very often show that the Dorset consignments have met their fate in that way. The oldworld owners of a few old-world farmhouses still brew and consume the renowned double

'Oh word of fear,

Unpleasing to a sportsman's ear,

more odious. An ardent sportsman, not many years since, is said at some public meeting to have thus tersely expressed himself:-Sir, I believe that a man who would kill a fox would kill his own father.' This may appear strong language, but it shows

the detestation in which the offence is held.

ale of other days. But the star of the Dorsetshire beer-trade has long since paled before new-fangled notions and bitter ale. Of wheat very few shiploads move eastward to London; but the Cornish miners depend largely on supplies from Dorset. Between forty and The fly-fisher will also find himself well off in fifty steam-engines are working away upon this country. The growth of trout in rivers the wheat-farms; and the tall chimney raises is well known to tell a tale of the quality of a frequent protest against the notion that the the water with reference to irrigation-twocounty has taken up a permanent position pound, three-pound, and even five-pound fish behind the age. What an average Dorset occurring in the soft waters of the chalk, farm in the corn and sheep districts really is, when fish of equal age in moory or stained and how it is commonly laid out, the follow-waters rarely get beyond half a pound. This ing statement of figures will show. Take 500 acres as the mean area, and ont of these allow 300 to tillage, 60 to dry watered meadow, and 100 to ewe-leaze or sheep-walk. Cow-leaze ground, home-crofts, paddock, and homestead will make up the 40 remaining acres. On the larger farms, ranging from 1200 to 1500 acres, there will be a much greater proportion of down-land and sheeppastures, with good and useful breadths of coppice and woodland.

The greater farming lights have for many years past perceived the uses of frequent consultation; and the Farmers' Clubs of Blandford, Winfrith, and Milborne have done good service, and won a name beyond the county border. The estate of Lulworth Castle is said to have risen 30 per cent. in value within a few years of the time when the Winfrith Club was set on foot." A feeling against admitting the squirearchy to a share in these agricultural debate-nights is now happily giving way. That the meetings should have been at first regarded as a sort of comitia tributa was natural enough; but exclusiveness is now seen to be out of place, as the interests of squire and farmer are the same in relation to nearly all the subjects discussed; and the cause of sound cultivation is pretty sure to be the loser by shutting the door of a useful conference in the face of the largest holders.

speaks well for the streams of the Frome for several miles above and below the county town. Excellent fish abound from Frampton Court, where the representative of the Sheridans now lives, to Lord Ilchester's interesting old farmhouse of Woodsford-Strangways, the remnant of a grand old quadrangular manor-place' which belonged to an unruly Earl of Devon, and was battered down by Edward IV. The farm-people will still show you Gunhill Mound' in an adjoining field. The Stour, within the limits of Dorset, is no fly-fishing stream; but better sport is found in its waters after the confluence with the Avon near Christchurch, in Hampshire. Otters have been hunted on both the Frome and the Stour within quite recent years.*

There is much to attract the zoological observer within the county. A breed of roedeer was introduced by Lord Dorchester, who formerly owned the noble property of Milton Abbey, and a few stragglers have been seen stepping across the gorse and heath near Yellowham Woods, not far from Dorchester. Before the disforesting of Cranborne Chace, in 1828, twelve thousand head of fallow-deer ranged over the lands of the unlucky proprietors within the Chace. Fourteen Dorset parishes were large gainers by the disforesting; and between 4000 and 5000 acres of down, common, and coppice have been broken up since that time. There is a golden-eagle preserved at Sherborne Castle, shot by the keeper near a dead deer in the

The hunting reputation of Dorset is high, and well merited. In no county is the sport pursued with greater ardour. The Vale of Blackmoor, from the days of Sir Thomaspark. Delalinde and the White Hart, has been famous for its sport. All classes enter into it. Meets at Short-Wood, or at Stock (now, alas! deprived of its enthusiastic master), are matter of no small county interest. Nowhere is the crime of vulpicide,

* Mr. Ruegg's Paper in the Bath Agricultural Journal, VIII, Part I.

