XXXV POLITICAL, SOCIAL, LITERAKY 153 



letters which he received about the Scenery of 

 England book, the three following may be quoted 

 — ^the first, from the Speaker, for the sake of his 

 quaint " law of compensation " suggestion, and 

 the others as being from distinguished men of 

 science, showing how highly they estimated this 

 essentially " popular " work. 



Speaker's House, S.W., 

 23rd February 1902. 



Dear Avebury — It was very kind of you to tell 

 Macmillan to send me a copy of your most interesting 

 book. I wonder how you find time for so much thinking 

 and writing. And, on the doctrine of averages — does 

 it not sometimes afflict you to consider how many 

 thousand unfortunate people must have been born 

 blind to all that passes around them in order to com- 

 pensate for your prodigious powers of observation ? 



I am glad to see you have recovered from your 

 influenza. — -Yours very truly, W. C. Gully. 



Professor Bonney, the President of the Geo- 

 logical Society, writes : 



23 Denning Road, Hampstead, N.W., 

 February \8th, 1902. 



My dear Lord Avebury — I am very much obliged 

 to you for the copy of your new book on the Scenery of 

 England, which I greatly value. There was certainly 

 need for a volume of the kind, for Ramsay's book, as 

 you say, was a little too geological, and it was not 

 improved by some of the later additions. I am not 

 sure whether even you might not with advantage have 

 given a little more expansion to the scenery at the 

 expense of the geology. All the descriptive parts are 

 so good — the section about the Downs, for instance, 

 breathes the very air of those great billows of turf — 

 scenery which has an inexpressible charm and is unique 

 of its kind. I should have liked you to take each of 

 the separate types of our scenery — you have done it 

 to some extent — and to have worked it out with the 

 same elaboration, so that the reader could feel thb 

 spirit of the place. But there are already not a few 



