened out sideways, so as to form an elegant and
gracefully curved outline for the whole implement.
Next come the flanged axes, with projecting ledges on
either side ; and then the palstaves with loops and ribs,
each marking some new improvement in the character of
the weapon, which ths inventor would no doubt have
patented but for the unfortunate fact that patents were
as yet wholly unknown to Bronze Age humanity. Later
still come the socketed hatchets of many patterns, with
endless ingenious little devices for securing some small
advantage to the special manufacturer. I can fancy the
Bronze Age smith showing them off with pride to his
interested customers : ' These are our own patterns — the
newest thing out in bronze axes ; observe the advantage
you gain from the ribs and pellets, and the peculiar
character which the octagonal socket gives to the
hafting ! ' Indeed, in this single department of bronze
celts alone, Mr. Evans in his great monumental work
figures over a hundred and eighty distinct specimens (out of
thousands known), each one presenting some well-marked
advance in type upon its predecessor. There is almost
a Yankee ingenuity of design in many of the dodges thus
registered for our inspection.

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

THE BRONZE AXE. 005

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

Of agriculture first, because the bronze hatchet enabled
men to make such 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 country at once began
to be cleared and cultivated. Stone Age tillage was the
tillage of tiny plots in the forest's depths ; Bronze Age
tillage was the tillage of fields and wide open spaces in
the champaign country. The Stone Age knew no
specials implements of agriculture as such ; its tomahawk
was indiscriminately applied to all purposes alike of war
or gardening. You scalped your enemy with it, or you
cut up your dinner, or you dug your field, or you planted
your seed-corn, according as taste or circumstances
directed. But while the Bronze Age men had axes to
hew down the wood, they had also sickles and reaping-
hooks to cut their crops, and a sort of hoe or scraper to
till the soil with. Specialisation reached a very high
pitch. All the remains of the Bronze Age show us an
agricultural people by no means idyllic in their habits to
be sure, and not all disposed to join the Peace Preserva-
tion Society, but cultivating large stretches of wheat or
barley, grinding their meal in regular mills, and possessed
of implements of considerable diversity, some of which I
shall proceed to notice later.

The evidences of commerce and of navigation are equally
obvious. Bronze itself consists of tin and copper : and
there are only two parts of the world from which tin in

q

226 THE BRONZE AXE.

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 in tin, for which some corresponding
benefits must of course have been offered by the early
purchaser. As a matter of fact, we know with some
probability that it was Cornish tin which first tempted
the Phoenicians out of the inland sea, past the Pillars of
Hercules, to brave the terrors of the open Atlantic.
Long before the days of such advanced navigation, how-
ever, the Cornish tin was transported by land across the
whole breadth of Southern Britain and shipped for the
Continent from the Isle of Thanet. A very old track-
way runs along the crest of the Downs from the West
Country to Kent, known now as the Pilgrim's Way,
because it was followed in far later, times by mediaeval
wayfarers from Somerset and Dorset to the shrine of St.
Thomas a Becket at Canterbury. But Mr. Charles
Elton has shown conclusively that the Pilgrim's Way is
many centuries more ancient than the martyr of King
Henry's epoch, and that it was used in the Bronze Age
for the transport of tin from the mines in Cornwall to
the port of Sandwich. To this day antique ingots of
the valuable metal are often dug up in hoards or finds
along the line of the ancient track. They were evidently
buried there in fear and trembling, long ages since, in
what Indian voyageurs still call a cache, by caravans
hurriedly surprised by the enemy ; and owing to the
unfortunate accident of the possessors all getting killed
off in the ensuing fray, the ingots have been left undis-
turbed for centuries for the benefit of antiquaries at the

THE BRONZE AXE. 227

present time. ' It's an ill wind that blows nobody good.'
Probably the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii
had very little notion what valuable relics their bodies
and houses would prove in the end for curious posterity.

The converse evidence of a return trade in other goods
is no less striking. Not only are articles in amber
found in Bronze Age tombs all over Europe (though the
gum itself belongs to the Baltic and the North Sea
alone), but also gold objects of southern workmanship
occur in British barrows ; while sometimes even ivory
from Africa is noticed in the inlaid handles of some
Welsh or Brigantian chieftain's sword. Glass beads were
likewise imported into Britain, as were also ornaments
of Egyptian porcelain. In fact, the Bronze Age clearly
marks for us the period when trade routes extended in
every direction from the Mediterranean, north and south,
and when the world began to be commercially solidified
by a primitive theory of foreign exchange. It is a little
odd that the basis of all this traffic was tin, and that we
still use the name of that same metal as a brief equivalent
for coin in general : but persons of serious economical or
philological intelligence are particularly requested not to
enter into grave correspondence with the author of this
paper on any possible levity which they may detect
lurking in this innocent remark.

Some small idea of the rapid advance in civilization
which marked the Bronze Age may perhaps be formed
from a brief enumeration of the principal classes of
remains which have come down to us intact from that
first epoch of metal. Besides all the various celts,
hatchets, and adzes, whose name is legion, and whose

Q2

228 THE BRONZE AXE.

patterns are manifold, many other 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 in endless variety of design.
Knives are common, and the vanity of Bronze Age man
made him even put up without a murmur with the pangs
of shaving with a bronze razor. Daggers and rapiers
naturally abound, many of them of rare and beautiful
workmanship. Halberds turn up less frequently, but swords
are abundant, and are sometimes tastefully decorated with
gold or ivory. Even the scabbards sometimes survive,
while the shields, adorned with concentric rings or with
knobs and bosses, would put to shame the rank and file
of cheap modern metal work. Nay, the very trumpets
which sounded the onset often lie buried by the warrior's
side, and the bells which adorned his horse's neck bring
back to us vividly the Homeric pictures of Bronze Age
warfare.

The private life of Bronze Age man and his correlative
wife is illustrated for us by another great group of more
strictly personal relics. There are pins simple and pins
of the infantile safety-pin order : there are brooches
which might be worn by modern ladies, and ear-rings so
huge that even modern ladies would in all probability
object to wearing them, unless, indeed, a princess or an
actress made them the fashion. The torques, or neck-
lets, are among the best known male decorations, and are
still famous in Ireland, where Malachi (whoever he
may have been) wore the collar of gold which he tore

THE BRONZE AXE. 229

from the proud invader. Many of the bracelets are
extremely beautiful ; but, strange to say, as if on purpose
to spite the common prejudice about the degeneracy of
modern man, they are all so small in girth as to betoken
a race with arms and legs hardly any bigger than the
Finns or Laplanders. Of the clasps, buttons, and
buckles I will say nothing here. I have enumerated
enough to suggest to even the most casual observer the
vastness of the revolution which the Bronze Age wrought
in the mode of life and the civilisation of ancient man.

Bronze found our early ancestor, in fact, a half-
developed savage : it left him a semi-civilized Homeric
Greek. It came in upon a world of skin-clad hunters
and fishers : it went out upon a world of Phoenician
navigators, Egyptian architects, Achaean poets, and
Eoman soldiers. And all this wide difference was
wrought in a period of some eight or ten centuries at the
outside, almost entirely by the advent of the simple
bronze axe.

THE ISLE OF BUIM.

±DEEHAPS you have never heard its name before ; yet in
the earlier ages of this kingdom of Britain, Kuim Isle,
rising dim through the mist of prehistoric 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 Wantsum Strait, Euim Island —
the Holm of the Headland — stood out with its white wall
of broken cliffs into the German Sea. The greater part
of it consisted of gorse-clad chalk down, the last subsiding
spur of that great upland range which, starting from the
central boss of Salisbury Plain, runs right across the
face of Surrey and Kent, and, bifurcating near Canterbury,
falls sheer into the sea at the end of either fork by
Eamsgate or Dover. But in earlier days Buim Isle was
not joined as now by flats and marshes to the adjacent
mainland ; the chalk dipped under the open Wantsum
Strait, much as the chalk of Hampshire dips to-day under
the Solent Sea, and reappeared again on the other side
in the Thanet Downs, as it reappears in the Isle of
Wight at the ridge of St. Boniface and the central hills

THE ISLE OF RUIM. 231

about Newport and Carisbrooke. For now the murder
indeed is out, and you have discovered already that Euim
—this dim, mysterious Euim — is only just the common-
place, vulgarized Isle of Thanet.

Still, it is not without cause that I have ventured to call
it by that strange and now almost forgotten old-world
name. There is reason, we know, in the roasting of eggs,
and, if I have gone out of my way to introduce the
ancient isle to you by its title of Euim, it is in order that
we might start clear of the odour of tea and shrimps, the
artificial niggers, and cheap excursionists, that the name
of Thanet brings up most prominently at the present day
before the travelled mind of the modern Londoner. I
want to carry you back to a time when Eamsgate was
still but a green gap in the long line of chalk cliff, and
Margate but the chine of a little trickling streamlet that
tumbled seaward over the undesecrated sands ; when a
broad arm of the sea still cut off Westgate from the Eecul-
ver cliffs, and when the tide swept unopposed four times a
day over the submerged sands of Minster Level. You
must think of Thanet as then greatly resembling Wight
in geographical features, and the Wantsum as the equiva-
lent of the Solent Sea.

In the very earliest period of our history, before ever
the existing names had been given at all to the towns or
villages — nay, when the towns and villages themselves
were not — Euim was already a noteworthy island. For
there is now very little doubt indeed that Thanet is the
Ictis or ' Channel Island ' to which Cornish tin was
conveyed across Britain for shipment to the continent.
The great harbour of Britain was then the Wantsum Sea,

232 THE ISLE OF RUlti.

known afterwards as the Eutupine Port, and later still as
Sandwich Haven. To that port came Gaulish and
Phoenician vessels, or possibly even at times some belated
Phocaean galley from Massilia. But the trade in tin was
one of immense antiquity, long antedating these almost
modern commercial nations : for tin is a necessary com-
ponent of bronze, and the bronze age of Europe was
entirely dependent for its supply of that all-important
metal upon the Cornish mines. From a very early date,
therefore, we may be sure that ingots of tin were
exported by this route to the continent, and then trans-
ported overland by the Ehone valley to the shores of the
Mediterranean.

The tin road, to give it its more proper name, followed
the crest of the Hog's Back and the Guildford downs,
crossing the various rivers at spots whose very names
still attest the ancient passages — the Wey at Shalford,
the Mole at Burford, the Medway at Aylesford, and the
Wantsurn Strait at Wade, in which last I seem to hear
the dim echo to this day of the Eoman Vada. Buim
itself, as less liable to attack than an inland place, formed
the depot for the tin trade, and the ingots were no doubt
shipped near the site of Eichborough. We may regard
it, in fact, as a sort of prehistoric Hong-Kong or Zanzi-
bar, a trading island, where merchants might traffic at
ease with the shy and suspicious islanders.

Euim at that time must have consisted almost entirely
of open down, sloping upward from the tidal Wantsum,
and extending a little farther out to sea than at the
present moment. Pegwell Bay was then a wide sea-
mouth ; Sandwich flats did not yet exist ; and the Stour

THE ISLE OP RUIM. 233

itself fell into the Wantsura Strait at the' place which
still bears the historic name of Stounnouth. Bound the
outer coast only a few houseless gaps marked the spots
where ' long lines of cliff, breaking, had left a chasm '-
the gaps that afterwards bore the familiar names of
Ramsgate, that is to say Euim's Gate, or ' the Door of
Thanet ; ' Margate, that is to say, Mere Gate, the gap of
the mere (Kentish for a brook), Broadstairs, Kingsgate,
Newgate, and Westgate. The present condition of
Dumpton Gap (minus the telegraph) will give some idea
of what these Gates looked like in their earliest days ;
only, instead of seeing the cultivated down, we must
imagine it wildly clad with primaeval undergrowth of yew
and juniper, like the beautiful tangled district near
Guildford, still known as Fairyland. Thanet is now all
sea-front — it turns its face, freckled with summer resorts,
towards the open German Ocean. Euim had then no
sea-front at all, save the bare and inaccessible white
cliffs ; it turned, such as it was, not toward the sea, but
toward the navigable Wantsum. Even until late in the
middle ages Minster was the most important place in the
whole island ; and after it ranked Monkton, St. Nicholas,
and Birchington — villages, all of them, on the flat
western slope. The growth in importance of the seaward
escarpment dates only from the days when Thanet
became practically a London suburb.

With the Eoman invasion Ruiin saw a new epoch begin.
A great organization took hold of Britain. Roads were
made and colonies established. Verulam and Camulodun
gave place in part as centres of life and trade to York and
London. Even in the native days, I believe, the Thames

234' THE ISLE OF RUIM.

must always have been a great commercial focus, and the
Pool by Tower Hill must always have been what Bede
called it many centuries later, ' a mart of many nations.'
But under the Eomans London grew into a considerable
city ; and as the regular sea highway to the Thames lay
through the Wantsum, in the rear of Thanet, that strip
of estuary became of immense importance. In those
days of coasting navigation, indeed, the habit was to
avoid headlands, and take advantage everywhere of
shallow short cuts. Ships from the continent, therefore,
avoided the North Foreland by running through the
Wantsum at the back of Thanet ; as they avoided
Shellness and Warden Point by running through the
Swale, at the back of Sheppey.

