70 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
wanting. Field is separated from field hy ditches half-choked 
with weeds. The horizon is broken only by straggling plantations 
of alders and black poplars. A few willows here and there cluster 
in a corner which seems to have escaped the attention of the agri- 
culturist. As we come to a halt at one of those lonely stations— 
‘‘ Where none but a Great Eastern train would stop, 
Where there’s no one to pick up and no one to drop” — 
we marvel how people can be found to dwell in the midst of 
such a melancholy district. In spring or early summer, indeed, 
our ears may catch the chattering notes of the Sedge-bird or the 
feeble song of the Reed Sparrow, but at all other seasons of the year 
silence reigns; and the traveller, if he be passing through the 
country for the first time, wonders whether he may have inhaled 
the germs of an ague, and whether the stories he may have heard 
as to the opium-consuming habits indulged in by the Fen men to 
prevent that dire malady are true or not. Such are probably the 
thoughts presented to ninety-nine out of every hundred even 
intelligent passengers through a considerable portion of Hunting- 
donshire, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. But the 
one man out of the hundred will know that the landscape he 
views was not always as he sees it, and that its present condition 
has been brought about at an expense of money and life and 
labour which no one can compute, and that it may be regarded 
as one of the greatest triumphs of the human intellect over the 
concurrent forces of nature—for has he not read Mr. Smiles’s 
‘Lives of the Engineers’ ? 
It is impossible to doubt the fact that this wide expanse, so 
unlovely, so repulsive—we may almost say—in its present state, 
was once an absolute paradise, abounding in animal life and 
diversified by vegetation, the nature of which we can hardly ¢on- 
ceive. Yet if we turn to what is recorded of its earlier condition 
we find but little to satisfy our longings for information, and we 
must say that that little has not been made the most of by the 
authors of the book which has prompted these remarks. They 
have, it is true, and we are much obliged to them for it, given on 
the whole a fairly accurate, and in some respects a happy, para- 
phrase of that curious passage in the ‘ Liber Eliensis,’ wherein a 
monk of the twelfth century depicted some of the principal features 
of the fen country of his time, and we may add that this is the 
