LOCALITY AND NATURE. 169: 
things. It is of such little things that great nature is 
made. 
On the highest part of the Forest Ridge in Sussex, 
where the soil is sandy and covered with heath, fern, and 
fir trees, there never seemed to be any rooks. These 
birds, so very characteristic of the country, appeared to 
be almost absent over several miles. They went by some- 
times, sailing down into the vale, but never stopped on 
the hill, not even to walk the furrows behind the plough. 
This would seem to indicate a remarkable absence of the 
food they like, for it is very rare indeed for a piece of 
ground to be fresh ploughed without rooks coming to it. 
There were rookeries beneath in the plains where the 
elms and beeches grew tall, but the birds never came 
up to forage. Crows could be found, and stopped on 
the hill all the year. Wood-pigeons, like the rooks, went 
over, but did not stay. Starlings were not at all plenti- 
ful; blackbirds and thrushes were there, but not nearly 
so numerous as is usually the case; fieldfares and red- 
wings drifted by in the winter, but never stopped. 
Slow-worms lived in the sand under the heath, and 
lizards, but no snakes and only a fewadders. Inquiring 
of an old man if there were many snakes about, he said 
no; the soil was too poor for them ; but in some places 
down in the vale he had dug up a gallon of snakes’ 
eggs in the ‘maxen.’ The word was noticeable as a 
survival of the old English ‘mixen’ for manure heap. 
Swallows, martins,and swiftsabounded ; and asfor insects, 
they were countless—honey-bees, wild bees, humble- 
bees, varieties of wasps, butterflies—an endless list. So 
common a plant as the arum did not seem to exist; on 
the other hand, ferns literally made up the hedges, grow- 
ing in such quantities as to take the place of the grasses 
There was, too, a great variety of moss and fungi. The 
