THE SCENERY OF ENGLAND.* THE fundamental fact of Lord Avebury's
interesting and delightful book is well indicated in the lines of Ovid which he has prefixed to his opening chapter :— " Vidi ego, quod fnerat quondam solidissima tellus, Ease fretum : vidi factas ex aequore terms; Et precut a pelago conchae jaeuere marinae."
Every reader will recognise in these comparatively unfamiliar lines the suggestion of the noble stanzas in which Tennyson expresses the essence of geological history :— " There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
Oh earth, what changes haat thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands ; They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go."
Our existing scenery is the product, and bears the hall-mark, of that long series of secular changes through which the earth's surface has passed since it was "a fluid haze of light."
Once a mass of slowly solidifying granite and gneiss, exposed to a pressure which was probably not less than four or five him- dred atmospheres ; then covered by the ocean which separated Europe from the lost continent of Atlantis ; then in turn ex- posed to the weather, under water 'again, covered by ice, ravaged by volcanic outbursts, and so forth, the surface of our islands has been slowly carved into the great diversity of forms which it now presents to the tourist in search of the picturesque. The mountains of Scotland and Wales and Cumberland, the Essex marshes and the beautiful Surrey commons, the volcanic cones of Arthur's Seat and North Berwick Law, the moraines of Honister and the ash-beds of • The Scenery of England, and the Causes to which it is Doe. By the Bight Hon. Lord Avebury. London : Macmillan and Co. [15s. net.] Brent Tor, the variegated sands of Alum Bay and the white chalk cliffs of ]-2.1over, are all pages in the wonderful book of
Nature, from which the trained geologist reads the past history of our land with certainty surpassing that which is felt by the historian of man in many parts of his narrative. It is this history in its special relation to the different types of scenery that Lord Avebury has set himself to narrate with his well-known lucidity of statement and wealth of illustA- tion, on lines which were probably suggested by Sir Archibald Gei'de's charming Scenery of Scotland. Lord Avebury's book is a worthy pendant to its predecessor, and there could be no better introduction to Nature-study or companion for the intelligent tourist. The automobilist in search of a new holiday might do much worse _than. make Lord Avebury's book the guide and companion of his next tour.
Students of the history of the earth are well aware that Lord Avebury is not only a lucid popularise; but has himself taken an eminent part in clearing up the geological record. He reminds us that he and Kingsley in 1855 "discovered in the great gravel-pit at Maidenhead part of the skull of a musk sheep, the most Arctic of mammals, which is now con- fined to Arctic America and Greenland." This was the first specimen of the kind that had been found in Europe, and its discovery gave a distinct impetus to the belief, then slowly gaining ground, that our country had at one time been covered by an ice-sheet in comparison with which the glaciers of Norway and the Alps are insignificant, just as the Alps, and even the Himalayas, are quite modern hills in comparison with our own Pennines and Grampians The history of our scenery really begins with the glacial period, which was the first great moulding influence that has left marks still readily discernible on the features of the land. Lord Avebury anew affirms the opinion, which he ex- pounded at length in his Prehistoric Times, that the glacial period began, in our country, about 200,000 years ago, and that existing conditions commenced to return about 50,000 years ago. The ground of this estimate—which seems to us to be the most plausible that has yet been put forward—is an astronomical consideration. Croll showed that an increase in the eccen- tricity of the earth's orbit—whose shape we know to be always undergoing a slow and secular change—would produce glacial conditions in that hemisphere of the earth which happened to have its winter when the earth was at its furthest distance from the sun. A succession of unusually severe winters would thus lead to a gradual accumulation of ice which the short summer would be unable to melt, and in time the greater part of the land-surface of that hemisphere would be covered with a thick ice-sheet such as now stretches from side to side of Greenland, and such as a thousand cognate facts prove to have once covered our own country. It is an easy matter to calculate the changes in the earth's orbit, and it seems that the last period of high eccentricity began about 240,000 years ago, and lasted for 160,000 years. Vast as these numbers look from a merely human point of view, they are, of course, the merest trifle in the geological record, and Lord Avebury holds that "we can hardly estimate at less than 100,000,000 years the time which must have elapsed since the commencement of life on our planet." This, as Lord Kelvin has so ably shown, is probably an outside figure; but we cannot say that it is too great.
Perhaps the most interesting of all the chapters in Lord Avebury's book is that which deals with local divisions. He describes in a clear and informing fashion the various reasons which have led to the situation of our towns. The world has long suspected 'that in most cases there was a physical connection between the features of the land and the origin of towns ; we no longer hold the opinion of that eminent divine who saw a ptoof of the goodness of Providence in the fact that nearly all great rivers happened to run through important cities. " Many of our cities and towns were ancient fortifications, chosen for facility of defence or as important strategical positions ; others are situated at the mouths of rivers, others where rivers meet, others at fords, and some were built round bridges,—these, however, are much fewer in number, showing that our ancestors did not avail them- selves of bridges until a comparatively recent period in our history." In many cases the very names of the towns convey an explanation of their site. Thus we have Chesterfield, Doncaster, Manchester, Exeter, situated where the Romans 4,
built their camps, and where there were usually earlier fortified dwellings. Dartmouth, Plymouth, Weymouth, stand at the outfall of rivers,. Oxford and Cambridge testify to the im- portance of a plaid where a river might be crossed. Other towns are situated at the confluence of two rivers—like Cob- lentz, Reading, or Carlisle—" where there are often considerable sheets of gravel, so that the inhabitants had the advantage of water, a dry healthy soil, and a situation affording consider- able facility of defence by means of one or more earthworks thrown across from one river to the other." It is a' sad thing, but a fact, that primitive man was mainly taken up with the need of guarding himself from foes of his ow,n. race. Both towns and villages, again, are determined in site by the presence of good water-bearing strata. "In the Midland counties the narrow bands where the Keuper Sandstones of the Trias outcrop, rich in springs of good water, relieved by swelling hills or picturesque scarps, and adorned with luxuriant growth of trees, were naturally selected by the ancient inhabitants of. the district as the sites of their earliest permanent settlements, and since the dawn of history they have always remained the favourite sites for towns, villages, and mansions." In oueown times, again, we have seen the growth of new towns like Middlesbrough, and the great enlargement of old ones - like Glasgow and Birmingham, determined by the neighbourhood of coal and iron. One day, as Lord Kelvin suggests, we may see great manufacturing towns grow up beside the waterfalls, which will supply them with power: something of the kind has already begun at Niagara and Foyers. Finally, we read that London was probably founded "on the first spot going up the river where any considerable tract of dry land touches the stream. It is a tract of good gravel, well supplied with wateY, not liable to flooding, and not commanded by neighbouring higher ground. It was, therefore, admirably suited for the first human settlement, and the wisdom of the choice has been ratified by the continuous growth of the great city." We must not take leave of this excellent book without commending its numerous and beautiful illustrations.
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