204 
NATURE NOTES 
Nature, to wage inveterate war against the lesser, whilst a wise 
Government punishes the man who shoots the greater fish- 
poacher.” 
COUNTY CHARACTERISTICS. 
|0 the sorrow of the antiquary and the student of folk- 
lore, but to the delight of political dreamers, our 
English counties are rapidly losing their distinctive 
characteristics. The physical features of the inhabi- 
tants are becoming hopelessly merged into a common type. One 
finds an increasing number of Sussex people who are not blue- 
eyed, as were their forefathers. The Cumbrian dalesmen are 
not so uniformly tall and stalwart as formerly, and no longer is 
the proverb true — if more than the latter half ever were true — 
“ Cheshire born, Cheshire bred, strong i’ th ’arm, weak i’ th’ 
head.” More than this, the strains of particular groups are 
now considered to have been almost from the outset very mixed. 
For instance, around the old Danish boroughs, the Celtic ele- 
ment is still very strong and Saxon, not to say Iberian, blood 
mingles with both races. The boundaries of the shires are occa- 
sionally ill-defined, a part of Worcestershire, for example, is 
insulated in the county of Gloucester. Nor are the areas of 
episcopal sees always co-terminous with those of counties. 
Religious superstitions and commercial customs are vanishing 
at an accelerating rate, and the number of “ test words ” by 
which dialects may be differentiated gets smaller and smaller. 
There has been a slight counter-movement ; the delimitation of 
districts for Parliamentary and County Council purposes, the 
quickening influence of territorial regiments, and the develop- 
ment of county teams for football and cricket, tend towards 
county patriotism, though in the last-named department pro- 
fessionalism modifies the effect to a marked degree. 
Our counties, as separate areas, may safely be traced back 
a thousand years. Mr. Grant Allen, in “ Anglo-Saxon Britain,” 
referring to the close of the Saxon period, wrote : “ The sub- 
divisions of the kingdom were now pretty generally conter- 
minous with the modern counties. In Wessex and the east the 
counties are either older kingdoms, like Kent, Sussex and Essex, 
or else tribal divisions of the kingdom, like Dorset, Somerset, 
Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey. In Mercia the recovered country 
is artificially mapped out round the chief Danish burgs, as in 
the case of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Bedfordshire, North- 
amptonshire and Leicestershire, where the county town usually 
occupies the centre of the arbitrary shire. In Northumbria it 
is divided into equally artificial counties by the rivers.” Paren- 
thetically it may be noted, that the term “ shire ” is generally 
