REVIEWS AND EXCHANGES 
'55 
would inevitably result to the farmer and to the gardener if owls 
were persecuted. The figures given above do not, of course, 
give the exact proportion of good which owls do ; some indi- 
viduals had nothing in their stomachs, some had other mammals 
or spiders ; but it is certainly safe to befriend in every possible 
way the four species whose bill of fare is so constituted that four 
out of every five individuals dine on mice or insects. — Massa- 
chusetts Audubon Society for the Protection of Birds. 
REVIEWS AND EXCHANGES. 
Types of Scenery and their Influence on Literature. By Sir Archibald 
Geikie, D.C.L., F.R.S. The Romanes Lecture, 1898. 
Macmillan & Co. 2s. 
Few, if any, of our living men of science have a literary gift 
equal to that of Sir Archibald Geikie, so that it was a happy 
choice which selected him to deliver the Romanes Lecture ; whilst 
at the same time he could hardly have chosen a more suitable 
subject for an address to so exclusively literary a university as 
that of Oxford than the influence of scenery upon literature. In 
his masterly treatment of this theme, so interesting to Selbornians, 
he describes three leading types of British scenery, lowlands, 
uplands, and highlands, taking Cowper, Thomson and Burns as 
the chief exponents of the first, Scott of the second, and Mac- 
pherson’s “ Ossian” and Wordsworth of the third. The follow- 
ing is his summary from this standpoint of our earlier poets : — 
“ The simple, child-like delight in Nature, so characteristic of Chaucer, and 
the influence of cultivated scenery, so conspicuous in him, are readily traceable 
among his successors. Shakespeare throughout his plays presents us with not a 
few reminiscences of his youth among the Warwickshire woodlands. In Milton 
we see how the placid, rural quiet of the Colne valley inspired the two finest 
lyrics in the English tongue. For a century after Milton’s time poetry in this 
country ceased to have any living hold on outer nature, but became, with each 
generation, more polished and artificial. When at last a reaction set in, the 
impulse that led to the most momentous revolution that has marked the history of 
English poetry came in large measure from the writings of three poets, each of 
whom drew his inspiration from lowland scenery.” 
Sir Archibald next discusses the influence of the scenery of 
the Ouse valley upon Cowper, and then — what is of special 
interest to us from Mr. Lionel Johnson’s article in our volume 
for 1892 — the source of the inspiration of Thomson. 
“ Thomson,” he says, “came to London in 1725, when he was 25 years of age, 
and the following year he published his 1 Winter.’ The poem, though written at 
Barnet, took its inspiration from the Border. . . . It is interesting to note 
that even after he had been five years in the south of England, and must have 
seen in that time much variety of weather and many different watercourses, it is 
still from the north that he draws his sketches. When, for instance, he tells how 
in autumn — 