To protect this main navigable channel, accordingly,
the Eomans built the two great guardian fortresses of
the coast, Eutupiae, or Eichborough, at the southern
entrance, and Eegulbium, or Eeculver, at the northern
exit. Under the walls of these powerful strongholds,
whose grim ruins still frown upon the dry channel at
their feet, ships were safe from piracy, while Euim itself
sheltered them from the heavy sea that now beats with
north-east winds upon the Foreland beyond. In fact,
the Wantsum was an early Spithead: it stood to
Eutupiae as the Solent stands to Portsmouth and
Southampton. But Thanet Isle hardly shared at all in
this increased civilisation ; on the contrary, Eutupiae
(the precursor of Sandwich Haven) seems to have
diverted all its early commerce. For Eutupiae became
clearly the naval capital of our island, the seat of that
vir spectabilis, the Count of Saxon Shore, and the

THE ISLE OF RUIM> 235

rendezvous of the fleets of those British « usurpers '
Maximus and Carausius. It was also the Dover of its
own day, the favourite landing place for continental
travellers ; while its famous oysters, the true natives,
now driven by the silting up of their ancient beds to
Whitstable, were as much in repute with Eoman
epicures as their descendants are to-day with the young
Luculluses of the Gaiety and the Criterion.

I have ventured by this time to speak of Euim
as Thanet ; and indeed that was already one of the
names by which the island was known to its own
inhabitants. The ordinary history books, to be sure,
will tell you in their glib way that Thanet is ' Saxon '
for Euim ; but, when they say so, believe not the fond
thing, vainly imagined. The name is every day as old
as the Eoman occupation. Solinus, writing in the third
century, calls it Thanaton, and in the torn British frag-
ment of the Peutinger Tables — that curious old map of
the later empire — it is marked as Tenet. Indeed, it is a
matter of demonstration that every spot which had a
known name in Eoman Britain retained that name after
the English conquest. Kent itself is a case in point,
and every one of its towns bears out the law, from Dover
and Lymne to Eeculver and Eichborough, which last is
spelt ' Eatesburg ' by Leland, Henry the Eighth's
commissioner.

In some ways, however, Thanet, under the Eomans,
must have shared in the general advance of the country.
Solinus says it was ' glad with corn-fields '—felix
frumentariis campis — but this could only have been on the
tertiary slope facing Kent, as agriculture had not yet

236 THE ISLE OF RUIM.

attempted to scale the flanks of the chalk downs. As
lying so near Rutupiae, too, villas must certainly havo
occupied the soil in places, as we know they did in the
Isle of Wight ; while the immense number of Roman
coins picked up in the island appears to betoken a some-
what dense provincial population.

The advent of the English brings Thanet itself, as
distinct from its ancient port, the Wantsum, into the
full glare of legendary history. According to tradition,
it was at Ebb's Fleet, a little side creek near Minster,
that Hengest and Horsa first disembarked in Britain.
As a matter of fact, there is reason to suppose that at a
very early time an English colony did really settle down
in peace in Thanet. On Osengal Hill, not far from Ebb's
Fleet, the cemetery of these earliest English pioneers
in England was laid bare by the building of the South
Eastern Eailway. The graves are dug very shallow in
the chalk, seldom as deep as four feet ; and in them lie
the remains of the old heathen pirates, buried with their
arms and personal ornaments, their amber beads and
strings of glass, and the coins that were to pay their
way in the other world. But, what is oddest of all, a
few of the graves in this earliest English cemetery are
Roman in character, and in them the interment is made
in the Roman fashion. The inference is almost
irresistible that the first settlement of Thanet by the
English was a purely friendly one, and that Roman and
Jute lived on side by side as neighbours and allies on
the Kentish island.

I don't doubt, myself, that the whole settlement of
Kent was equally friendly, and that the population of

THE ISLE OF RU2M. 237

the county contains throughout an almost balanced
mixture of Celtic and Teutonic elements.

However, the century and a half that succeeded the
English colonization of south-eastern Britain were, no
doubt, a time of great retrogression towards barbarism,
as everywhere else in Eomanised Europe. The villas
that must have covered the gentle slopes towards the
Wantsum fell into decay ; the fortresses were destroyed ;
the roads ran wild ; and the sea and river began slowly
to slit up the central part of the great navigable back-
water. A hundred and fifty years after Hengest and
Horsa, if those excellent gentlemen ever really existed,
another famous landing took place in Thanet. Augustine
and his companions disembarked at Ebb's Fleet, and held
close by (on the hill behind Prospect House) their first
interview with JEthelberht. But though this epoch-
making event happened to occur in Thanet, it has no
special connection with the history of the island, any
further than as' a component of England generally. And
indeed, even through the garbled version of Bede, it is
plain enough to see that British Christendom was not
yet wholly wiped out in eastern Britain. The conver-
sion of Kent was essentially a conversion of the king and
nobles to theBoman communion; it brought back once more
the part of Britain most in connection with the continent
into the broad fold of continental Christendom. It is
quite clear, in fact, that Butupiae and Durovernum,
Eichborough and Canterbury, had never ceased to hold
close intercourse with the opposite shore, whose cliffs
still shine so distinctly from the hills about Eamsgate.
For JEthelberht himself was married to a Christian

238 THE ISLE OF RU1M.

Frankish princess of the house of the Merwings ; and
coins of the Frankish kings and of the Byzantine
emperors have been found on the surface or in contem-
porary Jutish graves in Kent.

It is interesting to observe, too, that of the monks
whom Gregory chose to accompany Augustine on his
easy mission, one was Lawrence, who succeeded his
leader as second Archbishop of Canterbury, and another
was Peter, the first Abbot of St. Augustine's monastery.
Out of compliment to these pioneer missionaries, or to
their Roman house of St. Andrew's, almost every old
church in that part of Kent is dedicated accord-
ingly, either, to St. Augustine, St. Lawrence, St. Peter,
St. Gregory, St. Andrew, or St. Martin (patron of
Bertha's first church at Canterbury). Thus, as we shall
see hereafter, St. Lawrence was the mother church of
Ramsgate, and St. Peter's of Broadstairs, while the
entire lathe bears the name of St. Augustine.

In Thanet, too, the first evidence of the new order of
things was the foundation in the island of that great
civilizing agency of mediaeval England, a monastery. The
site chosen for its home was still, however, characteristic
of the old point of view of Thanet. It was the place
that yet bears the name of Minster, situated on a little
creek of the Wantsum sea, where some slight remains of
an ancient pier may even now be traced among the silt
of the marshes. The island still looked towards the
narrow seas and the port of Rutupise, not, as now,
towards the tall cliffs and the German Ocean. Ecgberht,
fourth Christian king of Kent, by the advice of Theodore,
the monk of Tarsus who became Archbishop of Canter-

THE ISLE OF RUIM. 239

bury, made over to the lady whose name is conveniently
Latinised as Dompneva, first abbess, some forty-eight
plough-lands in the Isle of Thanet. This cultivated
district, bounded by the ancient earthwork known (from
the name of the second abbess) as St. Mildred's Lynch,
lay almost entirely within the westward-sloping and
mainly tertiary lands ; the higher chalk country was as
yet apparently considered unfit for tillage. The existing
remains of Minster Abbey are, of course, of comparatively
late Plantagenet date ; but as parts of a great grange,
whose still larger granary was burnt down only in the
last century, they serve well to show the importance of the
monastic system as a civilizing agency in the country
districts of 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 then only three furlongs
wide, and could be forded at two points, near Sarr and
at Wade. The seaward mouth was also beginning to be
encumbered with sand, and the first indication we get of
this important impending change is the fact that we now
hear less of Eichborough, and more of Sandwich, the new
port a little nearer the sea, whose very name of the Wick
or haven on the Sand, in itself sufficiently tells the
history of its origin. As the older port got progressively
silted up, the newer one grew into ever greater import-
ance, exactly as Norwich ousted Caister, or as Ports-
mouth has taken the place of Porchester. Nevertheless,
the central channel still remained navigable for the vessels
of that age — they can only have drawn a very few feet of
water — and this made the Wantsum in time the great

240 THE ISLE OF RUIM.

highway for the Danish pirates on their way to London,
and exposed Thanet exceptionally to their relentless
incursions.

In fact, the Danes and Northmen were just what they
loved to call themselves, vik-ings or wickings, men of the
viks, wicks, bays, or estuaries. What they loved was
a fiord, a strait, a peninsula, an island. Everywhere
round the coast of Britain they seized and fortified the
projecting headlands. But in the neighbourhood of the
Thames, the high road to the great commercial port of
London, the mementoes of their presence are particularly
frequent. The whole nomenclature of the lower Thames
navigation, as Canon Isaac Taylor has pointed out, is
Scandinavian to this day. Deptford (the deep fiord),
Greenwich (the green 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 in like manner still recalls the
time when a Danish ' wall '—that is to say, a vallum or
earthwork — ran across the isthmus to defend the
Scandinavian peninsula from its English enemies.

At such a time Sandwich, with its shallow fiord, was
sure to afford good shelter to the northern long ships ;
and isolated Thanet, overlooking the navigable strait,
was a predestined depofc for the northern pirates, as four
centuries earlier it had been for the followers of those
mythical personifications, Hengest and Horsa. Long
before the unification of England under a single West
Saxon overlordship the Danes used to land in the island
every year, to plunder the crops, and in 851, when

THE ISLE OF RUIM. 241

JEthelwulf was lord of Wessex at Winchester, 'heathen
men,' says the Winchester Chronicle, with its usual
charming conciseness, ' first sat over winter in Tenet.'
From that time forward the ' heathen men ' continually
returned to the island, which they used apparently as a
base of operations, with their ships lying in Sandwich
Haven ; in fact, Thanet must long have been a sort of
irregular Danish colony. Still, St. Mildred's nuns
appear to have lived on somehow at Minster through the
dark time, for in 988 the Danes landed 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 secure any time in the ninth, tenth, and
early eleventh centuries.

At least as late as the Norman conquest the Wantsum
remained a navigable channel, and the usual route to
London by sea was in at Sandwich and out at North-
mouth. It was thus that King Harold's fleet sailed on
its plundering expedition round the coast of Kent (a
small unexplained incident of the early English type, only
to be understood by the analogies of later Scotch history),
and thus too, that many other expeditions are described
in the concise style of our unsophisticated early
historians. But from the eleventh century onward we
hear little of the Wantsum as a navigable channel; it
has dwindled down almost entirely to Sandwich Haven,
' the most famous of English ports,' says the writer of the
life of Emma of Normandy, about 1050. Sandwich is
indeed the oldest of the Cinque Ports, succeeding in this
matter to the honours of Rutupiae, and all through the

242 THE ISLE OF RUIM.

middle ages it remained the great harbour for continental
traffic. Edward III. sailed thence for France or
Flanders, and as late as 1446 it is still spoken of by a
foreign ambassador as the resort of ships from all
quarters of Europe.

Still, the Wantsum was all this while gradually silting
up, a grain at a time, and the Isle of Euim was slowly
becoming joined to the opposite mainland. When
Leland visited it, in Henry VIII. 's reign, the change was
almost complete. ' At Northmouth,' says the royal
commissioner, in his quaint dry way, ' where the estery
of the se was, the salt water swelleth yet up at a Creeke
a myle or more toward a place called Sarre, which was
the commune fery when Thanet was fulle iled.' Sand-
wich Haven itself began to be difficult of access about
1500 (Henry VII. being king), and in 1558 (under Mary)
a Flemish engineer, ' a cunning and expert man in water-
works,' was engaged to remedy the blocking of the
channel. By a century later it wras quite closed, and the
Isle of Thanet had ceased to exist, except in name, the
Stour now flowing seaward by a long bend through
Minster Level, while hardly a relic of the Wantsum
could be traced in the artificial ditches that intersect the
Cat and banked-up surface of the St. Nicholas marshes.

Meanwhile, Thanet had been growing once more into
an agricultural country. Minster, untenable by its nuns,
had been made over after the Danish invasions to the
monks of St. Augustine at Canterbury, and it was they
who built the great barn and manor house which were
the outer symbol of its new agricultural importance.
Monk ton, close by, belonged to the rival house of Christ

THE ISLE OF RUIM. 243

Church at Canterbury (the cathedral monastery), as did
also St. Nicholas at Wade, remarkable for its large and
handsome Early English church. All these ecclesiastical
lands were excellently tilled. After the Keformation,
however, things changed greatly. The silting up of the
Wantsum and the decay of Sandwich Haven left Thanet
quite out of the world, remote from all the main high-
roads of the new England. Ships now went past the
North Foreland to London, and knew it only as a
dangerous point, not without a sinister reputation for
wrecking. On the other hand, on the land side, the
island lay off the great highways, surrounded by marsh
or half-reclaimed levels ; and it seems rapidly to have
sunk into a state resembling that of the more distant
parts of Cornwall. The inhabitants degenerated into
good wreckers and bad tillers. They say an Orkney man
is a farmer who owns a boat, while a Shetlanderis a
fisherman who owns a farm. In much the same spirit,
Camden speaks of the Elizabethan Thanet folks as ' a
sort of amphibious creatures, equally skilled in holding
helm and plough ' ; while Lewis, early in the last century,
tells us they made ' two voyages a year to the North
Seas, and came home soon enough for the 'men to go to
the wheat season.' With genial tolerance the Georgian
historian adds, ' It's a thousand pities they are so apt to
pilfer stranded ships.' Piracy, which ran in the Thaneb
blood, seemed to their good easy local annalist a regret-
table peccadillo.

