cultivated their understandings, they would not have learnt to give any really profitable direction to their labour, and we should still have been as scantily supplied with furniture and clothes as the good people of Colchester of whom we have been speaking. Let us see what accumulated supply, or capital, of food the inhabitants of England had five centuries ago. Possessions in cattle are the earliest riches of most countries. We have seen that cattle was called "live money;" and it is supposed that the word capital, which means stock generally, was derived from the Latin word "capita," or heads of beasts. The law-term "chattels" is also supposed to come from cattle. These circumstances show that cattle were the chief property of our ancestors. Vast herds of swine constituted the great provision for the support of the people; and these were principally fed, as they are even now in the New Forest, upon acorns and beech-mast. In Domesday Book, a valuation of the time of William the Conqueror, it is always mentioned how many hogs each estate can maintain. Hume the historian, in his Essays, alluding to the great herds of swine described by Polybius as existing in Italy and Greece, concludes that the country was thinly peopled and badly cultivated; and there can be no doubt that the same argument may be applied to England in the fourteenth century, although many swine were maintained in forests preserved for fuel. The hogs wandered about the country in a half-wild state, destroying, probably, more than they profitably consumed; and they were badly fed, if we may judge from a statute of 1402, which alleges the great decrease of fish in the Thames and other rivers, by the practice of feeding hogs with the fry caught at the weirs. The hogs' flesh of England was constantly salted for the winter's food. The people had little fodder for cattle in the winter, and therefore they only tasted fresh meat in the summer season. The mustard and vinegar seller formed a business at Colchester, to furnish a relish for the pork. Stocks of salted meat are mentioned in the inventory of many houses there, and live hogs as commonly. But salted flesh is not food to be eaten constantly, and with little vegetable food, without severe injury to the health. In the early part of the reign of Henry VIII., not a cabbage, carrot, turnip, or other edible root, grew in England. Two or three centuries before, certainly, the monasteries had gardens with a variety of vegetables; but nearly all the gardens of the laity were destroyed in the wars between the houses of York and Lancaster. Harrison speaks of wheaten bread as being chiefly used by the gentry for their own tables; and adds that the artificer and labourer are "driven to content themselves with horse-corn, beans, peason, oats, tares, and lentils." There is no doubt that the average duration of human life was at that period not one-half as long as at the present day. The constant use of salted meat, with