DECREASE OF ANIMAL LIFE 371 



nested ; Pimlico was largely built upon piles, and Sir Charles 

 Lucas recorded in his address to the British Association in 

 1914, that he had heard a lady tell how her grandfather used 

 to say that in the heart of the district where Belgrave Square 

 now stands he had shot Snipe. The same authority records 

 that in the last three centuries the amount of land recovered 

 from the marshes of Lincolnshire alone must have been more 

 than 500 sq. miles. 



In Scotland a similar condition of things held. Herodian 

 describes the Caledonians as wearing neither coat of mail 

 nor helmet, lest they should be impeded in their marches 

 through bogs and morasses whence such quantity of vapour 

 was exhaled that the air was always thick and cloudy. Even 

 in the sixteenth century, the country was generously supplied 

 with swamps. 



" Everywhere," says Professor Hume Brown in describing Scotland in the 

 time of Queen Mary, " there were numerous mosses, lochans, and even 

 lochs, which have long since disappeared, and the disappearance of which 

 has materially altered the general aspect of the country. To take but one 

 example, in Blaeu's map of Fife, there are some twenty lochs or lochans, 

 several of them as large as the present Loch Leven, of which there is little 

 or no trace at the present day." 



At a still later date wild-fowl frequented marshes in the heart 

 of modern Edinburgh in the Nor' Loch now occupied by 

 Princes Street Gardens, and in the large Borough Loch 

 which occupied the site of the Meadows and regarding 

 which the proclamation was made in 1581 that " na gyrs 

 [grass] women or utheris pas within the South Loch to 

 sheir the gyrs thereof, hary the burdis nestis, tak away the 

 eggs of the saming before Midsymer nixt." 



How has the reclamation of such sheets of water affected 

 the natural associations of animals? The amount of bird life 

 which has been banished may be judged from a statement 

 said to have been made by William of Malmesbury, who lived 

 in the twelfth century, to the effect that the Lincolnshire 

 Fens were so covered with Coots and Ducks and the flashes 

 [pools] with fowl, that in moulting-time, when the birds were 

 unable to fly, the natives could take two or three thousand 

 at a draught with their nets. Old records show that the 

 marshes of Scotland were not less rich in bird life. In the 

 sixteenth century Boece said of Loch Spynie, near Elgin, 

 now all but vanished through the influence of man, 



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