were horned in the old breed, a collection like this might easily have
been made.

The greatest change of the last hundred years is no doubt that which the
plough has wrought in the aspect of the downs. There is a certain
pleasure to the eye in the wide fields of golden corn, especially of
wheat, in July and August; but a ploughed down is a down made ugly, and
it strikes one as a mistake, even from a purely economic point of view,
that this old rich turf, the slow product of centuries, should be ruined
for ever as sheep-pasture when so great an extent of uncultivated land
exists elsewhere, especially the heavy clays of the Midlands, better
suited for corn. The effect of breaking up the turf on the high downs is
often disastrous; the thin soil which was preserved by the close, hard
turf is blown or washed away, and the soil becomes poorer year by year,
in spite of dressing, until it is hardly worth cultivating. Clover may
be grown on it but it continues to deteriorate; or the tenant or
landlord may turn it into a rabbit-warren, the most fatal policy of all.
How hideous they are--those great stretches of downland, enclosed in big
wire fences and rabbit netting, with little but wiry weeds, moss, and
lichen growing on them, the earth dug up everywhere by the disorderly
little beasts! For a while there is a profit--"it will serve me my
time," the owner says--but the end is utter barrenness.

One must lament, too, the destruction of the ancient earth-works,
especially of the barrows, which is going on all over the downs, most
rapidly where the land is broken up by the plough. One wonders if the
ever-increasing curiosity of our day with regard to the history of the
human race in the land continues to grow, what our descendants of the
next half of the century, to go no farther, will say of us and our
incredible carelessness in the matter! So small a matter to us, but one