solid the tracks over which the wheels of vehicles will afterwards pass. ENCLOSURES. We The perfection of land enclosures into properly divided compartments remains yet to be completed in this country. Those who remember the old open field, with its encumbrances of land-marks, rough ditches, and marsh lands, will contrast favourably with that condition the great improvements which modern enclosure has introduced. The increased vegetation in the form of living fences has added not only to the beauty of the landscape, but, under proper cultivation, to the health of the land and of the flocks that feed on the land. may, indeed, look upon land enclosure as a system of reclaiming land, and the day ought not to be far off when this system will be carried out fully in every part. That vast portions of land still lie unreclaimed is obvious to all who travel through the counties of England, so that there is sufficient work for the agriculturist, even in the way of reclamation. Before passing to the reclaiming process there is, however, much to be done in the way of improvement for health of many enclosures nearest to the homes of the cultivator. The first enclosure demanding attention, almost everywhere, is that enclosure called the farm-yard. At the Sanitary Congress at Hastings, in May, 1889, we had this subject brought up under the heading of farm-yard sanitation, by Dr. G. T. B. Waters. The facts that came out were most striking and important. The description of the modern farm-yard with the liquid sewage yielding ammoniacal odours; the imperfect shelter for the animals; the wooden boxes containing fodder, and the miserable cattle standing day after day, and week after week, up to their knees in liquid 26 LAND ITS ATTRACTIONS AND RICHES. sewage, their sides and haunches plastered with the same in a partially dried condition, formed a picture which could not be refuted and which is lamentable as belonging to the present day. The farm-yard is a standing centre for the production of disease, and, tuberculosis in cattle extending probably to sixty per cent. of all the cattle sent to the metropolitan markets, must have a considerable origin in this central source of evil. I do not hold so strongly as some do that tuberculous disease in the lower animals passes, through the consumption of their flesh, to the members of the human family. There can, however, be no doubt that cattle suffer directly from the insanitary farm-yard, and I have seen quite enough to carry conviction that human beings resident near these places are injured by malarious influences. In the practical accomplishment of health through land, sanitation, like charity, should commence at home; it should commence in the enclosure called the homestead, and should radiate from that centre, in the form of good drainage, good water, and good roads, through the whole of the estate. B. W. RICHARDSON. CHAPTER IV. THE PLEASURES OF THE COUNTRY. BY PERCY WHITE, Editor of Public Opinion. "Beatus ille, qui procul negotiis, Ut prisca gens mortalium, 'Palerna rura bobus exercet suis." Hor. Epod. 2, i. In In every healthily constituted human being there are a number of primitive instincts that turn the desires to the country whenever the sun shines and the skies are blue. These are the undeveloped atavisms, inherited, perhaps, from ancestors who fought for acorns with fists or bludgeons, when, as Horace describes, in unconscious anticipation of Darwin, they first crept forth on the earth a dumb and dirty crowd of unkempt savages. the recesses of every mind, worn and obliterated by years of friction against London life though it may be, there lies concealed a sentiment that can only find adequate satisfaction in the sights and the sounds of the country; in the wide distances, the soft horizons, the scent of new-mown hay, or the melancholy odour of decaying leaves. Man, himself a part of Nature, is connected by an inexplicable kind of telepathy with the landscape surrounding him. The message of of "the happy autumn fields" is born to the human soul through the medium of eyes and psychical senses for which we have no name. If, as George Eliot says, we were not well wadded with |