Intervention of Man 267 



He described how the countryside, visible from his 

 windows at Eastbourne, had certainly been in a " state 

 of nature ' ' about two thousand years ago when Csesar 

 had set foot in Britain and had made the Roman camps, 

 the remains of which still mark the chalk downs of 

 England. 



"Except, it may be, by raisiug a few sepulchral mounds, 

 such as those which still, here aud there, break the flowing 

 contours of the Downs, man's hands had made no mark upon 

 it ; and the thin veil of vegetation which overspread the broad- 

 backed heights and the shelving sides of the coombs was unaf- 

 fected by his industry. The native grasses and weeds, the 

 scattered patches of gorse, contended with one another for pos- 

 session of the scanty surface soil ; they fought against the 

 droughts of summer, the frosts of winter, and the furious gales, 

 which swept with unbroken force, now from the Atlantic, and 

 now from the North Sea, at all times of the year ; they filled 

 up, as they best might, the gaps made in their ranks by all 

 sorts of overground and underground ravagers. One year with 

 another, an average population, the floating balance of the un- 

 ceasing struggle for existence among the indigenous plants, 

 maintained itself. It is as little to be doubted that an essen- 

 tially similar state of nature prevailed in this region for many 

 thousand years before the coming of Caesar ; and there is no 

 assignable reason for denying that it might continue to exist 

 through an equally prolonged futurity except for the interven- 

 tion of man." 



This present state of nature, he explained, is onlj- a 

 fleeting phase of a process that has gone on for millions 

 of years. Under the thin layer of soil are the chalk 

 cliffs, hundreds of feet thick and witnesses of the en- 

 tirely different phases of the struggle that went on 

 while the cliffs were being formed at the bottom of the 

 chalk sea, when the vegetation of the nearest land was 

 as different from the existing vegetation as that is dif- 

 ferent from the trees and flowers of an African forest. 



