232 JReviews — Lord Aveburi/'s Sceneri/ of England. 



I^ IE -V I IB ^AT- S. 



I. — The Scenery ob^ Ej^gland and the Causes to which it is 

 • ' ' Btie. By the Eight Hon. Loud Avebtjkt (Sir John Lubbock, 



Bart.), F.E.S., D.C.L., LL.D., F.G.S., etc. Koyal 8vo ; pp. 534, 

 ■ with 197 illustrations. (London : Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1902. 



Price 15s. nett.) 



(PLATES XIII AND XIV.) 

 ri^HE name of Lubbock is one to conjure with, and has for so many 

 J. years arrested public attention, and become " familiar in their 

 , mouths as household words," that it is no easy matter to abandon the 

 memory of it, or to recognize our esteemed and valued friend under 

 ■his new guise, however high be the dignity which the title confers. 



In his capacity as a popular writer it may be truly said of the 

 author Nihil quod tetigit sed ornavit, and certainly the field of his 

 discourses has been wide indeed. From 1865, when he wrote on 

 Prehistoric Times ; Primitive Man ; and the Origin of Civilization; 

 to the Use and the Pleasures of Life, and the Beauties of Nature ; 

 of Flowers, Fruit, and Leaves ; of British Wild Flowers ; of Insects; 

 Ants, Bees, and Wasps ; and many other " Chapters in Popular 

 Natural History " ; we pass on to the " Scenery of Switzerland," 

 and now to that of England itself. 



In the writings of the early fathers we find the surface of the 

 primitive earth described as, originally, perfectly smooth, but after 

 the wickedness of mankind had brought upon it the Noachian 

 Deluge the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the 

 .ruptured portions of the heretofore united crust floated about on the 

 liberated waters and became continents and islands, according to 

 their sizes, whilst other pieces of the crust, being forced upon their 

 beam - ends, became converted into mountain-chains. This is a 

 simple, if not very accurate explanation of Nature ; but the careful 

 study of geology in the past hundred years has led to our being shown 

 a more excellent way of interpreting the groundwork of Nature. 

 We find that many and varied foi'ces have contributed to bring 

 about the present configuration of our earth's surface, and although 

 the main land-masses and the deeper oceanic depressions were 

 doubtless sketched out in Palaeozoic times, yet the minor details 

 'resulting from later sedimentary deposits in shallower seas, the 

 elevation of mountain-chains, the carving and shaping of land- 

 surfaces, and the production of plateaux and steppes, of hills and 

 valleys, all in fact which constitutes our scenery, is but a thing 

 of yesterday, geologically speaking, although the expression "old 

 as the hills" still remains perfectly true when comparing Nature's 

 srdallest operations with the pigmy events and periods in man's 

 ephemeral calendar of existence. 



When one looks at the long, array of geological textbooks upon 

 one's bookshelf it seems at first difficult to accept the justice of 

 Lord Avebury's indictment that our geological literature is very 

 much scattered, that it has to be sought for in innumerable memoirs, 



