1. Moors, uplands, and downs (such as Dartmoor and Salisbury Plain) are more or less wild according to their elevation and the geological formation on which they occur. They consist of large tracts of land either without fences at all, or only those of the most inefficient kind, rather boundary-lines than otherwise. They are never used for haymaking, nor are they cultivated beyond depasturing. These are dotted with patches of rough grass, thorns, briers, and shrubs or stunted trees where the surface is much broken, and the animals they are made to carry are few; but on the more rounded and smooth lines of the downs is a finer herbage, kept so not only from the nature of the case, but from the fact that such a position favours the more thickly stocking it with that close-grazing animal the sheep. These pasturages, though very extensive, are yet being encroached upon by a higher cultivation, and the hayfields one occasionally meets with around the squatter’s cabin even in the wild mountainous parts of Wales sufficiently testify to the greater productiveness of which the most unfavourable districts are capable. 2. The village common is sometimes extensive; it, too, as the former, is only grazed. Many of them have of late years been enclosed. Where much depastured—and they usually carry as much stock as they can bear—there is a remarkable absence of plants other than grasses. Indeed, grass-herbage, and usually of the best species, will prevail, unless in places where there may be stagnant water, in which cases a little drainage would produce a large public benefit; but as what is everybody’s business is done by no one, the common is too often left much wilder, and thus made poorer than it need be. 3. The river flats here meant are, for the most part, large fields partaking of the nature of common; that is, certain farmers and others have the privilege of grazing during the autumn; but it is _aimed up_ early in spring, for the purpose of taking a crop of hay. Such lands would be impoverished by such constant haymaking; but the winter floods leave behind them a deposit of silt and fluviatile materials, and perhaps beside act as a solvent; so that their fertility is wonderfully maintained.