In all this, however, we begin to catch the first faintly-
resounding note of modern Thanet. The intelligent
reader will no doubt have observed, with his usual acute-

K 2

244 THE ISLE OF RUIM.

ness, that up to date we have heard practically nothing
of Eamsgate, Margate, and Broadstairs, which now form
the real centres of population in the nominal island. Its
relations have all been with Eutupiae, Sandwich, Canter-
bury, and the mainland. But the silting up of the
Wantsum turned the new Thanet seaward, by the chalky
cliffs ; and the gaps or gates in that natural sea-wall now
began to be of comparative importance as fishing stations
and small havens. Ebb's Fleet was no longer the port of
Euim. The centre of gravity of the island shifts at this
point, accordingly, from Minster to Ramsgate. The
change is well marked by certain interesting ecclesiastical
facts. .Neither Eamsgate nor Broadstairs had originally
churches of their own. The first formed part of the
parish of St. Lawrence, which was itself a mere chapelry
of Minster till late in the thirteenth century. The old
village lies half a mile inland, and Eamsgate itself was
throughout the middle ages nothing more than a mere
gap and cove where the fishermen of St. Lawrence kept
their boats. The first church in the town proper was
not erected till 1791. Similarly, Broadstairs formed
part of the parish of St. Peter's, the village of which 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. The cliffs were then nothing; the inward
slope was everything.

Margate seems to have been the first place in the new
Thanet to attain the honour of a place in history. As in
two previous cases, the Mere Gate 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 the

THE ISLE OF RUIM. 245

existing town. But as the Northmouth closed up, and
Sandwich Haven decayed, the Mere Gate naturally
became the little local port for corn grown on the island
and wool raised on the newly-reclaimed Minster Level.
A wooden pier existed at Margate long before the reign
of Henry VIII., when Leland found it " sore decayed,"
and the village was in repute for fishery and coasting
trade. Throughout the Stuart period Margate was the
ordinary place of departure and arrival for Flushing and
the Low Countries. William of Orange frequently
.sailed hence, and Marlborough used it for almost all his
expeditions. It was about the middle of the last century,
however, that the real prosperity of Margate first began.
Then it was that citizens of credit and renown in London
first hit upon the glorious discovery of the seaside, and
that watering-places tentatively and timidly raised their
unobtrusive heads along the nearer beaches. The
journey from London could be made far more easily by
river than that to Brighton by coach ; and so Margate,
the nearest spot to town (by water) on the real sea with
any accommodation for visitors, became in point of fact
the earliest London seaside resort. It was, if not the
first place, at least one of the first places in England to
offer to its guests the perilous joy of bathing machines,
which were inaugurated here about 1790.

With the introduction of steamers Margate's fortune
was made. Floods of Cockneydom were let loose upon
the nascent lodging-houses. Then came the London,
Chatham and Dover, and South Eastern Eailvvays, and
with them an ever-increasing inundation of good-
humoured cheap-trippers. The Hail-by- the- Sea and

246 THE ISLE OF RUIM.

other modern improvements and attractions followed.
Like the rest of Thanet, Margate has now become a
mere suburb of London, and what it resembles at the
present day a delicate regard for the feelings of the
inhabitants forbids me to enlarge upon. I will merely
add that the recognized modern name of Margate is an
etymological blunder, due to the idea immortalized in
the borough motto, " Porta maris, Portus salutis," that
it means Door of the Sea. The true word is still
universally preserved on the lips of the local fisher-
folk, who always religiously call it either Meregate or
Mergate.

Eamsgate, a much more attractive and enjoyable
centre, rich in excursions to points of genuine interest,
dates somewhat later. It first came into note about the
beginning of the eighteenth century, when it did a
modest trade with the Levant and the Black Sea, or, as
contemporary English more prettily phrases it, ' with
Eussia and the east 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 off the Downs. The
engineer was Smeaton, and he succeeded in creating an
artificial harbour of great extent, which has lasted
substantially up to the present time. This new port,
rendered safer by the enlargement in 1788, made
Eamsgate at once into an important seafaring town,
the capital of the Kentish herring trade, alive with
smacks in the busy season. The steamers did it less
good at first than they did to Margate; but the
completion of the two railways, and the building of
the handsome extensions on the east and west cliffs,

THE ISLE OF RUIM. 24?

turned it at once into a frequented watering-place,
It is the fashion nowadays rather to laugh at Ramsgate.
Marine painters know better. Few harbours are livelier
with red and brown sails ; few coasts more enjoyable
than the cliff walk looking across towards the Goodwins,
the low shore by Sandwich, the higher ground about
Deal and Dover, and the dim white line of Cape
Blancnez in the distance.

Broadstairs, close by the lighthouse on the North
Foreland (the Cantium Promontorium of Eoman geo-
graphy), is still newer as a place of public resort. But as
a fishing village it dates back to the middle ages, when
the little chapel of " Our Lady of Bradstow " stood in
the gap of the cliffs, and was much addressed by
anxious sailors rounding the dangerous point after the
silting up of the Wantsum. Ships as they passed
lowered their top-sails to do it reverence. Under Henry
VIII. a small wooden pier was thrown out to protect the
fishing boats ; and about the same time, as part of the
general scheme of coast defence inaugurated by the
king, a gate and portcullis were erected to close the gap
seaward, in case of invasion. The archway and
portcullis groove remain to this day, with an inscription
recording their repair in 1795 by Sir John Henniker.
The railway has turned Broadstairs into a minor rival of
Ramsgate and Margate a.nd ' a favourite resort for
gentry/ where ' those who require quietness, either
from ill health or a retiring disposition/ says a local
guide-book, may enjoy ' the united advantages of
tranquillity and seclusion.'. Hundreds of retiring souls
indeed may be observed on the beach, any day during tho

248 777.5: ISLE OF RUIM.

season, seeking tranquillity in a game of cards, repairing
their health with the stimulus of donkey exercise, or
soothing their souls in secret hour with music sweet as
love, discoursed to them by gentlemen in loose pink
suits and artificially imitated .^Ethiopian countenances.

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

At the present day Thauet as a whole consists of two
parts : the live sea front, which is one long succession of
suburban watering-places ; and the agricultural interior,
including the reclaimed estuary, which ranks among the
best-farmed and most productive districts in all England.
Yet till a very recent date the Thanet farmers still
retained the use of the old Kentish plough, the coulter
of which is reversed at the end of every furrow ; and
many other curious insular customs mark off the agricul-
ture of the island even now from that which prevails over
the rest of the country.

I don't know whether I'm wrong, but it often seems to
me the very best way to gain an idea of the real history
of England is thus to take a single district piecemeal,

THE ISLE OF RUIM. 219

and trace out for one's self the main features of its
gradual evolution. By so doing we get away from mere
dynastic or political considerations, leave behind the
bang of drums or the blare of trumpets, and reach down
to the living facts of common human activity themselves
— the realities of the workaday world of toilers and
spinners. By narrowing our field of view, in fact, we
gain a clearer picture on our smaller focus. We see how
the big historical revolutions actually affected the life of
the people ; and we trace more readily the true nature of
deep-reaching changes when we follow them out 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 we rested, panting, after our long
steep climb, on the cathedral platform.

Now the question was a pertinent and in its way a
truly philosophical one. Fiesole crests the ridge of a
Tuscan hill, and in America they don't build cities on
hill-tops. You may search through the length and
breadth of the United States, from Maine to California,
and I venture to bet a modest dollar you won't find a
single town perched anywhere in a 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 by harbours of sea or inland lake ;
or by navigable rivers ; or at the junction of railways ;
or at a point where cataracts (sadly debased) supply ample
water-power for saw-mills and factories ; or else in the
immediate neighbourhood of coal, iron, oil wells, or gold
and silver mines. In short, the position of American
towns bears always an immediate and obvious reference,

A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 251

to the wants and necessities of our modern industrial
and commercial system. They are towns that have grown
up in a state of profound peace, and that imply advanced
means of communication, with a free interchange of
agricultural and manufactured products.

Hence in America it is always quite easy to see at a
glance the raison d'etre 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
European manufactured goods. Chicago is the main
collecting and distributing centre for the wide basin of
the upper Great Lakes, as Cincinnati is for the Ohio
Valley, and St. Louis for the Mississippi and Missouri
confluents. Pittsburg bases itself upon its coal and its
iron; Buffalo exists as the point of transfer where
elevators raise the corn of Chicago from lake-going
vessels into the long, low barges of the Erie Canal. In
every case, in that newest of worlds, one can see for one-
self at a glance exactly why so large a body of human
beings has collected just at that precise spot, and at no
other.

But when you have toiled up, hot and breathless,
through olive and pine, from the Viale at Florence to the
antique Cyclopean walls of Etruscan Fassulae, you
wonder to yourself, like our American friend, as you pant
on the terrace of the Eomanesque cathedral, what on
earth they could ever have wanted to build a town up
there for, anyway.

If we look away from Tuscany to our own England,

252 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD.

however, we shall find on many a deserted down or lonely
tor ample evidence of the causes which led the people of
this ancient Etruscan town to build their citadel at so
great a height above the neighbouring valley. Fiesole,
says Dante, in a well-known verse, was the mother of
Florence. Even so in England, Old Sarum was indeed
the mother of Salisbury, and Caer Badon or Sulis was
the mother of Bath. And when there was first a Faesulss
on the hill here there could be no Florence, as when first
there was 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 there could be no
Bath.

In very early times indeed, in the European land area,
when men began first to gather together into towns or
villages, two necessities determined their choice of a
place to dwell in : first, food-supply (including water) ;
and second, defence. Hence every early community
stands, to start with, near its own cultivable territory,
usually a broad river- valley, an alluvial plain, a ' carse '
or lowland, for uplands as yet were incapable of tillage
by the primitive agriculture of those early epochs. But it
does not stand actually in the carse ; it occupies as a rule
the nearest convenient height or hill-top, most often the
one that juts out farthest into the subjacent plain, by
way of security against the attack of enemies. This is
the beginning of almost every great historical European
town ; it is an arx or acropolis overhanging its own tilth
or ager ; and though in many cases the town came down
at last into the valley, retaining still its old name, yet the
remains of the old earthworks or walls on the hill-top

A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 253

above often bear witness to our own day to the original
site of the antique settlement upon the high places.

One can mark, too, various stages in this gradual
process of secular descent from the wind-swept hills into
the valleys below, as freer communications and greater
security made access to water, roads, and rivers of greater
importance than mere defence or elevated position. At
Bath, for example, it was the Pax Eomana that brought
down the town from the stockaded height of Caer Badon,
and the Hill of Solisbury to the 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 lived
from the Celtic first into the Eoman and then into the
West Saxon world ; it had a cathedral of its own in
Norman times ; and even long after Bishop Eoger Poore
founded the New Sarum, which we now call Salisbury,
at the point where the great west road passed the river
below, the hill-top town continued to be inhabited, and,
a? everybody knows, when all its population had finally
dwindled away, retained some vestige of its ancient
importance by returning a member of its own for a single
farmhouse to the unreformed Parliament till '32. As for
Fiesole, though Florence has long since superseded it as
the capital of the Arno Valley, the town itself still lives
on to our own time in a dead-alive way, and, like Norman
Old Sarum, retains even now its beautiful old cathedral,
its Palazzo Pretorio, and its acknowledged claims to
ancient boroughship. In England, I know by personal
experience only one such hill-top town of the antique
sort still surviving, and that is Shaftsbury ; but I am
told that Launceston, with its strong castle overlooking

254 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD.

the Tamar, is even a finer example. This relatively
early disappearance of the hill-top fortress from our own
midst is in part due, no doubt, to the early growth of the
industrial spirit in England, and our long-continued
freedom from domestic warfare. But all over Southern
Europe, as everybody must have noticed, the hill-top
town, perched, like Eza, on the very summit of a pointed
pinnacle, still remains everywhere in evidence as a
common object of the country in our own day.

