March 2, 1882] 
NATURE 
415 
observed, and its elliptical elements having been com- 
puted on several hands with marked consistency, we may 
assume that its present form of orbit is known with 
considerable accuracy. W. F. DENNING 
THE MAKING OF ENGLAND} 
an instructive article in M/acmillan’s Magazine for 
this month, Prof. Geikie shows what important in- 
fluences the geological development of our country has had 
upon its history. Prof. Geikie begins in long past pre- 
historic times, when England formed part of the European 
continent, and rapidly traces the changes which have gone 
to make England what it is; shows the bearing which the 
physical geography of the country had on the settlements 
of the early inhabitants, pre-Aryan and Aryan, and in 
later times on the development of England’s commerce, 
and the growth of her greatness. What Prof. Geikie 
does for England as a whole Mr. Green attempts to do 
for “Anglo-Saxon” England, for that England which 
was destined to form the broad basis of the England of 
the present day. Mr. Green, in his well-known “ History 
of England,” as we pointed out at the time of its publica- 
tion, made some attempt to take account of the physical 
conditions of our country in so faras they have influenced 
her history; and this is essentially the method he fol- 
lowed in his valuable text-book of British Geography. 
Hitherto historians have taken little or no account of the 
environment of nations, although it is evident that that 
must be a factor of the first importance in determining 
the character of a people and their historical develop- 
ment. In a general way every one must admit that the 
climate and physical condition of a country have their 
influence on the character of a people; but in its strictly 
scientific aspect the subject is yet in its infancy, and we 
hope that Mr. Green’s example will encourage others, 
both historians and scientific geographers, to work it out 
thoughtfully and minutely. It is not our province to 
examine Mr. Green’s work critically, as an historical 
treatise ; we shall leave it to others to say whether 
all his statements and inferences are authorised by 
the documents on which they are based. But that the 
work is full both of interest and instruction every one 
must admit. Mr. Green’s geographical and topographical 
instincts are unusually keen, and his faculty for clothing 
the dry bones of chronicles, and antiquarian discoveries, 
and ethnological data with living flesh and blood is pro- 
bably unsurpassed. In a series of pictures he brings 
before us our Teutonic forefathers with a vivid force that 
has all the interest and excitement of reality. We see 
them hovering off the shores of England, even while the 
Romans were in possession, watching their opportunity 
to pounce down upon the prosperous towns and home- 
steads ; we see them at last get a firm footing, south and 
east and north, holding the coast regions with com- 
parative ease, but baffled for years by the primeval 
forests and thick underwood, the widespread marshes and 
impassable rivers. Not for at least two centuries were 
they able quite to overcome these obstacles, and these, 
with the other physical features of the country, determine 
the relative positions ultimately occupied by Jute, Angle, 
Saxon, and Celt. With regard to the last-mentioned, 
Mr. Green, from a study of the finds in the Settle and 
other caves, is able to bring before us a touching picture 
of the flight of the Celtic men, women, and children with 
what utensils and ornaments they could carry with them 
before the advance of the ruthless Saxon. 
“The hurry of their flight may be gathered from the 
relics their cave-life has left behind it. There was clearly 
little time to do more than to drive off the cattle, the 
swine, the goats, whose bones lie scattered round the 
hearth fire at the mouth of the cave, where they served 
1 “The Making of England.’’ By John Richard Green, M.A., LL.D 
Maps. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1881.) 
the wretched fugitives for food. The women must have 
buckled hastily their brooches of bronze or parti-coloured 
enamel, the peculiar workmanship of Celtic Britain, and 
snatched up a few household implements as they hurried 
away. The men, no doubt, girded on as hastily the 
swords whose dainty sword-hilts of ivory and bronze still 
remain totell the tale of their doom, and hiding in their 
breast what money the house contained, from coins of 
Trajan to the wretched ‘minims’ that told of the 
Empire’s decay, mounted their horses to protect their 
flight. At nightfall all were crouching beneath the 
dripping roof of the cave or round the fire that was 
blazing at its mouth, and a long suffering began in which 
the fugitives lost year by year the memory of the civilisa- 
tion from which they came. A few charred bones show 
how hunger drove them to slay their horses for food ; 
reddened pebbles mark the hour when the new vessels 
they wrought were too weak to stand the fire, and their 
meal was cooked by dropping heated stones into the pot. 
A time seems to have come when their very spindles were 
exhausted, and the women who wove in that dark retreat 
made spindle whorls as they could from the bones that 
lay about them.” 
Then, when the invader has settled down in his con- 
quests, the author restores to us with the broadness of 
reality, partly with material obtained by the researches of 
the archeologist, their mode of life, the nature and dispo- 
sition of their Zs or settlements, the life of earl, ceorl, 
labourer, and slave, and to show us in the town 7zoo0/ the 
germs of our modern complicated parliament. 
Mr. Green has evidently taken the greatest pains to 
master the physical geography and the great topographi- 
cal features of the country at the landing of the Teutonic 
invaders. It was in many respects as different as possible 
from the surface with which we are at present familiar. 
The New Forest, Cranbourne Chase, and other scanty 
forests are but the remains of what at that period was 
almost one universal forest, impenetrable to all but 
natives, thickly clothed with underwood, and from which 
the great chalk-ranges rose, and provided almost the only 
settling-places of the inhabitants. Nowadays we find all 
our great cities along the river valleys or the coast ; then 
the uplands were the only areas on which the inhabitants 
could settle, the marshy and wood-grown banks of the 
rivers being all but uninhabitable. 
“It was not merely its distance from the seat of rule or 
the later date of its conquest that hindered the province from 
passing completely into the general body of the Empire. 
Its physical and its social circumstances offered yet greater 
obstacles to any effectual civilisation. Marvellous as was 
the rapid transformation of Britain in the hands of its 
conquerors, and greatly as its outer aspect came to differ 
from that of the island in which Claudius landed, it was 
far from being in this respect the land of later days. In 
spite of its roads, its towns, and its mining-works, it re- 
mained, even at the close of the Roman rule, an ‘isle of 
blowing woodland, a wild and half-reclaimed country, 
the bulk of whose surface was occupied by forest and 
waste. The rich and lower soil of the river valleys, 
indeed, which is now the favourite home of agriculture, 
had in the earliest times been densely covered with 
primzeval scrub; and the only open spaces were those 
whose nature fitted them less for the growth of trees, the 
chalk downs and oolitic uplands that stretched in long 
lines across the face of Britain from the Channel to the 
Northern sea. In the earliest traces of our history these 
districts became the seats of a population and a tillage 
which have long fled from them as the gradual clearing 
away of the woodland drew men to the richer soil. Such 
a transfer of population seems faintly to have begun even 
before the coming of the Romans; and the roads which 
they drove through the heart of the country, the waste 
caused by their mines, the ever-widening circle of culti- 
vation round their towns, must have quickened this social 
