GEOLOGY AND HISTORY. 501 



Under the Romans Britain became a corn-producing and grain- 

 exporting agricultural country, like the America of our own day. 

 And just as the valley of the St. Lawrence and the northern Missis- 

 sippi basin now form the most important wheat-growing part of Amer- 

 ica, so the valleys of the greater rivers formed the most important part 

 of Roman Britain. The plain of York, formed by the Ouse and other 

 tributaries of the Humber, is the largest low-lying corn-field and 

 meadow-land in our country. It consists mainly of triassic strata, 

 overlaid in the lower reaches by a deep bed of alluvium. In the cen- 

 ter of this rich agricultural tract lay the Roman provincial capital of 

 Eboracum. Another wealthy region is the post-tertiary level of the 

 eastern counties ; and here the colony of Camalodunum lay sur- 

 rounded by numerous villas of rich land-owners. The tertiary valley 

 of the Thames shows its importance by including the considerable 

 cities of Londinium, Verulamium, and Rhutupite. Other Roman 

 towns Lincoln, Cirencester, Bath, and Dorchester filled up the rich 

 oolitic and green-sand belt of central England ; while Winchester 

 overlooked the tertiary vale of the Itchin at Southampton, and took 

 its name of Venta Belgarum from the- agricultural lowland at its 

 doors. We may gather from the Roman historians that the occupa- 

 tion of southeastern Britain was real and thorough. The native popu- 

 lation was reduced to serfdom, and the country became a mere feeder 

 of Rome or of the Gallic cities. 



Primary Britain, however, seems never to have fallen into so mis- 

 erable a condition. The Roman supremacy was here probably con- 

 fined to a mere military occupation, like our own occupation of Ku- 

 maon or the Simla Hills. Caledonia never fell into their hands, and 

 even in Wales and the Pennine chain we find only military stations, 

 like Isca Silurum or Segontium, not large cities like London, York, 

 and Lincoln. Even where the Romans thoroughly penetrated the 

 primary region, as in Cornwall or the Forest of Dean, it was always 

 for a geological reason, to secure the mines of tin or iron. This differ- 

 ence, I believe, had almost as much to do as geographical position 

 with the subsequent relations of the Britons to the English invaders. 

 While the servile herd of the Belgian, Icenian, Trinobantian, and Bri- 

 gantian country, demoralized by Roman centralization, fell easily be- 

 fore the Jutish or Anglian pirates, the more independent mountaineers 

 of Wales, Cumbria, and Strathclyde long resisted the English on- 

 slaught, and only at last succumbed as free subject races, instead of 

 beiag enslaved or exterminated like their eastern fellow countrymen. 

 The Scottish Highlands not only retained their own independence, but 

 even gave their kings to the Teutonic Lothians. Granite naturally 

 makes freemen, as alluvium naturally makes slaves. 



When the English settled in southeastern Britain, they occupied 

 for the most part the secondary and tertiary plain. But they also 

 pushed northward into the primary region up to the Firth of Forth, as 