I said above that Fiesole was the mother of Florence,
and, in spite of formal objections to the contrary, I ven-
ture to defend that now somewhat obsolete and heretical
opinion. For why does Fiesole stand just 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 amply sufficient reason. Even if, like Fiesole,
it is mainly a survival (though at Fiesole there are, indeed,
olives in plenty and other live trades to keep a town
going), it yet exists there in virtue of facts which once
upon a time were quite sufficient to bring the world to
the spot, and it goes on existing, partly by mere conserva-
tive use and wont, no doubt, but partly also because
there are houses, churches, mills, and roads all ready
built there. Now, a town must always, from a very
early period, have existed upon the exact site of Fiesole.
And why ? To answer that question you have only to
look at the view from the platform. I do not mean to
suggest that the ancient Etruscans came there to enjoy
the prospect as we go nowadays to the hotels on the lligi
or to the summit of Mount Washington. The ancient
Etruscan was a practical man, and his views about

A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 255

views were probably rudimentary. But gaze down for a
moment from the cathedral platform upon the valley of
the Arno, spread like a glowing picture at your feet, and
see how immediately it resolves the doubt. Not, indeed,
the valley of the Arno as it stands at present, thick set
with tower and spire and palace. In order to arrive at
the raison d'etre of Fiesole you must blot out mentally
Arnolfo's vast pile, and Brunelleschi's dome, and Giotto's
campanile, and Savonarola's monastery, and the tall and
slender tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, rising like a shaft
sheer into the air far, far below — you must blot out,
in short, all that makes the world now congregate at
Florence, and all Florence itself into the bargain. No-
where on earth do I know a more peopled plain than
that plain of Arno in our own time, seen on a sunny
autumn day, when the light glints clearly on each white
villa and church and hamlet, from this specular mount
of antique Fiesole. But to understand why Fiesole itself
stands there at all you must neglect all this, neglect all
the wealth of art that makes each inch of that valley
classic ground, and look only, if you 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 the sunshine, a comparatively flat and
wide, open valley ; olive and stone pine and mulberry on
its slopes ; pasture land and flowery vale in its midst.
North and south, in two long ridges, the Apennines
stretch their hard, blue outlines from Carrara to Siena
against the afternoon sky — outlines of a sort that one

256 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD.

never gets in northern lands, but which remind one
so exactly of the painted background to a fifteenth-
century Italian picture that nature seems here, to our
topsy-turvy fancy, to be whimsically imitating, an effect
from art. But in between those two tossed and tumbled
guardian ridges, the valley of the Arno, as it flows
towards Pisa, with the minor basins of its tributary
streams, expands for a while about Florence itself into
a broad and comparatively level plain. In a mountain
country so broken and heaved about as Peninsular
Italy, every spare inch of cultivable plain like that has
incalculable value. True, on the terraced slopes of the
hillsides generation after generation of ingenious men
have managed to build up, tier by tier, a wonderful
expanse of artificial tilth. But while oil and wine can
be produced upon the terraces, it is on the river valleys
alone that the early inhabitants had to depend for their
corn, their cheese, and their flesh-meat. Hence, in
primitive Italy and in primitive England alike, every
such open alluvial plain, fit for tilth or grazing, had
overhanging it a stockaded hill-fort, which grew with
time into a mediaeval town or a walled city. It is just
so that Caer Badon at Bath overhangs, with its prehistoric
earthworks, the plain of Avon on which Beau Nash's city
now spreads its streets, and it is just so that Old Sarum
in turn overhangs, with its regular Eoman fosses anl
gigantic glacis, the dale of the namesake river in Wilts,
near its point of confluence with the stream of the
Wily.

A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 257

We find it hard, no doubt, to imagine nowadays that
once upon a time England was almost as thickly covered
with hill-top villages (though on minor heights) as Italy
is in the present century. Yet such was undoubtedly the
case in prehistoric times. I know no better instance of
the way these stockaded villages were built than the
magnificent group of antique earthworks in Dorset and
Devon which rings round with a double row of fortresses
the beautiful valley of the Axminster Axe. There, on
one side, a long line of strongholds built by the Duro-
triges caps every jutting down and hill-top on the southern
and eastern bank of the river, while facing them, on the
opposite northern and western side, rises a similar series
of Damnonian fortresses, crowning the corresponding
Devonshire heights. Lambert's Castle, Musberry Castle,
Hawksdown Castle, and so forth, the local nomencla-
ture still calls them, but they are castles, or castra, only
in the now obsolete Eoman sense ; prehistoric earth-
works, with dyke and trench, once stockaded with wooden
palings on top, and enclosing the huts and homes of the
inhabitants. The river ran between the hostile terri-
tories ; each village held its own strip of land below its
fortress-height, and drove up its cattle, its women, and
its children, in times of foray, to the safety of the kraal
or hill-top encampment.

In such a condition of society, of course, every com-
munity was absolutely dependent upon its own territory
for the means of subsistence. And wherever the means
of subsistence existed, a village was sure to spring up in
time upon the nearest hill-top. That is how the oldest
Fiesole of all first came to be perched there. It was a

258 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD.

hill- top refuge for the tillers and grazers of the fertile
Arno vale at its feet.

But why did the people of the Arno Valley fix upon
the particular site of Fiesole ? Surely on the southern
side of the river, about the Viale dei Colli, the hills
approach much nearer to the plain. From San Miniato
and the Bello Sguardo one looks down far more directly
upon the domes and palaces and campaniles of Florence
spread right at one's feet. Why didn't the primitive
inhabitants of the valley fix rather on a spur of that
nearer range — say the one where Galileo's tower stands
— for the site of their village ?

If you know Florence and have asked that question
within yourself in all seriousness as you read, I see you
haven't yet begun to throw yourself into the position of
affairs in prehistoric Tuscany. You can't shuffle off your
own century. For between the broad plain and the
range of hills where the Viale dei Colli now winds
serpentine on its beautiful way round the glens and
ravines, the Arno runs, a broad torrent flood in times of
freshet : the Arno, unbridged as yet (in the days I speak
of) by the Ponte Vecchio, an impassable frontier between
the wide territory of prehistoric Fiesole and the narrow
fields of some minor village, long since forgotten, on the
opposite bank. The great alluvial plain lies north of the
river ; the three streams whose silt contributes to form
it flow into the main channel from Pistoja and Prato.
To live across the river on the south bank would have
been absolutely impossible for the owners of the plain.
But Fiesole occupies a central spur of the northern
heights, overlooking the valley to east and west, and

A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 259

must therefore have been always the natural place from
which to command the plain of Arno. A little above
and a little below Florence gorges once more hem the
river in. So that the plain of Florence (as we call it
nowadays), the plain of Fiesole, as it once was, 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 our own minds to get rid entirely of
that beautiful mushroom growth, Florence, and to think
only of the most ancient epoch. While we are in
Florence itself, to be sure, it seems to us always, by
comparison with our modern English towns, that
Florence is a place of immemorial antiquity. It was
civilized when Britain was a den of thieves. While in
feudal England Edward I. was summoning his barons to
repress the rising of William Wallace, in Florence,
already a great commercial town, Arnolfo di Cambio had
received the sublime orders of the Signoria to construct
for the Duomo ' the most sumptuous edifice that human
invention could desire or human labour execute,' and had
carried out those orders with consummate skill.
While Edward III. was dreaming of his lawless
filibustering expeditions into France, Giotto was
encrusting the face of his glorious belfry with that
magnificent decoration of many-coloured marbles which
makes northern churches look so cold and grey and
barbaric by comparison. While Englishmen were
burning Joan of Arc at Eouen, Fra Angelico was
adorning the walls of San Marco with those rapt saints
and those spotless Madonnas. Even the very back

8 2

260 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD.

streets of Florence recall at every step its mediaeval
magnificence. But when from Florence itself one turns
to Fiesole, the city by the Arno sinks at once by a
sudden revulsion into a mere thing of yesterday by the
side of the city on the Etruscan hill-top. Fiesole was a
town of immemorial antiquity while Florence was still,
what perhaps its poetical name imports, a field of
flowers.

But why this particular height rather than any other
of the dozen that jut out into the plain ? Well, there
we get at another fundamental point in hill-top town
history. Fiesole had water. A spring at such a height
is comparatively rare, but it is a necessary accompani-
ment, or rather a condition precedent, of all high-place
villages. In the Borgo Unto you will still find this
spring — a natural fountain, the Fonte Sotterra — in an
underground passage, now approached (so greatly did the
Fiesolans appreciate its importance) by a Gothic arch-
way. The water supplies the whole neighbourhood ; and
that accounts for the position of the town on the low col
just below the acropolis.

Who first chose the site it would be impossible to
say ; the earliest stockaded fort at Fiesole (enclosing the
town and arx above) must go back to the very dawn of
neolithic history, long before the Etruscans had ever
issued forth from their Bhsetian fastnesses to occupy the
blue and silver-grey hills of modern Tuscany. Nor do
we know who built the great Cyclopean walls, whose
huge rough blocks still overhang the modern carriage
road that leads past Boccaccio's Valley of the Ladies
and Fra Angelico's earliest convent from the town in the

A HILL- TOP STRONGHOLD. 261

Valley. They are attributed to the Etruscans, of course,
on much the same grounds as Stonehenge is attributed
to the Druids — because in the minds of the people who
made the attribution Etruscans and Druids were each
in their own 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 Arno erected these vast megalithic
walls round their city and citadel as a protection, pro-
bably, against the people who held the Ligurian sea-board.
Throughout the early historical period at least we know
that Faesulse was an Etruscan border-town against the
Ligurian freebooters, and we can see that the arx or
acropolis of Faesulse must have occupied the hill-top
now occupied by the Franciscan monastery on the
height above the town, while the houses must have
spread, as they still do within shrunken limits, about
the spring and over the col at its base.

Faesulae was not one of the great Etrurian cities, not
one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan League. Volterra
occupies the site of the large Tuscan town which lorded
it over this part of the Lower Apennines. But Fsesulae
must still have been a considerable place, to judge by the
magnitude and importance of its fortifications, and it
must have gathered into itself the entire population of all
the little Arno plain. As long as fortis Etruria crevit,
Fsesulse must always have held its own as a frontier post
against the Ligurian foe. But when fortis Etruria began
to decline, and Eome to become the summit of all things,
the glory of Fsesulae received a severe shock. Not indeed
by conquest — that counts for little — but the Eoman
peace introduced into Italy a new order of things, fatal

262 A HILL- TOP STRONGHOLD.

to the hill-tops. Sulla, who humbled Faesulae, did far
worse than that : he planted a Eoman colony in the
valley at its foot — the colony of Florentia — at the point
where the road crossed the Arno — the colony that was
afterwards to become the most famous commercial and
artistic town of the mediaeval world as Florence.

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

Nevertheless, just as in mediaeval England the upper
town on the hill, the castled town of the barons, often
existed for many years side by side with the lower town
on the river, the high-road town of the merchant guilds
— just as Old Sarum, for example, continued to exist side
by side with Salisbury— so Faesulae continued to exist
side by side with Florentia. As a military post,
commanding the plain, it was needful to retain it ; and
so, though Sulla destroyed in part its population, he
reinstated it before long as one of his own Eoman colonies.
And for a long time, during the ages of doubtful peace

A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 263

that succeeded the first glorious flush of the military
empire, Fsesulse must have kept up its importance
unchanged. The remains of the Eoman theatre on the
slope behind the cathedral — great stone semicircles
carved on a scale to seat a large audience — betoken a
considerable Eoman town. And from a very early period
it seems to have possessed a Christian church, whose
first bishop, according to a tradition as good as most, was
a convert of St. Peter's, and was martyred, says his
legend, in the Neronian persecution. The existing
cathedral, its later representative, is still an early and
very simple Tuscan basilica, with picturesque crypt and
raised choir, of a very plain Eomanesque type. It looks
like a fitting church for the mother-town of Florence ; it
seems to recall in its own cold and austere fabric the
more ancient claims of the sombre Etruscan hill-top
city.

It was the middle ages, however, that finally brought
down Fiesole in earnest to the plain. Pisa had been the
earliest Tuscan town to attain importance and maritime
supremacy after the dark days of barbarian incursion ;
but as soon as land-transit once more assumed general
importance, Florence, seated on the great route from the
north to Eome by Siena, and commanding the passage of
the Arno and the gate of the Apennines, naturally began
to surpass in time its distanced rival. As early as the
Eoman days a bridge is said to have spanned the Arno
on the site of the existing Ponte Vecchio. The mediaeval
walls enclosed the southern tete da pant within their
picturesque circuit, thus securing the passage of the river
and giving Florence its little Janiculus, the Oltrarno.

204 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD.

with its southern exit by the Porta Komana. The real
1 makers of Florence ' were the humble workmen who
thus extended the firm hold of the growing republic to
the southern bank. By so doing, they gave their city
undoubted command of the imperial route from Germany
Eomeward, and brought in their train Dante and Giotto,
Brunelleschi andDonatello, FraAngelico and Savonarola,
the Medici and the Pitti, Michael Angelo and Kaffaele,
and all the glories of the Eenaissance epoch. For as at
Athens, so in Florence, art and literature followed plainly
in the wake of commerce.

But the rise of Florence was the fall of Fiesole.
Already in the eleventh century the undutiful daughter
had conquered and annexed her venerable mother ; and
in proportion as the mercantile importance of the city
in the plain waxed greater and greater, that of the city
on the hill-top must slowly have waned to less and less.
At the present day Fiesole has degenerated into a mere
suburb of Florence, which, indeed, it had almost become
when Lorenzo the Magnificent held his country court at
the Villa Mozzi, or even earlier, when Boccaccio's lively
narrators fled from the plague to the gardens of the
Palmieri, though it still retains the dignity of its ancient
cathedral, its municipal palace, its gigantic seminary,
and its great overgrown Franciscan monastery, that
replaces the citadel on the height above the town. Nay,
more, with its local museum, its bishop's palace, and its
quaint churches, it keeps up, to some extent, all the airs
and graces of a real living town. But in reality these
few big buildings, and the graceful campanile which
makes so fair a show in all the neighbouring views, are

A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 265

the best of the little city. Fiesole looks biggest seen
from afar. All that is vital in it is the ecclesiastic- •!
establishment, which still clings, with true ecclesiastical
conservatism, to the hill-top city, and the trade of the
straw plaiters, who make Leghorn straw goods and
pester the visitor with their flimsy wares, taking no
answer to all their importunities save one in solid coin of
good King Umberto.

