In several parts of Lancashire, especially in the extreme south-east, the surface is occupied by wet and dreary wastes, composed of peat, and locally called "mosses." That they have been formed since the commencement of the Christian era there can be little doubt, abundance of remains of the branches of trees being found near the clay floor upon which the peat has gradually arisen. The most noted of these desolate flats is that one called Chat, or St. Chad's Moss, the scene of the special difficulty in the construction of the original Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Nothing can exceed the dismalness of the mosses during nine or ten months of the year. Absolutely level, stretching for several miles, treeless, and with a covering only of brown and wiry scrub, Nature seems expiring in them. June kindly brings a change. Everything has its festival some time. For a short period they are strewed with the summer snow of the cotton-sedge,--the "cana" of Ossian, "Her bosom was whiter than the down of cana"; and again, in September, they are amethyst-tinted for two or three weeks with the bloom of the heather. During the last quarter of a century the extent of these mosses has been much reduced, by draining and cultivation at the margins, and in course of time they will probably disappear. Forests were once a feature of a good part of Lancashire. Long subsequently to the time of the Conquest, much of the county was still covered with trees. The celebrated "_Carta de Foresta_," or "Forest Charter," under which the clearing of the ground of England for farming purposes first became general and continuous, was granted only in the reign of Henry III., A.D. 1224, or contemporaneously with the uprise of Salisbury Cathedral, a date thus rendered easy of remembrance. Here and there the trees were allowed to remain; and among these reserved portions of the original Lancashire "wild wood" it is interesting to find West Derby, the "western home of wild animals," thus named because so valuable as a hunting-ground.[7] No forest, in the current sense of the word, has survived in Lancashire to the present day. Even single trees of patriarchal age are almost unknown. Agriculture, when commenced, proceeded vigorously, chiefly, however, in regard to meadow and pasture; cornfields have never been either numerous or extensive, except in the district beyond Preston called the Fylde--an immense breadth of alluvial drift, grateful in almost all parts for good farming. [7] Retained to this day as the name of one of the principal Lancashire "Hundreds," it is West Derby which gives title to the Earls of the house of Stanley, and not, as often supposed, the city in the midland counties. II LIVERPOOL