e pavements! Brick and mortar
have killed out all life over square miles of Middlesex. For myself, I
love better the densely-peopled fields than this human desert, this
beflagged and macadamised man-made solitude. The country teems with
life on every hand; a thousand different plants and flowers in the
spangled meadows; a thousand varied denizens of pond, and air, and
heath, and copses. Their ways are endless. They attract me far more
with their infinite diversity than the grey and gloomy haunts of the
cab-horse and the stock-broker.

But my Arcady, as you will see, is none the less tolerably broad and
eclectic in its limits. These various essays have been suggested to my
pen by rambles far and wide between its elastic confines. The little
tractate on _Mud_, for example, recalls to mind some pleasant weeks
among the Italian lakes and on the plain of Lombardy. _A Desert Fruit_
owes its origin to a morning at Luxor. _High Life_ had its key-note
struck by a fortnight in the Tyrol. _Tropical Education_ is a dim
reminiscence of old Jamaican experiences. Our _Eight-Legged Friends_
were observed at leisure on the window-panes of our own little nook at
Dorking. _A Hill-Top Stronghold_ was sketched _in situ_ at Florence by
a window that looked across the valley to Fiesole. Excursions into
books or into the remoter past have given occasion for the
archaeological essays relegated here to the end of the volume.

My thanks are due to Messrs. Longmans for permission to reprint from
their magazine _My Islands_, _A Hill-Top Stronghold_, _A Desert Fruit_,
_The Isle of Ruim_, _Eight-Legged Friends_, and _Tropical Education_. I
have also to acknowledge a similar courtesy on the part of Messrs.
Smith & Elder with regard to _Mud_, _The Bronze Axe_, _High Life_,
_Pretty Poll_, _The Greenwood Tree_, _On the Wings of the Wind_,
_Casters and Chesters_, and _Fish as Fathers_, all of which originally
appeared in the _Cornhill_. Messrs. Chatto & Windus have been equally
kind as regards the paper on _An English Shire_ contributed to the
_Gentleman's_. _A Persistent Nationality_ made its first bow in the
_North American Review_, and has still to be introduced to an English
audience.

G.A.

Hind Head, Surrey, _Oct._, 1892.

SCIENCE IN ARCADY.

MY ISLANDS.

About the middle of the Miocene period, as well as I can now remember
(for I made no note of the precise date at the moment), my