The white-tailed eagle has made its marsh-harrier and black-grouse have also been appearance on Morden Heath, where the known. The osprey has been seen in the vale of the little Bredy, and the hobby in Middleborough Woods. Short-eared owls are common; the tawny-owl broods over the departed glories of Cranborne Chace, occa

*They are still common on the Stour between Sturminster Newton and Blandford.

sionally visiting Blackmoor Vale. Peregrine- | probably on various other parts of the falcons are now and then observed in the Isle heaths; Erica ciliaris and the Gentiana of Purbeck or along the Lulworth coast, and, pneumonanthe in Purbeck. The bee-orchis further inland, on Knighton Heath; but the occurs in several places on the chalk and great bustard is seen no more on the wide oolite, especially near the sea, and the rarer downs where he was once well known.* fly-orchis at Bingham's Melcombe. To these The Vale of Blackmoor boasts an original we may add lady's-tresses' (Spiranthe auand unwearied entomologist, still keen in his tumnalis), plentiful at Swanage and elsefavourite pursuit. During fifty long years, where; the Vicia sylvestris in woods on the steadily as a veteran-fox hunter, Mr. Dale, of chalk; the Gagea lutea at Hilton; the CeterGlanville's Wootton, has chased the moth ach officinaria near Dorchester; and the and butterfly, nor has his zeal been unre- beautiful Osmunda regalis in a few places warded. He is the first, and as yet the only, on the heath.* discoverer of the halictophagus, a member of the order Strepsiptera; and the homopterous Ulopa trivia was new to Britain when he found it near Lulworth. The sea-coast between Swanage and Lulworth, Portland Island, and Mr. Dale's own neighbourhood in the Vale, are the best entomological grounds in the county.

Dorset, as every one knows, bears the stamp of chalk set upon it in its length and in its breadth. One-third part of the county -an area of more than three hundred square miles in all-belongs to this formation; and the great arms of the chalk-downs afford the readiest key to the entire geological structure. Clay and sand occupy somewhat more than another third, and the rest is parcelled out among gravels, loams, and different kinds of waste. The chalk downs trend away from east to west. The northern and bulkier limb starts from near Shaftesbury, and the southern and thinner one from the eastern end of Purbeck. They enclose the 'trough of Poole,' a district of Bagshot sands or plastic clay, with other formations above the chalk, and unite near Beaminster in the extreme west. The north down has a pretty uniform width of ten miles; the south seldom measures more than two miles across, and is casemated seaward along part of its range by the oolite facings of the cliffs. The outer escarpment of the higher line, skirted by a narrow strip of greensand, abuts on the Kimmeridge and Oxford clays of the famous Vale of Blackmoor, and these formations are in their turn belted by cornbrash and calcareous grit, with occasional patches of fuller's earth.

Dr. Arnold, who was no musician, used to say that wild-flowers supplied him with his music. Not finding in his mind any link between deep emotions and musical sounds, he was aware of a very strong link connecting such emotions with wood-anemones and wood-sorrel. Warwickshire was therefore comparatively dull and dumb to him; but he might have found a perpetual harmony in Dorset. There is perhaps hardly any county, except Devonshire and Yorkshire, the flora of which would yield a larger catalogue to the careful observer. The sea-coast, the sands and bogs, the hills and valleys of the chalk, and the stiff clays (alternating with limestone) of the upper oolite-all contribute to the list, and are adorned by a flora peculiar to themselves. The profusion of common spring-flowers which are to be found in the woods of all parts of England, seem in the southern counties to turn every bank into a garden, and nowhere more than in parts of Dorset. Even an unscientific lover of Nature could not spent many days in the neighbourhood of the heaths, and in some of the vale districts, without noticing their rich*The following may be added to the list, ness in this respect, with a vague impulse though some among the number are by no means perhaps towards becoming a collector, or at rare: Campanula rapunculus, in Elcombe Wood, any rate a more intelligent reader of the near Blandford; Helleborine (epicactis), found between Hod and Hamilton Hills; the graceful flowbook before him. For the sake of those ering rush (Butomus umbellatus), and white wateropen who love to recognise a rare plant amidst lily (Nymphæa alba), called by Withering the the crowd of other beauties, here are sub-queen of British flowers; these last are both joined the names of a few less common flow-found in the waters of the Stour that skirt Lord ers belonging to the county, with their locali ties. Elecampane (Inula Helenium) is found at Haselbury Bryan, in the Vale of Blackmoor; Pinguicula Lusitanica, a species of butterwort, on a bog near Dorchester, and

Blackmoor was anciently called Watchet or Whitehart Forest, the tale being that

There is a curious account given in Lander of the

Portman's park at Bryanstone, and at Hammoon.

tenure by which Bryanstone is held: This was held in grand serjeantry by a pretty odd jocular tenure, viz, by finding a man to go before the king's army for 40 days when he should make war in Scotland (some records say in Wales) bareheaded and bare-footed, in his shirt and linnen*The crossbill (Loxia curvirostris, Yarrell) is drawers, holding in one hand a bow without a also found in Dorset.

string, in the other an arrow without feathers.'

