A MODEL OF RECLAMATION.
Local historians of England are almost always welcome. We have to thank an Oxford fellow for a bit of real research
into English history ; and his book, which appears almost simultaneously, may be fitly compared with the Survey of the Thames Valley:I. Some years ago Mr. Orwin, in his travels on behalf of agriculture, discovered a waste where once a village had been and traced the lugubrious downfall. What houses did not moulder away were used for mending roads. On visiting the place some years after his discovery I failed
to find any relic of the church or of the bulk of the cottages. What had been a sufficiently flourishing hamlet had de- generated into a waste, a prairie. The last inhabitant was a shepherd but his place had been finally taken by a man on a horse. Happily, Mr. Orwin's new discovery is of a triumph
not of destruction, but of creation. What was a prairie has become a flourishing community, thanks to the persistence of a family of ardent reclaimers. It is a story that every Minister of Employment should digest.
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