The master has a right to the service for which he pays, but can claim nothing further; and on his side the labourer has no right to defraud his master of his due, by giving him less than the best of his time and work. He can no longer complain with justice that he is ground down, as in former years; for even though, in this present time of agricultural depression, his actual receipts may be low, his position is very different from what it was twenty years ago, and there is no doubt that he has been proportionately less a sufferer from the bad times than the farmers have been.

These changes have not been effected without a good deal of bitter feeling and heart-burning on both sides. The subject of the insufficient pay of the agricultural labourer was brought to the front about thirty years ago by the vigorous letters to the 'Times' of "S. G. O.," who, as a resident in Dorsetshire, made the labourers of that county the type of the illused agricultural workman. In 1866, the story of the committal of a man named John Cross to Dorchester Jail for a month on the paltry charge of taking a piece of broken hurdle from a hedge, created a wild sensation in many parts of the country. Subscription boxes were were to be seen on all the stations of the South Western line. of sympathy were even held, and collections made, in Manchester, and the subject was actually caricatured in one of the Crystal Palace pantomimes. A sum of nearly a hundred pounds was raised, to the bewildering astonishment of the poor man, whose ideas had never soared beyond his weekly wages of eight or nine shillings, and who could never

Meetings

"understand why the gentlefolks should trouble theirselves about he." Plenty Plenty of angry feeling naturally ensued between farmers and workpeople, and a bitter newspaper warfare was waged. One well-known nobleman wrote letters to the Times' describing the state of Dorsetshire to be a sort of bucolic Utopia. He stated facts and figures-on very insufficient data - which were proved to be incorrect by some of the labourers on his estate; one or two of whom accurately detailed their actual earnings and hours of labour in some very intelligently written letters to the 'Spectator,' proving that their standing wages were nine shillings per week, or, taking harvest earnings into consideration, an average of nine shillings and ninepence, in lieu of the fourteen shillings and sixpence with which their landlord credited them. At that time the wages were always paid monthly, and often in kind instead of in coin; so that on some farms men seldom handled money at all, but took home their bacon, cheese, or flour, as the case might be, the consequence being that the labouring men were always immersed in hopeless debt to the small shopkeepers, who in their turn, being unable to pay ready money for their goods, were only supplied with inferior articles at exorbitant prices. One of the results of the "John Cross agitation" in Dorsetshire was the substitution of weekly for monthly paymentsa distinct gain to the labourer, though it was some time before he was fully alive to the advantages of the change, and he would indulge in an occasional grumble that "he never saw a piece of gold now." In some parts of the country the farmer would hire the

man by the size of his family, and would pay him accordingly. Advertisements were not uncommon in the local papers: "Wanted, a carter, with two or three working boys;" or, "A shepherd wanted, with a working family." Should the boys, thinking to better themselves, obtain work elsewhere, the father would stand a chance of losing his place, and being turned out of his home.

The enclosing of the commons, wherever it could be done, by the lord of the manor, was a great and just grievance to the poor man. Whatever may have been the worth of his legal rights to them, the prescriptive usage of being able to graze his cow or his geese was a great help to his meagre wages; and the Dorset poet, Barnes, in some of his vigorous lines, tells us how keenly

the loss of a bit of common was felt, and how little the grant of allotments, in lieu of what the labourer had looked on as his own, was regarded as any adequate compensation :—

"Thomas. I be very sorry To hear what they be gwain about. But yet I s'pose there'll be a 'llotment vor ye

When they do come to mark it out.

John. No; not vor me, I fear. An' if there should,

Why, 'twouldn't be so handy as 'tis

now;

Vor 'tis the common that do do me good,

I'd drash his busy zides vor'n if I could.

Avore they took away our work they ought

To meäke us up the bread our leabour bought."

The last half-century has certainly extinguished the poetical side of the agricultural labour. The children of the next genera tion will not be able to find any meaning in the poet Cowper's lines:

"We may discern the thrasher at his task;

Thump after thump resounds the constant flail,

That seems to swing uncertain, and yet falls

Full on the destined ear. Wide falls the chaff,

The rustling straw sends up a frequent mist

Of atoms, sparkling in the noonday beam."

cow."

Another grievance to the agricultural labourer in those days was the merging of the small holdings into the large farms of 1000 and 1200 acres, and the same poet describes their feelings on this subject ;

accustomed to the cheery sound of the flail will not find equal music in the whistle and buzz of the steam-thrasher; and though of course the farmer is bound to avail himself of the new lights of science in all steam implements which may save labour and time, yet the superiority of the flail - thrashed

corn is still acknowledged in the market, besides the advantage of securing better straw for thatching purposes. And who that from his childhood has looked forward to the delights of the hay-field, the early morning sound of the mowers whetting their scythes, and swishing through the long grass in perfect time with each other, can feel otherwise than regretful, to use the mildest term, at the substitution of the mowing-machine. The harvest-field, too, is shorn of its picturesque charms. The men with their sickles, and the women and children binding the sheaves, certainly make a more cheerful scene in the landscape than can ever be offered by the ugly reaper with its ungainly arms.