One last question. How does it come that in these
southern climates the hill-top town has survived so much
more generally to our own day than in Northern Europe ?
The obvious answer seems at first sight to be that in the
warmer climates life can be carried on comfortably, and
agriculture can yield good results, at a greater height
than in a cold climate. Olives, vines, chestnuts, maize
will grow far up on Italian hill sides, and that, no doubt,
counts for something ; but I do not believe it covers all
the ground. Two other points seem to me at least
equally important, especially when we remember that
the hill-top town was once as common in the north as in
the south, and that what we have really to account for
in Italy is not its existence merely, but rather its late
survival into newer epochs. One point is that in
Southern Europe the state of perpetual internal warfare
lasted much longer than in the feudal north. The other
point is that each little patch of country in the south is
still far more self-supporting, has had its economic
conditions far less disturbed by modern rearrangements
and commercial necessities, than in Northern Europe.
In England every town and village stands upon some
high road ; the larger stand almost invariably upon some

266 A HILL- TOP STRONGHOLD.

railway or some navigable river. In Italy it is still quite
possible, where agricultural conditions are favourable, to
have a comparatively nourishing town perched upon
some out-of-the-way mountain height. Even a carriage
road is scarcely a necessity ; a mule path will do well
enough for wine and oil and the other simple commodities
of southern life. The hill-top town, in short, belongs to
an earlier type of civilisation than ours ; it survives,
unaltered, on ifs own pinnacle wherever that type of
civilisation is still possible.

And I sincerely hope our pretty American friend will
pardon me for having thus publicly answered, at so great
length, her natural question.

A PEESISTENT NATIONALITY.

STANDING to-day before the dim outline of Orcagna's
" Hell " in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, at
Florence, and mentally comparing those mediaeval
demons and monsters and torturers on the frescoed wall
in front 'of me with the more antique Etruscan devils
and tormentors pictured centuries earlier on the ancient
tombs of Etrurian princes, the thought, which had often
occurred to me before, how essentially similar were the
Tuscan intellect and Tuscan art in all ages, forced itself
upon me once more at a flash with an irresistible burst
of internal conviction. The identity of old and new
seemed to stand confessed. Etruria throughout has been
one and the same ; and it is almost impossible for any
one to over-estimate the influence of, the powerful, but
gloomy, Etruscan character upon the whole tone, not
only of popular Christianity, but of that modern civilisa-
tion which is its offspring and outcome.

I suppose it is hardly necessary, " in this age of
enlightenment " (as people used to say in the last
century), to insist any longer upon the obvious fact that
conquest and absorption do not in any way mean

268 A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY.

extermination, Most people still vaguely fancy to them-
selves, to be sure, that, when Borne conquered and
absorbed Etruria, the ancient Etruscan ceased at once to
exist — was swallowed, as it were, and became forthwith,
in some mysterious way, first a Eoman, and then a
modern Italian. 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 marry-
ing under consul and emperor just as they had done
under lar and lucumo ; Latin and Gaul, Lombard and
Goth, mingled with them in time, but did not efface
them; and I do not doubt that the vast mass of the
population of Tuscany at the present day is still of pre-
ponderatingly Etruscan blood, though qualified, of course
(and perhaps improved), by many Italic, Celtic, and
Teutonic elements.

Again, when we remember that Florence, Pisa, Siena,
Perugia are all practically in Tuscany, and that Florence
alone has really given to the world Dante and Boccaccio,
Galileo and Savonarola, Cimabue and Giotto, Botticelli
and Fra Angelico, Donatello and Ghiberti, Michael
Angelo and Baffael, Leonardo da Vinci and Macchiavelli
and Alfieri, and a host of other almost equally great
names, it will be obvious to every one that the problem
of the origin of this Tuscan nationality must be one that
profoundedly interests the whole world. Nay, more, we
must remember, too, that Etruria had other and earlier
claims than these ; that it spread up to the very walls of
Borne ; that the Etruscan element ia Borne itself was
immensely strong ; that the Boman religion owed, con-

A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY. 2G9

fessedly, much to Tuscan ideas ; that Latin Christianity,
the Christianity of all the Western world, took its shape
in semi-Tuscan Eome ; that the Eoman Empire was
largely modelled by the Etruscan Maecenas ; that the
Italian renaissance was largely influenced by the
Florentine Medici ; that Leo the Tenth was himself a
member of that great house ; and that the artists whom
he summoned to the metropolis to erect St. Peter's and
to beautify the Vatican were, almost all of them,
Florentines by birth, training, or domicile. I think,
when we have run over mentally these and ten thousand
other like facts, we will readily admit to ourselves the
magnitude of the world's debt to Tuscany — social, artistic,
intellectual, religious — both in ancient, mediaeval, and
modern times.

And what, now, was this strong Tuscan nationality,
which persists so thoroughly through all external
historical changes, and which has contributed so large
and so marvellous a part to the world's thought and the
world's culture ? It is a curious consideration for those
who talk so glibly about the enormous natural superiority
of the Aryan race, that the ancient Etruscans were the
one people of the antique European world, who, by
common consent, did not belong to the Aryan family.
They were strangers in the land, or, rather, perhaps they
were its oldest possessors. Their language, their
physique, their creed, their art, all point to a wholly
different origin from the Aryans. I am not going, in a
brief essay like this, to settle dogmatically, off-hand, the
vexed question of the origin and affinities of the Etruscan
type ; more nonsense, I suppose, has been talked and

270 A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY.

written upon that occult subject by learned men than
even learned men have ever poured forth upon any other
sublunary topic ; but one thing at least, I take it, is abso-
lutely certain amid the conflicting theories of ingenious
theorists about the Etruscan race, and that one thing
is that the Easennse stand in Europe absolutely alone,
the sole representatives of some ancient and elsewhere
exterminated stock, surviving only in Tuscany itself, and
in the Ehaetian Alps of the Canton Grisons.

At the moment when the Etruscans first appear in
history, however, they appear as a race capable of
acquiring and assimilating culture with great ease,
rapidity, and certainty. No sooner do they come into
contact with the Greek world than they absorb and
reproduce all that was best and truest in Greek civiliza-
tion. ' Merely receptive — European Chinese,' says, in
effect, Mommsen, the great Eoman historian : to me, that
judgment, though true in some small degree, seems harsh
indeed on a wider view, when applied to a people who
begot at last the ' Divina Commedia,' the campanile of
Florence, the dome of St. Peter's, and the glories of the
Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. It is quite true that the
Etruscans themselves, like the Japanese in our own time,
did at first accept most imitatively the Hellenic culture ;
but they gradually remoulded it by their own effort into
something new, growing and changing from age to age,
until at last, in the Italian renaissance, they burst out
with a wonderful and novel message to all the rest of
dormant Europe.

One of the most persistent key-notes of this under-
lying Etruscan character is the solemn, weird, and

A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY. 271

gloomy nature of so much of the true Etruscan workman-
ship. From the very beginning they are strong, but
sullen. Solidity and power, rather than beauty and
grace, are what they aim at ; and in this, Michael
Angelo was a true Tuscan. If we look at the massive
old Etruscan buildings, the Cyclopean walls of Faesulae
and Volteme, with their gigantic unhewn blocks, or the
gloomy tombs of Clusium, with their heavy portals,
and then at the frowning fagade of the Strozzi or
the Pitti Palace, we shall see in these, their earliest and
latest terms, the special marks of Tuscan architecture.
' Piled by the hands of giants for mighty kings of old,'
says Macaulay, well, of the Cyclopean walls. ' It some-
what resembles a prison or castle, and is remarkable for
its bold simplicity of style, the unadorned huge blocks of
stone being hewn smooth at the joints only/ says a modern
writer, of Brunelleschi's palatial masterpiece. Every
visitor to Florence must have noticed on every side the
marks of this sullen and rugged Etruscan character.
Compare for a moment the dark bosses of the Palazzo
Strozzi, the ' dpre energie ' of the Palazzo Vecchio, the
' beaute sombre et severe ' of the mediaeval Bargello, with
the open, airy brightness of the 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 this
persistent trait in the Etruscan idiosyncrasy. Tuscan
architecture is massive and morose where Venetian
architecture is sunny and smiling.

Now, Tuscan religion has in all times been specially
influenced by the peculiarly gloomy tinge of the Tuscan
character. It has always been a religion of fear rather

272 A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY.

than of love ; a religion that strove harder to terrorize
than to attract ; a religion full of devils, flames, tortures,
and horrors ; in short, a sort of horrible Chinese religion
of dragons and monstrosities, and flames and goblins.
In the painted tombs of ancient Etruria you may see
the familiar devil with his three-pronged fork thrusting
souls back into the seething flood of a heathen hell, as
Orcagna's here thrust them back similarly into that of its
more modern Christian successor. All Etruscan art is
full throughout of such horrors. You find their traces
abundantly in the antique Etruscan museum at Florence ;
you find them on the mediaeval Campo Santo at Pisa ;
you find them with greater skill, but equal repulsiveness,
in the work of the great Eenaissance artists. The
' ghastly glories of saints ' the Tuscan revels in. The
most famous portion of the most famous Tuscan poem is
the ' Inferno ' — the part that gloats with minute and
truly Tuscan realism over the torments of the damned
in every department of the mediaeval hell. And, as if
still further to mark the continuity of thought, here in
Orcagna's frescoes at Santa Maria Novella you have
every horror of the heathen religion incongruously
mingled with every horror of the Christian — gorgons and
harpies and chimaeras dire are tormenting the wicked
under the eyes of the Madonna ; centaurs are shooting
and prodding them before the God of Love from the
torrid banks of fiery lakes ; furies with snaky heads are
directing their punishments ; Minos and .ZEacus are
superintending their tasks ; and, in the centre of all, a
huge Moloch demon is devouring them bodily in his
fiery jaws, with hideous tusks as of a Japanese monster.

A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY. 273

It would be a curious question to inquire how far
these old and ingrained Etruscan ideas may have helped
to modify and colour the gentler conceptions of primitive
Christianity. Certainly, one must never for a moment
forget that Rome was at bottom nearly one-half Etruscan
in character ; that during the imperial period it became,
in fact, the capital of Etruria ; that myriads of Etruscans
flocked to Eome ; and that many of them, like Sejanus,
had much to do with moulding and building up the
imperial system. I do not doubt, myself, that Etruscan
notions large interwove themselves, from the very outset,
with Roman Christianity ; and whenever in the churches
or galleries of Italy I see St. Lawrence frying on his
gridiron, or St. Sebastian pierced through with many
arrows, or the Innocents being massacred in unpleasant
detail, or hell being represented with Dantesque minute-
ness and particularity of delineation, I say to myself,
with an internal smile, ' Etruscan influence.'

How interesting it is, too, to observe the constant out-
crop, under all forms and faiths, of this strange, under-
lying, non-Aryan type ! The Etruscans are and always
were remarkable for their intellect, their ingenuity, their
artistic faculty; and even to this day, after so many
vicissitudes, they stand out as a wholly superior people
to the rough Genoese and the indolent Neapolitans.
They have had many crosses of blood meanwhile, of
course ; and it seems probable that the crosses have done
them good : for in ancient times it was Rome, the
Etrurianised border city 01 the Latins, that rose to great-
ness, not Etruria itself ; and at a later date, it was after
the Germans had mingled their race with Italy that

v

274 A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY.

Florence almost took the place of Eome. Nay, it is
known as a fact that under Otto the Great a large
Teutonic colony settled in Florence, thus adding to the
native Etrurian race (especially to the nobility) that
other element which the Tuscan seems to need in order
that he may be spurred to the realisation of his best
characteristics, But allow as we may for foreign admix-
ture, two points are abundantly clear to the impartial
observer of Tuscan history : one, that this non- Aryan
race has always been one of the finest and strongest in
Italy ; and the other, that from the very dawn of history
its main characteristics, for good or for evil, have
persisted most uninterruptedly till the present day.

1

CASTEES AND CHESTEES.

EVERYBODY knows, of course, that up and down over the
face of England a whole crop of places may be found
with such terminations as Lancaster, Doncaster, Man-
chester, Leicester, Gloucester, or Exeter ; and everybody
also knows that these words are various corruptions or
alterations of the Latin castra, or perhaps we ought
rather to say of the singular form, castrum. So much
we have all been told from our childhood upward ; and
for the most part we have been quite ready to acquiesce
in the statement without any further troublesome inquiry
on our own account. But in reality the explanation
thus vouchsafed us does not help us much towards ex-
plaining the real origin and nature of these ancient
names. It is true enough as far as it goes, but it does
not go nearly far enough. It reminds one a little of
Charles Kingsley's accomplished pupil-teacher, with his
glib derivation of amphibious, ' from two Greek words,
amphi, the land, and bios, the water.' A detailed
history of the root ' Chester ' in its various British
usages may serve to show how far such a rough-and-
ready solution as the pupil-teacher's falls short of com-
plete accuracy and comprehensiveness.

T 2

276 CASTERS AND C HESTERS.

In the first place, without troubling ourselves for the
time being with the diverse forms of the word as now
existing, a difficulty meets us at the very outset as to
how it ever got into the English language at all. * It
was left behind by the Komans,' says the pupil teacher
unhesitatingly. No doubt ; but if so, the only language
in which it could be left would be "Welsh ; for when the
Eomans quitted Britain there were probably as yet no
English settlements on any part of the eastern coast.
Now the Welsh form of the word, even as given us in
the very ancient Latin Welsh tract ascribed to Nennius,
is ' Caer ' or ' Kair ; ' and there is every reason to
believe that the Celtic cathir or the Latin castrum had
been already worn down into this corrupt form at least
as early as the days of the first English colonisation of
Britain. Indeed I shall show ground hereafter for
believing that that form survives even now in one or two
parts of Teutonic England. But if this be so, it is quite
clear that the earliest English conquerors could not have
acquired the use of the word from the vanquished Welsh
whom they spared as slaves or tributaries. The new-
comers could not have learned to speak of a Ceaster or
Chester from Welshmen who called it a Caer ; nor could
they have adopted the names of Leicester or Gloucester
from Welshmen who knew those towns only as Kair
Legion or Kair Gloui. It is clear that this easy off-hand
theory shirks all the real difficulties of the question, and
that we must look a little closer into the matter in order
to understand the true history of these interesting
philological fossils.

