In the year 1788 Arthur Young in his travels through France visited the desolate region of the Landes. “Wastes, wastes, wastes!” was his lament over neglected Brittany, and no less could he say of the Landes, at that time a miserable tract of low ground, bordering the Bay of Biscay. Plantations, the sinking of wells, drainage and irrigation began to fix the unstable sands, making fruitful the marsh, creating a healthful climate and a fertile soil. Early in the 19th century the land here was sold _au son de la voix_, that is to say, the accepted standard of measurement was _the compass of the human lungs_. The stretch of ground reached by a man’s voice sold for a few francs. Crops replaced the scanty herbage of the salt marsh, and a familiar characteristic of the landscape, the shepherd on stilts, was seen no more. Six hundred thousand hectares of Landes planted with sea pines produced resin to the annual value of fifteen million francs, and through these trees also was achieved a climatic revolution, and it is this district which is now a department of a great and well-ordered State.[62] [62] From Arthur Young’s _Travels in France during the years_ 1788, 1789, with introduction by M. Betham Edwards. CHAPTER XVII. VARIETIES OF EPIDERMIS. Passing now to the smaller trenches of the front line I have chosen as the first of them a small study of the varieties of epidermis found in mammals. With the exception of aquatic mammals so few of this, the greatest vertebrate class, are not clothed with hair that it is only on the comparatively hairless body of man, with its third of a million fine hairs, that the varieties of epidermis can be broadly studied. Much of this chapter will resolve itself into a consideration of the palmar and plantar surfaces of certain mammals, where no hairy covering obscures the operation of stimulus and response. I assume that the foregoing phenomena of hair-direction have chosen and raised on his shield their own king. But here I must ask of the succeeding groups when they say, “I am, Sir, under the King, in some authority,” the question, “Under which King, Bezonian, speak or die”-- Shall it be Darwin’s Personal Selection? Roux’s Cellular or Histonal Selection? Wallace’s and Romanes’ Sexual Selection? Weismann’s Germinal Selection? The rule of Mendel? Selection of mutations according to de Vries? Or shall it be the barbarian king _Plasto-diēthēsis_? Which indeed of the seven kings will they choose, if I may thus personify them? I may, perhaps, urge on them the mild and tolerant rule of Lamarck and Darwin rather than that of the other anointed sovereigns, hoping this cannot be taken as an attempt to influence the jury through the Press in a case which is still _sub judice_. Stimuli and Response.