186 THE LIFE OF THE FIELDS. 



that hang so heavily under the weight of the September 

 dew. The horse-tails by the shore carry the imagina- 

 tion further back into the prehistoric world when re- 

 lations of these plants flourished as trees. The horse- 

 tails by ponds are generally short, about a foot or 

 eighteen inches high, more or less, but in ditches occa- 

 sionally there are specimens of the giant horse-tail as 

 high as the waistcoat, with a stem as thick as a walking- 

 stick. This is a sapling from which the prehistoric tree 

 can readily be imagined. From our southern woods the 

 wild cat has been banished, but still lives in the north 

 as an English representative of that ferocious feline 

 genus which roams in tropical forests. We still have 

 the deer, both wild and in parks. Then there are the 

 birds, and these, in the same manner as plants, repre- 

 sent the inhabitants of the trackless wilds abroad. 

 Happily the illustration fails mostly in reptiles, which 

 need not be regretted ; but even these, in their general 

 outline as it were, are presented. 



It has long been one of my fancies that this country 

 is an epitome of the natural world, and that if any one 

 has come really into contact with its productions, and is 

 familiar with them, and what they mean and represent, 

 then he has a knowledge of all that exists on the earth. 

 It holds good even of Australia ; for palaeontologists 

 produce fossil remains of marsupials or kangaroos. As 

 for the polar conditions, when going round for snipes I 

 constantly saw these in miniature. The planing action 

 of ice was shown in the ditches, where bridges of ice 

 had been formed ; these slipping, with a partial thaw, 

 smoothed the grasses and mars of teazles in the higher 

 part of the slope, and then lower down, as the pressure 



