JUNE 87 



character. This most ancient plant speaks of the old, 

 untouched land of which large stretches still remain 

 in the south of England — land too poor to have been 

 worth cultivating, and that has therefore for centuries 

 endured human contempt. In the early part of the 

 present century, William Cobbett, in his delightful 

 book, " Rural Rides," speaking of the heathy headlands 

 and vast hollow of Hindhead, in Surrey, calls it " cer- 

 tainly the most villainous spot God ever made." This 

 gives expression to his view, as farmer and political 

 economist, of such places as were incapable of culti- 

 vation, and of the general feeling of the time about 

 lonely roads in waste places, as the fields for the law- 

 less labours of smuggler and highwayman. Now such 

 tracts of natural wild beauty, clothed with stretches 

 of Heath and Fern and Whortleberry, with beds of 

 Sphagnum Moss, and little natural wild gardens of 

 curious and beautiful sub-aquatic plants in the marshy 

 hollows and imdrained wastes, are treasured as such 

 places deserve to be, especially when they stiU remain 

 within fifty miles of a vast city. The height to which 

 the bracken grows is a sure guide to the depth of soil. 

 On the poorest, thinnest ground it only reaches a foot 

 or two ; but in hollow places where leaf-mould ac- 

 cumulates and surface soil has washed in and made a 

 better depth, it grows from six feet to eight feet high, 

 and when straggling up through bushes to get to the 

 light a frond will sometimes measure as much as twelve 

 feet. The old country people who have always lived 