Already we have got one clear and distinct principle to

CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 277

begin with, which is too often overlooked by amateur
philologists. The Latin language, as spoken by Romans
in Britain during their occupation of the island, has left
and can have left absolutely no directs marks upon our
English tongue, for the simple reason that English (or
Anglo-Saxon as we call it in its earlier stages) did not
begin to be spoken in any part of Britain for twenty or
thirty years after the Romans retired. Whatever Latin
words have come down to us in unbroken succession
from the Roman times — and they are but a few — must
have come down from Welsh sources. The Britons may
have learnt them from their Italian masters, and may
then have imparted them, after the brief period of
precarious independence, to their Teutonic masters ; but
of direct intercourse between Roman and Englishman
there was probably little or none.

Three ways out of this difficulty might possibly be
suggested by any humble imitator of Mr. Gladstone.
First, the early English pirates may have learnt the word
castrum (they always used it as a singular) years before
they ever came to Britain as settlers at all. For during
the long decay of the empire, the corsairs of the flat banks
and islets of Sleswick and Friesland made many
a light-hearted plundering expedition upon the unlucky
coasts of the maritime Roman provinces ; and it was to
repel their dreaded attacks that the Count of the Saxon
Shore was appointed to the charge of the long exposed
tract from the fenland of the Wash to the estuary of the
Rother in Sussex. On one occasion they even sacked
London itself, already the chief trading town of the
whole island. During some such excursions, the pirates

278 CASTERS AND CHESTERS.

would be certain to pick up a few Latin words, especially
such as related to new objects, unseen in the rude society
of their own native heather-clad wastes ; and amongst
these we may be sure that the great Eoman fortresses
would rank first and highest in their barbaric eyes. In-
deed, modern comparative philologists have shown beyond
doubt that a few southern forms of speech had already
penetrated to the primitive English marshland by the
shores of the Baltic and the mouth of the Elbe before the
great exodus of the fifth century ; and we know that
Eoman or Byzantine coins, and other objects belonging to
the Mediterranean civilisation, are found abundantly in
barrows of the first Christian centuries in Sleswick — the
primitive England of the colonists who conquered Britain.
But if the word castrum did not get into early English by
some such means, then we must fall back either upon our
second alternative explanation, that the townspeople of the
south-eastern plains in England had become thoroughly
Latinised in speech during the Eoman occupation ; or upon
our third, that they spoke a Celtic dialect more akin to
Gaulish than the modern Welsh of Wales, which may be
descended from the ruder and older tongue of the western
aborigines. This last opinion would fit in very well with the
views of Mr. Ehys, the Celtic professor at Oxford, who
thinks that all south-eastern Britain was conquered and
colonised by the Gauls before the Eoman invasion. If so,
it maybe only the western Welsh who said Caer; the east-
ern may have said castrum, as the Eomans did. In either
of the latter two cases, we must suppose that the early
English learnt the word from the conquered Britons of
the districts they overran. But I myself have very little

CASTERS AND CHES7ERS. 279

doubt that they had borrowed it long before their settle-
ment in our island at all.

However this may be — and I confess I have been a
little puritanically minute upon the subject — the English
settlers learned to use the word from the first moment
they landed in Britain. In its earliest English dress it
appears as Ceaster, pronounced like Keaster, for the soft
sound of the initial in modern English is due to later
Norman influences. The new comers — Anglo-Saxons,
if you choose to call them so — applied the word to every
Eoman town or ruin they found in Britain. Indeed, all
the Latin words of the first crop in English — those used
during the heathen age, before Augustine and his monks
introduced the Eoman civilisation — -belong to such
material relics of the older provincial culture as the
Sleswick pirates had never before known : way from via,
watt from vallum, street from strata, and port homportus.
In this first crop of foreign words Ceaster also must be
reckoned, and it was originally employed in English as a
common rather than as a proper name. Thus we read in
the brief Chronicle of the West Saxon kings, under the year
577, ' Cuthwine and Ceawlin fought against the Welsh,
and offslew three kings, Conmail and Condidan and
Farinmail, and took three ceasters, Gleawan ceaster and
Ciren ceaster and Bathan ceaster.' We might modernise
a little, so as to show the real sense, by saying ' Glevum
city and Corinium city and Bath city.' Here it is
noticeable that in two of the cases — Gloucester and
Cirencester — the descriptive termination has become at
last part of the name ; but in the third case — that of
Bath— it has never succeeded in doing so. Ages after,

280 CASTERS AND CHESTERS.

in the reign of King Alfred, we still find the word used as a
common noun ; for the Chronicle mentions that a body
of Danish freebooters ' fared to a waste ceaster in Wir-
ral ; it is hight Lega ceaster ; ' that is to say, Legionis
castra, now Chester. The grand old English epic of
Beowulf, which is perhaps older than the colonisation of
Britain, speaks of townsfolk as 'the dwellers in
ceasters.'

As a rule, each particular Eoman town retained its
full name, in a more or less clipped form, for official
uses; but in the ordinary colloquial language 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 general sense, London.
Thus, in the north, Ceaster usually means York, the
Eoman capital of the province ; as when the Chronicle
tells us that ' John succeeded to the bishopric of
Ceaster ' ; that ' Wilfrith was hallowed as bishop at
Ceaster ' ; or that ' .ZEthelberht the archbishop died at
Ceaster.' In the south it is employed to mean Win-
chester, the capital of the West Saxon kings and
overlords of all Britain ; as when the Chronicle says that
' King Edgar drove out the priests at Ceaster from 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 Shropshire to go to Shrewsbury, and
in Norfolk to go to Norwich. In only one instance has this
colloquial usage survived down to our own days in a large
town, and that is at Chester, where the short form has
quite ousted the full name of Le^a ceaster. But in the

CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 281

case of small towns or unimportant Eoman stations,
which would seldom need to be mentioned outside their
own immediate neighbourhood, the simple form is quite
common, as at Caistor in Norfolk, Castor in Hunts, and
elsewhere. At times, too, we get an added English ter-
mination, as at Casterton, Chesterton, and Chesterholme ;
or a slight distinguishing mark, as at Great Chesters,
Little Chester, Bridge Casterton, and Chester-le-Street.
All these have now quite lost their old distinctive names,
though they have acquired new ones to distinguish them
from the Chester, or from one another. For example,
Chester-le-Street was CondercTo in Eoman times, and
Cunega ceaster in the early English period. Both names
are derived from the little river Cone, which flows
through the village.

Before we pass on to the consideration of those castra
which; like Manchester and Lancaster, have preserved
to the present day their original Eoman or Celtic prefixes
in more or less altered shapes, we must glance briefly at
a general principle running through the modernised forms
now in use. The reader, with his usual acuteness, will
have noticed that the word Ceaster reappears under
many separate disguises in the names of different modern
towns. Sometimes it is caster, sometimes Chester, some-
times cester, and sometimes even it gets worn down to a
mere fugitive relic, as ceter or eter. But these different
corruptions do not occur irregularly up and down the
country, one here and one there ; they follow a distinct
law and are due to certain definite underlying facts of
race or language. Each set of names lies in a regular
stratum; and the different strata succeed one another

282 CAS7"EAS AND CHESTERS.

like waves over the face of England, from north-east to
south-westward. In the extreme north and east, where
the English or Anglian blood is purest, or is mixed only
with Danes and Northmen to any large extent, such
forms as Lancaster, Doncaster, Caistor, and Casterton
abound. In the mixed midlands and the Saxon south,
the sound softens into Chesterfield, Chester, Winchester,
and Dorchester. In the inner midlands and the Severn
vale, where the proportion of Celtic blood becomes much
stronger, the termination grows still softer in Leicester,
Bicester, Cirencester, Gloucester, and Worcester, while
at the same time a marked tendency towards elision
occurs ; for these words are really pronounced as if written
Lester, Bister, Cisseter, Gloster, and Wooster. Finally,
on the very borders of Wales, and of that Damnonian
country which was once known to our fathers as West
Wales, we get the very abbreviated forms Wroxeter, Utto-
xeter, and Exeter, of which the second is colloquially still
further shortened into Uxeter. Sometimes these tracts
approach very closely to one another, as on the banks of
the Nene, where the two halves of the Eoman Durobrivse
have become castor on one side of the river, and Ches-
terton on the other ; but the line can be marked dis-
tinctly on the map, with a slight outward bulge, with as
great regularity as the geological strata. It will be most
convenient here, therefore, to begin with the casters,
which have undergone the least amount of rubbing
down, and from them to pass on regularly to the succes-
sively weaker forms in Chester, cester, ceter, and eter.

Nothing, indeed, can be more deceptive than the
Common fashion of quoting a Eoman name from the

CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 283

often blundering lists of the Itineraries, and then passing
on at once to the modern English form, without any hint
of the intermediate stages. To say that Glevum is now
Gloucester is to tell only half the truth ; until we know
that the two were linked together by the gradual steps
of Glevum castrum, Gleawan ceaster, Gleawe cester,
Gloucester, and Gloster, we have not really explained
the words at all. By beginning with the least corrupt
forms we shall best be able to see the slow nature of the
change, and we shall also find at the same time that a
good deal of incidental light is shed upon the impor-
tance and extent of the English settlement.

Doncaster is an excellent example of the simplest form
of modernisation. It appears in the Antonine Itinerary
and in the Notitia Imperil as Danum. This, with the
ordinary termination affixed, becomes at once Dona
ceaster or Doncaster. The name is of course originally
derived in either form from the river Don, which flows
beside it ; and the Northumbrian invaders must bave
learnt the names of both river and station from their
Brigantian British serfs. It shows the fluctuating
nature of the early local nomenclature, however, when
we find that Baeda (' the Venerable Bede ') describes the
place in his Latinised vocabulary as Campodouum — that
is to say, the Field of Don, or, more idiomatically, Don-
field, a name exactly analogous to those of Chesterfield
Macclesfield, Mansfield, Sheffield, and Huddersfield in the
neighbouring region. The comparison of Doncaster and
Chesterfield is thus most interesting : for here we have
two Eoman Stations, each of which must once have had
two alternative names; but in the one case the old

284 CASTERS AND CHESTERS.

Eoman name has ultimately prevailed, and in the other
case the modern English one.

The second best example of a Caster, perhaps, is
Lancaster. In all probability this is the station which
appears in the Notitia Imperil as Longovico, an oblique
case which it might be hazardous to put in the nomina-
tive, seeing that it seems rather to mean the town on the
Lune or Loan than the Long Village. Here, as in many
other cases, the formative element, vicus, is exchanged
for Ceaster, and we get something like Lon-ceaster or
finally Lancaster. Other remarkable Casters are Bran-
caster in Norfolk, once Branadunum (where the British
termination dun has been similarly dropped) ; Ancaster
in Lincolnshire, whose Eoman name is not certainly
known ; and Caistor, near Norwich, once Venta
Icenorum, a case which may best be considered under
the head of Winchester. On the other hand, Tadcaster
gives us an instance where the Eoman prefix has
apparently been entirely altered, for it appears in the
Antonine Itinerary (according to the best identification)
as Calcaria, so that we might reasonably expect it to be
modernised as Calcaster. Even here, however, we might
well suspect an earlier alternative title, of which we shall
get plenty when we come to examine the Chesters ; and
in fact, in Bseda, it still bears its old name in a slightly
disguised form as Kaelca ceaster.

First among the softer forms, let us examine the
interesting group to which Chester itself belongs. Its
Eoman name was, beyond doubt, Diva, the station on
the Dee — as Doncaster is the station on the Don, and
Lancaster the station on the Lune. Its proper modern

CASTERS AND C HESTERS. 285

form ought, therefore, to be Deechester. But it would
seem that in certain places the neighbouring rustics
knew the great Eoman 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 Eatae or Leicester ; and one at
Isca Silurum or Caerleon-upon-Usk. In each case the
modernisation has taken a very different form. Diva was
captured by the heathen English king, JEthelfrith of
Northumbria, in a battle rendered famous by Baeda, who
calls the place ' The City of Legions.' The Latin com-
pilation by some Welsh writer, ascribed to Nennius, calls
it Cair Legion, which is also its name in the Irish
annals. In the English Chronicle it appears as Lege
ceaster, Laege ceaster, and Leg ceaster ; but after the
Norman Conquest it becomes Ceaster alone. On midland
lips the sound soon grew into the familiar Chester.
About the second case, that of Leicester, there is a slight
difficulty, for it assumes in the Chronicle the form of
Laegra ceaster, with an apparently intrusive letter;
and the later Welsh writers seized upon the form to fit
in with their own ancient legend of King Lear. Nennius
calls it Cair Lerion ; and that unblushing romancer,
Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes it at once into Cair Leir,
the city of Leir. More probably the name is a mixture
of Legionis and Eatae, Leg-rat ceaster, the camp of the
Legion at Eatae. This, again, grew into Legra ceaster,
Leg ceaster, and Lei ceaster, while the word, though
written Leicester, is now shortened by south midland
voices to Lester. The third Legionis Castra remained
always Welsh, and so hardened on Cymric lips into Kair

286 CASTERS AND CHESTERS.

Leon or Caerleon. Nennius applies the very similar
name of Cair Legeion to Exeter, still in his time a
Damnonian or West Welsh fortress.