It is happily not given to us to peer into the history of the next fifty years. Judging by the rapid rate at which life is now being

lived, there will be more startling changes to record at the end of that period than the last halfcentury has shown. The simplicity and quaintness of rural life will be a thing of the past; reverence for old institutions is fast departing, and will soon be regarded as out of date, and not in keeping with the spirit of the age. The old faith that sustained our forefathers in many a weary fight, rugged and crude as it often was, has been shaken to its foundations by the spirit of insubordination and the craving for excitement which prevail in our own day. But all that was pure and noble in it is immortal, and must survive the storms that appear now to be crushing it; and we may believe that it will be as powerful and true a support to our posterity to the end of time as it has been to others in past ages.

IN the central hall of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington there is a remarkable group of animals, which strike the eye on account of their uniform sandy coloration these animals comprise representatives of many of the principal groups; there are birds, reptiles, and mammalia, all tinted of the same isabelline hue. A reference to the label upon the case will show that without exception they are inhabitants of the sandy desert regions of the world; and the wonderful similarity in colour which the animals bear to the locality in which they are found is well illustrated. This is not a unique example of a general correspondence in coloration between animals and their usual environment; close to the glass case containing the desert animals is another, which exhibits a series of arctic animals. It is a familiar fact to most people, that the majority of the few terrestrial animals which live in the polar regions are either white during the whole year or become white in the winter. The polar bear is always white; the arctic fox changes its colour at the approach of winter. There are a number of these foxes at the Zoological Gardens at present; and it is a very interesting fact that only one of them assumed the winter dress, though the bluishbrown fur of the rest is slightly grizzled. The winter of 1890-91, though severe enough for most of us, does not appear to have nearly reached that ideal of a winter which is entertained by the "blue foxes."

Another strongly marked in stance of " adaptation to environment " might be suitably illus

trated by models at the Natural History Museum: it is furnished by the inhabitants of the surfacewaters of the ocean, which constitute what is known as the "pelagic fauna.”

To any person, whether from choice or of necessity, inspecting the surface of the sea from the side of a boat, the water will appear not only clear and transparent but barren of life. Beyond an occasional jelly-fish, hardly anything of an animal nature will be seen; and yet the same tract of ocean will appear on favourable evenings to be lighted up by innumerable sparks of phosphorescent light. A quantity of the water strained through a muslin sieve will leave behind a gelatinous residue; this is composed of the bodies of countless organisms, which are invisible when freely floating in the water on account of their almost perfect transparency, and which give rise to the phenomena of phosphorescence. So abundant are these pelagic animals, that a square mile of water contains, it has been calculated, 800 tons of them. The inhabitants of forests often show a green coloration which is in harmony with their surroundings. Among the evergreen forests of the tropical regions "we find," says Mr Wallace, "whole groups of birds whose ground-colour is green. Parrots are very generally green, and in the East we have an extensive group of green fruit-eating pigeons; while the barbets, beeeaters, turacos, leaf-thrushes (Phyllornis), white eyes (Zosterops), and many other groups, have so much green in their plumage as to tend greatly to their concealment among the dense foliage." It is not only

birds which thus resemble in colour their surroundings: there are green tree-frogs, green tree-snakes, the iguanas, and a host of insects belonging to nearly every order into which that group is divided.

Where lichen-covered tree-stems are common, we find lichen-coloured caterpillars, moths, and other insects. A pretty moth (Cleora glabraria), not uncommon in the New Forest, is white, dusted with black, and its larva, which feeds upon lichens, is of the same colour. Some years ago, while collecting insects in that locality, I found in the same tufts of lichen a small black-and-white spider just as closely resembling the lichens.

It is supposed that these various colour resemblances have been brought about by the need for concealment. A caterpillar frequenting lichens, or a bird living among leaves, would be greatly advantaged by a colour resemblance to their several surroundings; hence variations in the required direction have escaped destruction, and there has been through long ages a gradual perfecting of the resemblances. This is the most generally received explanation: it accounts also for the coloration of animals like the spider, to which I have referred, which do not so much need protection from their enemies as a disguise, with the help of which they can steal upon their prey.

We must, however, guard against taking generalities for granted without a careful examination of the several cases. Many years ago Messrs Kirby and Spence called attention to the resemblance between lichen-feeding insects and their food: "Many of the mottled moths, which take their station of diurnal repose on the north side of the trunks of trees, are with difficulty distinguished from the

VOL. CL.-NO. DCCCCXIV.

grey and green lichens that cover them. Of this kind are Miselia aprilina and Acronycta psi. The caterpillar of Bryophila algæ, when it feeds on the yellow Lichen juniperinus, is always yellow; but when upon the grey Lichen saxatilis its hue becomes grey. This change is probably produced by the colour of its food." The last sentence contains

a

most noteworthy suggestion, which may help us in explaining many similar cases of coloration in a much simpler way than by natural selection or natural elimination. It is well known that the pigments, which are often the cause of the colours in animals, and always, except in the case of white, of plants, are extremely resistent to chemical action. Some of these pigments will pass unscathed through the strongest acids and the most powerful alkalis. It is quite conceivable, then, that they will be equally unaffected by the chemical action of an animal's digestive juices. There is, however, no need at all for theory upon this point; it has been shown to be the case in several instances. Dr Eisig found in the Mediterranean a species of worm living in the interior of a sponge. The sponge was a brilliant yellow, the colour being due to particles of a peculiar pigment deposited in its tissues. The worm was also yellow, and it might be supposed that this harmony had been brought about by the necessity for concealment. An inquisitive fish poking. its nose into the interior of the sponge, in search of the various small creatures which constantly take up their lodgings in such a spot, would pass over the "protectively coloured " worm, and select one that was obvious on account of its different colours. It was found, however, that the colour

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