Henry III. here hunted a beautiful white | though Leland, who missed the point of hart, and spared its life. This hart was by the saying, has taken it literally, and fallen and by killed at King's Stag Bridge in Pul- into the blunder that 'here be good daggers ham village, by Sir Thomas Delalinde, for made.' Two thousand people, more or less, which offence he was punished with impri- earn their bread in the flax-mills and ropesonment and grievous fine; and the fine was walks of Bridport or the neighbourhood; levied annually upon his lands, and the lands and an old charter conferred a monopoly of of those who followed with him in the chase navy cordage on the town, which still supof the Royal White Hart.' Fuller, after an plies a good deal. The fields are gay in interval of four hundred years, found himself June with the blue flower of the flax, and mulcted on this old score. Myself,' he says, the crop is gathered in July or August, if it 'hath paid a share for the sauce, who never has escaped its worst enemy-the worm of a tasted any of the meat: so that it seems mild and wet spring. Fine as the view is from King's venison is sooner eaten than digested.' Pillesdon Pen, it is surpassed by the view What is now Holwell Manor-house was for- from Bulbarrow, the loftiest point on a grand merly the principal Lodge of the Forest of chalk-reach in the north down, and from Blackmoor, and was then tenanted by the Blackdown, an isolated point of plastic clay King's warder. It is said to have been built near Dorchester, crowned with a beaconabout the year 1370, in the reign of Edward tower in memory of Nelson's Hardy, who III., and is still standing in good preserva- was born in a village at the foot. From tion, with its moat, and the remnant of a Bulbarrow you look northward into Somerset portcullis. Besides Blackmoor, Manwood as far as the Cheddar Cliffs and the Quan(on Forest Laws), in a list of sixty-nine old tocks, and southward to Portland and the English hunting-grounds, names Bere, Gil- Channel. From Hardy's Tower, if you are lingham, and Perbroke (Purbeck) Forests as facing the sea and the day is clear, Freshbelonging to Dorset. The vale boasts of water Cliffs bound the view on the extreme 170,000 acres, and is watered by the Stour left, and on the right the headlands of Babbiand the Cale, with their little affluents. Be- combe make the last point in a beautiful and sides innumerable dairy cows, it rears oxen broken coast-line. as bulky as those of the red sandstone vales and alluvial marshes of Somerset; and it sends yearly to London more pigs than either Somerset or Devon. The Blackmoor oaks are well known to a thriving little shipbuilding firm at Bridport, whose models find growing favour in the eyes of Liverpool buyTrees of 120 cubic feet are not uncom

ers.

mon.

Below the westward junction of the downs the chalk borders on the marlstone and lias of the Bridport and Lyme Regis country. Here, as elsewhere, patches of greensand occur; and on one side of them rises Pillesdon Pen, the highest point in the county, 934 feet above the sea. This hill stands partly in the parish of Broadwinsor, where Fuller once ministered; and close by is Lewesdon Hill, the subject of Crowe's descriptive poem called by that name and so much admired by Rogers. The two heights serve for landmarks in the Channel, being known to sailors as the 'Cow and Calf;' and neighbours living side by side without familiar intercourse are said by West Dorset men

to be

'As near akin As Lew'son Hill and Pillesdon Pen.'

Moving up the southern escarpment or the downs as far as Weymouth and Portland, we shall find the chalk bordering a district of greensand, Purbeck beds, and Kimmeridge clay, with a medley of middle and lower oolites between that and the sea. This is the district which was reported on in 1830 by Dean Buckland and Sir H. De la Beche before the Geological Society.* In it they found a succession of marine deposits-from the lias to the Portland stone-during the period of which formations large numbers of Plesiosaurs were the most conspicuous.inhabitants of a sea covering what is now the country between Weymouth and Lyme, where their remains, with those of the Ichthysoaur and Pterodactyle, lie so thickly imbedded in the lias. When this sea vanished, à forest of large cone-bearing trees and of Cycadeoid plants, indicating a warm climate, supplied its place. It is curious that in the diluvium topping the lias near Lyme church, many rhinoceros' teeth and parts of elephants' tusks have been found, and several nearly perfect tusks have been got from a similar cap of diluvium near Charmouth, one of which tusks-nine feet eight inches in length-is now in the Museum of the Geological Society. In process of time the dry land. of the Cycadeoid forest came to be a kind.

Another proverb grows out of the flax disstrict near Bridport in this far-west corner, which was once a hemp-growing district as well. 'Stabbed with a Bridport dagger,' is as much as to say 'hanged at the gallows;' gical Society of London, I.

