72 
Exmoor Reclamation. 
40 per cent. It is also richer in nitrogen than the majority of 
samples that have come under my notice ; and, on the whole, is 
a useful manure for general agricultural purposes, being well 
suited for most crops usually grown on the farm. 
This brief account of the chemical composition and properties 
of Bats' guano fully explains the variable statements which have 
appeared in agricultural periodicals with regard to its fertilising 
value. Bats' guano, it has been shown, includes manures, some 
of which contain as much as 10 per cent, of ammonia, and 
others only 1 per cent, and even less, and which differ in value 
from 3Z. per ton, and even less, to Wl. a ton and upwards. 
III. — Exmoor Reclamation. By Samuel Sidney. 
Exmoor was afforested by William Rufus, some seven hundred 
years ago, when Dartmoor was also made a Royal Forest. 
The red-deer, the chosen game of the Norman kings, still 
retain a doubtful hold upon the Exmoor hills, though they have 
long been driven, by the advance of cultivation, from the rest 
of England. In those old days they roamed in large herds 
over this remote and thinly inhabited district, attracted by the 
excellence of the summer pasture of the hills, and the solitary 
wildness of the deep oak-clad valleys. These valleys formed 
the purlieus of the Forest, over which the forest laws protected 
the royal chase against the neighbouring landowners. 
No doubt the deer often crossed the wide valley intervening 
between Exmoor and Dartmoor forests, where within the reach 
of tradition they still existed, and, when hunted, took refuge in 
the English Channel, as the Exmoor deer still do in the Severn 
sea. 
Still farther back, the Exmoor district had been 'thought 
by the Romans (the great strategists of old), to be of sufficient 
consequence to take a place in their system of occupation ; and a 
very large Roman camp, called Sholesborough Castle, stands on 
the south-western heights, overlooking the counties of Devon and 
Cornwall for many a mile ; while they had a smaller camp close 
to Lynmouth, which was used by them as a landing-place. All 
this shows that the Exmoor district had been held to be of some 
importance long before the days of the Red King. 
Be that, however, as it may, Exmoor remained in a state of nature, 
wild and desolate as an American prairie, until it was disforested 
by Act of Parliament in 181S. At that date the Exmoor Forest, 
together with the unenclosed lands lying open to it, comprised 
sixty thousand acres without a fence, and extended from the 
