ROMANTIC RICHMONDSHIRE. 
_Romantic | Richmondshire. | Being a complete account of the | 
Illustrated. | London : | Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, 
| Entered at Stationers’ Hall. 
[8vo. cloth, 525 pages—with map and 23 full page views. | 
It is not from want of appreciation that the appearance of . 
our review of this—the latest of Mr. Speight’s unapproachable _ * 
works on local topography——has been delayed, but simply from ae 
pressure upon our time and upon the space ‘The Naturalist’ 
has at disposal. As we have so often pointed out, we know o 
no writer to equal Mr. Speight in his possession of the ability to 
make a topographical work so full of living, real interest. He 
proves himself a worthy successor to such sterling topographers 
as Clarkson, Whitaker, and Plantagenet-Harrison, all of whom 
have treated of the same district or parts of it. 
It is beyond our scope to deal with the purely topographical 
aspect of Mr. Speight’s work, beyond saying that it treats of the 
beautiful valleys of Swaledale and Wensleydale, which together 
constitute the old baronial liberty of Richmondshire. The work 
is on pretty much the same lines as the author’s previous ones 
dealing with Craven and with Nidderdale, and is equally pro- 
fusely illustrated. The indexes and tables of contents are full 
and adequate, and there are separate tabulations of the Rainfall 
in the whole of the North Riding, and of the Altitudes of various 
mountains, roads, passes, towns and villages. The cover is 
embellished with a block of the view from Willance’s Leap, n 
Richmond. The volume divides into two portions, the first alts 
with Swaledale and the second with Wensleydale. Looking 
through the book with a naturalist’s eye, one notes the 
_ frequent allusions, sometimes direct, sometimes incidental, to 
_ geological and anthropological and meteorological phenomena, 
_ to birds and butterflies, plants and animals, to the trout of the 
Oxnop Beck, which Dr. Day named Salmo fario swaledalensis, 
to the large tracts of native juniper bushes which form so 
prominent a feature in the vegetation around Reeth, to the 
ae, heavy rainfalls and frequent floods which play such havoc in 
Swaledale, to the lead mining which was once a staple industry © 
_ Of the same dale, to the old monkish herb and flower gardens at - 
Coverham and Jerveaulx Abbeys, to those remarkable pits in the 
limestone called. the Puterguies. and: to the former existence ane 
