To one who wanders over the rich champaign of southern Devonshire, and surveys from some higher prominence the undulating tree-crowned ridges that slope down into orchard-filled hollows, and the green uplands that sweep in successive waves of verdure to the distant blue tors of Dartmoor, the scene appears as a type of all that is most peaceful, varied and fertile in English landscape. In the trim luxuriance that meets the eye on every side, the hand of man is apparent, though from many a point of vantage no sound may be heard for a time to show that he himself is anywhere near us. Yet ever and anon from the deep lanes, hidden out of sight under their canopy of foliage, there will come the creak of the groaning waggon and the crack of the waggoner's whip, as evidence that there are roads and human traffic through this bosky silent country. Amid so much quiet beauty, where every feature seems to be eloquent of long generations of undisturbed repose, it must surely stir the imagination to be told that underneath these orchards, meadows and woodlands lie the mouldering remnants of once active and long-lived volcanoes. Yet we have only to descend into one of the deep lanes to find the crumbling lavas and ashes of the old eruptions. The landscape has, in truth, been carved out of these volcanic rocks, and their decomposition has furnished the rich loam that nourishes so luxuriant a vegetation. Not less impressive is the contrast presented between the present and former condition of the broad pastoral uplands of the south of Scotland. Nowhere in the British Islands can the feeling of mere loneliness be more perfectly experienced than among these elevated tracts of bare moorland. They have nothing of the grandeur of outline peculiar to mountain tracts. Sometimes, for miles around one of their conspicuous summits, we may see no projecting knob or pinnacle. The rocks have been gently rounded off into broad featureless hills, which sink into winding valleys, each with its thread of streamlet and its farms along the bottom, and its scattered remnants of birch-wood or alder-copse along its slopes and dingles. Across miles of heathy pasture and moorland, on the summits of this great tableland, we may perchance see no sign of man or his handiwork, though the bleating of the sheep and the far-off barking of the collie tell that we are here within the quiet domain of the south-country shepherd.