Produced by Clare Boothby, Peter Yearsley and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net SCIENCE IN ARCADY BY GRANT ALLEN LONDON: LAWRENCE & BULLEN, 16, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 1892. To GRANT RICHARDS, _IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF MANY KIND OFFICES._ Avuncular Greeting. CONTENTS. PAGE MY ISLANDS 1 TROPICAL EDUCATION 21 ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND 40 A DESERT FRUIT 56 PRETTY POLL 71 HIGH LIFE 90 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS 105 MUD 123 THE GREENWOOD TREE 140 FISH AS FATHERS 157 AN ENGLISH SHIRE 177 THE BRONZE AXE 212 THE ISLE OF RUIM 231 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD 250 A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY 266 CASTERS AND CHESTERS 274 PREFACE. These essays deal for the most part with Science in Arcady. 'Tis my native country: for I am not of those who 'praise the busy town.' On the contrary, in the words of the great poet who has just departed to join Milton and Shelley in a place of high collateral glory, I 'love to rail against it still,' with a naturalist's bitterness. For the town is always dead and lifeless. There are who admire it, they say--poor purblind creatures--because, forsooth, 'there is so much life there.' So much life, indeed! No grass in the streets; no flowers in the lanes; no beetles or butterflies on the dull stone pavements! Brick and mortar have killed out all life over square miles of Middlesex. For myself, I love better the densely-peopled fields than this human desert, this beflagged and macadamised man-made solitude. The country teems with life on every hand; a thousand different plants and flowers in the spangled meadows; a thousand varied denizens of pond, and air, and heath, and copses. Their ways are endless. They attract me far more with their infinite diversity than the grey and gloomy haunts of the cab-horse and the stock-broker.