Equally interesting have been the fortunes of the three
towns of which Winchester is the type. In the old
Welsh tongue, Gwent means a champaign country, or
level alluvial plain. The Eomans borrowed the word as
Venta, and applied it to the three local centres of Venta
Icenorum in Norfolk, Venta Belgarum in Hampshire,
and Venta Silurum in Monmouth. When the first West
Saxon pirates, under their real or mythical leader, Cerdic,
swarmed up Southampton Water and occupied the
Gwent of the Belgae, they called their new conquest
Wintan ceaster, though the still closer form Waentan once
occurs. Thence to Winte ceaster and Winchester is no
far cry. Gwent of the Iceni had a different history.
No doubt it also was known at first as Wintan
ceaster ; but, as at Winchester, the shorter form
Ceaster would naturally be employed in local collo-
quial usage; and when the chief centre of East
Anglian population was removed a few miles north
to Norwich, the north wick — then a port on the
navigable estuary of the Yare — the older 'station sank
into insignificance, and was only locally remembered as
Caistor. Lastly, Gwent of the Silurians has left its
name alone to Caer-Went in Monmouthshire, where
hardly any relics now remain of the Eoman occupation.

Manchester belongs to exactly the same class as
Winchester. Its Eoman name was Mancunium, which
would easily glide into Mancunceaster. In the English
Chronicle it is only once mentioned, and then as Mame-

CASTERS AND C HESTERS. 287

ceaster — a form explained by the alternative Mamucium
in the Itinerary, which would naturally become Marnuc
ceaster. Colchester of course represents Colonia,
corrupted first into Coin ceaster, and so through Coi
ceaster into its present form. Porchester in Hants is
Portus Magnus ; Dorchester is Durnovaria, and then
Dorn ceaster. Grantchester, Godmanchester, Chester-
field, Woodchester, and many others help us to trace the
line across the map of England, to the most western
limit of all at Ilchester, anciently Ischalis, though the
intermediate form of Givel ceaster is certainly an odd
one.

Besides these Chesters of the regular order, there are
several curious outlying instances in Durham and
Northumberland, and along the Bom an Wall, islanded,
as it were, beyond the intermediate belt of Casters.
Such are Lanchester in Durham, which may be compared
with the more familiar Lancaster; Great Chesters in
Northumberland, Ebchester on the northern Watling
Street, and a dozen more. How to account for these is
rather a puzzle. Perhaps the Casters may be mainly
due to Danish influence (which is the common explana-
tion), and it is known that the Danes spread but
sparingly to the north of the Tees. However, this rough
solution of the problem proves too much : for how then
can we have a still softer form in Danish Leicester itself?
Probably we shall be nearer the truth if we say that
these are late names ; for Northumberland was a desert
long after the great harrying by William the Conqueror ;
and by the time it was repeopled, Chester had become
the recognised English form, so that it would naturally

288 CASTERS AND C11ESTERS.

be employed by the new occupants of the districts about
the Wall.

No name in Britain, however, is more interesting than
that of Rochester, which admirably shows us how so
many other Roman names have acquired a delusively
English form, or have been mistaken for memorials
of the English conquest. The Eoman town was known
as Durobrivae, which does not in the least resemble
Rochester ; and what is more, Baeda distinctly tells us
that Justus, the first bishop of the West Kentish see,
was consecrated * in the city of Dorubrevi, which the
English call Hrofaes ceaster, from one of its former
masters, by name Hrof.' If this were all we knew about
it, we should be told that Bseda clearly described the
town as being called Hrof's Chester, from an English
conqueror Hrof, and that to contradict this clear state-
ment of an early writer was presumptuous or absurd.
Fortunately, however, we have the clearest possible
proof that Hrof never existed, and that he was a pure
creation of Baeda's own simple etymological guesswork.
King Alfred clearly knew better, for he omitted this wild
derivation from his English translation. The valuable
fragment of a map of Roman Britain preserved for us
in the mediaeval transcript known as the Peutinger
Tables, sets down Rochester as Rotibis. Hence it is
pretty certain that it must have had two alternative
names, of which the other was Durobrivae. Rotibis
would easily pass (on the regular analogies) into Rotifi
ceaster, and that again into Hrofi ceaster and Rochester ;
just as Rhutupiae or Ritupse passed into Rituf burh, and
so finally into Richborough. Moreover, in a charter of

CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 289

King Ethelberht of Kent, older a good deal than Baeda's
time, we find the town described under the mixed form
of Hrofi-brevi. After such a certain instance of philo-
logical blundering as this, I for one am not inclined to
place great faith in such statements as that made by the
English Chronicle about Chichester, which it attributes to
the mythical South Saxon king Cissa. Whatever Cissan-
ceaster may mean, it seems to me much more likely that
it represents another case of double naming ; for though
the Eoman town was commonly known as Eegnum, that
is clearly a mere administrative form, derived from the
tribal name of the Eegni. Considering that the same
veracious Chronicle derives Portsmouth, the Eoman
Portus, from an imaginary Teutonic invader, Port, and
commits itself to other wild statements of the same sort,
I don't think we need greatly hesitate about rejecting its
authority in these earlier and conjectural portions.

Silchester is another much disputed name. As a rule,
the site has been identified with that of Calleva Atreba-
tum; but the proofs are scanty, and the identification
must be regarded as a doubtful one. I have already
ventured to suggest that the word may contain the
root Silva, as the town is situated close upon the
ancient borders of Pamber Forest. The absence of
early forms, however, makes this somewhat of a random
shot. Indeed, it is difficult to arrive at any definite
conclusions in these cases, except by patiently following
up the name from first to last, through all its variations,
corruptions, and mis-spellings.

The Cesters are even more degraded (philologically
speaking) than the Ghesters, but are not less interesting

u

290 CASTERS AND CHESTERS.

and illustrative in their way. Their farthest north-
easterly extension, I believe, is to be found at Leicester
and Towcester. The former we have already considered :
the latter appears in the Chronicle as Tofe ceaster, and
derives its name from the little river Towe, on which it
is situated. Anciently, no doubt, the river was called
Tofe or Ton, like the Tavy in Devonshire ; for all these
river-words recur over and over again, both in England
and on the Continent. In this case, there seems no im-
mediate connection with the Eoman name, if the site be
rightly identified with that of Lactodorum ; but at any
rate the river name is Celtic, so that Towcester cannot
be claimed as a Teutonic settlement.

Cirencester, the meeting-place of all the great Eoman
roads, is the Latin Corinium, sometimes given as
Durocornovium, which well illustrates the fluctuating
state of Eoman nomenclature in Britain. As this great
strategical centre — the key of the west — had formerly
been the capital of the Dobuni, whose name it sometimes
bears, it might easily have come down to us as Durchester,
or Dobchester, instead of under its existing guise. The
city was captured by the West Saxons in 577, and is
then called Ciren ceaster in the brief record of the
conquerors. A few years later, the Chronicle gives it as
Cirn ceaster ; and since the river is called Chirn, this
is the form it might fairly 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 down in
use ; so it softened both its initials into Cirencester,
while Cissan ceaster only got (through Cisse ceaster) as
far as Chichester. At that point the spelling of the

CASTE KS AND C HESTERS. 291

western town has stopped short, but the tongues of the
natives have run on till nothing now remains but Cisseter.
If we had only that written form on the one hand, and
Durocornovium on the other, even the boldest etymologist
would hardly venture to suggest that they had any con-
nection with one another. Of course the common
prefix Duro, is only the Welsh Dwr, water, and its
occurrence in a name merely implies a ford or river. The
alternative forms may be Anglicised as Churn, and Churn-
water, just like Grasmere, and Grasmere Lake.

I wish I could avoid saying anything about Worcester,
for it is an obscure and difficult subject ; but I fear the
attempt to shirk it would be useless in the long run.
I know from sad experience that if I omit it every
inhabitant of Worcestershire who reads this article will
hunt me out somehow, and run me to earth at last, with
a letter demanding a full and explicit explanation of this
silent insult to his native county. So I must try to put
the best possible face upon a troublesome matter. The
earliest existing form of the name, after the English
Conquest, seems to be that given in a Latin Charter of
the eighth century as Weogorna civitas. (Here it is
difficult to disentangle the English from its Latin dress.)
A little later it appears in a vernacular shape (also in a
charter) as Wigran ceaster. In the later part of the
English Chronicle it becomes Wigera ceaster, and Wigra
ceaster ; but by the twelfth century it has grown into
Wigor ceaster, from which the change to Wire oeaster
and Worcester (fully pronounced) is not violent. This
is all plain sailing enough. But what is the meaning of
Wigorna ceaster or Wigran ceaster ? And what Eoman

v 2

292 CASTERS AND C HESTERS.

or English name does it represent ? The old English
settlers of the neighbourhood formed a little independent
principality of Hwiccas (afterwards subdued by the
Mercians), and some have accordingly suggested that the
original word may have been Hwiccwara ceaster, the
Chester of the Hwicca men, which would be analogous
to Cant-wara burh (Canterbury), the Bury of the Kent
men, or to Wiht-gara burh (Carisbrooke), the Bury of the
Wight men. Others, again, connect it with the Bran-
nogenium of the Kavenna geographer, and the Cair
Guoranegon or Guiragon of Nennius, which latter is
probably itself a corrupted version of the English name.
Altogether, it must be allowed that Worcester presents
a genuine difficulty, and that the facts about its early
forms are themselves decidedly confused, if not contra-
dictory. The only other notable Ceasters, are Alcester,
once Alneceaster, in Worcestershire, the Eoman Alauna;
Gloucester or Glevum, already sufficiently explained;
and Mancester in Staffordshire, supposed to occupy the
site of Manduessedum.

Among the most corrupted forms of all, Exeter may
rank first. Its Latin equivalent was Isca Damnoniorum,
Usk of the Devonians ; Isca being the Latinised form of
that prevalent Celtic river name which crops up again in
the Usk, Esk, Exe, and Axe, besides forming the first
element of Uxbridge and Oxford; while the tribal
qualification was added to distinguish it from its name-
sake, Isca Silurum, Usk of the Silurians, now Caerleon-
upon-Usk. In the west country, to this day, ask always
becomes ax, or rather remains so, for that provincial
form was the King's English at the court of Alfred ; and

CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 293

so Isca became on Devonian lips Exan ceaster, after the
West Saxon conquest. Thence it passed rapidly through
the stages of Exe ceaster and Exe cester till it finally
settled down into Exeter. At the same time, the river
itself became the Exe ; and the Exan-niutha of the
Chronicle dropped into Exmouth. We must never forget,
however, that Exeter, was a Welsh town up to the reign
of Athelstan, and that Cornish Welsh was still spoken in
parts of Devonshire till the days of Queen Elizabeth.

Wroxeter is another immensely interesting fossil word.
It lies just at the foot of the Wrekin, and the hill which
takes that name in English must have been pronounced
by the old Celtic inhabitants much like Uricon : for of
course the awkward initial letter has only become silent
in these later lazy centuries. The Eomans turned it
into Uriconium ; but after their departure, it was
captured and burnt to the ground by a party of raiding
West Saxons, and its fall is graphically described in the
wild old Welsh elegy of Llywarch the Aged. The ruins
are still charred and blackened by the West Saxon fires.
The English colonists of the neighbourhood called
themselves the Wroken-saetas, or Settlers by the Wrekin
— a word analogous to that of Wilssetas, or Settlers by
the Wyly ; Dorsaetas, or Settlers among the Durotriges ;
and Sumorsaetas, or Settlers among the Sumor-folk, —
which survive in the modern counties of Wilts, Dorset,
and Somerset. Similar forms elsewhere are the Pecsaetas
of the Derbyshire Peak, the Elmedsaetas in the Forest of
Elmet, and the Cilternsastas in the Chiltern Hills. No
doubt the Wroken-saetas called the ruined Roman fort
by the analogous name of Wroken ceaster; and this

294 CASTERS AND C HESTERS.

would slowly become Wrok ceaster, Wrok-cester, and
Wroxeter, by the ordinary abbreviating tendency of the
Welsh borderlands. Wrexham doubtless preserves the
same original root.

Having thus carried the Castro, to the very confines of
Wales, it would be unkind to a generous and amiable
people not to carry them across the border and on to
the Western sea. The Welsh corruption, whether of
the Latin word or of a native equivalent cathir, assumes
the guise of Caer. Thus the old Eoman station of
Segontiuin, near the Menai Straits, is now called Caer
Seiont ; but the neighbouring modern town which has
gathered around Edward's new castle on the actual
shore, the later metropolis of the land of Arfon, became
known to Welshmen as Caer-yn-Arfon, now corrupted
into Caernarvon or even into Carnarvon. Gray's familiar
line about the murdered bards — ' On Arvon's dreary
shore they lie ' — keeps up in some dim fashion the
memory of the true etymology. Caermarthen is in like
manner the Eoman Muridunum or Moridunum — the fort
by the sea — though a duplicate Moridunum in South
Devon has been simply translated into English as
Seaton. Innumerable other Caers, mostly representing
Eoman sites, may be found scattered up and down over
the face of Wales, such as Caersws, Caerleon, Caergwrle,
Caerhun, and Caerwys, all of which still contain traces
of Eoman occupation. On the other hand, Cardigan,
which looks delusively like a shortened Caer, has really
nothing to do with this group of ancient names, being a
mere corruption of Ceredigion.

