unquestionably the temperate zones, with favourable circumstances and localities, produce the highest, and in the greatest numbers; and one great purpose they serve in creation is to furnish just lawgivers and rulers to the tropics and torrid zones, where passion is usually stronger than reason.

Amongst the nations of the world England has upon the whole played a very large part. She has produced a race of men certainly not inferior to any on the earth in physical energy or mental power, and she has produced them in large quantities. These islands were too valuable an abiding-place for inferior men, and one race pushed out another, till the strongest obtained possession, and welcomed amongst them all the best of their continental neighbours who might be seeking for a home. Soil and climate did their work in joining them together and changing them into Englishmen, sloughing off the weakly and assimilating the strong. Coal and iron did much for them, but the climate, varying enough for health, but without extreme heat or cold, did more; for it enabled men to be born and bred to live a long life, and do more days' work in every year of that life than most other nations. A healthy people in a healthy climate, with a circumscribed space for growing food, can only increase their numbers by producing something to sell to others in exchange for food. By dint of coal and iron, and brains, and hands, and arms given to manufactures, thirty millions of people exist where, without them, only half the number could be maintained in health. It is quite true that the fifteen millions might dwell together quite as happily without the manufactures, and with quite as healthy a climate, and, on the whole, a healthier population. But there is another and more important consideration. With only fifteen millions of people we could not furnish emigrants to colonies for allied friends, and we could not maintain fleets and armies to keep off despotic invaders who would strive to break down "the home of the free." That channel, called by us in the olden time the Narrow Sea, and by the French the "Sleeve," might be crossed by numerous invaders, and our island of long memories might become an appanage of a continental ruler, while the best of the race would go forth to populate other lands.

Those who profess to be learned in coal,* say that we are fast destroying a substance which we cannot reproduce. This, after all, is but conjecture. They say that there may be coal below a depth of four thousand feet, but that it will be too costly to be worth getting.

* Sir William Armstrong and Mr. Jevons.

There was a time when the same class of men argued that it was impossible to provide for our surplus population by emigration, on account of the great cost of transit, but each succeeding year reduced the cost, and now emigrants can go and return where formerly they could not go. So is it with mining and other labour. Every year adds to facilities and diminishes cost. Every succeeding year beholds more work done with less human drudgery, and the time will come that drudgery will be extinct. But, allowing that English coal becomes extinct, it by no means follows that we cannot import coal from other countries to the healthiest working climate in the world, and yet compete on favourable terms with the manufactures of other countries. And it is by no means certain that other sources of heat-power do not exist within man's reach. We are far from having solved the mysteries of the production of petroleum, a substance known in all time all over the earth, but only of late commanding general attention by proving to be a great source of wealth, competing with coal for various purposes. All the processes of nature in the general economy of the world, are destruction and reproduction: i. e., change of form, as we see in plants and animals, the dying changing into the living; and it is not difficult to imagine that chemical processes may be at work below the earth's surface destroying or disintegrating fuel on one side, and reproducing it on the other. We do not know the causes of volcanic action, and can only assume them; but it is clear that fuel of some kind is produced to feed the volcanoes and that huge forces are thus developed. The gases, thus set free, mingle with the atmosphere; but we know not how many processes may be at work restoring them to the interior of the earth to go again through the same routine, as constant as the evaporation from the sea and the fall of streams from the mountains. Had Etna or Vesuvius been situated in the Scilly Islands, it is possible that we should have devised means of utilising their heat-power for many purposes.

But supposing our fuel now existing to disappear, and with it our means of purchasing food and necessaries for fifteen millions of people, we should certainly turn our attention to improved means of doubling our own food production; and this is a vein far from worked out. If we must be reduced in numbers, England will become a picturesque country, more filled with beautiful ruins than any other; but if ambition survives amongst her neighbours, they will not leave her to be a nursing mother of freedom. Like other countries with their monuments in ruins, she

will become an appanage of despots, though too small to become a haunt of their correlative brigands. But, if France should grow up into a land of freedom and justice, it is possible that we may be linked closer together, and future geography books describe London as the chief town of France, the capital of philosophy and laws, the abode of learned ease, the great residence of the world's thinkers.