* Memoirs from the Transactions of the Geolo

of estuary, extending probably far away into Wiltshire, and bottomed by a triple deposit, fresh-water shells appearing in the lowest bed, oyster-shells in the middle, and a mixture of the two kinds in the upper. Then came the sea again, bringing with it the thick marine deposits of the greensand and the chalk, and then a tremendous catastrophe upset every thing, producing all kinds of contortions in the strata, and intersecting them with enormous faults, of which the great upcast of Ridgeway-fifteen miles in length from end to end-is the chief example. One revolution more preceded the advent of that tranquil state of external nature which we now enjoy. A series of stupendous inundations seems, before all grew still, to have swept over the region, scooping out the numberless combes among the hills, denuding and smoothing their slopes, completely modifying the previous surface, and partially overspreading the country with diluvial gravel.

dangerous Race off the Bill in the distance, and the united towns of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis skirting the beautiful bay on the near side of the harbour. The convicts do not, properly speaking, act as quarrymen, so far as the breakwater is concerned; they are only required to shovel up that vast mass of rubbly waste-it has been estimated at a weight of 20,000,000 tons-which was, until the Portland Harbour Act of 1847 was passed, lying useless on the top of the island. This wealth of débris, aided by contributions from the loose layers of calcareous slate and black cycadeous loam, which form the coverlid of the Portland beds, is ample material for the great bank that now stretches more than a mile and a half from the shore. The layers here mentioned are the dirt-bed' so fully explored by Dean Buckland. They are the remains of an ancient forest of Cycadæ, not one species of which grows at present in Europe; and what the workmen know as

The Dorset coast has been fortunate in its crows' nests' are the buds and trunks of describers. At Whitenose, the extreme these tropical plants. The intermediate layers easterly point of Weymouth Bay, the Buck- between the dirt-bed and the merchantable land and De la Beche survey no longer stone are not hard to specify. Calling the serves us; but this is precisely the point to dirt-bed the coverlid, we then come upon an which Mantell's description, beginning at upper blanket of cap-stone,' and a lower Swanage, the easterly extremity at Purbeck, blanket of 'roach,' before reaching the sheet comes down. We cannot, however, follow of fine architectural material. The 'cap' is Mantell just yet, being bound at the junction an irregular bed of flint-nodules, with a thin of the two surveys by a tie of more than local topping of earthy detritus; and the roach is interest. Taking our stand on the great wall a layer of inferior limestone, full of cavities of the Ridgeway fault, and looking south left by fresh-water shells. The best stone or over the undulating slopes of the Weymouth white-bed' itself does not rest immediately level, watered by the little Wey, at whose upon the clay, but on lower and valueless source George III. loved to take his morning oolitic strata, filled with veins of flint and draught, we get a full view of Portland chert, and with characteristic marine shells. Island, with all its belongings:-the Chesil The whole of the quarries are Crown proBank, that curious natural barrier of shingle perty, and the private lessees pay a royalty of defying the westerly and south-westerly gales; two shillings on every ton raised. The raisthe long timber-stage of the new Breakwater, ing of one ton is about the week's work of now fast approaching completion, and destined a single quarryman, who earns ten shillings to supply the Harbour of Refuge the same by the ton. The annual export of stone is defence on the east and south-east, that is reckoned at 50,000 tons; and at the present afforded by the mainland on the north, and rate of progress the island will bear quarrying by the Chesil Bank and the island on the for two thousand years to come. Inigo other sides the dull line of convict build- Jones drew attention to the Portland quarings on the summit of the island, where ries by using the material in 1614 for the about 1500 men pass through a second Banqueting Hall of Whitehall; St. Paul's term of penal servitude after nine months Cathedral, Westminster and Blackfriars at Pentonville or Millbank, and where a Bridges, are the more conspicuous examples. large section of them are employed in lad- But Sir Christopher Wren used the stone ing the breakwater-wagons with the rubble very widely indeed; and many of the London which goes to make the bank below the stag-churches and other public edifices were built ing-the long white escarpment which forms or restored with it after the Great Fire. the western face of the island, and looks as if all the quarry waste of all the quarries that were ever worked had been shot over it-the

* Mantell's Geology of the Isle of Wight,' &c., Chap. XII.