But outside Wales itself, in the more Celtic parts of

CASTERS AND CH ESTERS. 295

England proper, a good many relics of the old Welsh
Caers still bespeak the incompleteness of the early
Teutonic conquest. If we might trust the mendacious
Nennius, indeed, all our Casters and Chesters were once
good Cymric Caers ; for he gives a doubtful list of the
chief towns in Britain, where Gloucester appears as Cair
Gloui, Colchester as Cair Colun, and York as Cair
Ebrauc. These, if true, would be invaluable forms ; but
unfortunately there is every reason to believe that
Nennius invented them himself, by a simple transposition
of the English names. Henry of Huntingdon is nearly
as bad, if not worse ; for when he calls Dorchester ' Kair
Dauri,' and Chichester ' Kair Kei,' he was almost
certainly evolving what he supposed to be appropriate
old British names from the depths of his own conscious-
ness. His guesswork was on a par with that of the
schoolboys who introduce ' Stirlingia ' or ' Liverpolia '
into their Ovidian elegiacs. That abandoned story-teller,
Geoffrey of Monmouth, goes a step further, and concocfcs
a Caer Lud for London and a Caer Osc for Exeter,
whenever the fancy seizes him. The only examples
amongst these pretended old Welsh forms which seem
to me to have any real historical value are an un-
known Kair Edon, mentioned by Gildas, and a Cair
Wise, mentioned by Simeon of Durham, undoubtedly the
true native name of Exeter.

Still we have a few indubitable Caers in England itself
surviving to our own day. Most of them are not far
from the Welsh border, as in the case of the two Caer
Caradocs, in Shropshire, crowned by ancient British
fortifications. Others, however, lie further within the

296 CASTERS AND C HESTERS.

true English pale, though always in districts which long
preserved the Welsh speech, at least among the lower
classes of the population. The earthwork overhanging
Bath bears to this day its ancient British title of Caer
Badon. An old history written in the monastery of
Malmesbury describes that town as Caer Bladon, and
speaks of a Caer Dur in the immediate neighbourhood.
There still remains a Caer Eiden on the line of the
Eoman wall in the Lothians. Near Aspatria, in Cum-
berland, stands a mouldering Eoman camp known even
now as Caer Mote. In Carvoran, Northumberland, the
first syllable has undergone a slight contraction, but may
still be readily recognised. The Carr-dyke in Norfolk
seems to me to be referable to a similar origin.

Most curious of all the English Caers, however, is
Carlisle. The Antonine Itinerary gives the town as
Luguvallium. Baeda, in his barbarised Latin fashion
calls it Lugubalia. ' The Saxons,' says Murray's Guide,
with charming naivete, ' abbreviated the name into Luel,
and afterwards called it Caer Luel.' This astounding
hotchpotch forms an admirable example of the way in
which local etymology is still generally treated in highly
respectable publications. So far as we know, there
never was at any time a single Saxon in Cumberland ;
and why the Saxons, or any other tribe of Englishmen,
should have called a town by a purely Welsh name, it
would be difficult to decide. If they had given it
any name at all, that name would probably have been
Lul ceaster, which might have been modernised into
Lulcaster or Lulchester. The real facts are these.
Cumberland, as its name imports, was long a land of

CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 297

the Cymry — a northern Welsh principality, dependent
upon the great kingdom of Strathclyde, which held out
for ages against the Northumbrian English invaders
among the braes and fells of Ayrshire and the Lake
District. These Cumbrian Welshmen called their chief
town Caer Luel, or something of the sort ; and there is
some reason for believing that it was the capital of the
historical Arthur, if any Arthur ever existed, though
later ages transferred the legend of the British hero to
Caerleon-upon-Usk, after men had begun to forget that
the region between the Clyde and the Mersey had onco
been true Welsh soil. The English overran Cumberland
very slowly ; and when they did finally conquer it, they
probably left the original inhabitants in possession of the
country, and only imposed their own overlordship upon
the conquered race. The story is too long a one to repeat
in full here : it must suffice to say that, though the
Northumbrian kings had made the ' Strathclyde Welsh '
their tributaries, the district was never thoroughly
subdued till the days of Edmund the West Saxon,
who harried the land, and handed it over to the King
of Scots. Thus it happens that Carlisle, alone among
large English towns, still keeps unchanged its Cymric
name, instead of having sunk into an Anglicised
Chester. The present spelling is a mere etymological
blunder, exactly similar to that which has turned the old
English word igland into island, through the false analogy
of isle, which of course comes from the old French isle,
derived through some form akin to the Italian isola,
from the original Latin insula. Kair Leil is the spelling
in Geoffrey ; Cardeol (by a clerical error for Carleol, I

298 CAS7'ERS AND CHEST£RS.

suspect) that in the English Chronicle, which only once
mentions the town ; and Carleol that of .the ordinary
mediaeval historians. The surnames Carlyle and Carlile
still preserve the better orthography.

To complete the subject, it will be well to say a few
words about those towns which were once Ceasters, but
which have never become Casters or Chesters. Numerous
as are the places now so called, a number more may be
reckoned in the illimitable chapter of the might-have-
beens; and it is interesting to speculate on the forms
which they would have taken, ' 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 later on, from its position on the great
wall, as Ad Murum. Under the early English, after
their conversion to Christianity, the monks became the
accepted inheritors of Roman ruins; and the small
monastery which was established here procured it the
English name of Muneca-ceaster, or, as we should now
say, Monk-chester, though no doubt the local modernisa-
tion would have taken the form of Muncaster. William
of Normandy utterly destroyed the town during his
great harrying of Northumberland ; and when his son,
Robert Curthose, built a fortress on the site, the place
came to be called Newcastle — a word whose very form
shows its comparatively modern origin. Cast'ra and
Ceasters were now out of date, and castles had taken
their place. Still, we stick even here to the old root : for
of course castle is only the diminutive castellum — a scion
of the same Roman stock, which, like so many other

CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 299

members of aristocratic families, ' came over with
William the Conqueror.' The word castel is never used,
I believe, in any English document before the Conquest ;
but in the very year of William's invasion, the Chronicle
tells us, ' Willelm earl came from Normandy into Peven-
eey, and wrought a castel at Hastings port.' So, while
in France itself the word has declined through chastel
into chateau, 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 as Eoforwic, by a
very interesting piece of folks-etymology. Eofor is old
English for a boar, and wic for a town ; so our rude
ancestors metamorphosed the Latinised Celtic name into
this familiar and significant form, much as our own
sailors turn the Bellerophon into the Billy Buffun, and
the Anse des Cousins into the Nancy Cozens. In the
same way, I have known an illiterate Englishman speak
of Aix-la-Chapelle as Hexley Chapel. To the name,
thus disorted, our forefathers of course added the generic
word for a Eoman town, and so made the cumbrous title
of Eoforwic-ceaster, which is the almost universal form
in the earlier parts of the English Chronicle. This was
too much of a mouthful even for the hardy Anglo-Saxon,
so we soon find a disposition to shorten it into Ceaster
on the one hand, or Eoforwic on the other. Should the
final name be Chester or York ? — that was the question.
Usage declared in favour of the more distinctive title.
The town became Eoforwic alone, and thence gradually
declined through Evorwic, Euorwic, Eurewic, and Yorick

300 CASTERS AND C HESTERS.

into the modern York. It is curious to note that some
of these intermediate forms very closely approach the
original Eburac, which must have been the root of the
Roman name. Was the change partly due to the pre-
servation of the older sound on the lips of Celtic serfs ?
It is not impossible, for marks of British blood are strong
in Yorkshire ; and Nennius confirms the idea by calling
the town Kair Ebrauc.

Among the other Ceasters which have never developed
into full-blown Chesters, I may mention Bath, given as
Akemannes ceaster and Bathan ceaster in our old docu-
ments, so that it might have become Achemanchester or
Bathceter in the course of ordinary changes. Canter-
bury, again, the Roman Durovernum, dropped through
Dorobernia into Dorwit ceaster, which would no doubt
have turned into a third Dorchester, to puzzle our heads
by its likeness to Dome ceaster in Dorsetshire, and to
Dorce ceaster near Oxford; while Chesterton in Hun-
tingdonshire, which was once Dorme ceaster, narrowly
escaped burdening a distracted world with a fourth.
Happily, the colloquial form Cantwara burh, or Kent-
men's bury, gained the day, and so every trace of Duro-
vernum is now quite lost in Canterbury. North Shields
was once Scythles-ceaster, but here the Chester has simply
dropped out. Verulam, or St. Albans, is another curious
case. Its Romano-British name was Verulamium, and
Baeda calls it Verlama ceaster. But the early English
in Sleswick believed in a race of mythical giants, the
Wsetlingas or Watlings, from whom they called the Milky
Way ' Watling Street.' When the rude pirates from
those trackless marshes came over to Britain and first

CASTERS AND C HESTERS. 801

beheld the great Eoman paved causeway which ran
across the face of the country from London to Caernar-
von, they seemed to have imagined that such a mighty
work could not have been the handicraft of men ; and
just as the Arabs ascribe the rock-hewn houses of Petra
to the architectural fancy of the Devil, so our old English
ancestors ascribed the Eoman road to the Titanic Watlings.
Even in our own day, it is known along its whole course
as Watling Street. Verulam stands right in its track,
and long contained some of the greatest Eoman remains
in England ; so the town, too, came to be considered as
another example of the work of the Watlings. Baeda,
in his Latinised Northumbrian, calls it Vaetlinga ceaster,
as an alternative title with Verlama ceaster ; so that it
might nowadays have been familiar to us all either as
Watlingchester or Verlamchester. This is -one of the
numerous cases where a Eoman and English name lived
on during the dark period side by side. In some of Mr.
Kemble's charters it appears as Walinga ceaster. But
when Offa of Mercia founded his great abbey on the very
spot where the Welsh martyr Alban had suffered during
the persecution of Diocletian, Eoman and English names
were alike forgotten, and the place was remembered only
after the British Christian as St. Albans.

There are other instances where the very memory of a
Eoman city seems now to have failed altogether. For
example, Baeda mentions a certain town called Tiowul-
finga ceaster — that is to say, the Chester of the
Tiowulfings, or sons of Tiowulf. Here an English clan
would seem to have taken up its abode in a ruined Eoman
station, and to have called the place by the clan-name

302 CASTERS AND CHESTEKS.

— a rare or almost unparalleled case. But its precise site
is now unknown. However, Baeda's description clearly
points to some town in Nottinghamshire, situated on the
Trent ; for St. Paulinus of York baptized large numbers
of converts in that river at Tiowulfinga ceaster; and
the site may therefore be confidently identified with
Southwell, where St. Mary's Minster has always
traditionally claimed Paulinus as its founder. Bseda
also mentions a place called Tunna ceaster, so named
from an abbot Tunna, who exists merely for the sake
of a legend, and is clearly as unhistorical as his piratical
compeer Hrof — a wild guess of the eponymic sort with
which we are all so familiar in Greek literature. Simeon
of Durham speaks of an equally unknown Delvercester.
Syddena ceaster or Sidna cester — the earliest see of the
Lincolnshire diocese — has likewise dropped out of human
memory ; though Mr. Pearson suggests that it may be
identical with Ancaster — a notion which appears to me
extremely unlikely. Wude cester is no doubt Outchester,
and other doubtful instances might easily be recognised
by local antiquaries, though they may readily escape the
general archaeologist. In one case at least — that of OthoriaB
in Essex — town, site, and name have all disappeared
together. Beeda calls it Ythan ceaster, and in his time
it was the seat of a monastery founded by St. Cedd ;
but the whole place has long since been swept away by
an inundation of the Blackwater. Anderida, which is
called Andredes-ceaster in the Chronicle, -becomes Pefenes-
ea, or Pevensey, before the date of the Norman Conquest.
It must not be supposed that the list given here is by any
means exhaustive of all the Casters and Chesters, past

CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 803

and present, throughout the whole length and breadth
of Britain. On the contrary, many more might easily
be added, such as Eibbel ceaster, now Eibchester ; Berne
ceaster, now Bicester ; and Blaedbyrig ceaster, now
simply Bladbury. In Northumberland alone there are
a large number of instances which I might have quoted,
such as Eutchester, Halton Chesters, and Little Chesters
on the Eoman Wall, together with Hetchester, Holy
Chesters, and Eochester elsewhere — the county con-
taining no less than four places of the last name.
Indeed, one can track the Eoman roads across England
by the Chesters which accompany their route. But
enough instances have probably been adduced to exemplify
fully the general principles at issue. I think it will be
clear that the English conquerors did not usually change
the names of Eoman or Welsh towns, but simply
mispronounced them about as much as we habitually
mispronounce I^langollen or Llandudno. Sometimes
they called the place by its Eomanised title alone, with
the addition of Ceaster ; sometimes they employed the
servile British form ; sometimes they even invented an
English alternative ; but in no case can it be shown that
they at once disused the original name, and introduced
a totally new one of their own manufacture, In this,
as in all other matters, the continuity between Eomano-
British and English times is far greater than it is
generally represented to be. The English invasion was
a cruel and a desolating one, no doubt ; but it could not
and it did not sweep away wholly the old order of things,
or blot out all the past annals of Britain, so as to
prepare a tabula rasa on which Mr. Green might begin

804 CASTERS AND CHESTERS.

his History of the English People with the landing of
Hengest and Horsa in the Isle of Thanet. The English
people of to-day is far more deeply rooted in the soil than
that : our ancestors have lived here, not for a thousand
years alone, but for ten thousand or a hundred thousand,
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 the Eoman corruptions, but to the abori-
ginal Celtic, and the still more aboriginal Euskarian
tongue.

THE END.

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