The sea that runs between France and England has been one great cause of our growth and prosperity. It has been our fence, our barrier, our fortification, our police to keep out continental bandits. Had England remained as a French peninsula we should have been a continental people overrun by soldiers and living under military despotism, a condition not favourable to progress. Just as an enclosed farm is essential to agriculture, so is an enclosed country essential to the growth of freedom and progression.

And now another phase is arising, and men's minds are turned to devising the best means of facilitating transit between England and France-how to make England as much as possible a peninsula. There can be no doubt that sea-sickness, or the dislike of it, is the one great impediment to constant transit, and that, were there a land transit, there would be incessant travel. And, considering that the greatest depth of the channel is only about one hundred and seventy feet, or less than half the height of St. Paul's Cathedral, and that only for a portion of the twenty miles' total distance, there is no insurmountable engineering difficulty in making a dike of sufficient height and width from side to side to carry an ample roadway, always supposing that the money were forthcoming, and that it were commercially worth doing.

Geologists tell us that England was once a peninsula of France. Some convulsion, possibly an earthquake, cut through the chalk rock, and the constant rush of the tides in two opposite directions has since kept it open. The tides wash the shingle along the coasts and form banks in various places. If, therefore, a row of piles were planted on the bottom across the narrowest part of the Channel, sand and shingle would collect to the level of their tops and form a weir, which might be continually raised by additional piles, until it rose above water, and presented to the view a pair of beaches looking up and down Channel. This

is on the supposition that it were worth doing. It would be simply a larger work of the same nature as Plymouth breakwater. By a similar process, and at much less cost, the Island of Ceylon might be connected with the continent of India. But it would not be desirable to make England a peninsula of France, even

for the sake of transit without sea-sickness. The loss would be greater than the gain to the web-footed race that come over the " gannets' bath," though a very desirable causeway to the "Belles Poules," the Gallic birds, who might wish to come in too great numbers. We do not desire to see English capital employed on a causeway to the Continent; nor do we think it likely that France alone will project her coast-line sufficiently to annex us.

It is

Another plan proposed is to form a tunnel under the water, between Dover and Gris Nes. So far as borings have demonstrated, the chalk rock extends over the whole channel, from one side to the other, and the work is simple when compared with piercing the granite tunnel through the Alps. Only the air-shafts through 170 feet of water, and towering up 100 feet above it, would form any difficulty; that accomplished,—and it would be something more than an Eddystone Lighthouse, the boring would probably be proceeded with at the rate of two feet per hour, provided the material could be taken away fast enough, which does not seem difficult, as it could be thrown into the sea above; but even then it would be a ten years' labour. The process of boring would be by the power of compressed air, and the pneumatic system would probably be adopted for the haulage of railway-trains. But the tunnel would require lining, as well as boring, to keep out the filtration of sea-water. possible that by chemical means the solid chalk might be converted into a kind of hard limestone; but it would also require lining with some substance not brittle, to prevent cracking by vibration. We happen to be out of the direct line of earthquakes, but not beyond their vibratory influence, and a crack admitting superincumbent water, in however small quantities, would ever go on enlarging by the process that forms caverns in limestone regions. It would be needful to form a tough core, probably a wrought-iron tube of sufficient thickness; and this, cased in cement in and out, would probably be chemically and mechanically durable. But two tunnels would be needed, side by side, for up and down trains, or if a single tunnel were adopted, it must be large. There is the contingency of faults in the continuity of the chalk such as we see in all chalk cuttings; but this is not an insuperable difficulty, and the thing could, no doubt, be done, and will be done if it can be demonstrated that a sufficient number of passengers at a sufficiently high rate of payment, having the fear of sea-sickness before their eyes, can be found to make daily use of it, so as to pay a good interest on the outlay. And so strong is human love of speculation in the possible, and the possible profit, that the chances are in

favour of its being done. And it would be an easily defended outwork by drowning it instead of destroying it.

