58 A Century's Changes. 



palate. An American man of genius has written : — " 1 have 

 been thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception to the 

 commonly gross sense of taste (a mental jyerception mind), that I 

 have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I 

 had eaten on a hillside has fed ray genius." Therefore it is to 

 be hoped that some learned member of this Society will write a 

 paper on the philosophy of foods — we have already got the 

 science of foods ; we now want the philosophy. The subject is a 

 vast one, and, so far as I know, it has the advantage — a great 

 one to a writer — of being as yet untouched. 



No change during the century has been more marked here — 

 as, of course, elsewhere — than that in the means of locomotion. 

 Loss than a hundred years ago everybody in the parish walked 

 or rode, except a favoured few, ladies mostly, wlio were taken 

 about the countrv in covered carts. The late shoemaker 



3 



Archibald Sanders, walked twice a year over the hills to Carlisle, 

 carrying money in his pocket to pay his leather merchant. The 

 Rev. Mr Wright, of the Manse here, referred to already, kept 

 such a cart, and it used to go on long journeys on the long 

 summer days to tlie north of England, wliere his wife's relations 

 lived. Now the multitude drives ; it is the favoured few who 

 walk. The first gig came into this parish in 1825, from 

 Edinburgh, to Mr Graham of Shaw, and his Edinburgh friend 

 writing to him about it says : — "I received your letter yesterday, 

 and I have now closed a bargain for the gig complete at £50. 

 The maker warrants it for six months, so that if anything goes 

 wrong with it during that period let me know, and I shall be at 

 him." When I came to the parish, twenty years ago, the era of 

 walking had not quite closed. Shepherds and ploughmen — 

 shepherds especially — and their families all did their journeys on 

 foot. But now (I speak of the Hutton side of the parish) waggonettes 

 come up for them once a week, and on fair days, and term days, 

 and holidays, and all days, in short, on which there is a stir. Is 

 it not an illustration in a small way of a process which some 

 philosophers say is going on everywhere, in so many forms, yet so 

 unthought of, called " the arrest of the body "■ — a step in the 

 natural evolution of man 1 In connection with it one is tempted 

 to ask, " Will human legs be as serviceable at the end of next 

 century as they are at the end of this one 1 " 



The peat harvest, which used to be a kind of carnival in the 

 spring days here, has also departed. In these days the mosses 