The trains full of rubble reach the Breakwater by a series of inclines, and are immediately run out to the end of the staging by small locomotives. As each waggon passes over the appointed place of delivery, a catch holding up its floor is knocked away, and in

near Bridport. The breadth at the Abbotsbury end is 170 yards, and 200 at Portland, both reckonings being taken at low water of spring-tides. The base of blue clay is covered to a depth of from four to six feet with a coat of smooth round pebbles, chiefly of a white calcareous spar, but partly of quartz, chert, and jasper, so deep that a horse's legs sink nearly to the knee at every step. The soundest theory that has hitherto been offered to explain whence this stock of pebble is derived, is this: that they are driven up by the wind-waves from the chalk cliffs west of Bridport, in the neighbourhood of Lyme, Sidmouth, or Bere Head. Other kinds of shingle, but in very small comparative quantity, may be brought down by the river Otter from Budleigh Salterton and Aylesbere Hill.* The size of the pebbles gradually decreases from east to west. At Portland, stones are often picked up three or four inches in diameter; but near Bridport they are no bigger than coarse particles of sand, and four or five go to the inch. The change is gradual, but so constant that smugglers landing on the bank in thick weather or a dark night can tell the exact spot without difficulty. The cause of the largest shingle being found to leeward is supposed by Mr. Coode to be, that large pebbles of exceptional dimensions offer nearly the whole of their

this manner 3000 tons are, during full work, tumbled daily with great uproar into the sea, the bank being thus gradually formed with a clear breadth of 500 feet at the base. The inner limb of the Breakwater, reaching 600 yards due east from the shore, is adorned with a noble coping of hewn stone, ending in a 'head' of 100 feet diameter, on which a small fort, mounting eight guns, has just been placed. The outer limb, by far the longer of the two, after running a short distance due east, turns sharply, and heads a point or two off north for the rest of its career. The near end of this limb is furnished with a head answering to that just mentioned, and a space of 400 feet separates these bastions, the foundations of which are laid 25 feet below low-water level of spring-tides, and thus allow easy entrance or exit to line-ofbattle ships at all times. A fort, mounting fifty guns, will terminate the outer limb at its farther end; and the whole magnificent area of the harbour-more than 2000 acres in all -will be protected by the fortifications actively progressing on the northern head of the island. Between the Breakwater and the Chesil Bank is Portland Castle, a low fort cased with white stone, unpretending enough in its look, but with something of a history belonging to it. Henry VIII. built it shortly after his return from the 'Field of the Cloth of Gold;' and Jane Seymour, Catherine How-surface to the action of the wind-waves, and ard, and Catherine Parr, all had a grant of it in turn. The Royalists contrived to wrest it out of Parliamentary hands by a stratagem, and found all the rich furniture and treasure of Wardour Castle stored within. How Portland came by its name is a vexed and not a very important question. We have seen the copy of a Saxon charter granting the island to the ealden mynstre on Wyncheastre;' and Camden vouches the records of Winchester Cathedral to the effect that a Saxon adventurer, named Port, landed here at a date variously stated, but not later than the sixth or seventh century, and transmitted his name to posterity. There was a pitched battle between the Danes and the Portlanders in 837, which terminated in favour of the islanders.

are, therefore, far more easily moved than the small ones which are closely embedded together, and over which the waves have a tendency to travel. Leland, Hollinshed, and Camden all speak of a time when the bank was liable to be broken through by a gale. This has long ceased to be the case; but what has been the amazing violence of the attacks made by the south-west winds, these facts, carefully ascertained by Mr. Coode, will show: During the gale of December 27th, 1852, the quantity of shingle scoured away between Abbotsbury and Portland was 3,673,300 tons; and the quantity thrown in during the next eighteen days was 2,671,500 tons. On the 23rd of November in the same year a heavy ground-swell, consequent on half a gale of only four hours' duration from the The Chesil Bank is one of the longest and south-west, scoured away, within eighteen strangest ridges of pebbles in Europe. From hours, 4,553,200 tons; and in five days afterits Portland extremity it extends north-west- wards 3,553,200 tons of shingle were found ward in a regular curve parallel to the coast, to have been thrown in again. These quanand from this it is separated by a narrow back-tities were derived from careful admeasurewater, called the Fleet, which ends in Lord ment of the profile of the bank.' Ilchester's swan-decoy at Abbotsbury, stocked in the palmy days of the abbots with no less than 7000 swans. The bank unites with the mainland here, and runs along the shore nearly six miles further-making a total of almost sixteen-to the cliffs at Burton Castle,

Weymouth lies between Portland and the

*The authority for these details is the published abstract of an able paper by Mr. John Coode, Engineer-in-Chief of the Portland Break water. The

paper was read before the Institute of Civil Engineers in 1853.