Bridges, with piers in the Channel, have also been proposed, and no doubt they are within the bounds of engineering possibility; but they would amount to a prohibition of large sailing-vessels up and down the Channel, and a considerable risk to steamers-artificial rocks whereon to be cast away; they are the least probable of any process, more costly than a tunnel, and involving greater risk in use.

There are two other methods: the balloonwhich might answer for special excursions, but not for traffic, on account of the uncertainty of the arrival-and the old-fashioned existing method of the sea surface. Our choice lies, therefore, on three methods, over the sea, under the sea, and on the sea.

The latter has been very much neglected. It has not kept pace with other things, or long ere this the Channel would have been a mere ferry as regarded travel between France and England. We have made big ships for distant voyages, forgetting altogether that it is the short traffic that pays best. The chief reason for the difference between England and Ireland lies in the sea-sickness that most passengers undergo more or less.

Some persons are not liable to sea-sickness; but they are very few; as a rule, we may take it for granted that all are liable to it. Our greatest sea-captains, the Nelsons and Cochranes, were constantly liable to it, and it is a greater nuisance for a short ferry than for a long sea voyage. If people were sea-sick on the Thames, passage-boats would not be used; if people were not sea-sick on crossing the Channel there would be an incessant transit. Now sea-sickness is merely a question of waves, and waves cease to be perceptible when overlaid with a sufficiently large float. The Great Eastern steamship, with a length of about 700 feet, is not large enough altogether to prevent rolling and pitching in the waves of the Atlantic; but the waves of the Channel are much smaller, and if overlaid with a vessel twice the length of the Great Eastern-a quarter of a mile-like the Charing Cross bridge-such a vessel would make perfectly smooth water, and if double-ended, with efficient piers on either shore, might make the transit each way in an hour, and with no risk of being run down day or night. In fact, she might be a floating lighthouse; and by reason of her large size, might be of very shallow draught, and with the piers sufficiently far out might perform her work at all periods of the tide, with railway-trains on her deck, and ample room for passengers and merchandise

besides. A new kind of traffic other than railway transit would commence. Pedestrians or promenaders would pay their shilling or sixpence on either side to walk on board and walk out as they do between London and Gravesend, only with far greater and more certain profit to the ship owners, as there would be no lines of competing railways. Such a vessel, properly constructed in cells, would be absolutely unsinkable and unburnable, and she would not long be the only one, for the result would gradually be the growth of two enormous cities on either side the Channel. That they have not hitherto grown up has simply been the limited traffic in passengers by reason of sea-sickness, and the almost total absence of commerce. With gigantic ferry-boats, the passenger traffic will be as that between London and Brighton, and the commerce as that between Liverpool and New York. They will be the gateways of the whole Continent, the meeting grounds of the nations, healthier localities than either London or Paris, possibly adding to the health of London by lessening its population. And the people on either side the water will gradually grow as like each other as the inhabitants of London and Southwark, and freedom will permeate as from a centre in radial lines throughout Europe. It will be a marvellous result that will follow on the building of the first pair of steam-ships that shall enable us to cross the "Narrow Sea" as steadily as on firm land by the proper uses of our coal and iron, and shall yet ensure us isolation at pleasure from those who might love oppression better than justice.

W. BRIDGES ADAMS.

THE LAST WOLF IN GWENTLAND. THOMAS HERBERT, called Gloff, i.e., The Lame, the hero (after the wolf) of the following ballad, was a son of William first Earl of Pembroke; his descendants lived in the parish of Goytre, Monmouthshire, where their residence, now a farm-house, still remains. Traditions of the neighbourhood say that the family who lived there paid their taxes with the heads of wolves.

There's thunder on the Blorenge,
Hark! echoing far it sounds
O'er fair Llanover's sloping sides,
And Goytrey's woody bounds;
Again it peals,-then comes a pause-
And then it peals more nigh,
But in that pause did you not mark
A clear far-ringing cry?
A hollow, wailing, long-drawn cry,
The Gwentians know the tone:
The last old wolf, his race all slain,

Howls on the hills alone,
Howls and then listens-but in vain,
There comes no answering cry,
The last of all the wolves is he,
And 'tis his turn to die.