the Babylonian plains on their journey west, and have become acquainted with different methods of wheat-growing in the East. May we not say that it is likely that the Western Highlands took their township formation from the Scandinavian north, through an immigration round the Orkneys, and the Southern Irish and the people of the West of England theirs from the traders of the Mediterranean, Greeks, Phoenicians, or Carthaginians? They must have been bold seamen who first struck out into the Atlantic round Land's End from Cadiz, and surely great traders. As the Irish immigration would appear to have been the earliest in point of time, it might well be that their system of farming came to them from the East through Spain, which was much earlier civilised by contact with the traders than Gaul, and much nearer to Ireland, according to the seamanship of that time, than any part of the greater island, except the extreme south-west. Only very daring sailors would reach Ireland at all. Arable Cultivation modifies the Social Use of Land.-As a matter of fact, apart from any speculation, any such variety in farming methods only emphasises the difference between the pastoral life, concerned with the breeding of animals and co-existing with a communistic tribal formation, and the graingrowing, which leads to fencing and the individual ownership of land. 2 Nearness to the great grain-growers of the ancient world of Europe, the Romans-Republican, Imperial, Pagan, and monastic Christian-influenced the date at which pastoral pursuits gave way to agriculture; the suitability of the climate and soil for either was assisted by the labours of those who brought to the monasteries the science of grain-growing and the legal ideas of land management and land ownership of the Romans. But they could not have pretended to have succeeded in Eastern England and South-Eastern Scotland if the natural fitness of the soil and climate for grain-growing, and its unfitness for grass, had not led them into the way. Where dairying and stock-raising is the important industry, the farmer requires that his homestead shall be so placed that the stock on the unenclosed pasture can freely reach the byre, and that his enclosures for stock shall be convenient for this. In the place of the yardlands round the village he must have his hagi, his enclosed pastures-in other words, he wants a certain amount of isolation. There was another circumstance. When the main support of cattle was the open range, more than one village shared in the use of it, the cattle intermixing on the range, but driven out by a certain route and brought in in the autumn. In a country at all rolling, the stock-breeder wishes to have every ' convenience for pasturing both sides of the hills, while at the same time he can keep his stock under control, and be able to pen or house them at convenience, and water them at the · stream which runs down the valley. He and his family will salt and hunt up the stock on the waste. A hamlet or a few isolated farmhouses are more convenient than a large village for such a business. The grain-grower, on the other hand, must have his grain fields, if only for safety, near his house, and his neighbours near him to help in field operations. In the one case the man wishes his home pasture for stock, in the other his corn fields to be convenient to his homestead. The village street and the yardlands are necessary for arable culture.3 Rainfall. Which parts of the Islands were suitable for grain and which for grass is a matter dependent on rainfall. If you should draw a rough line from Southampton to Sheffield, and through Carlisle and Lanark-Inverness, you would have roughly a division of cultivation which would explain without any need for theories about race or tribal customs why west of that line the far greater amount of land is devoted to pasturage, and east of the line to arable cultivation. It is not only the hilly contour of the land that counts; in the west throw down a sod and stamp on it, and it will grow; in the east it is difficult to find the sod to throw down, and very hard to make it grow. As a result of the difference in rainfall, the whole of the western half of the larger island and the west of Ireland is, to a great extent, a pastoral and dairying country, and the eastern half is principally employed in agriculture. Anyone driving from Cirencester to London, following the course of the Thames, then from London to Cambridge, and from Cam bridge across the Chilterns back to the west, would find the same conditions existing to-day as they did when Arthur Young took his six weeks' tour in the eighteenth centurygreat corn fields on the east coast, to which was attached the business of fattening stock, and a vast expanse of grass in the west, which could be used most profitably for growing stock. I give a few figures from the statistics of 1880,4 which may help to explain my meaning. Statistics of counties by themselves may be unreliable, as they are liable to be crossed by local variations of industry, such as potatoes in Anglesey and Ireland, hops in Kent and Hampshire, apple orchards in Hereford and Devon; and they are very greatly affected by the statistics of sheep breeding and by the abandonment by absentee landlords of good pasture land to wild deer, variations which have to be considered in drawing any conclusions from the number of cattle. The very name of Huntingdon, for instance, reminds one of the green waste which covered it in the time of Henry II., while the proud boast of Anglesey was its ability to provide corn for all Gwynneth. The sheep of Huntingdonshire are more than three to one of those of Anglesey. Salop and Worcester have 581,000 sheep, and Norfolk 638,000. In Scotland, the large acreage given up to mountain deer, and the introduction of sheep on a large scale into the Western Highlands, affects the reliability of the contrast in cattle. Yet nowhere else in the Islands is the contrast in corn-growing so pronounced. I have not added, for reasons of space, the statistics as to oats, as the small total of cultivated land in the west, except in Ireland, precludes any large acreage of grain. I have, for the same reason, selected only certain counties, trying fairly to balance; but I warn any untravelled reader, who is unacquainted with the vast amount of land lying waste and unused in these Islands, that any such balance of pasturage and arable can only be considered in connection with great tracts profitably devoted to sheep, such as in Wiltshire, Dumfries, Argyll, and Tipperary. The particulars as to the sheep in Ireland are those of 1916. They are not given in Bevan's Atlas. The amount of grain raised in Ireland, even in the rough and poor counties of the west, is in striking con trast to the very small amount of cultivation in the Western Highlands of Scotland, especially if one keeps in mind the large crops of potatoes raised in the island. Somerset Hereford Salop and Anglesey Cheshire Cattle. Acreage. EAST. 1,049,815 207,783 12-6 36-6 165,452 1,055,133 Essex. After all deductions are made for local variations and conflicting industries, the striking result, which cannot be discounted, is this:-In the East there is an immense preponderance of corn-growing; in the West, the rainfall being unfavourable to corn, and the grass sweet and plentiful, there is very little corn and a proportionately large preponderance of cattle. Now it is an axiom of good farming that corn cultivation does not of necessity mean fewer cattle, but rather the reverse; as the saying has it, no corn no cattle, no cattle no manure, no manure no corn. According to farming canons there ought to be as much |