who know the primitive necessary lore of civilization; it is the illiterate. In California, Louis Stevenson found men studying the quality of vines grown on different pockets of earth, just as the peasants of Burgundy and the Rhine have done for ages. And even so the English generations have watched the produce of their varying soils. When or how was it learnt--was it at Oxford or at Cambridge?--that the apples of Devonshire are so specially fit for cider? Or how is it that hops are growing--some of them planted before living memory--all along the strip of green sand which encircles the Weald--that curious strip to which text-books at last point triumphantly as being singularly adapted for hops? Until it got into the books, this piece of knowledge was not thought of as learning; it had merely been acted upon during some centuries. But such knowledge exists, boundless, in whatever direction one follows it: the knowledge of fitting means to ends: excellent rule-of-thumb knowledge, as good as the chemist uses for analyzing water. When the peculiar values of a plot of land have been established--as, for instance, that it is a clay 'too strong' for bricks--then further forms of localized knowledge are brought to supplement this, until at last the bricks are made. Next, they must be removed from the field; and immediately new problems arise. The old farm-cart, designed for roots or manure, has not the most suitable shape for brick-carting. Probably, too, its wide wheels, which were intended for the softness of ploughed land, are needlessly clumsy for the hard road. Soon, therefore, the local wheelwright begins to lighten his spokes and felloes, and to make the wheels a trifle less 'dished'; while his blacksmith binds them in a narrower but thicker tyre, to which he gives a shade more tightness. For the wheelwright learns from the carter--that ignorant fellow--the answer to the new problems set by a load of bricks. A good carter, for his part, is able to adjust his labour to his locality. A part of his duty consists in knowing what constitutes a fair load for his horse in the district where he is working. So many hundred stock bricks, so many more fewer of the red or wire-cut, such and such a quantity of sand, or timber, or straw, or coal, or drain-pipes, or slates, according to their kinds and sizes, will make as much as an average horse can draw in this neighbourhood; but in London the loads are bigger and the vehicles heavier; while in more hilly parts (as you may see any day in the West Country) two horses are put before a cart and load which the London carter would deem hardly too much for a costermonger's donkey.