184 
NATURE NOTES 
hamlet of Kingston Vale, with its old-time red brick and tiled 
Elizabethan farmhouses, and its neat white cottages and villas, 
nestling amongst their gardens and orchards. The grand old 
oaks and beeches of the Royal Park of Richmond form a dark 
and magnificent background to the lovely landscape. 
Hundreds, nay thousands, of Londoners are quite ignorant 
of the fact that such beautiful sylvan scenery as may be found 
in the wild and less frequented parts of Wimbledon Common 
exists so near the smoky old city in which they toil and labour 
from year’s end to year’s end. But perhaps it is well so, for 
the wrecked condition of the hazel bushes, rowan trees and 
heather tell their own tale of the ravages wrought upon them 
by the “ trippers ” from the great Metropolis. 
J. M. B. Durham. 
A NOTE ON CARLYLE AND DARWIN. 
]HERE are two passages from the works of Carlyle and 
Darwin respectively which have not, as far as I am 
aware, ever been compared with each other, although 
it is likely that readers of both these authors’ writings 
may have noticed them, just as I did some years ago. These 
two passages may therefore be of some little interest. To begin 
with Carlyle: “ ‘ In an opening of the woods’; for the country 
was still dark with wood in those days, and Scotland itself still 
rustled shaggy and leafy like a damp black American forest, 
with cleared spots and spaces here and there. Dryasdust 
advances several absurd hypotheses as to the insensible but 
almost total disappearance of these woods; the thick wreck of 
of which now lies as peat , sometimes with huge heart-of-oak 
timber-logs embedded in it, on many a height and hollow. The 
simplest reason doubtless is, that by increase of husbandry there 
was increase of cattle, increase of hunger for green food ; and 
so more and more the new seedlings got yearly eaten out in 
April, and the old trees, having only a certain length of life in 
them, died gradually, no man heeding it, and disappeared into 
peat ” (“ Past and Present,” Popular Edition, p. 85). 
Now for Darwin: “ Here we see how potent has been the 
effect of the introduction of a single tree, nothing whatever else 
having been done, with the exception of the land having been 
enclosed, so that cattle could not enter. But how important an 
element enclosure is I plainly saw near Farnham, in Surrey. 
Here there are extensive heaths, with a few clumps of old 
Scotch firs on the distant hill-tops ; within the last ten years 
large spaces have been enclosed, and self-sown firs are now 
springing up in multitudes, so close together that all cannot live. 
When I ascertained that these young trees had not been sown 
