But my Arcady, as you will see, is none the less tolerably broad and eclectic in its limits. These various essays have been suggested to my pen by rambles far and wide between its elastic confines. The little tractate on _Mud_, for example, recalls to mind some pleasant weeks among the Italian lakes and on the plain of Lombardy. _A Desert Fruit_ owes its origin to a morning at Luxor. _High Life_ had its key-note struck by a fortnight in the Tyrol. _Tropical Education_ is a dim reminiscence of old Jamaican experiences. Our _Eight-Legged Friends_ were observed at leisure on the window-panes of our own little nook at Dorking. _A Hill-Top Stronghold_ was sketched _in situ_ at Florence by a window that looked across the valley to Fiesole. Excursions into books or into the remoter past have given occasion for the archaeological essays relegated here to the end of the volume. My thanks are due to Messrs. Longmans for permission to reprint from their magazine _My Islands_, _A Hill-Top Stronghold_, _A Desert Fruit_, _The Isle of Ruim_, _Eight-Legged Friends_, and _Tropical Education_. I have also to acknowledge a similar courtesy on the part of Messrs. Smith & Elder with regard to _Mud_, _The Bronze Axe_, _High Life_, _Pretty Poll_, _The Greenwood Tree_, _On the Wings of the Wind_, _Casters and Chesters_, and _Fish as Fathers_, all of which originally appeared in the _Cornhill_. Messrs. Chatto & Windus have been equally kind as regards the paper on _An English Shire_ contributed to the _Gentleman's_. _A Persistent Nationality_ made its first bow in the _North American Review_, and has still to be introduced to an English audience. G.A. Hind Head, Surrey, _Oct._, 1892. SCIENCE IN ARCADY. MY ISLANDS. About the middle of the Miocene period, as well as I can now remember (for I made no note of the precise date at the moment), my islands first appeared above the stormy sheet of the North-West Atlantic as a little rising group of mountain tops, capping a broad boss of submarine volcanoes. My attention was originally called to the new archipelago by a brother investigator of my own aerial race, who pointed out to me on the wing that at a spot some 900 miles to the west of the Portuguese coast, just opposite the place where your mushroom city of Lisbon now stands, the water of the ocean, as seen in a bird's-eye view from some three thousand feet above, formed a distinct greenish patch such as always betokens shoals or rising ground at the bottom. Flying out at once to the point he indicated, and poising myself above it on my broad pinions at a giddy altitude, I saw at a glance that my friend was quite right. Land making was in progress. A volcanic upheaval was taking place on the bed of the sea. A new island group was being forced right up by lateral pressure or internal energies from a depth of at least two thousand fathoms.